Postmodern Narrative Theory

Datum: 01. Januar 2011 Autor: Tamariin Kommentare: 0

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Postmodern Narrative Theory

Anyone who tries to research the writings in critical theory and postmodernism will soon understand the fact that there are difficulties in providing a short and useful overview covered in just one book. However, Mark Currie’s Postmodern Narrative Theory is rhetorically lively and uses a language that has a popular appeal which does not interfere its response to often difficult debates in narrative theory. The author connects fictional narratives with those of the non-fictional world by stating that their indivisibility characterizes modern fiction, criticism and culture. The book shows the transition in narrative theory from its formalist beginnings, through deconstruction and various historicisms and psychoanalysis, up to its current matters with the social and cultural means of narrative. Guiding along its two principal themes, namely the relationship of narrative to identity and the role of time in experience, the book pictures the reciprocity of fiction, criticism and ideology that symbolize the involvement of narrative theory to an understanding of postmodern culture [1] , which this book report shows throughout Currie’s main arguments used in chapter six as well as sketching the assembled materials the author used to verify and show evidence of his arguments.[2]

Chapter 6: True Lies: Unreliable Identitis in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Currie starts the sixth chapter of his book by giving the reader an overview of the nature of unreliable identities, using the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde to help the reader understand his argumentation. Thereafter, he focuses on “inner distance”, “narrative shipwreck” and “writing and seeing” as well as on “self-conscious self-consciousness”. Thus, he analyses the concept of unreliable identities for those critics who want to understand to what extent narrative is reliable and for narrators themselves to give them an idea of how far their narrative will be trusted by readers. The author begins his argumentation by contradicting truth and lie of statements of first person narrative by saying that messages often have to be seperated in time to make logical sense and to be reliable, since the reader is restricted to the perceptions of the narrator. He proceeds by explaining that one main point in psychoanalyst writing is to create this schism to split the ‘I’ between past and present. He then substantiates his arguments by using the former theories of Freud who assumed that “mental disturbance is a state of self-ignorance” (p.117) which is surmounted by the time of description through self-knowledge and that self-ignorance is a kind of repression. Mr. Currie puts in question if this does not mean using one form of madness to cure another one? He directly answers to this by explaining that one has to try to narrate oneself as if one were another person in ