McClure 350: 220: Principles of Literary Analysis Spring, 2010 John McClure Murray Hall 203 B

PRECEPTS AND PRACTICES FOR THE STUDY OF NARRATIVE (Segments revised or added during term marked with asterisk and in italics) INTRODUCTION Literary narratives tell stories, but they also use the resources of story-telling to explore different domains of life and to address urgent questions, issues, and problems. Yet narratives methods of exploration and persuasion are different from those of exposition, analysis, and argument. The college composition, the editorial, the sermon, the philosophical treatise, and the sociological study all tend to develop their arguments more directly, abstractly, and systematically than narrative. Narrative builds its meanings implicitly rather than explicitly, concretely rather than abstractly, and by way of complex, many-sided stories rather than the well-marked sequences of exposition and argument. In this course we will practice the art of explicating this sort of work: of bringing out its patterns and meanings. In part, explication is a technical art: a matter of putting specific questions to texts and formulating specific answers. But it also depends on less formal, more exploratory processes which are extremely important, but on which we shall spend less time. One of these has to do with the assiduous noting and harvesting of ones own fleeting critical responses, hunches, and insights. Even as we read a text, we open a dialogue with it, reacting to events, making assessments, and noting curious repetitions, key passages, glimpsed patterns of development, and potential themes. This primary dialogue is often so faintly verbalized and so fleeting that the insights it offers get lost. Then we have to begin again when we sit down (sometimes days later) to write a paper or exam, without any record of the reading experience or of what we learned about the text as we read it. Thats one reason why virtually all successful critics read with a pencil or pen in hand, using it to underline words and passages they think might be important, to note repetitions, and to scribble intuitions, responses, and emerging insights in the margins or at the back of the book. Another reason is that this activity not only preserves valuable insights, it also invigorates that inner critic who is already trying to make sense of the text as he or she reads. Thus while we will focus this semester mostly on the art of deliberate analysison assembling a repertory of specific critical questions and putting them to a number of textsour hope is that you will also be practicing the basic art of listening to your inner critical voice. With time, this voice should itself be using some of the categories and employing some of the critical questions we are introducing here. I. SOME HEURISTICS FOR NARRATIVE If the sections that follow explore the sort of work narratives do, the following questions help us discover and describe how they do this work. They alert us to some of the fundamental forms or patterns by which narratives explore their themes and deliver their judgments and

McClure

recommendations. Such questions and question sets (think, for instance, of the famous journalistic Who? What? Where? When? and Why?) are sometimes called heuristics (from the Greek, to find or discover). Deliberately simple in their formulation, they need to be used energetically and inventively. When they are, they not only illuminate basic patterns and meanings, but show how these are complicated, revised, challenged, and even dismantled. So its essential to play vigorously with heuristics, applying them over and over, focusing on different chunks of text, and modifying them at will. To begin to get at a narratives significant patterns, Kenneth Burke recommends that we ask several questions, over and over again, of passages, episodes, and the work as a whole: 1. FROM WHAT, THROUGH WHAT, TO WHAT, AND WHY? (Use this question to trace the sequential forms of the narrative: plot trajectories, character development, and the unfolding of narrative debates, but also mood changes, thought processes, the give-and take of conversation, and other more local sequences.) 2. WHAT GOES WITH WHAT, AND AGAINST WHAT, AND WHY?(Ask this question to map the individual, social, and ideological terrain of a narrative, to see how different characters, groups, political ideologies, beliefs, etc are defined, aligned, and evaluated. Look not just for simple equations and oppositions, but for complex, many-sided patterns and for instances in which conventional patterns are first traced out and then blurred or deconstructed). Use a variation of this heuristicWhat goes over what, and under what, and why?--to trace the way things get ranked in the world of the narrative. 3. WHAT HAPPENS OVER AND OVER AGAIN, AND WHY? (Use this question to map crucial patterns of repetition and repetition with variation in a narrative) Note: Words (keywords), images, symbols, character-types, situations, and actions are all regularly repeated for effect in the course of a narrative. Repetition produces effects of rhythm and variation that add to the pleasure of reading. It also signals emphasis: calls the readers attention to important questions and themes. And repetition helps establish the shape of things in the narratives world: fundamental features of the social landscape, conditions of existence, character traits, etc. Finally, by means of variation (repetition with a difference), repetition illuminates change and development, the sequential unfolding of things. Here is one critics description of the forms and uses of novelistic repetition: A number of different forms of repetition may be identified in . . . novels generally. On a small scale, there is repetition of verbal elements: [key]words, figures of speech, shapes or gestures. . . . On a larger scale, events or scenes [with their distinctive characters and actions] may be duplicated within the text . . . reenactments of the same event involving the same cluster of motifs. . . . A novel is interpreted in part through the noticing of such recurrences [as] they work to generate meaning or to inhibit the too easy determination of meaning based on the linear sequence of the story. . . . Any novel is a complex tissue of repetitions and of repetitions within

