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Narrativity and Its Modes As Culture-Transcending Analytical Categories MARIE-LAURE RYAN

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Narrativity and Its Modes As Culture-Transcending Analytical Categories MARIE-LAURE RYAN rjfoxml-als-v1.cls RJFO_A_477893 April 7, 2010 20:42 Narrativity and its modes as culture-transcending analytical categories MARIE-LAURE RYAN Queries Q1. Au: ‘poets do not write sonnets any more’ – on this side of the Atlantic at least, this statement is simply not true. There has been something of turn to form and a lot of poets (e.g. the present poet laureate) use sonnet form (with or without the classical rhyme scheme). The same applies – though perhaps to a lesser degree – to villanelles, sestinas, etc. Q2. Au: ‘(i.e. Abbott 2002: 16)’ – do you mean ‘that is, Abbot’? Or should this perhaps be ‘e.g.’? Q3. Au: Tokyo changed to Edo (see Kornicki’s article). Is this OK? rjfoxml-als-v1.cls RJFO_A_477893 April 7, 2010 20:42 Narrativity and its modes as culture-transcending analytical categories MARIE-LAURE RYAN 5 Abstract: This article investigates the value of the concept of narrativity and its modes for the investigation of the literary forms of non-Western cultures such as Japan’s. Following Ben-Amos (1969), a distinction is made between ‘ethnic’ concepts of genre, which correspond to the types of text recognized by the members of a culture, and universally applicable ‘analytical’ concepts which 10 form the building blocks of ethnic categories. ‘Narrative’ is shown to be one of these analytical concepts. This article situates narrative within the life of the mind through a Venn diagram, defines it in terms of several features whose presence or absence determine various degrees of narrativity, and outlines a descriptive theory that recognizes three types of ‘modes of narrativity’: semantic, discursive and 15 pragmatic. The contribution of the study of the modes of narrativity to Japanese literature lies in the possibility of combining them in endless ways, creating ever new culture-specific literary forms. Keywords: narrative modes, narrativity, ethnic categories, analytical cate- gories, kanazoshi¯ , soshi¯ 20 To capture the specificity of cultural and literary traditions such as those of Japan, we need standards of comparison. If literary forms were patterned according to Saussure’s (1959: 114–20) conception of language as a system where there are only differences without positive terms (a conception that makes individual lan- guages incommensurable and precludes the possibility of a universal grammar), 25 the genres or discourse types of a culture would be entirely constituted by their opposition to each other, and there would be no solid ground for comparing them across cultures. To take an imaginary example: if in culture A the literary form ‘agu’ is defined by its opposition to ‘aku’, and in culture B ‘hsiaga’ contrasts with ‘tsuga’ and ‘dinga’, we will need to get out of the literary systems of these two 30 cultures and use a set cross-culturally applicable features to situate the ‘agu’ of culture A with respect to the ‘hsiaga’ of culture B. Japan Forum 21(3) 2009: 307–323 ISSN: 0955–5803 print/1469–932X online Copyright C 2009 BAJS DOI: 10.1080/09555801003773711 rjfoxml-als-v1.cls RJFO_A_477893 April 7, 2010 20:42 308 Narrativity and its modes The ethnographer Dan Ben-Amos (1969) has made a most useful distinc- tion between two types of generic concepts: the so-called ‘ethnic’ genres, which correspond to the categories yielded by native taxonomies, and the ‘analytical categories’ made up by specialists for the purposes of description and classifica- 35 tion. As an ethnographer he believes that the ultimate purpose of genre theory is the description of ethnic categories, and he warns against the import and crude application of Western literary concepts to study the genres of other cultures. But, even if one accepts the view that the literary system of a culture should be studied in its own terms, there is no need to give up the possibility of describing 40 this system by means of cross-culturally applicable analytical concepts. The gap between an ethnic and an analytical approach to literary forms can be bridged by viewing analytical categories as the primitive building blocks, or basic features, out of which culture-specific literary forms are made. It is not easy to reconstitute the list of ‘ethnic genres’ of a culture. One pos- 45 sible approach is to ask people what kind of texts they like to read (or whatever formulation is appropriate for an oral culture). Another way to collect genres is to look at the organization of a bookstore into distinct departments, such as ‘mystery’, ‘science fiction’, ‘fantasy’, ‘horror’ and ‘romance’, or at the labels used by the bookselling industry. (This method seems particularly widespread among 50 scholars of Edo literature.) In some cases, categories designed by literary critics may impose themselves and gain cultural recognition within a learned public. But whatever method is used to establish a native taxonomy, the