thesis on narrative theory

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Narrative theory.

• Didier Coste Didier Coste Universite Bordeaux Montaigne
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.116
• Published online: 28 June 2017

The narrative mode of world-representation and world-building is omnipresent and far exceeds the domain of literature. Since literature is not necessarily narrative and narrative not necessarily literary, the study of narrative in a literary context must confront narrative and literature in a dual way: How does the presence of narrative affect literature? And how does literariness affect narrative? The basic terminology needs to be clarified by comparing English with the vocabulary of other natural languages. No consensus has been reached, even in the West, on the nature of narrative discourse.

The entire history of poetics shows that, before the middle of the 20th century, little attention was paid to the narrative components of literary texts qua narrative—that is, insofar as the same narrative elements could equally be found in non-aestheticized uses of verbal and non-verbal languages. Aristotelian poetics, based on the mimesis of human action, keeps its grip on narrative theory. The post-Aristotelian triad separated more sharply the lyric from the epic and dramatic genres, but modern narrative theories, mostly based on the study of folk tales and the novel, have still failed to unify the field of literary narrative, or have done it artificially, dissolving narrative discourse into the undifferentiated experience of human life in linear time.

The Western “rise of the novel,” in Ian Watt’s sense, and its worldwide expansion, turned the question of fiction, not that of narrativity, into the main focus of narrative studies. Later, the emergence of formalism and semiotics and the “linguistic turn” of the social sciences pushed the narrative analysis of literary texts in the opposite direction, with all of its efforts bearing on minimal, supposedly deeper units and simple concatenations. The permanent, unresolved conflict between an analytical and constructivist view grounded in individual events and a holistic view concerned with story-worlds and storytelling leaves mostly unattended such fundamental questions as how narrative is used by literature and literature by narrative for their own ends.

Literary narrativity must be thoroughly reconsidered. A critical, transdisciplinary theory should submit to both logical and empirical trial—on a large number of varied samples—and narrative analyses that would take into account the following concepts used to forge methodological tools: discrimination (between the functions of discourse genres and between pragmatic roles in literary communication); combination rules (whether linear or not); levels (as spatial placing, as interdependence and hierarchical authority); scale and spatiotemporal framing and backgrounding , especially the (dominant) time concepts in a particular cultural context. The preconditions for analysis begin by investigating the relation between aesthetic emotions and narrative in other cultural domains than the West and the English-speaking world.

Literary narrativity and social values concur to link the rhetorical manipulation of narrative with its aestheticization. The pleasure and fear of cognition combine with strategies of delusion to either acquiesce to the effects of time and violence or resist them; routine and rupture are alternatively foregrounded, according to needs.

• literary aesthetics
• narrativity
• reader response
• spatiotemporal framing

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date: 14 November 2024

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Narrative Theory, 2006–2015: Some highlights with applications to Ian McEwan’s Atonement

This essay is a sequel to “Narrative theory, 1966–2006: A narrative,” Chapter 8 of the 2006 edition of The nature of narrative. Rather than attempting to be comprehensive, it highlights five particular developments in the field, each connected with issues discussed in the 2006 essay, and it illustrates the interpretive consequences of each development by considering its implications for reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement. The first two developments are related to ongoing “instabilities” I identified at the end of the 2006 essay: unnatural narratology and theories of fictionality. The next three developments are related to the three main approaches I discussed in 2006: within cognitive theory, work on theory of mind or mind-reading; within feminist theory, work on intersectionality; within rhetorical theory, work on the narrative communication model.

In 2006, when I finished “Narrative theory, 1966–2006: A narrative,” my contribution to the fortieth anniversary edition of The nature of narrative , I had a bittersweet feeling. I felt good about offering the account, however partial and otherwise flawed, of important developments in the field over that forty-year period. That account could, I hoped, serve as a useful guide for those who wanted to know “what [...] narrative theory is all about,” as Robyn Warhol put it in her paratextual comment. But I was also acutely aware that the guide would become more outdated with each passing month. Looking back from my vantage point in the summer of 2015, I am more inclined to focus on the sweet side of my experience. Yes, the chapter is no longer an up-to-date guide to the field, but it does stand as a reasonable history of those four decades, one that others can profitably supplement, modify, and contest. Furthermore, the recent work that limits the chapter’s usefulness as a guide is eloquent testimony about the continuing vitality of narrative theory, a phenomenon I am very happy to celebrate.

The advances in the field since 2006 also make the task of doing justice to what’s happened over the last decade a formidable one. The three “protagonists” I highlighted in 2005 – narrative as a formal system, narrative as an ideological instrument, and narrative as rhetoric – have all continued to evolve. All the core concepts of narrative – plot, event, character, time, space, and the various components of narrative discourse – have received valuable attention. Furthermore, narrative theory has benefited from new attention to narrative in poetry (see McHale and McAllister), to further study of narrative in media other than print, with work on graphic narrative and television especially significant. Finally, narrative theory has been enriched by attention to narrative’s role in non-literary disciplines with special progress being made in narrative and medicine, and narrative and law.

Rather than trying to offer a comprehensive but inevitably cursory overview of these developments within this limited space, I will offer more detailed accounts of five of them that have strong connections to the earlier narrative. [1] The first two developments are related to “instabilities” I noted at the end of “Narrative theory, 1966–2006”: (1) “narrative theory and the tradition of nonmimetic narrative,” and (2) “narrative theory, the borders between fiction and nonfiction, and cross-border traffic” (334–335). The other three developments are related to the three approaches I feature in that account: (3) from the cognitive approach, work on mind-reading or Theory of Mind; (4) from the feminist approach, work on the concept of intersectionality; and (5) from the rhetorical approach, work on the narrative communication model. To illustrate practical consequences of this work, I will turn, as I did in 2006, to analyses of Ian McEwan’s Atonement.

