Fictions of Discourse: Reading Narrative Theory

Lawrence Mathews is an associate professor of English at the Memorial
University of Newfoundland.

In his conclusion, Patrick O’Neill identifies two possible ways in
which narratology can be applied to literary texts: “as a mere
mechanical hand-book of occasionally useful terms” or as “an
indispensable and highly sophisticated model for generating more
differentiated, more self-aware, more interesting readings.”
Unfortunately, Fictions of Discourse provides little evidence of
narratology’s potential to play the latter role.

O’Neill’s engaging persona guides the reader through the
intricacies of his subject, drawing on a broad range of examples, from
the Bible to Calvin and Hobbes, making a witty case for Zeno as the
world’s first postmodernist, and maintaining a relaxed, genial tone.
But this book is deadly dull reading nonetheless.

There are, for example, a great many sentences like this one: “In a
sentence like ‘John watched Mary, who wished he would stop,’
‘Mary’ is still a non-transparent, focalized as far as the internal
focalization by ‘John’ is concerned, but in terms of focalization by
the external narrator of the sentence as a whole, ‘Mary’ is a
transparent focalized, since the narrator, unlike John, can see
‘through’ her and her own focalization of the situation as an
independent character-focalizer.” Yes, a wearily worthy point is no
doubt being made about the deployment of “occasionally useful
terms,” but I wonder how anyone who cares about writing could, without
ironic intent, produce such a sentence.

Fictions of Discourse defines and illustrates terms and outlines the
positions of various theorists; O’Neill’s stated intent is, almost
inevitably, “to generate appropriately suggestive questions” rather
than “to provide definitive answers.” I kept hoping, in vain, for
something definitive—if not “answers,” at least a compelling
illustration of narratology’s value, in the form of one sustained
“interesting” reading of one text. But as it was, the array of
snippets quoted from so many works of fiction served only to remind me
of the richness and variety of literature itself in contrast to the
barrenness of this sort of writing about it.