On Narratology: Criteria, Corpus, Context
Over a dozen years ago, in a fine book called The Narrative Act devoted to the study of narration and point of view, Susan Sniader Lanser noted that narra tology (by which she meant "formalist structuralist poetics of narrative" in its exploration of narrative, paid no attention to sex or gender (she tended to use the terms interchangeably) "[N]owhere in modern narrative theory is there mention of the author's or narrator's gender [this vacillation too may be telling] as a sig nificant variable [yet] surely the sex of a narrator is at least as significant a factor in literary communication as the narrator's grammatical person, the pres ence or absence of direct address to a reader, or narrative temporality" (46 47) A few years later, in a 1986 article entitled "Toward a Feminist Narratology," Lanser examined some of the reasons why the feminist and the formalist investi gation of narrative had ignored each other. For, just as narratologists paid little attention to questions explored by feminist theory and criticism, the latter hardly showed enthusiasm for narratology: feminist thinkers may have produced a lot of suggestive work on narrative (or linear narrative, or "bad" linear narrative) and?say?its "inherent" Oedipal configuration, but without much recourse to narratological claims, methods, and arguments. I will condense Lanser's account while recasting it and underlining its implications: (a) "everyday" terminology versus technical language, the attempt of (some) feminists to speak and write in ways understandable to everyone and thus implicitly to criticize the elitism, au thoritarianism, and protectionism of "science" including the attempt of narratol ogist to develop a special (scientific) vocabulary; (b) distrust of binary logic and of universals (as tools of the patriarchy, it hierarchies, exclusions, and repres sions) versus confidence in and reliance of them (as necessary to argumentation and basic to the enterprise of specifying the rules that govern all and only narra tives) (c) mimetic orientation versus semiotic approach, the view that narrative says something about and influences the world versus an interest in narrative as a meaning producing instrument, with no consideration of how related or ade