McClure

3 repetitions, or of repetitions linked in a chain fashion to other repetitions. In each case there are repetitions making up the structure of the work within itself, as well as repetitions determining its multiple relations to what is outside it. (J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition, 1-3)

4. WHAT QUESTIONS DOES THE NARRATIVE ADDRESS, AND HOW ARE THEY HANDLED? Narratives are shaped not just by conflicts and actions (plot) but by questions and debates (themes). This heuristic is designed to help us trace the introduction and exploration of specific questions and debates. Note: Narratives often introduce the questions and debates that they address by having characters pose the questions or stage the debates. For this reason its very important to pay attention to what characters think and say and to the arguments they have with themselves and one another. 5. WHAT SORT OF STORY IS THIS, AND HOW DOES IT DIFFER FROM OTHER STORIES OF ITS TYPE? (This question gets at story-tellers use of familiar patterns: genres, sub-genres, and plot formulas. It helps us get a sense of what to expect, formally and thematically, from a narrative, and at the same time it helps us recognize innovation or originality. Dealing with any text belonging to literature, we must take into account a double requirement. First we must be aware that it manifests properties that it shares with all literary texts, or with texts belonging to one of the sub-groups of literature (which we call, precisely, genres). It is inconceivable, nowadays, to defend the thesis that everything in the work is individual, a brand-new product of personal inspiration, a creation with no relation to works of the past. Second, we must understand that a text is not only the product of a pre-existing combinatorial system . . . it is also a transformation of that system. We can already say, then, that every literary study must participate in a double movement: from the particular work to literature generally (or genre), and from literature generally (or genre) to the particular work (Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic, 6-7). A coherent reading of any art work, whatever the medium, requires some detailed awareness of the grid of conventions upon which, and against which, the individual text operates. . . . Through our awareness of convention we can recognize significant or simply pleasing patterns of repetition, symmetry, contrast . . . pick up directional clues in a narrative work, see what is innovative and what is deliberately traditional at each nexus of the artistic creation (Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, 47). II. THE ART OF CLOSE READING Novels, in the words of one critic, are loose, baggy monsters, they pose challenges to the reader that most poems and plays do not pose. If one way to begin understanding a novel is by bringing the above questions to bear on its entire sweep, another is by asking these and similar questions of

McClure

one segment of the novel (chapter, episode, passage) and then exploring its relevance to the whole. The skills youve acquired in the close reading of poetry are also very useful here. In this class, youll often be asked to analyze a passage, episode, or scene and to discuss the work it does. What do these questions mean, and how are they to be answered? *In formally analyzing a passage, episode, or scene we ask: What kind (or kinds) of writing do we find here: reported or dramatized action, description of character or situation, rendered or summarized reflection, dialogue, commentary, etc.? Who is narrating, and from what point of view? What is its plot or pattern of development? What debates or explorations shape the passage? What stylistic features, discourses, keywords, images, symbols, and motifs shape the passage? When we ask what sort of work a passage, episode, or scene does, we mean: What does it depict or disclose about characters, situations, events, themes? How does what is disclosed advance the larger narratives plot? How does it transform or deepen our understanding of characters and situations? How does it develop the explorations and arguments (themes) of the whole narrative? How does it contribute to the formal patterns of the larger text? III. THE WORK OF LITERARY NARRATIVE Literary narrative is a mode of thinking about and evaluating shared situations, styles of being, styles of becoming, and systems of belief. Narrative is a Mode of Thinking Folklore and myth may be seen to show narrative as a form of thinking, a way of reasoning about a situation. (Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot) About Problematic Situations, Kenneth Burke describes the novel as equipment for living. Burke writes that, [c]ritical and imaginative works are answers to questions posed by the situation in which they arose. They size up problematic situations, showing how things are and how theyre going, and they offer strategies for dealing with them (The Philosophy of Literary Form, 304, 297). They deal, in other words, both with questions of fact (What is really going on here?) and with questions of value and practice (What should we do about it?). The range of situations runs from the intimate (internal struggles, family relations, love) through the social (situations of war, oppression, instability, opportunity) to the cosmic (human relations to ultimate beings and forces). Styles of Being, Leo Bersani offers us another elegantly simple and comprehensive definition of the meaning-making work of the novel. Novelistic character, he writes, is a means of

