RECENT THEORIES OF NARRATIVE
Since the 19C, the methods of the natural sciences have served as a model for the rationalisation of
other disciplines. But during the past two decades that model has proved inadequate for an understanding of
society and culture. The behaviourism that dominated psychology until recently has given way to an exploration
of cognitive processes and purposive action. Philosophers of history have shown that narration is not just an
impressionistic substitute for reliable statistics, but a method of understanding the past that has its own rationale.
News of the world comes to us in the form of "stories" told from one or another point of view.
The marginal status of the novel started to change after World War II when the New Critics applied
themselves to the task of showing that the novel’s aesthetic value and meaning could be backed up by detailed
analysis of form, just as in other genres. Mark Schorer´s Technique as Discovery (1947) and Forms of Modern
Fiction (1948) disregarded plot, character, setting and theme, and concentrated on techniques involving the
author’s relation to the narrator, the narrator relation to the story, and the ways in which they provide access to
the minds of characters -matters of point of view. Joseph Frank’s essay Spatial Form in Modern Literature (1945)
concentrated not only in the matter of how the story is told; He discussed other topics constituting the form of the
novel: structure of image, metaphor, and symbol that emerge from the action, the treatment of time, and the
relationship between the novel and the structures of myth.
Analysis of point of view, images, and symbols converge in discussions of "the stream of
consciousness". Books by Lionel Trilling (1948), Lawrence Bowling (1950), Robert Humphrey (1954), Melvin
Friedman (1955), Leon Edel (1955), Harry Levin (1963)...
After 1960, narrative theory became an international subject of study and an interdisciplinary subject.
Structuralism conceived the study of literature as a subdivision of the sciences of man -humanities and social
sciences-, and they used the most scientific of humanistic disciplines -linguistics- as a model or paradigm for the
development of theories that would link literature, anthropology, and sociology together. This trend coincides with
the publication of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ The Structural Study of Myth (1955).
For these critics, the novel was distinguished from other genres by its content and subject matter -the
representation of life in all its diversity, breaking away from other conventional forms, and shaped by human
values -beliefs, ideologies, pretensions, romantic desire, etc. This emphasis on representational truth and moral
issues in the critical tradition is related to its educational goals: even when the novel is not didactic, it can be used
to gain knowledge about life.
Most English and American critics hold that the novel originated in the 18C. Critics who concentrated on
its technical features to provide an explanation argued that subjective points of view and the record of
consciousness became important in literature when philosophy, political thought, and society began to
emphasise the autonomy of the individual. For those who conceive the novel as a depiction of social reality, its
appearance marks the emergence of the middle class as the shaping force of history, ending the period when
literature portrayed all characters but the aristocracy as crude, comic, or unworthy of serious treatment.
Roland Barthes extended and adapted the methods of anthropology and structural linguistics to the
study of modern literature. So did the Russian structuralist Victor Shklovsky, who studied Laurence Sterne´s
Tristam Shandy, and M.M. Bakhtin, who rejected the formalist emphasis on literary technique at the expense of
social and political factors in the study of the novel. Members of the formalist group were, among others, Roman
Jakobson, Boris Eichenbaum and Boris Tomaschevsky. Russian influence on French structuralism was very
important. Tzvetan Todorov translated many of the essays and is the most systematic and comprehensive of
structuralism.
For the traditional assertion that the novel is a realistic representation of life, structuralists substitute the thesis
that all stories are shaped by conventions and imagination. The novel is in their view but one relatively recent
type of narrative. Their attempts to identify the conventions underlying myths, folktales, science fiction, the
fantastic, autobiography, and detective stories as well as the realistic novel, and to explain how language,
society, and the mind have contributed to the formation of literary conventions has suggested new areas of study
and stimulated critics to develop alternative theories.
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INTRODUCTION
The novel is only one of many possible prose narrative forms. It shares with other narratives, like the epic
and the romance, two basic characteristics: a story and a story-teller. The epic tells a traditional story and is
an amalgam of myth, history, and fiction. Its heroes are gods and goddesses and extraordinary men and
women. The romance also tells stories of larger-than-life characters. It emphasizes adventure and often
involves a quest for an ideal or the pursuit of an enemy. The events seem to project in symbolic form the
primal desires, hopes, and terrors of the human mind and are, therefore, analogous to the materials of dream,
myth, and ritual. Although this is true of some novels as well, what distinguishes the novel from the romance is
its realistic treatment of life and manners. Its heroes are men and women like ourselves, and its chief interest,
as Northrop Frye said, is "human character as it manifests itself in society."