1 Unnatural narratology; Or “narrative theory and the tradition of non-mimetic narrative”

Brian Richardson’s Unnatural voices has turned out to be a seminal text for those interested in what he refers to as anti-mimetic or unnatural narrative (the term “unnatural” of course plays off Monika Fludernik’s proposals for a “natural” narratology [1996]). Richardson has remained a major contributor to this work, as evident in his collaborations with others (in the co-edited volume, A poetics of unnatural narrative ; and in the essay “Unnatural narratives, unnatural narratology”), his contribution to Narrative theory: Core concepts and critical debates , and his recent book, Unnatural narrative: Theory, history, and practice ). Other important voices include Jan Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Stefan Iversen. The key principle underlying this movement is that there is an inextricable connection between the corpus of narratives one uses to develop one’s theory and the content of that theory. The key contention is that mainstream narrative theory has been built on mimetic narratives (that is, those that are constrained by what is actual or possible in the extratextual world) and therefore has a mimetic bias that limits its explanatory power. For example, Richardson argues that the definition of narrative as “someone telling someone else that something significant has happened within a recognizable storyworld” (a formulation that clearly has the rhetorical definition in mind: somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purposes that something happened) reflects this bias ( Phelan 2006: 22). To account properly for unnatural narratives, Richardson contends, the definition would need to acknowledge that each of its elements has been problematized by practices in the anti-mimetic tradition. Not every narrator or narratee is a “someone” – some are nonhuman, some are collective. Some occasions are mimetically impossible, as the technique of first-person present tense narration indicates. And some of the things that happen are impossible according to what Aristotle called the laws of probability and necessity, as when Virginia Woolf’s Orlando suddenly becomes a woman. One of the pleasures of engaging with the work of the unnatural narratologists is learning about the long tradition of anti-mimetic narratives and the varieties of unnaturalness they exhibit.

While unnatural narratologists have emphasized the need to call attention to the long tradition of anti-mimetic narrative, they also argue that there is often more unnaturalness in the mimetic tradition than narrative theorists have noticed, let alone accounted for. [2] Indeed, when one reads mimetic fiction through the lens of unnatural narratology, one’s perceptions of anti-mimetic elements become more acute, as the following discussion of Atonement suggests.

It is possible to read McEwan’s novel, for all its metafictional hijinks, as ultimately committed to mimesis. Looking at the major elements of narrative, we see that the characters are well-drawn, possible people; that the settings — an upper-class estate in mid-1930s England, the French countryside during the British retreat from Dunkirk, and multiple sites in London – are all either plausible imitations (that country estate) or historical realities (Clapham Common); and that the events not only all conform to the constraints governing human behavior in the actual world, but are also caught up in the grim realities of the second World War. Looking at the narrative discourse, we do see something far less straightforward, as McEwan delays the disclosure that Parts I, II, and III are a novel existing within the storyworld, written by its protagonist, Briony Tallis, and, thus, that he has constructed a novel within a novel (Briony’s Atonement is contained within his Atonement which continues on for the final section called “London, 1999”). But though this novel-within-a-novel structure adds the metafictional dimension, it does not make Atonement anti-mimetic. Indeed, one could argue that this structure is, in part, mimetically motivated by Briony’s ambition to be a novelist. Furthermore, although McEwan’s novel contains information that contradicts information in Briony’s novel (most notably, its disclosure that Briony never met with her sister Cecelia and Robbie Turner in 1940 and promised to do what she could to atone for wrongly identifying Robbie as the sexual assailant of Lola Quincy), mimetically-oriented readers can easily keep the novel “natural” by emphasizing the distinction between what happens in Briony’s novel and what happens in McEwan’s.

Looking at Atonemen t through the lens of unnatural narratology, however, I find it increasingly difficult to preserve the mimetic. At the very least it becomes extra-mimetic, in the sense of “significantly exceeding the constraints of standard mimesis.” Two features of the novel become especially salient.

McEwan’s delayed disclosure that Parts I, II, and III are Briony’s novel and his contradicting information in her novel mean that he engages in an act of what Richardson has identified as “denarration” (“Denarration in fiction”). That is, he tells his audience that certain events happened and then he subsequently tells his audience that these events did not happen. It is a more elaborate version of Richardson’s example from Beckett’s Molloy : “It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not raining. It was not midnight” (171). Preserving the mimetic by invoking the ontological difference between Briony’s novel and McEwan’s novel comes at the price of ignoring the experiential quality of the denarration. McEwan makes his readers go from believing in Briony’s meeting with Cecilia and Robbie to no longer believing: he uses “London, 1999” to have Briony reveal that “Robbie Turner died of septicemia at Bray Dunes on 1 June 1940” and that “Cecilia was killed in September of the same year by the bomb that destroyed Balham Underground station” (350). By the same token, attending to the experiential dimension of the denarration does not erase the ontological difference between the events in Briony’s novel and the events in the actual world of McEwan’s novel. Consequently, McEwan’s novel uses its extra-mimetic dimension to explore the power of fiction and its capacity for world-making. “Briony met with Cecelia and Robbie,” “Briony did not meet with Cecilia and Robbie”: the denarration demonstrates that in fiction “saying makes it so.” In this way, Atonement supports the unnatural narratologists’ claims about the radical difference between fiction and nonfiction.

McEwan’s delayed disclosure about Briony being the author of Parts I, II, and III adds another layer to the novel’s narration. Before that disclosure, Parts I, II, and III have all the marks of a modernist novel, deploying an overarching noncharacter narrator exercising the epistemological privileges of variable focalization. In Part I, that narrator focalizes through Briony, Cecilia, Robbie, and even Briony and Cecilia’s mother Emily. Part II is a tour de force of internal focalization as it traces Robbie’s consciousness through his participation in the retreat from Dunkirk. Part III returns us to Briony’s focalization. Once McEwan uses “London, 1999” to definitively reveal that Briony is the author of Parts I, II, and III, he also signals that we should attribute the handling of the narration in those Parts to Briony. This attribution is all the more appropriate, given that Briony wrote her earlier drafts during the period of late modernism. But McEwan’s revelation also means that the noncharacter narration of Briony’s Atonement is simultaneously character narration within his Atonement . Consequently, Briony’s decision to offer internal focalization from the perspectives of characters other than herself functions simultaneously as conventional and authoritative within her novel and as unnatural within McEwan’s – indeed, the tour de force of Part II is one long violation of the mimetic code governing Briony’s character narration, since she could not know what Robbie was thinking during the retreat. We could try to preserve the mimetic here by saying that in Part II of his novel, McEwan is ultimately more concerned with Briony and her desire to atone than with Robbie and his experiences during the retreat. Consequently, we should read Part II as revelatory not about Robbie but about Briony and her efforts to assuage her guilt by using her account of Robbie’s experience to make him live, as Humbert Humbert says in another context, “in the minds of later generations.” But, again, that move comes at the price of ignoring the experiential quality of the narration, which engages us deeply in Robbie’s consciousness. Preserving the mimetic undermines that engagement and in so doing detracts from the power of the novel. Rather than preserving the mimetic, therefore, I suggest that we acknowledge – and admire – McEwan’s exposure of the limitations of such efforts.

Unnatural narratology has amply demonstrated the value of attending to the anti-mimetic tradition and of re-reading allegedly mimetic fictions through its lens. In addition, it has not only added concepts such as “denarration” to narratology’s analytical repertoire, but it has also done valuable work on “unnatural” techniques such as second-person narration and “we”-narration. Nevertheless, the extent to which it is a genuinely new theoretical paradigm remains an open question. As Peter J. Rabinowitz and I note in Narrative theory , unnatural narratology takes as its project developing a theory of X (where X is anti-mimetic narrative) rather than developing a theory rooted in a new view of narrative as Y. We contrast Richardson’s approach with our rhetorical theory that conceives of narrative as a rhetorical action, David Herman’s world-making approach that conceives of narrative as a mental model of a storyworld, and feminist narratology that conceives of narrative as a site for the representation and exploration of the politics of gender in particular and of intersectional identity in general. The question, then, is whether unnatural narratology’s account of the anti-mimetic results in extensions or revisions to existing narrative theory, or a new paradigm for the field. Ten years from now the answer is likely to be clearer. For now, though, it is clear that work in unnatural narratology has added considerable value to the larger enterprise of narrative theory.

2 Fictionality; Or narrative theory, the borders between fiction and nonfiction, and cross-border traffic

The most significant complication of this instability has come from studies of fictionality, with Richard Walsh’s 2007 Rhetoric of fictionality functioning as an especially important statement. Walsh’s key move is to separate fictionality from generic fictions such as the novel, the short story, and the fiction film:

Not that fictionality should be equated simply with “fiction,” as a category or genre of narrative: it is a communicative strategy, and as such it is apparent on some scale within many nonfictional narratives, in forms ranging from something like an ironic aside, through various forms of conjecture or imaginative supplementation, to full-blown counterfactual narrative examples. ( Walsh 2007: 7)

This separation leads Walsh to regard fictionality as a rhetorical resource (“a communicative strategy”) whose uses are best explained by relevance theory, rather than by ontological distinctions between “truth” and “non-truth” that end up making fictionality derivative of or in other ways inferior to nonfictionality. Shifting to relevance theory allows Walsh to contend that fictionality is a way not of escaping from the actual world but of engaging with it in a distinct way. As he puts it, “[f]ictionality is a rhetorical resource integral to the direct and serious use of language within a real-world communicative framework” ( Walsh 2007: 15–16). In the rest of the book, Walsh explores the consequences of this view for a range of narratological concepts related to generic fictions from the fabula to the narrator.

Although Walsh offers a clear view of what he means by fictionality, he does not offer a straightforward definition of it. In the 2015 essay, “Ten theses about fictionality,” Walsh, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and I define it in relation to nonfictionality and highlight its use of invention. Where nonfictionality is a mode in which a speaker’s discourse is constrained by her effort to reflect actual states, fictionality is a mode in which a speaker invents nonactual states, whether through the use of counterfactuals, hypotheticals, or imaginative constructions. Nielsen and Simona Zetterberg Gjerlevsen propose a more succinct definition: fictionality is intentionally signaled invention in communication. “Intentionally” reflects the rhetorical orientation toward a speaker’s purpose; “signaled” distinguishes fictionality from lying, which is not fictionality, but defective nonfictionality (uses of fictionality are designed to be recognized, whereas lies are not); “invention” indicates the discourse’s concern with non-actual states; and “in communication” specifies the broad domain in which fictionality occurs.

This conception of fictionality has several important consequences. (1) It calls attention to the pervasiveness of fictionality throughout discourse: we pepper our conversations with it – think of all the times we say, “I wish that,” or, “What if that?” – and it is a key tool in multiple disciplines – via thought experiments, simulations, hypotheses, and so on. (2) It allows us to recognize that fictionality is not primarily an escape from the actual world but rather an indirect way of engaging with it. The most common reason we shift from nonfictive to fictive discourse is to better capture aspects of the actual. Of course sometimes one can resort to fictionality for escapist purposes, but one can argue that the ultimate goal of the escapism is to take a time-out so that one can return to the actual in a refreshed state. (3) It re-situates generic fictions such as the novel and the fiction film as one kind of fictionality, rather than as either fictionality tout court or the epitome of fictionality. (4) It both highlights the utility of the fiction/nonfiction distinction and provides a fresh approach to “cross-border traffic.” It obviously opens the door to attention to the deployment of fictionality within global nonfiction, and it invites thought about the deployment of nonfictionality within global fictions.

This approach to fictionality can also further illuminate Atonement . Looking at Briony’s focalization of Robbie’s consciousness in Part II through this lens, we can transcend the choice of viewing it as mimetic (of Briony’s character and her desires) or unnatural (a case of Briony’s knowing more than she can plausibly know). We can instead view it as (a) Briony’s opting for invention as a way to capture key aspects of Robbie’s experience, and (b) McEwan’s implicit endorsement of that move precisely because it is a miniature example of what he – and any fiction writer – typically does, that is, use invention as a way to engage with the actual.

This approach to fictionality opens up other aspects of McEwan’s global fiction, especially some of its meta-fictional moves. When McEwan has Briony send her early draft of her novel, “Two figures by a fountain,” to Horizon magazine, and then includes Cyril Connolly’s rejection letter, McEwan complicates the relation between Briony’s novel and his novel. Within her novel, the episode is a significant complication, one that further spurs her interest in doing something more direct to atone for her misdeed. Within McEwan’s novel, it is a crucial contribution to the story of Briony’s development as a writer, a story that continues until the very end of “London, 1999,” and one that invites us to compare what we learn about Briony’s manuscript with the novel we are reading. In addition, the meta-fictional move can be understood as McEwan’s thought experiment: given the aesthetics of late modernism in general, and those of Horizon magazine and Cyril Connolly in particular, what would be the most plausible response to a short narrative built on variable focalization in which no judgment of the focalizing characters can be detected? As McEwan executes this thought experiment, he uses his fictional Briony and her fictional manuscript to convey his view of the actual Connolly’s aesthetic judgment.

Most significantly, McEwan is concerned with cross-border traffic in the central ethical-aesthetic issue foregrounded by the delayed disclosure of the novel-within-a-novel structure. Is Briony justified in departing from what actually happened to Robbie and Cecilia in her novel, given that its purpose is to atone for her misidentification of Robbie as Lola’s assailant? Within the storyworld, Briony’s departure can be understood as a turn to fictionality in order to engage with the actual. Briony makes the case this way: “I like to think that it isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them at the end” ( McEwan 2001: 351). Briony sees herself atoning through her fictionalizing by giving Robbie and Cecilia the kind of happiness that her transgression prevented them from having. In Experiencing fiction , I argue that McEwan guides his audience to regard Briony’s choice as ethically and aesthetically flawed by linking her alteration of what happened to Robbie and Cecilia with the juvenile ethics and aesthetic underlying the play she wrote at age thirteen, “The trials of Arabella.” Revisiting the issue through the lens of fictionality reinforces this view: Briony’s move comes across as “weakness” and “evasion” precisely because, within the world of her narrative, there is no return to the actual. In other words, the fictionalizing is not a way to engage with the actual but to escape from it, and ultimately to deny it.

As a collaborator with Walsh and Nielsen, I obviously find the turn to fictionality very promising, but I should acknowledge that many narrative theorists are more skeptical. Paul Dawson, for example, has countered “Ten theses about fictionality” with “Ten theses against fictionality.” Some find that, in a world that recognizes such matters as the complexity of the psyche and the importance of perspective, the distinction between fictionality and nonfictionality is far more difficult to sustain than champions of the turn acknowledge. What I might call an act of invention, someone else might call a subjective perception of the actual. Others worry about an impulse to claim too much territory: should all figures of speech be considered instances of fictionality? If so, then how much does this view of fictionality leave to nonfictionality? Still others contend that the claims for the explanatory power of fictionality are overblown, and that some of those claims are just old wine in new bottles. For example, generic fictions have almost always been interpreted as ways of intervening in the actual world. As with unnatural narratology, the next ten years should bring some clearer resolution to these debates.

3 Theory of mind or mind-reading

In my 2006 essay, I only briefly mention Lisa Zunshine’s Why we read fiction because Zunshine’s book had not yet been published when I wrote the essay, and, though I had read the manuscript, I could not reliably predict its reception. [3] Ten years later we can recognize its discussions of Theory of Mind not only as a major contribution to cognitive narratology, but also one whose influence has extended beyond that subfield of narrative theory. Zunshine uses the terms Theory of Mind (ToM) and “mind-reading” as synonyms that refer to humans’ “ability to explain people’s behavior in terms of their thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires” ( Zunshine 2006: 6). Zunshine’s argument is two-fold. First, she demonstrates how central the exercise of mind-reading is to both our everyday lives – it is essential to everything from driving a car in traffic to communicating with our loved ones – and to our reading of fiction, where we watch characters engaged in reading each other’s minds and simultaneously read those minds ourselves, making further inferences about the implied author’s mental activities. Zunshine notes that in both everyday activities and in fiction, mind-reading often goes awry, but that outcome only makes the phenomenon all the more fascinating: being accurate makes life much less difficult, yet it is easy – and, thus common – to be inaccurate.

Zunshine organizes the book into three parts. Part I, “Attributing minds,” both explicates the concept of ToM and shows how fiction often challenges our mind-reading abilities by pushing them to their limits. Zunshine shows, for example, that our minds can typically process up to four levels of embedded intentionality but have trouble with more than four. We can manage this sentence: “I know that Zunshine thinks that Steven Pinker thinks that modernist novelists think erroneously about their representations of consciousness.” But we have trouble with this one: “I know that Zunshine thinks that Steven Pinker thinks that modernist novelists erroneously think that readers think that they can keep track of more than four levels of embedded intentionality.” Part II, “Tracking minds,” focuses on the issue of “metarepresentation,” or the cognitive ability to keep track of the source of information and to judge its quality in relation to one’s knowledge of the source. As you read this paragraph, for example, you are not just taking away the information that “Zunshine shows human minds can readily handle four levels of embedded intentionality,” but also adding the tag “Phelan says” to that information. Part III, “Concealing minds,” offers an analysis of the detective story as a genre that relies heavily on both mind-reading and source tracking.

By the end of Part III, Zunshine has amply demonstrated her claims about the centrality of mind-reading to everyday life and to fiction, and so she rounds off to the second fold of her argument. Given that mind-reading is so important and yet can so easily go awry, we find value in activities that sharpen our skills. We read fiction precisely because it is one such activity, even perhaps the one that most fully engages and challenges those skills; Zunshine puts it this way: “Theory of Mind is a cluster of cognitive adaptations that allows us to navigate our social world and also structures that world. Intensely social species that we are, we thus read fiction because it engages, in a variety of particularly focused ways, our Theory of Mind” ( Zunshine 2006:162).

In subsequent work, Zunshine has thickened her description of mind-reading by exploring the relevance of other aspects of human cognition to the ways authors construct and readers re-construct literary representations. In Strange concepts and the stories they make possible (2008), Zunshine focuses on the cognitive categories of essentialism and functionalism, and especially on the tensions that sometimes arise between them. As Zunshine explains, essentialism is the mind’s tendency to extract a stable and continuing essence of an animate being or an abstract idea from limited data, and functionalism is the mind’s tendency to regard artifacts as having changeable identities as their functions change. What’s more, essentialism is far from a surefire, can’t-miss way of understanding the entities it gets applied to, and, indeed, the effort to locate an essence in any one trait or tangible property is doomed to fail. As Zunshine succinctly expresses it, human beings are “an essentializing species in a world without essences” ( Zunshine 2008: 66). Consequently, it is no surprise that literature has often played with this paradox of essentialism as in the motifs of confused identity (e. g., Dryden’s Amphitryon itself based on plays by Plautus and Moliere) and in twins on stage or screen (e. g., Shakespeare’s The comedy of errors ), though the exact moves in that play vary as history and culture vary. In addition, since essentialism and functionalism are cognitive tendencies rather than a binary with strict boundaries, it is also not surprising that literature, especially science fiction, has given our minds some especially challenging cognitive workouts through its construction of hybrid creatures such as robots, cyborgs, and androids: entities that are part animate and part artifact, and that therefore generate various tensions in our responses. Furthermore, Zunshine contends, looking at these tensions helps illuminate the many narrative instantiations of “the Frankenstein Complex,” a pattern in which the hybrid entity rebels against its human creator. Finally, the relations between the cognitive activities associated with essentialism and functionalism help illuminate the sense underlying nonsense poetry such as “The hunting of the snark” and the sense underlying some surrealist visual art such as Victor Brauner’s Wolftable . More generally, Why we read and Strange concepts together help Zunshine advance her larger project of analyzing fiction’s power to provide representations of socio-cognitive complexity that challenge and sharpen our mind-reading abilities. [4]

It is instructive to compare Zunshine’s case for the value of fiction with the one made by the fictionality theorists. While both see fiction’s value as residing in its ultimate connection with the actual world, and while both pay attention to experiential dimensions of reading, Zunshine’s case rests on a view of “reading fiction as valuable exercise,” while the fictionality theorists’ case rests more on a view of reading fiction as a way to understand aspects of the actual world.

Atonement can be productively understood as a novel that exercises our mind-reading skills in the service of a narrative exploring the powers, and especially the limitations, of mind-reading. It is a novel about the problem of other minds, and it explores that problem in multiple ways. (1) Cecilia and Robbie misread each other’s mental states – and indeed their own – until Robbie makes the Freudian slip of giving her his profane note (“In my dreams I kiss your cunt, your sweet wet cunt. In my thoughts I make love to you all daylong” [ McEwan 2001: 80]) and then suddenly they are able to connect, both mentally and physically: they become what Alan Palmer has labeled a social mind. [5] Indeed, the passage from the novel I analyzed in the 2006 essay is a wonderful representation of their accurately reading each other’s minds and celebrating that reading with their bodies. (2) Briony’s misidentification of Robbie as Lola’s assailant stems from her attribution to him of a permanent mental state based on her having read his profane expression of desire for Cecilia. Indeed, McEwan sets up a feedback loop between Briony’s reading of Robbie’s external behavior (his writing) and her mind-reading. Because Briony concludes that Robbie is a “maniac” ( McEwan 2001: 112), she confidently fills in the gap in her perceptions when she finds Lola in the dark. She perceives only “a figure, a person [...] backing away from her and beginning to fade into the darker background of the trees” ( McEwan 2001: 154). But her inference about Robbie’s mind leads her to misidentify him. (3) The delayed disclosure adds another layer to the mind-reading because it requires McEwan’s audience to reconfigure the source-tracking. What we thought was only McEwan’s novel is actually Briony’s novel contained within McEwan’s novel. Thus, what we thought came directly from McEwan (or his narrator) we have to reinterpret as from Briony. Thus, every act of mind-reading in Parts I, II, and III has another layer.

Consider, for example, the passage in Chapter Two in which Cecilia reflects on Robbie’s recent behavior toward her, and in particular her conclusion that “she was being mocked, she knew” ( McEwan 2001: 26). Attending to mind-reading and source-tracking, we can describe our inferences before the disclosure of the novel-within-a-novel structure as follows: “McEwan knows that Cecilia thinks that Robbie thinks she deserves to be mocked.” Here we have three levels of embedded intentionality. After that disclosure our inferencing has to add two other layers of embedded intentionality, one for Briony the novelist, the other for Briony the character: “McEwan knows that Briony the novelist knows that Briony the character thinks that Cecilia thinks that Robbie thinks she deserved to be mocked.” And now we’re at five levels of embedding and thus stretching our mind-reading capabilities beyond their usual limits.

What I have identified as the central ethical/aesthetic question is also an issue of mind-reading, this one focused on McEwan’s mind. Does McEwan think that when Briony decides to alter the historical fates of Robbie and Cecilia in her novel she weakens her novel and paradoxically strengthens his? Or does McEwan think that Briony’s decision strengthens both her novel and his? (Presumably we can rule out the hypothesis that he thinks her decision strengthens her novel but weakens his, since our default application of mind-reading principles leads us to conclude that he would not intentionally make choices that weaken his novel.) Finally, does McEwan think how we answer these questions is less important than our engaging the acts of mind-reading these questions (including this one) entail? Whatever McEwan’s answer to this last question, I believe that Zunshine would answer it in the affirmative. Over to you then: how would you answer the question, and how would you respond to Zunshine’s “yes”?

4 Feminist narrative theories, intersectionality, and critique

Arguably the most valuable contribution to feminist narratology in the last decade is among the most recent: Narrative theory unbound: Queer and feminist interventions , co-edited by the pioneering feminist narratologists of the 1980 s, Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser. The collection is valuable for multiple reasons. [6] (1) It brings together twenty-two essays by scholars at different stages of their careers, with different relationships to feminist and queer theory, working on a wide range of issues: empathy, religion, lifewriting, temporality, emplotment, and more. In this way, the collection serves as a reminder that the plural term – “feminist and queer narrative theories” – is more accurate than the singular. (2) At the same time, the collection presents a vision – implicit throughout, and explicit in Warhol and Lanser’s “Introduction,” and in Lanser’s individual contribution, “Toward (a queerer and) more (feminist) Narratology” – of a multi-faceted and multi-directional relationship among feminist theory, queer theory, narrative theory, narrative as a form, and individual narratives. (3) The collection identifies the concept central to that vision: intersectionality. Citing its origin in the work of legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, Lanser explains the concept this way: “Intersectionality argues that multiple aspects of identity – gender, race, ethnicity, class, nationality, global position, age, sexuality, ability, religion, language, historical moment – converge and interact to create actual or perceived social positions, meanings, experiences, and representations in a world patterned by structural inequalities” ( Warhol and Lanser 2015: 27).

