The chronology of events, whereby Patron’s important book appeared several months after the final version of my entry had already been submitted to the Handbook, obviously made it impossible for me to take her book into consideration in my discussion. This is indeed regrettable, but inevitable. On the other hand, the harsh tone of Patron’s comments, often bordering on straight scolding, is as regrettable, especially as it was not inevitable.
As to the matter at hand, on the commission side my entry is indeed a presentation of the standard view of the narrator within narratology. This is what I was invited to do, and did to the best of my ability. After all, the venue is entitled “Handbook of Narratolgy” and not “of narrative studies in the humanities and social sciences,” a wonderful thing to have, but still a future dream. Of course I am aware that there are important discussions of narrative and, eo ipso, the narrator, in philosophy, film studies, discourse studies, linguistics, ethnography and so on. But even assuming I were capable of competently surveying them all, the resultant text would have exceeded by far the allowed length of the entry as well as its disciplinary framework. With specific reference to the works of Kuroda, Banfield and Hamburger, they may indeed be of crucial importance, but it must be admitted that they have had very limited impact within narratology proper, and this is why I mentioned them so briefly.
Regarding the definition of “Narrator” I offer, I strongly believe its purpose is to provide a systematic account of the standard way this term is understood in current narratology, and not to reflect the historical vagaries of its usage. In lexicography in general one also distinguishes between dictionaries tout court and historical dictionaries. The historical survey may indeed be incomplete, but let us not forget that the purpose of the handbook is to provide a useful account of the etat present des etudes in our discipline for the benefit not only, and maybe not even primarily, of specialists in any of its sub-domains, but of all workers in the field, as well as of colleagues in other disciplines concerned with narrative in one way or another, and of advanced students. I still feel my entry does provide such a useful account. The proper place for a minute and exhaustive discussion of historical twists and turns is the individual specialized research work, of which Patron’s own book is a prime example. As for my supposed confusions and errors regarding the narrator vs. author distinction, let us not forget that the term “narrator,” or its lexical equivalent, has not been available in all times and languages (one prime example being Russian literary theory). The term “author” was thus sometimes made to serve double or even treble duty, designating different concepts or entities ranging from the biographical author to author-in-fabulator role, to fictional individual in the story world.
Much more important is the omission side, or my supposed failure to be critical i.e., to go into the meta-theoretical, epistemological and methodological assumptions subtending the narrator model within narratolgy or to confront the received view with alternative views in linguistics and philosophy. Here Patron definitely has a point. Doing so would have made the discussion more complete, but would also have cast the writer in the role of critic and judge in addition to that of surveyor. Now different handbooks in literary studies, linguistics and philosophy have different policies on whether a critical component should be added to the informative survey, and things could have gone either way. But since this component was indeed missing, I will try to provide it now.
In my entry I reported that, for all works of narrative fiction, narratologists (1) posit an inner-textual speech position, slot or teller-role as the source from which the current narration originates; (2) then proceed to fill this slot with an occupant-agent: a specifiable mediating/narrating instance or individual entity of some kind, different from the actual author in his biographical setting, serving as the teller or originator of the narration; and (3) claim that this individual is a distinct entity on the fictional level. The term “narrator” has come to conflate and designate all three components, and this may indeed give rise to confusions and misunderstanding. Calling a fictional narrative “narratorless,” for example, may thus mean denying (3), but also denying both (3) and (2), which is a much more radical claim. One could in principle negate (3) and yet accept (1) and (2), or even negate both (3) and (2) and hold on to (1) only, claiming that in the case of fictional narrative the story “tells itself”, the teller being some abstract “Geist der Erzaehlung”, as Thomas Mann calls it at the beginning of Der Erwählte. In a recent article entitled “Necessarily a Narrator or a Narrator if Necessary” (Journal of Literary Semantics 40:1, 2011, 43-57) I have surveyed a whole array of linguistic, aesthetic, philosophical, and literary-theoretical positions serving as grounds for narratologists adopting or rejecting (3), and also (2) on occasion, but, I must admit, I still tended to conflate in my usage (2) and (3). A very detailed critique of this article, in the form of a personal communication from Ms. patron, helped me clarify in my mind some thorny issues in this context, and for this I am grateful to her.
The question quite simply is this: if we accept (1) and (2)—which most everybody does—who could the narrating instance be in principle? One could formulate three different possible views:
A. The minimalist view: the originator of the narration is always the author in his capacity as fabulator, playing the culturally defined role of spinner of tales. While not self-contradictory, such a view is hard to maintain as it would involve an enormous stretching of the fabulator role, and I am not aware of any literary scholar actually holding this view.
B. The maximalist view: the originator of the narration is always an individual who is a member of the fictional sphere, even when this individual’s presence is textually unmarked (=impersonal narration) and the only thing we have is an anonymous narrating voice. This position too is not self-contradictory, but could well be faulted as unwarranted precisely for lack of support in such cases (see more below).
C. The middle way: If we replace essentialism with instrumentalism and universal claims with qualified existential ones, we can regard both the author cum fabulator and the fictional teller as two co-existing options, constantly available to us. In some cases the first would be better warranted, while in others the second would make more sense.
In terms of rules of procedure or methodological norms, two opposing norms can be envisioned even within C. The first would claim that the default case of the originator of the narration is the fictional narrator, and good reasons should be provided whenever one rejects this option in favour of the author-cum-fabulator one. The opposite norm, which some philosophers have advocated, is that the default case is the author as fabulator-pretender, and good reasons should be provided whenever one posits instead a fictional individual as the teller.
How do matters stand then in actual narratological practice? In all cases of first person narration, whether auto- or homodiegetic, everybody seems to agree that it is justified to posit a narrator figure who is a member of the fictional world, even though this narrator may be very similar to the actual biographical author. In such cases the narrator-figure could be described as the author’s counterpart in the fictional domain (See 3.6 in the entry). I am not aware of any discussion concerning the teller in second person narratives, and this is a lacuna in this area. My personal view though is that when speaker and addressee are both individuated the speaker could best be treated as a fictional entity. On the other hand, if the “you” is employed as equivalent to “one” or “anybody” or to the general reader role and speaker indicators are scarce, a good case could be made for viewing the teller role as being filled by the author as fabulator. The major bone of contention though is the very common case of heterodiegetic (third person, Er-Erzählung) impersonal narration where the highest textual speaker position is occupied by an anonymous unindividuated (“geistig und abstrakt” in Mann’s words) voice or, in other words, where the speaker position is unmarked. It is precisely in such cases, Patron and others argue, that it is totally unwarranted to fill the teller slot with the fictional individual figure of an “effaced” narrator. In such cases, so the argument goes, it makes much more sense to make the author in his role as illusionist, spinner of tales or producer of display texts the originator of the discourse. Such narratives are hence “narratorless” in that they do not have (3), while still possessing (2).
If we adopt an instrumentalist view of theories, regarding them as cognitive tools rather than ontological commitments, one could now quickly assess the relative cost/benefit of postulating a narrator vs. author as fabulator in the case of third person impersonal narration. Quite obviously, the advantages of one position are the shortcomings of the other and vice versa. The advantages of the author as fabulator position are as follows: this position conforms with Occam’s dictum that entities (and, one might add, especially fictional ones) should not be multiplied beyond necessity. It also conforms to David Lewis’ principle of minimal departure for fictional worlds, where it is claimed that a fictional universe should be assumed to be similar to the actual one in all respects unless explicitly specified otherwise. This view also enables us to tackle the issue of narrative style in a literal way. It is thus the real author in his role as fabulator who makes all the stylistic choices regarding the narration, sometimes in conformity with conventions of genre, theme and subject matter. And finally, adopting this view provides continuity with a long intellectual tradition harking back to antiquity. Conversely, sticking with the always a narrator position, even in the case of impersonal third person narration, preserves the absolute distinction between the fictional and the truth-functional as regards both the told and the telling. It also provides a uniform treatment along a continuum for all varieties of fictional narration instead of splitting the domain into two radically heterogeneous sub-domains. And it is also simpler, since it involves semantic considerations only and does not require pragmatic considerations about actual people playing specific, culturally defined “pretend” roles. Ultimately, it may be our deeply held fundamental views on the relation between art and actuality, rather than methodological considerations, which make us adopt one of the two positions.
I realize that much more could be said on the subject and that the discussion could go on indefinitely, but I prefer to hark back at this point to the words of one wise man who claimed, more than two millennia ago, that “of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the flesh” (Ecclesiastes 12:12), and so to conclude my own role in the discussion, at least for the time being.
