The Bonding of Narrative and the
Literature Effect
Porter Abbot
Professor of English
UC Santa Barbara
This paper has taken quite a different course from the one I promised
in my first abstract. Almost immediately after I set
to work, I found that there was a major problem in defining the terms in
my title: "narrative" and "literature." But further, I found that
this was an interesting problem and one, moreover, that echoes problems
that will continue to plague us as we try to find ways of connecting across
the disciplines. So what I then set out to do was to take these two
terms as my subject and to address them, as best I could, from a cognitive
psychological standpoint, all the while keeping the literary senses of
these terms in view. But my work quickly became dominated by a powerful
distinction that can be expressed metaphorically like this: where narrative
is a platform, literature is a set of toggle switches (in the age of computers,
I believe this is not a mixed metaphor). Most of my presentation will be
focussed on showing how this distinction works. It is interesting
and provocative in itself, but it also has implications for the issue I
begin with: the problem of achieving pan-disciplinary exchange at the level
of concepts and terms.
First Abstract
The capacity to produce and to receive narrative is a universal human
trait, one that gave us wonderful advantages in describing both the world
and ourselves in terms of events happening in time. It is not hard to think
of ways in which narrative has been, and continues to be, directly useful
for our survival. "If you don’t deliver the cash by 3:00 this afternoon,
Mac and the boys are going to break your kneecaps." If I hear this without
understanding narrative, I am in danger of serious damage. In fact (projecting
the narrative into the future), it probably will not be long before I lose
the capacity to reproduce. This is the kind of purely instrumental narrative
that we use daily, if less sensationally, and with extraordinary flexibility.
Even with immediately practical narratives like the one above, we discriminate
different narrative worlds (my example is in the conditional; its world
is possible; its reality with any luck will be restricted to the imaginations
of those involved). But there comes a point when we become aware of what
some call the "narrativity" of narrative. We see how it is constructed,
sometimes with great pleasure. As such, narrative begins to acquire the
literature effect, a quality that has been discussed in different ways
and in different terms by a number of scholars, among them Richard Gerrig,
Paul Hernadi, and David Miall. This effect is not restricted to fiction,
yet even with so-called true stories, when we are aware of it, our relationship
to the narrative changes. My paper will be about this interesting transit
from forgetfulness to awareness, from immediate practicality to the indirect
practicality of narrative in a "space off."
Porter
Abbott is Professor of English at UC Santa Barbara. The
following books and articles are particularly relevant to his presentation:
Beckett writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph (1996), Diary
Fiction: Writing as Action (1984), "Extratextual Intelligence," New
Literary History (1997), "Old Virginia and the Night Writer: The Origins
of Woolf's Narrative Meander," in Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays
on Women's Diaries (1996), "Beginning Again: The Post-Narrative Art
of Texts for Nothing and How It Is," in The Cambridge Companion to Beckett
(1994), and "Writing and Conversion: Conrad's Modernist Autography," The
Yale Journal of Criticism (1992) He is currently finishing an
introduction to narrative and hopes after that to complete another book
in progress tentatively titled Darwinian Conversions.
Personal web page: http://www.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/abbott.htm
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