The collection also shows that attending to intersectionality will have different effects from one inquiry to another, depending on which aspects of identity are put in conversation with which elements of narrative. In addition to Lanser’s illuminating discussion in her essay, the volume includes three other essays that foreground intersectionality: Susan Stanford Friedman’s “Religion, intersectionality, and queer/feminist narrative theory: The Bildungsromane of Ahdaf Soueif, Leila Abouelela, and Randa Jarrar,” Suzanne Keen’s “Intersectional narratology in the study of narrative empathy,” and Sue J. Kim’s “Empathy and 1970 s novels by Third World women.” Keen’s essay is especially noteworthy because it shows how her attention to intersectionality links her excellent work on narrative empathy, work that she has previously described as a contribution to rhetorical narratology, with the project of feminist narrative theory. The work is rhetorical because it focuses on the construction, the communication, and the effects of empathy. When, however, Keen foregrounds intersectionality, she emphasizes that the effects are contingent on the intersectional identities of actual readers.

In her essay, Lanser argues that feminist theories highlight the ways in which a rigorously intersectional approach to form soon becomes indistinguishable from an approach to content. I shall try to exemplify that point, as I turn to an intersectional analysis of the formal features governing McEwan’s way of representing the relationship between himself as author and Briony as author. Among other things, attention to intersectionality “in a world patterned by structural inequalities” leads to a layered assessment of the politics of form in the novel.

At the time he finished Atonement, Ian McEwan was a fifty-three year old, white, middle-class (perhaps upper middle class), British, able-bodied, secular, heterosexual male, living in London just before the historical events we now refer to as 9/11. At the time she finished her “Atonement,” Briony Tallis was a seventy-seven year old, white, middle class (perhaps upper middle class) British, secular female in the early stages of vascular dementia, living in London two years before 9/11. In the course of the novel, McEwan also represents her as a young, naïve, upper-class girl with grandiose ideas about her abilities and her importance, and later as a less naïve, less privileged girl attempting to come to terms with the terrible mistake her naiveté and grandiosity have led her to make. Furthermore, as I have noted above, one of the salient features of the relationship between the authors is that McEwan finds fault with Briony the writer’s decisions to write a counterfactual account of the final fates of Robbie, Cecilia, and her younger self.

Attending to intersectionality in “a world patterned by structural inequalities,” we may be tempted to begin and end by criticizing the way that this relationship reinforces that patterning: the more culturally powerful McEwan sets up for critique the less culturally powerful Briony. Indeed, it’s not a fair contest: a middle-aged white male at the height of his artistic powers has far more authority than an aging woman losing her cognitive powers. And, of course, he gets to construct the whole relationship. Although I believe that this criticism is valid, I also believe it is far from the whole story. Lanser cautions that, in turning to intersectionality, scholars should not “impose crude categories onto complex characters, or to forge simplistic explanations for narrative events” ( Warhol and Lanser 2015: 29) – and, I would add, not “be satisfied with simplistic accounts of the relations between authors and their characters.” So let’s look a little more closely.

The first place I look – McEwan’s handling of the difference in historical location – actually gives the criticism more force. Although McEwan does not call attention to this fact, Briony, who is thirteen on the day she commits what she refers to as her “crime” ( McEwan 2001: 146), was born in 1922, the year that saw the publication of those monuments of modernism, James Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s The waste land . Furthermore, both the dominant techniques of Parts I, II, and III, and the inclusion of Cyril Connolly’s letter of rejection signal that Briony herself is a thoroughgoing modernist. But McEwan’s historical location, regardless of his fascination with modernism, means that for his 2001 novel to make its mark in literary history, it needs to do more than reproduce the aesthetics of modernism. As we have seen, with “London, 1999” and its various ripple effects, McEwan demonstrates his own innovative engagement with post-modernism. In so doing, he implicitly trumps the achievement of Briony’s novel, a point that becomes clear if we imagine his Atonement without “London, 1999” – what a loss that would be! In addition, by signaling that he finds Briony’s particular modernist performance ethically and aesthetically flawed, McEwan creates even more distance between the quality of her performance and his.

But the second place I look – McEwan’s delayed disclosure of the novel-within-a-novel structure – leads me to temper this criticism. In order to bring about the multiple effects of that delayed disclosure, McEwan needs to make the reader of Parts I, II, and III feel that she is reading an Ian McEwan novel – not the composition of a lesser novelist. To put this point another way, not only is every sentence of the novel both Briony’s and McEwan’s, but McEwan also seeks to make the aesthetic quality of Briony’s sentences in Parts I, II, and III measure up to the aesthetic standards he sets for himself. In this way, the quality of McEwan’s novel depends to a large degree on the quality of Briony’s novel; therefore, in the novel’s very texture, he seeks to make Briony’s performance, if not ultimately equal to his, something that both he and his audience can admire.

The third place I look – the broader challenge McEwan faces in constructing Briony’s character – adds another layer to my understanding and assessment. As the two lists of identity markers indicate, McEwan and Briony share more aspects of identity than they don’t. For all the shared aspects (race, nationality, sexuality, ability), McEwan can draw on his own experiences. For the sites of difference – gender, age, historical location, and, during Briony’s childhood, class – McEwan can draw on his education, his research, and his imagination. Of course, it is gender that requires the greatest exercise of imagination. Indeed, representing Briony – from the inside – as a thirteen year old, an eighteen year old, and a seventy-seven year old, and making plausible her evolution over those sixty-four years, requires a remarkable act of what Keen would call “authorial empathy” ( Empathy and the novel 134). Furthermore, this empathetic act extends to his ability to inhabit Briony’s weaknesses as ethical actor and as novelist. Because I find the novel to be so powerful – and because so many others have a similar experience – my concern over the way the novel reinforces the pattern of structural inequalities exists alongside my admiration for McEwan’s extraordinary empathy for Briony.