Development of the Novel
The term for the novel in most European languages is roman, which suggests its closeness to the
medieval romance. The English name is derived from the Italian novella, meaning "a little new thing."
Romances and novelle, short tales in prose, were predecessors of the novel, as were picaresque narratives.
Picaro is Spanish for "rogue," and the typical picaresque story is of the escapades of a rascal who lives by his
wits. The development of the realistic novel owes much to such works, which were written to deflate romantic
or idealized fictional forms. Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605-15), the story of an engaging madman who tries to
live by the ideals of chivalric romance, explores the role of illusion and reality in life and was the single most
important progenitor of the modern novel.
The novel broke from those narrative predecessors that used timeless stories to mirror unchanging moral
truths. It was a product of an intellectual milieu shaped by the great seventeenth-century philosophers,
Descartes and Locke, who insisted upon the importance of individual experience. They believed that reality
could be discovered by the individual through the senses. Thus, the novel emphasized specific, observed
details. It individualized its characters by locating them precisely in time and space. And its subjects reflected
the popular eighteenth-century concern with the social structures of everyday life.
The novel is often said to have emerged with the appearance of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719)
and Moll Flanders (1722). Both are picaresque stories, in that each is a sequence of episodes held together
largely because they happen to one person. But the central character in both novels is so convincing and set
in so solid and specific a world that Defoe is often credited with being the first writer of "realistic" fiction. The
first "novel of character" or psychological novel is Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740-41), an epistolary novel
(or novel in which the narrative is conveyed entirely by an exchange of letters). It is a work characterized by
the careful plotting of emotional states. Even more significant in this vein is Richardson's masterpiece Clarissa
(1747-48). Defoe and Richardson were the first great writers in our literature who did not take their plots from
mythology, history, legend, or previous literature. They established the novel's claim as an authentic account
of the actual experience of individuals.
Reasons for the Novel's Popularity
Since the eighteenth century, and particularly since the Victorian period, the novel, replacing poetry and
drama, has become the most popular of literary forms--perhaps because it most closely represents the lives of
the majority of people. The novel became increasingly popular as its social scope expanded to include
characters and stories about the middle and working classes. Because of its readership, which included a
large percentage of women and servants, the novel became the form which most addressed the domestic and
social concerns of these groups.
Experimentation: The Developing Role of the Narrator
As it evolved, the novel expanded in terms of its form. Writers began to experiment with different modes of
presentation. Central to experimentation was the role of the narrator. In a given novel, who talks to the
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reader? From whose point of view is the story told? Is the narrator identifiable with the author? Is the narrator
a character in the story or another character who simply observes the actions of others in the story? Is the
narrator reliable--can you believe him or her? Or is he or she unreliable, unable to convey the story without
distortion? How does the device of the narrator "frame" the story? How does the reader determine what the
truth is about the events reported?
Nineteenth-century novelists like Thackeray and Dickens often told their stories through an omniscient
narrator, who is aware of all the events and the motivations of all the characters of the novel. Through this
technique the writer can reveal the thoughts of any character without explaining how this information is
obtained. Henry James, who began writing in the last third of the nineteenth century, used the technique of
point-of-view narration so completely that the minds of his characters became the real basis of interest of the
novel. In such works, our knowledge of events and characters is itself limited by the limitations of this
character or central consciousness.
Since Henry James' time, many writers have experimented with shifting the focus of the novel further
inward to examine human consciousness. Writers like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and William Faulkner
used a method of narration known as stream of consciousness, which attempts to reproduce the flow of
consciousness. Perceptions, thoughts, judgments, feelings, associations, and memories are presented just as
they occur, without being shaped into grammatical sentences or logical sequences. In stream-ofconsciousness narration, all narrators are to some degree unreliable, which reflects the twentieth century's
preoccupation with the relativity and the subjective nature of experience, of knowledge, and of truth.
Proliferation of Types
The novel continues in its popularity to this day. It has moved away from a primarily realistic focus and has
evolved into the expansive form that incorporates all other fictional modes. Today, for example, there are
many types of novels. There is the allegorical novel, which uses character, place, and event to represent
abstract ideas and to demonstrate some thesis. The science fiction novel relies on scientific or pseudoscientific machinery to create a future society which parallels our own. The historical novel is set in the past
and takes its characters and events from history. The social novel is concerned with the influence of societal
institutions and of economic and social conditions on characters and events. These three types, the science
fiction, social, and historical novel, tend to be didactic, to instruct readers in the necessity for changing their
morality, their lives, and the institutions of society. The regional novel presents the influence of a particular
locale on character and events. The detective novel is a combination of the picaresque and psychological
novel in that it reveals both events and their motivation. And there are many others.
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