Response to Gerald Prince

I wish to address two points in Gerald Prince's review essay of my book; one of the points is factual, the other raises some interesting questions about the definition of narrative. Prince claims that I tend “to use terms like ‘narrative,’ ‘text,’ ‘work,’ ‘literature,’ and ‘novel’ interchangeably (see, e.g., 8, 27, 31, et passim)” (268). I have always admired Prince's rigorous definitions and careful applications of those definitions and have tried to follow his example in my own work. I sometimes vary my terms so as not to repeat a word like “narrative” or “novel” too often; I will substitute “text” or “work” on occasion where its denotation is clear, since all narratives and novels are also texts and works (though these are obviously not symmetrical relations—not all texts are narratives). Readers should have no trouble determining what I mean by each term and what each term refers to. I am confident that they will find no false equivalences on the pages indicated or elsewhere in the book.I will say almost nothing about matters that are primarily differences of interpretation, however broad, narrow, or self-evident, though surely B. S. Johnson's novel-in-a-box, The Unfortunates, is a narrative by any definition since it narrates the activities and memories of an individual who travels to and reports on a soccer match while being overwhelmed by memories of a good friend who had died young. This is incontrovertibly both a novel and a narrative with a fixed fabula and a variable sjužet. Instead, I will take up Prince's most interesting and consequential critique, concerning the definition—and nature—of narrative itself. Prince is the only theorist I know of who explicitly insists that a represented sequence of events must, among other features, be noncontradictory in order to be a narrative. My book rejects this criterion; it is designed to discuss and theorize novels with numerous contradictions like Robbe-Grillet's La Jalousie, Anna Kavan's Ice, Kate Atkinson's Life after Life and many other similar works of fiction. I thus needed a more capacious definition of narrative than those usually employed, and clarified that my definition did not preclude the existence of contradictory narratives. Prince disputes this and offers the following reductio ad absurdum of my position: “It would apply to representations like ‘The king died and then the queen died,’ ‘The king died and then the queen died and then he did not die,’ ‘The king died in 1967 and then he died in 1956’ (cf. 109), ‘The king died and yet the king died,’ or ‘The king died though the king will die.’ Indeed, it would pertain to all kinds of representation” (269).This claim raises two questions: first, using Prince's criterion, how much contradiction is necessary for a text to cease to be a narrative? There are many minor contradictions and inconsistencies in numerous novels; in Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, Susan is both said to have written important correspondence and to be essentially illiterate. This contradiction, along with many other inconsistencies in the book, should certainly not negate its status as a narrative. But where does one draw the line? Is the Moran narrative in Molloy not a narrative because Moran avows at its end, “Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining” (170). Are metaleptic fictions not narratives because they violate ontological boundaries? Are narratives that present two or three different endings, like O. Henry's “Roads of Destiny,” actually not narratives because of their implied self-contradictions? Is The French Lieutenant's Woman not a narrative because its first ending is contradicted by a second ending? If one major contradiction is allowed, why not five, as occurs in Jenny Erpenbeck's Aller Tage abend (The End of Days), where the protagonist dies five times at different stages of her life (or lives)? It is then a short step to the over twenty deaths of Atkinson's Ursula Todd, and the even greater contradictions of Coover's “The Babysitter” or Robbe-Grillet's La Jalousie. I do not see what convincing criterion could be devised to divide this group of texts into genuine and false narratives; neither do I see how one can throw out the entire group of texts and say that none are narratives. Furthermore, I don't see what the problem would be with narratives that contain contradictions, especially those that are deliberately placed there to produce specific effects.The second question is what do we do with narrative texts that contain contradictions if we do not call them narratives? How can a text be a novel if it is not a narrative? In such a case, we will have to come up with a new definition of novel instead of the standard “an extended fictional narrative in prose.” Finally, let us consider this depiction of a sequence of events in a comparatively recent work of fiction: “1she kills her father, and her father comes back, and she kills him again, and the book goes on for a bit, and then he's there again. So it's a different kind of game, an anti-realistic kind of game” (atd. in Penner 57). This brief summary sounds very much like some of Prince's proffered contradictory mini stories. It is in fact the author's account of part of his novel, The Heart of the Country, by Nobel Prize winner, J. M. Coetzee. Surely we don't want to deny narrative status to this brilliantly composed and extremely compelling work.It appears that we must either reject contradictory narratives as narratives because they could produce some of the sillier possibilities that Prince adduces, or we reject Prince's position and remain able to refer to significant contradictory novels as narratives. It seems to me evident that if we allow Prince's criterion then we must throw out far too many narratives for the sake of a principle that many authors refuse to follow. Here I believe we should theorize what major authors of fiction actually do, rather than construct artificial critical boundaries. Neither should we dismiss fictions because they employ constructs only possible in fiction, such as impossible worlds, metalepsis, inversions of time, illogical spaces, and impossible acts of narration. All these strategies contradict real world possibilities, but this only means that such fictions are doing their job by being inventive; we should do ours and formulate narratological models that do justice to these often strange yet compelling works.I thank Gerald Prince for raising these important issues and thereby establishing a formal debate over the very intriguing and significant question of narrative and contradiction

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