McClure

testing [or exploring] the life and death potentialities of certain styles of being; and the fate of a certain character, as it slowly takes shape in the course of a novel, reveals the value of his or her style, its complicity with life or with death (Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax 179). We can increase the range of Bersanis insight by saying that narratives also explore and evaluate social styles of being--the institutions, customs, practices, and values of whole communities. Note: A style of being is an individual (and/or collective) mode of feeling, thinking, and behaving, a way of ordering ones relation to ones self, others, and the world. We might speak of a hedonistic, nihilistic, conservative, or Buddhist style, or of a self-disciplined style, a devout style, or a selfish style. Experiences of Becoming, Mikhail Bakhtin adds that in recent centuries the novel has been equally interested in tracing the education of its protagonists, their development, becoming . . . gradual formation (The Dialogic Imagination 388, 392). And Beliefs (discourses), Elsewhere, Bakhtin develops another description of the novels work. Novels, he says, stage strenuous dialogues or debates between competing sets of ideas: discourses, ideologies, creeds, doctrines, or belief systems: Imagine the work [both as a dialogue between belief systems and] as a rejoinder in a given dialogue (Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 274). When the novel is understood in this way, the critics task is to identify the discourses in play, trace the unfolding of the debates, and show how certain discourses emerge as vessels of the novels truth. That Also Teaches Us to Live with Complexity and Ambiguity. None of this is to suggest that literary narratives always end with all questions answered, problems solved. Indeed, several schools of criticism see the work of the literary narrative precisely as that of helping us to recognize and respect complexity and ambiguity: Society might well be benefitted by the corrective of a disintegrating art which converts each simplicity into a complexity, which ruins the possibilities of ready hierarchies, which concerns itself with the problematical, the experimental, and thus by implication works corrosively upon those expansionist certainties preparing the way for our social cataclysms (Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement, 105). The generic work of the novel is to argue against the idea of one language of truth in favor of pluralism and dialogue (Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination). IV. CHARACTER AND STYLES OF BEING Let us return, for a moment, to Leo Bersanis description of the work of novelistic character: Novelistic character, he writes, is a means of testing [or exploring] the life and death

McClure

potentialities of certain styles of being; and the fate of a certain character, as it slowly takes shape in the course of a novel, reveals the value of his or her style, its complicity with life or with death (Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax 179). What Bersani suggests, here, is that characters in the novel are not only ends in themselves, they are as well a means to other ends: in this case, the exploration of specific styles of being or ways of life and, let us add, the beliefs that underwrite them He suggests that characters are not only more of less richly particularized individuals but also models or exemplars, to one extent or another, of widely distributed styles of being. To read a novel or other narrative in the way he suggests, we need to, --Attend to the rich particularity, of any given character, to her inner life (fears and desires, moods and attitudes, constant emotions, style of thought and reflection, beliefs, and internal contradictions); to her interaction with the world (social identity and position, affiliations, point of view, mode of relating to others, preoccupations, etc.), and to her development. --Establish as well, the ways in which the character represents or embodies a specific style of being, serves as a spokesperson for a specific doctrine, belief system, discourse, etc. --Trace tensions and changes in the characters style. --And show how the narrative explores and evaluates the life and death potentialities of the style of being and system of belief represented by the character. Identifying Styles of Being: A style of being is a broadly recognizable way of life (of shaping ones energies and attitudes; seeing and relating to self, other, world), one that is linked to a certain philosophy, movement, or culture. While individuals organize their existence in a variety of ways, their choices are rarely if ever totally idiosyncratic and original. Instead, they are partially determined by social prompts and models. The most common or controversial modes of selforganization and orientation get labelled (so today, consumerist, hedonist, competitive individualist, fundamentalist name popular styles of being). At any given moment, there is an urgent and often heated conversation goingin churches and schools, on television or in the papers, among philosophers and cultural critics, and in daily conversation--over the wisdom or value of different styles: a conversation over how to live. Bersanis point is that this conversation also goes on in literary narrative. To follow it, we may need to know something about the social styles and debates of a given era. (Here is where lectures and critical reading come in handy.) So, for instance, in reading Wuthering Heights its useful to know that in early nineteenth century England, people were weighing the relative merits of traditional gentility, Evangelical moralism, Romantic vitalism, and Broad Church benevolence as styles of being, and that they were fascinated with rough, rural forms of life. Narratives often offer cues regarding the social styles their characters embody, and sometimes they label these styles explicitly. But sometimes narratives are dealing with styles of being that have no commonly accepted name, and it is often enough to be able to recognize that the novelist is building an evaluative description of a specific sort of person, with specific traits. We do this by studying how a character thinks, speaks, and acts; what roles she plays, what goals she pursues, what is said about her, what institutions, images, and others she is identified with, etc. Then we can describe her style, and name it, provisionally.