result will be an unstructured list and not a neat formal model in which a global field is divided into a certain number of mutually exclusive and complementary categories, such 55 as the tripartite division of classical literature into epic, lyric and dramatic. Only analytical categories can be arranged into symmetrical spatial configurations such as wheels, grids, pyramids or trees (Hernadi 1981; Tripp 1981). Several factors make it virtually impossible to establish a comprehensive and definitive list of genres for a given culture: (1) genres can be freely divided into subcategories, 60 and there is no way to tell when we have reached bottom; (2) cultures are made of many groups that consume and are aware of different types of texts; (3) new genres are continually born, and old genres fall out of favor. Even if one adopts a synchronic perspective, generic taxonomies cannot be limited to the categories that are alive at a certain time, since people read texts from many different pe- 65 Q1 riods. For instance, poets do not write sonnets any more, but sonnets are still read and recognized, and they are consequently still part of the active generic competence of educated readers. The project of cataloging the genres of a culture is further complicated by the fact that literary forms, or more broadly types of text, evolve over time while retaining the same label, so that it is very difficult to 70 tell whether a given text should be considered a historical variant of an existing genre or the founding member of a new genre. In the study of genre, a purely diachronic approach is as inadequate as a purely synchronic one, and an approach rjfoxml-als-v1.cls RJFO_A_477893 April 7, 2010 20:42 Marie-Laure Ryan 309 that combines both perspectives has remained as elusive in literature as it is in 75 linguistics. Once we establish a list of culturally recognized genres, we need analytical categories to describe, distinguish and compare its individual items. But analytical categories are not themselves primitive concepts; they can be composed of a variety of features and they can be realized more or less completely, depending 80 on the number of features that are themselves implemented. The study of genre thus encompasses three levels: 1. Genres proper, the categories of native taxonomy. To qualify as genre a text type must have ‘currency’, or popular recognition within a social group. Examples of genres are ‘myth’, ‘legend’, ‘fairy tale’, ‘novel’, ‘short story’, ‘epic poetry’, 85 ‘lyric poetry’ or, on a lower level, ‘romance novel’, ‘detective story’ and ‘science fiction’ in Western cultures. In an ideal taxonomy, generic categories would be mutually exclusive, and individual texts would fit snugly into one, and only one, genre. This is more likely to happen with the heavily stereotyped, formula-driven texts of popular and older literatures than with the texts of 90 the high literature of modern Western cultures. At least since Romanticism, literary value has been associated with a text’s ability to break with tradition, hybridize existing genres or transgress established conventions. This is why ‘genre fiction’ is a rather deprecatory label for texts that can be easily classified into one of the genres of popular literature. 95 2. Analytical categories designed by theorists. These differ from the genres listed above in that they appear in combination with one another, rather than in pure form, and the same category may be part of the defining conditions of several genres. Examples of analytical categories are ‘narrative’, ‘fiction’, ‘prose’, ‘rhyme’, ‘meter’, ‘metaphor’, ‘pun’, ‘irony’ or ‘being about a certain 100 subject matter’. The novel, a type 1 category, can be defined through the type 2 categories of narrative prose fiction of a certain length. Most analytical cat- egories are cross-culturally applicable, but some cultures of high literacy have developed tailor-made theoretical notions for the study of their own genres. For instance, Greek drama has been traditionally defined in terms of katharsis 105 (Aristotle’s Poetics) and Sanskrit drama in terms of rasa (Tripp 1981). Both of these concepts describe the intended effect of the genre on the audience. 3. The individual features that define analytical categories: for instance, involving characters, setting and events as the distinctive features of narrative; being made of language and lacking formal constraints as the features of prose; referring to 110 an imaginary world and relying on an act of presence as the features of fiction. Since these properties are the constitutive elements of analytical categories, they are crucially dependent on the particular definition of the category. To take one example: if one conceives narrativity as the play of suspense, curiosity and surprise, as does Meir Sternberg (1992: 529), it is these concepts, rather rjfoxml-als-v1.cls RJFO_A_477893 April 7, 2010 20:42 310 Narrativity and its modes than the presence of characters, setting and events, which constitute the basic 115 features of narrative texts.
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