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A Corporeal Narratology

2000; University of Arkansas Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

2374-6629

Daniel Punday,

Narrative Theory and Analysis

Despite its signal importance to so many schools of contemporary criticism, human body has largely failed to garner a significant place in narratology. This neglect results from narratology's traditional focus on what Gerald Prince has called questions of over questions of what. An overview like Mieke Bal's influential Narratology breaks narratology down into study of and aspects. The former are actual events, actors, and places that make up story, and latter are ways that text manipulates presentation of those elements. A narrative cannot exist if lacks both elements and aspects, but, as Prince notes, narratology has traditionally been interested in latter: in most common type of narrative criticism the narratologist pays little or no attention to story as such, narrated, what that is represented, and concentrates instead on discourse, narrating, way in which 'what' is (75). One reason for this focus on manipulation of story elements rather than on elements themselves is narratology's emphasis, growing out of modern fiction, on consciousness and perception. Our most flexible and enduring narrative concepts--stream of consciousness, point of view, and free indirect discourse--all describe authorial attempt to get down on paper a character's way of thinking. The human body has rarely been an explicit part of these modernist aesthetics. Another reason that narratology has focused on story aspects rather than elements is that is far less clear how we are to study such elements. While students at undergraduate level can usually grasp with relatively little difficulty idea that a narrative is a series of choices made by an author to achieve a certain effect and meaning, we have considerably more difficulty explaining how objects represented shape narratives that represent them. The human body, consequently, has rarely been studied as a narratological object. I am not, of course, suggesting that critics have not discussed human body in individual narratives, hut rather that such discussions rarely are used as an occasion to raise fundamentally narratological issues. The 1985 issue of Poetics Today on female body edited by Susan Suleiman is typical of way that narratology has failed to integrate body into its core interests. This volume certainly talks a great deal about narrative and about issues arising from body, but two rarely come together to produce what we could call a corporeal narratology. Suleiman's own essay on alternatives to traditional ways of representing female body is a case in point. Suleiman first discusses reaction to recently popular female erotic texts, like Erica Jong's Fear of Flying and Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle, and concludes, If popularity of these books is, on one hand, a positive sign, suggesting that American public is ready to admit some real changes in what is considered an accept able story or an acceptable use of language by women, may also be a sign that neither book is felt to imply a genuine threat to existing ways of seeing and being between sexes (47). Suleiman then goes on to consider alternatives to traditional representations of gender, concluding with Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve, in which it is impossible to say who is woman and who is man, where one sex or one self begins and other ends (63). Despite her interest in how narrative represents gender, Suleiman does not ask question that seems to me central one of a corporeal narratology: how do certain ways of thinking about body shape plot, characterization, setting, and other aspects of narrative? [1] In reviewing recent history of narratology, Mieke Bal cites this Poetics Today volume as an instance of how recent criticism has drifted away from core narratological issues: although this volume is definitely not devoid of narratological concerns, these certainly do not predomi nate (The Point 728). …