McClure Character, Style of Being, and Discourse

The novel is consistently alert to the role of language in shaping our character or style of being. In A Portrait of the Artist, For instance, James Joyce makes the key role of specific life discourses in his protagonists development emphatically clear. As Stephen Dedalus is growing up, Joyce tells us, [H]e . . . hear[s] about him the constant voices of his fathers and of his masters, urging him to be a gentleman above all things and urging him to be a good catholic above all things. These voices now had come to be hollowsounding in his ears. When the gymnasium had been opened he had heard another voice urging him to be strong and manly and when the movement toward national revival had begun to be felt in the college yet another voice had bidden him to be true to his country. . . . In the profane world, as he foresaw, a worldly voice would bid him raise up his fathers fallen state by his labours and, meanwhile, the voice of his school companions urged him to be a decent fellow. (James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man ) Notice that each voice Joyce lists belongs to more than one person; it is a social voice. And notice that the different voices articulate and advocates specific life philosophies and styles of being. This suggests that ordinary conversation is suffused with philosophical ideas and prompts, that the thought-world of the developing individual is not entirely his own, and that his thoughts about how to live are likely to be complex and conflicted. And it means that a characters style of being will be closely identified with one or more socially authoritative or innerly persuasive discourses, discourses that shape his behavior. Tracing a characters development: In many novels, the main character is not static but developing, in the process of taking shape. This means that the character herself is trying out different languages (that is, different verbally coded philosophies of life) and the styles of being and beliefs they endorse. Bakhtin has some interesting things to say about this process of ideological becoming. The process, as Bakhtin describes it, is messy, stressful, and complex. It entails learning a whole set of languages, and finding (of forging) ones own language or set of languages, a way of seeing and being that makes personal sense. Even the illiterate peasant, Bakhtin observes, lived in several language systems: he prayed to God in one language . . . sang songs in another, spoke to his family in a third, and, when he began to dictate petitions to the local authorities through a scribe, he tried speaking yet a fourth language (the official-literate language, paper language). But these languages were not dialogically coordinated in the linguistic consciousness of the peasant; he passed from one to the other without thinking, automatically; each was indisputably in its own place. . . . As soon as a critical interanimation of languages began to occur in the consciousness of our peasant, as soon as it became clear that . . . the ideological systems and approaches to the world that were indissolubly connected with these languages contradicted each other and in no way could live in peace and quiet with one another--then . . . the necessity of actively choosing ones orientation among them began (M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 295-6). The struggle to find and forge an orienting language or set of languages is so important, Bakhtin continues, because the discourses we are taught to take as true often define us in ways we do not find accurate or comfortable. Thus a gap forms between the official descriptions and prescriptions of the reigning discourses and our own intuitions and impulses. Consciousness, Bakhtin writes,