Response to Patron (Margolin Narrator Entry)
Submitted by Uri Margolin on Mon, 18. July 2011The chronology of events, whereby Patron’s important book appeared several months after the final version of my entry had already been submitted to the Handbook, obviously made it impossible for me to take her book into consideration in my discussion. This is indeed regrettable, but inevitable. On the other hand, the harsh tone of Patron’s comments, often bordering on straight scolding, is as regrettable, especially as it was not inevitable.
As to the matter at hand, on the commission side my entry is indeed a presentation of the standard view of the narrator within narratology. This is what I was invited to do, and did to the best of my ability. After all, the venue is entitled “Handbook of Narratolgy” and not “of narrative studies in the humanities and social sciences,” a wonderful thing to have, but still a future dream. Of course I am aware that there are important discussions of narrative and, eo ipso, the narrator, in philosophy, film studies, discourse studies, linguistics, ethnography and so on. But even assuming I were capable of competently surveying them all, the resultant text would have exceeded by far the allowed length of the entry as well as its disciplinary framework. With specific reference to the works of Kuroda, Banfield and Hamburger, they may indeed be of crucial importance, but it must be admitted that they have had very limited impact within narratology proper, and this is why I mentioned them so briefly.
Regarding the definition of “Narrator” I offer, I strongly believe its purpose is to provide a systematic account of the standard way this term is understood in current narratology, and not to reflect the historical vagaries of its usage. In lexicography in general one also distinguishes between dictionaries tout court and historical dictionaries. The historical survey may indeed be incomplete, but let us not forget that the purpose of the handbook is to provide a useful account of the etat present des etudes in our discipline for the benefit not only, and maybe not even primarily, of specialists in any of its sub-domains, but of all workers in the field, as well as of colleagues in other disciplines concerned with narrative in one way or another, and of advanced students. I still feel my entry does provide such a useful account. The proper place for a minute and exhaustive discussion of historical twists and turns is the individual specialized research work, of which Patron’s own book is a prime example. As for my supposed confusions and errors regarding the narrator vs. author distinction, let us not forget that the term “narrator,” or its lexical equivalent, has not been available in all times and languages (one prime example being Russian literary theory). The term “author” was thus sometimes made to serve double or even treble duty, designating different concepts or entities ranging from the biographical author to author-in-fabulator role, to fictional individual in the story world.
Much more important is the omission side, or my supposed failure to be critical i.e., to go into the meta-theoretical, epistemological and methodological assumptions subtending the narrator model within narratolgy or to confront the received view with alternative views in linguistics and philosophy. Here Patron definitely has a point. Doing so would have made the discussion more complete, but would also have cast the writer in the role of critic and judge in addition to that of surveyor. Now different handbooks in literary studies, linguistics and philosophy have different policies on whether a critical component should be added to the informative survey, and things could have gone either way. But since this component was indeed missing, I will try to provide it now.
In my entry I reported that, for all works of narrative fiction, narratologists (1) posit an inner-textual speech position, slot or teller-role as the source from which the current narration originates; (2) then proceed to fill this slot with an occupant-agent: a specifiable mediating/narrating instance or individual entity of some kind, different from the actual author in his biographical setting, serving as the teller or originator of the narration; and (3) claim that this individual is a distinct entity on the fictional level. The term “narrator” has come to conflate and designate all three components, and this may indeed give rise to confusions and misunderstanding. Calling a fictional narrative “narratorless,” for example, may thus mean denying (3), but also denying both (3) and (2), which is a much more radical claim. One could in principle negate (3) and yet accept (1) and (2), or even negate both (3) and (2) and hold on to (1) only, claiming that in the case of fictional narrative the story “tells itself”, the teller being some abstract “Geist der Erzaehlung”, as Thomas Mann calls it at the beginning of Der Erwählte. In a recent article entitled “Necessarily a Narrator or a Narrator if Necessary” (Journal of Literary Semantics 40:1, 2011, 43-57) I have surveyed a whole array of linguistic, aesthetic, philosophical, and literary-theoretical positions serving as grounds for narratologists adopting or rejecting (3), and also (2) on occasion, but, I must admit, I still tended to conflate in my usage (2) and (3). A very detailed critique of this article, in the form of a personal communication from Ms. patron, helped me clarify in my mind some thorny issues in this context, and for this I am grateful to her.
