Narrations of Ambiguity: Contemporary
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
NARRATIONS OF AMBIGUITY: CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES TO TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE THEORY by MATTHEW TODD WOMBLE Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON May 2015 Copyright © by Matthew Todd Womble 2015 All Rights Reserved ii Acknowledgements I want to acknowledge the invaluable help and guidance I received from my supervising committee. I am indebted to my chair, Dr. Jim Warren, for multiple reasons, not the least of which is his willingness three years ago to work with a literature student like me. His guidance during my year of comprehensive exams steered me to the topics I take up in this dissertation, and our ongoing conversations have continually helped frame my analyses. I am similarly thankful of Drs. Tim Morris and Ken Roemer for their astute feedback and seemingly never-ending breadth of knowledge. Without their time and effort, this dissertation would be lacking in terms of scope, depth, and diversity of texts. On a personal level, I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to have worked with each of these three professors and to have had the chance to “pick their brains” over the last two years. They are each experts in their own respective fields, and my own scholarship undoubtedly benefits from their expertise and their guidance. I would also like to say thanks to Half Price Books (Flagship Location, Northwest Highway, Dallas), whose large reading room served as the setting for much of the writing below; to the Avett Brothers, Local Natives, and Tennis, whose music served as the soundtrack to my daily writing; and to Diet Coke, without which none of this could have been accomplished. April 10, 2015 iii Abstract NARRATIONS OF AMBIGUITY: CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES TO TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE THEORY Matthew Todd Womble, PhD The University of Texas at Arlington, 2015 Supervising Professor: Jim Warren This dissertation examines contemporary American novels and short stories through the lens of narrative and rhetorical theory. While I begin by tracing Wayne Booth’s contributions in The Rhetoric of Fiction and the multitude of responses and challenges since made towards his book, I concurrently point out the persistent desire among narrative theorists to develop a systematic approach, one that can be applied consistently to all narratives. Recent narratologists have worked to show the variety of ways that narrative texts defy these attempts at systematization; my dissertation is an entry into this area of contemporary narratology. Each of my chapters focuses on a specific narrative element or technique—second person narration; the implied author; reader-as-translator; and collective/missing narrators. Specifically, I argue that narratives from authors such as Junot Diaz, Cormac McCarthy, Helena Maria Viramontes, and Dave Eggers, among others, contain usages of these techniques that further complicate attempts to encapsulate their potential textual potentialities, and that these narrative choices entail specific implications for the larger thematic elements of the narratives. Ultimately, this dissertation is structured in a way that brings together elements of narrative theory, postmodern critical theory, and literary studies in general. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements .............................................................................................................iii Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iv Chapter 1 Introduction......................................................................................................... 1 Critical Context ........................................................................................................... 3 Methods and Chapters ............................................................................................. 11 Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 23 Chapter 2 .......................................................................................................................... 25 Narratology and Second-Personhood ...................................................................... 27 The Colloquial “You” ................................................................................................. 42 A Closed Circuit of Narration .................................................................................... 48 Chapter 3 .......................................................................................................................... 66 The Implied Author ................................................................................................... 68 The Useful Implied Author ........................................................................................ 74 The Not-so-Useful Implied Author ............................................................................ 80 Autofiction and the Implied Author ........................................................................... 91 Chapter 4 ........................................................................................................................ 113 The Texts ................................................................................................................ 115 Code-Switching ...................................................................................................... 119 Translation .............................................................................................................. 130 Translating the Untranslated: Reader-as-Translator .............................................. 138 Chapter 5 ........................................................................................................................ 158 We-Narrators .......................................................................................................... 160 Missing / Absent Narrators ..................................................................................... 178 Chapter 6 ........................................................................................................................ 198 v Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 198 Works Cited ..................................................................................................................... 216 Biographical Information ................................................................................................. 225 vi Chapter 1 Introduction Contemporary Challenges to Traditional Narratology A fundamental impetus for many of the seminal texts in narrative theory and narratology is an attempt to establish a succinct vocabulary and approach to understanding narrative texts. In Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, Gerard Genette refers to his study as “essentially a method of analysis” (23), while Jonathan Culler’s Foreword to the text praises Genette for “[filling] this need for a systematic theory of narrative” (7). Mieke Bal similarly describes the focus of her Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative as a systematic approach to narrative; Gerald Prince went as far as putting together an explicit dictionary, titled bluntly A Dictionary of Narratology. These three texts make transparent an instrumental force behind narratological inquiries: explaining potentially- and unlimitedly-diverse narrative texts through a system of knowledge based on distinct techniques, patterns, and paradigms of understanding. However, the ever-increasing number of narrative texts seems to indicate an inherent fallacy in these comprehensive and systematic approaches. More contemporary scholars in narrative theory, such as those associated with the recent field known as unnatural narratology, recognize this fallacy of a systematic approach to all narratives in large part because authors continue to produce narratives that present direct challenges to these systems. Scholars like as James Phelan, Brian Richardson, and Monika Fludernik, among others, have posed questions that challenge narrative theory’s attempts to “describe all narration—fictional and non-fictional, conversational and literary under the umbrella of one unified theory.” Contemporary challenges to traditional narrative theory are similar in many ways—and owe much—to broader examples from the major movements in literary theory 1 over the past half-century. To a certain extent, the work of contemporary narratologists, and their approaches to strange and challenging narrative texts, are exercises in postmodern literary criticism in general. Questions concerning issues of antimimetic narrative, narrator reliability/unreliability, distinctions between real author and implied author, and paralepses and problematic narrative time—although not necessarily using those terms—are approached and discussed in postmodern theoretical inquiries and are not unique to contemporary narratology. At the same time, the work being done by scholars like Phelan, Fludernik, and Richardson, among others, provides a framework through which the narrative elements themselves are more than devices used by authors to achieve grander theoretical goals. Contemporary narratologists allow for narrative texts to be approached in ways that, while remaining completely aware of the relevance and