McClure

awakens to independent ideological life precisely in a world of alien discourses surrounding it, and from which it cannot initially separate itself (345). Indeed, it is compelled at first to assent to certain discourses, certain ways of thinking and seeing. The official discourse of parents, teachers, politicians, preachers, advertising writers, and powerful peers demands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own; it binds us, quite independent of any power it might have to persuade us internally. Sometimes this authoritative discourse does convince us. But, it happens more frequently that an individuals becoming . . . is characterized precisely by a sharp gap between these two categories: in one, the authoritative word (religious, political, moral; the word of a father, of adults, and of teachers, etc.) that does not know internal persuasiveness, in the other internally persuasive word that is denied all privilege, backed up by no authority at all, and is frequently not even acknowledged in society (not by public opinion, nor by scholarly norms, nor by criticism). . . . The struggle and dialogic interrelationship of these categories of ideological discourse are what usually determine the history of an individual ideological consciousness. (Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 342) The ideological becoming of a human being, therefore, is a process that entails selecting discourses and trying on the modes of seeing and being they prescribe, modes which when put to the test reveal the discourses complicity with life or death. But it is often the case, in life and fiction, that none of the available discourses are fully persuasive or satisfying. Then ideological becoming entails sifting through and selectively assimilating the words of others, building ones own discourse or dialogue out of the materials at hand. Of course this selecting and sifting is rarely fully conscious and neednt ever lead to the formulation of a single coherent language of the subject. What Bakhtin says of novels may also be true of their most sympathetic characters minds: The generic work of the novel is to argue against the idea of one language of truth in favor of pluralism and dialogue (Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination). [Dostoyevsky] affirms the independence, internal freedom, unfinalizability, and indeterminacy of the hero. (Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevskys Poetics) V. DISCOURSE AND DEBATE IN LITERARY NARRATIVE Characters, Bakhtin argues, not only model styles of being but also give voice specific systems of belief: A character is the image of a language. And the novel itself is designed to explore and evaluate the ideologies it assigns to its characters (and narrator). Thus the critic needs to develop an ear for different discourses, different verbal-ideological systems. This means learning to notice when a character or narrator is giving voice to a recognizable set of attitudes, assumptions, and ideas, a specific doctrine, creed, belief system, life philosophy, or world view. Sometimes the work itself will label a particular mode of speech: call it Christian, or neo-Hegelian, or conservative. But more often we will have to do this work ourselves, either by drawing on our knowledge of the discourses circulating in a particular culture, or by getting this knowledge from criticism, or by making up a label for a mode of seeing and speaking that occurs over and over in the work. Of course merely designating a discourse is not sufficient: we have to learn to describe the basic tenets of the discourse in question, its substance. Sites for study: One way to begin to identify the discourses that figure in a novel is by paying close

McClure

attention to passages of declamation, reflection, debate, and dialogue. Its here that we get the most sustained display of the discourses that suffuse the world of the novel and shape characters ways of seeing and being. And from here we can begin to hear snatches of the discourses as they emerge again and again in more fleeting form, as keywords or phrases. Debate in Narrative: Bakhtin argues (in a way that anticipates Bersanis formulation regarding styles of being) that novels can be profitably read as dialogues or debates between the discourses they introduce. Debate has several meanings, two of which are crucial for our understanding of the nature of narrative debates and dialogues: 1. A formal discussion of some question of public interest in a legislative or other assembly OED 2. A long term, multi-sided and relatively unstructured discussion of an issue, as in someones mind, or between individuals or groups in society at large Structurally, narrative debates or dialogues are closer to the second sort. They take place over time, in the course of events, entangled with other debates. As they unfold, evidence emerges, positions change, and new questions arise. Characters and readers are swayed to one side or another. Resolutions may emerge (as they do in formal debate) but the novelist may also choose to leave the debates she has staged only partially resolved. One form of criticism traces out these debates and rewrites them in the manner of debate. It seeks to show, --what perspectives and positions (discourses) are in play, --what parties are engaged, --what the stakes are, --how the debate unfolds, --and which position emerges as the strongest, if any. Exploring the politics of discursive life. If novelists are interested in exploring the life and death potentialities of different discursive orientations, they are also interested in depicting and evaluating different speech communities, different modes of orchestrating discursive life. Bakhtin points out that some individuals and communities are monologic: they insist that there is only one language of truth and that only one authoritative, official discourse, one allencompassing way of seeing and being can be spoken. Others, the healthier ones, he thinks, are more dialogic. They make space for different languages and beliefs, encourage the testing of established truths, and allow new ideas to emerge. Most communities fall between these extremes. They allow for a certain play of discourses, but some discourses are privileged--marked as authoritative, meaning-legislating, official, or hegemonic-- while others are marginalized and subjugated, and still others are almost totally proscribed. Basic Tenets of Bakhtins Discourse Theory: --a discourse or language is any specific verbal-ideological formation, a socially distributed set of ideas with its own style and vocabulary; --the social world is the site of a play of discourses, a struggle orchestrated by specific rules of exchange and dominated by certain privileged or official discourses, tied to powerful institutions;

