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A Contextual View of Narrative Fiction in the First Person Plural

2008; Ohio State University Press; Volume: 16; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nar.2008.0000

1538-974X

Amit Marcus,

Contemporary Literature and Criticism

A Contextual View of Narrative Fiction in the First Person Plural Amit Marcus (bio) "We" fictional narratives have—as Brian Richardson has recently argued persuasively—"a supple technique with a continuous history of over a century that continues to be deployed in a considerable number of texts" (55–56). Richardson's contention lies in contrast with Margolin's view that "we" literary narratives have always been rare (115). The debate between Margolin and Richardson is partly the result of their different uses of the term "'we' fictional narratives." Margolin employs the term more rigorously, as referring only to narratives told wholly or mostly in the first person plural. By contrast, Richardson's use is suppler, designating also narratives in which there are thematically significant shifts from "we" to other pronouns and vice versa. However, the more interesting difference between them, in my view, lies in Richardson's emphasis on the historical conditions of composition of these narratives, which contrasts Margolin's disregard of contextual norms and their effect on narrative technique. In endorsing Richardson's contextual outlook, I wish to demonstrate that the frequency of first person plural narration depends on a variety of norms: philosophical (what beliefs about consciousness operate in the writer's community?), social-political (what are the societal and political conditions under which the narrative is being composed and how might the narrative be addressing them?), and literary (should the form and the ideology of the narrative represent the hegemonic system of values or subvert it? what counts as a deviation from the literary norm?). My main goal in this essay is to analyze some of the norms that may hinder or, alternatively, [End Page 46] foster the creation of first person plural literary works. The historical awareness of the fluidity of literary (and other) values will also contribute to my discussion of other, non-contextual approaches to "we" narratives. Margolin (132) cites three reasons for what he considers as the rarity of "we" fictional narratives. The first is "what Roman Jakobson has called 'the semantic instability and internal contradiction, [two] inherent properties of the first person plural'" (454).1 The second is the "inherently unresolved" mental access in "we" narratives, which combines "immediate first-person inside knowledge with a second- or third-person inferential one." The third reason mentioned by Margolin is that "the intense sense of collective subject . . . is probably easier to convey directly in lyrical or meditative texts than to embody in a description of situations and courses of events." Margolin's synchronic analysis is founded on classical Structuralist assumptions and method, and as such, does not take into account philosophical, social-political, and literary conventions that determine the preference of one pronoun to another. It implies that first person plural narration always is and always will be rare to the same degree. I intend to demonstrate that this effect is dependent on a certain conception of consciousness and narration in literature which is, by its very nature, contextually bounded. The approach that links the preference of certain pronouns in the narration of fictional works to a specific ideology, historical conditions and intellectual atmosphere is familiar. For example, Roland Barthes (29–40) analyzes the use of the third person in the classical nineteenth-century novel as a manifestation of bourgeois ideology, which seeks to disguise its interests and world-view and represent them as universal truths—in other words, to naturalize them. Barthes argues that the authority of the omniscient narrator serves this purpose much better than a first person narrator would, since the latter's system of beliefs and values is perceived by the reader from the outset as subjective and therefore disputable. By contrast, Brian Richardson ("I etcetera" 320–1) contends that there is no unequivocal connection between a certain ideology and the use of a specific form of narration. He points out that authors who sympathized with fascism, such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline, frequently use first person singular narrators, thereby confirming that first person narratives are not essentially more emancipatory than third person narratives. However, I believe it is worthwhile to articulate connections between ideology and form (including narrative locus) that are more complicated and less rigid than the...