Attending to intersectionality also leads me to step back from this close reading and note that its primary concern is with identity markers of culturally mainstream subjects. Readers of Atonement interested in representations of racial and ethnic minorities, disabled characters, LGBTQ identities, and other culturally subaltern subjects will not find their interests rewarded. I hasten to add that this description of McEwan’s subject matter is in no way an indictment of either him or the novel. Instead it is the basis for another observation: as rich as Atonement is, our literary landscape will be far richer if it is built on a principle of diversity, one that finds a place for Atonemen t amidst a variety of other narratives that explore different kinds of intersectional identities.

Finally, I take another step away from the details of Atonement and acknowledge that my understanding and assessment of its intersectionality is inevitably influenced by the interaction of my own multiple aspects of identity – just as your response to my commentary will inevitably be influenced by yours. This acknowledgment does not mean that such assessments are only matters of opinion about which there is nothing further to be said. It means instead that such assessments are themselves openings for further explorations of our agreements and disagreements, explorations that have the potential not only to lead each of us to change his or her mind, but also to teach us more about the powers and limits of intersectional analysis.

5 Rhetorical theory and the narrative communication model

In some recent work, I have argued that it is high time narrative theorists revised the standard communication model, and I have linked that argument to the limitations of the story-discourse distinction as a grounding principle of narrative theory (“Rhetoric, ethics, and narrative communication”). [7]

The standard model was first proposed by Seymour Chatman in his aptly titled Story and discourse (1978). Chatman’s diagram of his model treats narrative communication as a one-track linear transmission from one agent of the discourse to another (the brackets indicate the agents Chatman locates inside the narrative text):

Actual Author→[Implied Author→Narrator→Narratee→Implied Reader] →Actual Reader

Conspicuous by their absence from the model are characters. They are not present because they are part of story and this model is designed to track discourse. They are implicitly there because the model assumes that their dialogue is part of what narrators report to narratees. But subordinating characters to narrators often misrepresents their functions, as we can see when we try to analyze the communication in the opening passage of the Benjy section of William Faulkner’s The sound and the fury. Indeed, the effort will expose other limitations of the standard model.

Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass. “Here, caddie.” He hit. They went away across the pasture. I held to the fence and watched them going away. “Listen at you now.” Luster said. “Aint you something, thirty three years old, going on that way. After I done went all the way to town to buy you that cake. Hush up that moaning.” (3)

Among many other things, Faulkner communicates here that the trigger for Benjy’s moaning is the word “caddie” (even if first-time readers may not recognize the trigger). Chatman’s one-track model would explain that communication by noting that the golfer’s and Luster’s lines of dialogue are embedded within Benjy’s narration, and that this embedding allows Benjy to unknowingly transmit the information about the cause of his moaning. This account, however, radically understates the role of the dialogue, and it obscures our view of Faulkner’s remarkable construction of an interactive effect between Benjy’s narration and the dialogue. Here’s a better account: Faulkner employs not one, but three tracks of communication, and he sets up a synergy among those tracks to disclose the trigger for Benjy’s moaning. In addition to the author-narrator-audience track identified by Chatman, Faulkner uses two author-character-character-audience tracks that are functionally independent of that first track, since Benjy does not alter or comment on the dialogue. Faulkner deploys the author-golfer-caddie-audience track to introduce the key word, and he deploys the Luster-Benjy-audience track to tell us that Benjy moans. The synergy among these two communications and Benjy’s naïve reporting prompts the audience’s inference about the trigger. In sum, Faulkner’s communication depends on characters, multiple tracks, and synergy – all of which are absent from Chatman’s model. To be sure, Chatman’s model works for some narrative communications, but it is a Newtonian model in an Einsteinian narrative universe.

Furthermore, doing better justice to this one passage opens our eyes to (1) other tracks of communication in other passages; two of the most prominent are author-structural sequence-audience (in any narrative with distinct segments such as The Sound and the Fury and Atonemen t), and author-occasion of telling-audience (any dramatic monologue); and (2) the possibility of synergies among all these tracks.

The larger points are these: we can’t simply revise Chatman’s model by finding a place for characters and their dialogue within it, but instead should discard its linear, one-way approach altogether. Instead, we should focus on the two constants in the communication (the author, or, if you prefer, as I do, the implied author, and the actual audience) and the multiple potential resources – narration, dialogue, occasion, narratees, paratexts, structure, and so on – that mediate the rhetorical exchange. Such a model, I contend, will enable narrative theorists to do better justice to the Einsteinian universe of narrative communication.

With Atonement, the consequences of this view become clear in two main ways. (1) It highlights the importance of the implied author-structural sequence-audience track, especially McEwan’s silent juxtaposition of Briony’s novel with “London, 1999.” (2) It does greater justice to the role of dialogue (the implied author-character-character-audience track) and to synergies between dialogue and narration (the author-narrator-audience track) than Chatman’s one-track model is able to do.

So powerful is the communication via structural sequence that it is easy to overlook the absence of any explicit statement about the novel-within-a-novel structure – or, indeed, any explicit statement that Parts I, II, and III are written by Briony. Instead, the communication arises out of a synergy among signals at the end of Part III, signals across Part I and Part III, the ontological break between the first three parts and “London, 1999,” and specific comments Briony makes in her diary entry. McEwan ends Part III with the initials “BT” and the note “London, 1999,” which may seem all but explicit markers of Briony’s authorship and the place and date of her completion of this version of the manuscript. But without her comments in “London, 1999” – comments addressed only to herself – about changing the fates of Robbie and Cecilia in her most recent draft and about her fifty-nine year struggle to tell the story, we could supply other signifieds for “BT”: Brian Thomas, Beverly Thatcher, Bradley Tanner, and so on. Those comments of course make it all but inevitable to read “BT” as “Briony Tallis,” and thus to see that at the very end of Part III, McEwan subtly shifts from the ontology of Briony’s storyworld – in which she is character but not author of her own character – to the ontology of his storyworld in which she is a character who, as author, represents her former self. McEwan uses the interplay between Parts I and III both to confirm the communication about the novel-within-a-novel structure and to add another layer to it, one that also gives more persuasive force to Briony’s comments about her fifty-nine year effort to write the book. In particular he uses Cyril Connolly’s letter to Briony about “Two Figures by a Fountain” subtly to indicate that Briony’s first draft in 1940 has been revised into the book we are reading. To take just one of many examples, Connolly writes, “There are some good images – I liked ‘the long grass stalked by the leonine yellow of high summer,’” ( McEwan 2001: 294) and that image has appeared in Part I ( McEwan 2001: 36).