McClure

10

--the world of personal exchange (dialogue) is also the site of a play of discourses shaped by specific protocols of speech and speech practices. --individual consciousness also hosts a play of discourses that shapes personal perception, conduct, and desire, and this play is determined by specific, more or less enabling, mental practices or modes of thought. VI. SETTING AND SOCIAL DRAMA IN LITERARY NARRATIVE Like histories, novels describe and trace the development of large-scale social forces and systems. Like sociological studies, they trace the human impact of these forces and systems. Like editorials and political analyses, they take sides in social debates and propose strategies for resolving these conflicts, and struggles But they do so in stories shaped around the experiences of individual humans embedded in particular social settings. Discourses are not the only elements of the social world that figure powerfully in literary narrative. Novels and other narratives are interested in a whole range of social forces, institutions, and struggles: wars, occupations, social catastrophes, economic systems and developments, systems of discrimination, class structures, and more subtle social pressures and promptings. Many critics see the interaction of individuals and society as the great subject of the novel. But novels also focus on the social drama itself: on specific social situations, events, problems, and struggles. They seek, in Burkes words, to size up social situations and histories and to imagine strategies for dealing with them. They attempt, in Bersanis terms, to evaluate the life and death potentialities of different social orders and styles of being. Thus we can stretch the notion of character to include not just individual human characters and destinies, but different sorts of actors: nation-states, multinationals . . . sub-national groupings and movements (whether religious, political, or economic), and even intimate face-to-face groups, such as villages, neighborhoods, and families (Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 33). And we can expand the notion of conflict and plot to include social struggle and change. Locating the social: Novels, plays, and films build up their representations of the social world in several ways: --by shorthand references to social systems, entities, events, problems --by abstract-analytical social description and analysis: Narratives often shift into the registers of sociology, history, political science, etc. to sketch out social structures, problems, and conflicts. Passages written in these registered are often overlooked by readers, but they help us get a larger picture of the narratives imagined world and recognize the implications of concretely depicted scenes and events. We find such prose embedded in dialogues between characters, interior monologues, and the narrators comments. --by social storytelling: Many narratives also shift into the register of history to relate social struggles and transformations. --by social symbolism: Characters, objects, and events can all be socially symbolic: socially significant both in themselves, locally and specifically, and as markers of more

McClure general groups, patterns, and problems. They are parts that stand, to a certain degree, for wholes, individuals that stand for groups, particularities that stand for patterns. --and, of course, by accounts of the concrete social experiences of their characters.

11

Part of the art of reading for the social entails learning to recognize and reflect on these elements and zones of the text. The harder part entails learning to think socially, the way a historian, sociologist, or political scientist might, about fictional worlds. Note: Exploring the socio-historical dimensions of narratives, like exploring their discursive and ideological dimensions, entails turning our attention away from the most dramatically engaging narrative zones. In The Names, Don DeLillo acknowledges that in demanding such a turning away, narrators risk losing their audience. The storyteller, he writes, begins to recite. Heads nod, heads wag, a child squats down to pee. The man tells his story at a rapid clip, spinning event after event. . . . When the storyteller interrupts his narrative to consider things, to weigh events and characters . . . to examine methodically, the mob grows impatient, then angry (277). Yet DeLillo, like most great novelists, is ready to risk losing some of his audience in order to dramatize and reflect on social, psychological, and philosophical matters. His novels are full of such interruptions. VII. THE ONTOLOGICAL DIMENSION OF LITERARY NARRATIVE Literary narratives portray not only social realities, but ultimate realities, the landscape and workings of the cosmos itself. In some narratives, a certain ontology or world view, is simply taken for granted. But in others the ultimate shape and sense of things is put in question. Renaissance playwrights, writing at the moment when secular scientific views of reality were beginning to challenge religious views, regularly used their plays to stage confrontations between a bi-planar, other-worldly ontology and a single-plane, this-worldly ontology (McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 34). And this sort of ontological destabilization and debate continues today, its most recent manifestation being contemporary magical realist narratives. Elements of a World View --An evaluative description of the basic features and dynamics of the world, or universe, or cosmos, indicating how it is constructed, how it works, and how it is unfolding --A description of humans, their capacities and their proper role in the world --Prescriptions for flourishing, well-being, or survival in the world (location of resources for strength and well-being) --A criticism of competing world views World View in Literary Narratives: --The portrait of the world drawn in most narratives is sketchy, incomplete, a matter of certain highlighted elements and much obscurity. Often the narrator assumes that we will need only a few cues to recognize the world, because it corresponds in its characteristics to the world projected by some socially powerful discourse. Some Narratives of Ontological Uncertainty --Narratives of ontological destabilization and debate: episodes in which characters