The question quite simply is this: if we accept (1) and (2)—which most everybody does—who could the narrating instance be in principle? One could formulate three different possible views:
A. The minimalist view: the originator of the narration is always the author in his capacity as fabulator, playing the culturally defined role of spinner of tales. While not self-contradictory, such a view is hard to maintain as it would involve an enormous stretching of the fabulator role, and I am not aware of any literary scholar actually holding this view.
B. The maximalist view: the originator of the narration is always an individual who is a member of the fictional sphere, even when this individual’s presence is textually unmarked (=impersonal narration) and the only thing we have is an anonymous narrating voice. This position too is not self-contradictory, but could well be faulted as unwarranted precisely for lack of support in such cases (see more below).
C. The middle way: If we replace essentialism with instrumentalism and universal claims with qualified existential ones, we can regard both the author cum fabulator and the fictional teller as two co-existing options, constantly available to us. In some cases the first would be better warranted, while in others the second would make more sense.
In terms of rules of procedure or methodological norms, two opposing norms can be envisioned even within C. The first would claim that the default case of the originator of the narration is the fictional narrator, and good reasons should be provided whenever one rejects this option in favour of the author-cum-fabulator one. The opposite norm, which some philosophers have advocated, is that the default case is the author as fabulator-pretender, and good reasons should be provided whenever one posits instead a fictional individual as the teller.
How do matters stand then in actual narratological practice? In all cases of first person narration, whether auto- or homodiegetic, everybody seems to agree that it is justified to posit a narrator figure who is a member of the fictional world, even though this narrator may be very similar to the actual biographical author. In such cases the narrator-figure could be described as the author’s counterpart in the fictional domain (See 3.6 in the entry). I am not aware of any discussion concerning the teller in second person narratives, and this is a lacuna in this area. My personal view though is that when speaker and addressee are both individuated the speaker could best be treated as a fictional entity. On the other hand, if the “you” is employed as equivalent to “one” or “anybody” or to the general reader role and speaker indicators are scarce, a good case could be made for viewing the teller role as being filled by the author as fabulator. The major bone of contention though is the very common case of heterodiegetic (third person, Er-Erzählung) impersonal narration where the highest textual speaker position is occupied by an anonymous unindividuated (“geistig und abstrakt” in Mann’s words) voice or, in other words, where the speaker position is unmarked. It is precisely in such cases, Patron and others argue, that it is totally unwarranted to fill the teller slot with the fictional individual figure of an “effaced” narrator. In such cases, so the argument goes, it makes much more sense to make the author in his role as illusionist, spinner of tales or producer of display texts the originator of the discourse. Such narratives are hence “narratorless” in that they do not have (3), while still possessing (2).
If we adopt an instrumentalist view of theories, regarding them as cognitive tools rather than ontological commitments, one could now quickly assess the relative cost/benefit of postulating a narrator vs. author as fabulator in the case of third person impersonal narration. Quite obviously, the advantages of one position are the shortcomings of the other and vice versa. The advantages of the author as fabulator position are as follows: this position conforms with Occam’s dictum that entities (and, one might add, especially fictional ones) should not be multiplied beyond necessity. It also conforms to David Lewis’ principle of minimal departure for fictional worlds, where it is claimed that a fictional universe should be assumed to be similar to the actual one in all respects unless explicitly specified otherwise. This view also enables us to tackle the issue of narrative style in a literal way. It is thus the real author in his role as fabulator who makes all the stylistic choices regarding the narration, sometimes in conformity with conventions of genre, theme and subject matter. And finally, adopting this view provides continuity with a long intellectual tradition harking back to antiquity. Conversely, sticking with the always a narrator position, even in the case of impersonal third person narration, preserves the absolute distinction between the fictional and the truth-functional as regards both the told and the telling. It also provides a uniform treatment along a continuum for all varieties of fictional narration instead of splitting the domain into two radically heterogeneous sub-domains. And it is also simpler, since it involves semantic considerations only and does not require pragmatic considerations about actual people playing specific, culturally defined “pretend” roles. Ultimately, it may be our deeply held fundamental views on the relation between art and actuality, rather than methodological considerations, which make us adopt one of the two positions.
I realize that much more could be said on the subject and that the discussion could go on indefinitely, but I prefer to hark back at this point to the words of one wise man who claimed, more than two millennia ago, that “of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the flesh” (Ecclesiastes 12:12), and so to conclude my own role in the discussion, at least for the time being.