I have discussed the effects of this communication, especially the ways it affects our reconfiguration of the novel, both in Experiencing Fiction and in the previous analyses in this essay, so here I will build on this analysis of the “how” with a discussion of the “why.” Why delay and why be implicit and subtle, rather than be upfront and explicit? Because in a novel about the problem of other minds, guiding one’s audience through so many reconfigurations, including ones about the relationships among the consciousness of the protagonist-author and the actual author, is a way to have the audience actively grapple with the problem of other minds – even as that grappling is not an end in itself, but a means to explore the ethical issues of transgression, atonement, and the role of narrative in both.

Turning to character-character dialogue, I note first that it is simultaneously an event and narration by other means, and thus, that it crosses the story/discourse divide. Like character narration, dialogue involves one text but multiple tellers (author, each character), and multiple purposes (that of the author and those of the characters). The art of constructing the dialogue consists in having the single text work effectively for all tellers. In addition, the skillful author can create a synergy between the dialogue and the narration as a way to highlight gaps between what the characters communicate to each other, what I have called conversational disclosure, and what the author communicates to his audience, what I have called authorial disclosure.

The following passage provides a good illustration of how McEwan establishes synergies between the author-character-character-audience track and the author-narrator-audience track to communicate more than would be communicated by the sum of their separate tracks. The passage mixes narration focalized through Briony with a conversation between Briony and Lola just after the assault, and it contains no internal evidence that the narrator is aware of any effects stemming from that mix. Earlier in the conversation, Briony has told Lola that it was Robbie who assaulted her. Lola is the first speaker.

“But you saw him. You actually saw him.” “Of course I did. Plain as day. It was him.” Despite the warmth of the night, Lola was beginning to shiver and Briony longed for something she could take off and place round her shoulders. Lola said, “He came up behind me, you see. He knocked me to the ground . . . and then . . . he pushed my head back and his hand was over my eyes. I couldn’t actually, I wasn’t able . . .” “Oh Lola.” Briony put out her hand to touch her cousin’s face and found her cheek. It was dry, but it wouldn’t be, she knew it wouldn’t be for long. “Listen to me. I couldn’t mistake him. I’ve known him all my life. I saw him.” “Because I couldn’t say for sure. I mean, I thought it might be him by his voice.” “What did he say?” “Nothing. I mean, it was the sound of his voice, breathing, noises. But I couldn’t see. I couldn’t say for sure.” “Well I can. And I will.” ( McEwan 2001: 157)

The result of the synergy between the two tracks of communication is that the authorial disclosure far exceeds the conversational disclosure. The two passages of narration, while focused on Lola’s physical situation and Briony’s response to it, combine with Briony’s dialogue to further explain her motivation in naming Robbie. The narration informs us that Briony has no garment to give Lola to warm her up, but the dialogue reminds us that she has her conviction about Robbie. The synergy invites us to see Briony substituting her assurances about Robbie for a shawl. Similarly, when Briony touches Lola’s face and imagines her crying, she wants to provide the comfort of her conviction. The synergy conveys Briony’s purpose behind her conversational disclosures: to convey to Lola that she (Briony) is her supportive, helpful, and above all, knowing friend. Indeed, this purpose leads Briony to ignore something that McEwan guides his audience to notice: Lola’s questionable slide from saying that “his voice” made her think that it could be Robbie (itself a big leap since she had only heard him speak at the crowded dinner table), to saying that she heard only “breathing, noises” (which would be an insufficient basis on which to identify a stranger’s voice). Already we can see the gap between authorial disclosure and conversational disclosure.

That gap becomes much greater when we turn to how McEwan uses the synergy between narration and Lola’s conversational disclosures to convey her purpose, especially when we consider these matters in light of our later knowledge that Lola knows that Paul Marshall was her assailant. The two passages of narration, with their information that Lola shivers but does not cry, leave open the possibility that Lola, while genuinely in distress after what she has experienced, is also manipulating her naïve cousin. This possibility becomes more likely when we put the narration together with Lola’s backtracking about possibly recognizing Robbie’s voice. Lola’s purpose, then, is to manipulate Briony into committing irrevocably to her identification of Robbie so that she can protect Marshall.

McEwan’s purpose is to communicate the discrepancy between the two character’s purposes, and especially to communicate that Briony does not realize that she is being maneuvered. McEwan’s purpose includes inviting his audience to reflect on – and to compare – the ethical dimensions of each character’s purpose. Briony’s motives are good, though her behavior itself is indefensible. Lola, on the other hand, has nothing mitigating her behavior, which seeks to ensure that an innocent man will suffer in order to protect the guilty.

At the same time, McEwan’s delayed disclosure of the novel-within-a-novel structure has the ripple effect of adding another layer to the authorial disclosure here. Briony is responsible for the synergistic effects and McEwan is responsible for making her responsible. This layering raises a significant question about the ethics of Briony’s telling. Briony the novelist represents Lola as the more ethically deficient character here. Is she stacking the deck against Lola, who after all has just been assaulted, in order to make her own deficiency appear to be somewhat less appalling? Or is the adult Briony using her novelistic skills to capture as well as she can the nuances of that conversation? I incline toward this latter view, since Briony does not shrink from taking responsibility for her crime, but I would not insist on it. What I would insist on is that McEwan’s skillful handling of the synergies among his multiple tracks of narration makes the question of the ethics of Briony’s telling a significant part of his authorial disclosure.

6 Conclusion

In the fifty years since the publication of the first edition of The nature of narrative, narrative theory has not only emerged as a readily identifiable field of study. It has also made substantial progress in its project of explaining how narrative works and why it matters. This look at just a few highlights of the last ten years indicates that the field continues to flourish and that the pace of developments continues to be brisk. I can’t wait to see what kind of progress the field makes over the next decade – and beyond.

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