McClure

12

ontological assumptions (their world views) are challenged (by other characters and/or by events), producing disorientation, and which open debates between competing world views. --Narratives of ontological exploration: episodes in which characters struggle to orient themselves in the terrain of an unfamiliar world. --Narratives of ontological stabilization and resolution: episodes in which characters achieve a kind of ontological stability and their own debate, at least, is resolved. Three types of ontologically disruptive narrative: The fantastic [genre] requires the fulfillment of three conditions. First, the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons [not make-believe creatures] and to hesitate between a natural and a supernatural explanation of the events described. Second, this hesitation may also be experienced by a character . . . and at the same time the hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work. . . . Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as poetical readings [that is, readings which would lead us to see the possibly supernatural events as merely symbolic]. If a text ultimately provides a naturalistic explanation for the strange event, Todorov continues, it belongs to the genre of the uncanny. If it provides a supernatural explanation, it belongs to the genre of the marvelous. Only the text which refuses any resolution is to be called fantastic. (Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic, 33) VIII. OPEN ENDINGS: THE PRODUCTION AND NEGOTIATION OF UNCERTAINTY As we have seen, all narratives pose and address questions. Disagreements, debates, quests, and mysteries are the very engines of narrative plot and argument. Any single narrative will pose many questions: local questions about character and motive, larger questions about subjectivity, society, ethics, and the ultimate shape of things. Narratives may provide solutions to the questions they raise. But these solutions are frequently only partial and provisional. And certain questions may remain open, certain situations ambiguous, certain debates undecided, certain mysteries unresolved, even as the narrative reaches its conclusion. Indeed, some narratives seem designed to emphasize the complex and undecidable aspect of things. They dismantle conventional beliefs, draw us deeper into complexity, and offer strategies for handling uncertainty rather than solutions to all problems. As cited above, Kenneth Burke describes and justifies this sort of art: Society might well be benefitted by the corrective of a disintegrating art which converts each simplicity into a complexity, which ruins the possibilities of ready hierarchies, which concerns itself with the problematical, the experimental, and thus by implication works corrosively upon those expansionist certainties preparing the way for our social cataclysms (Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement, 105).

McClure

13

Uncertainty and the Art of Critical Writing: Because narratives not only open up questions, exposing complexity, but often leave questions only partially resolved, it is essential that critics learn how to describe complexity and uncertainty. This means learning the grammatical forms and terms that express complexity and qualification: Both . . . and, A but also B, at the same time, not only, while, asks, suggests, questions, complicates, leaves unresolved, etc. It means learning to describe the controversies and mysteries that inform a text; trace the efforts to resolve them, and describe their ultimate resolution or endurance. And it means learning to make ones essays less assertive, more interrogative and exploratory. Some of the best essays work to clarify the ambiguities of a text rather than to propose some authoritative reading of its arguments. IX. THE LITERARY ESSAY: A successful assignment-based essay, --responds directly to the question/prompt, addressing its several aspects directly and using its terms and patterns -- uses the critical terms and analytical techniques on which weve focused --has a clear and sufficiently complex thesis or statement of purpose --carefully defines, clarifies, and qualifies its basic concepts and claims --is well constructed: with a clear and clearly marked pattern of argument, analysis, and/or exposition --avoids the pattern of plot summary with running commentary and avoids unsupported assertions. --is probing: gets beyond the obvious as soon as possible --covers the crucial elements of the text in developing its argument --does justice to the complexity/ambiguity/ obscurity of the text --quotes and discusses specific passages to bring out meaning and substantiate claims --pays close attention to the language and form of the passages it cites --cites longer passages only in order to subject them to close analysis. --is verbally polished: written in a precise, vigorous, supple, clear, and grammatically correct prose --follows the basic MLA rules for formatting and citation --meets the assignments minimal requirement for length --does not entail plagarism (For a description of the Universitys policy on plagarism, visit the following English Department website: wp.rutgers.edu/courses/plagiarism) 220PrePr.s10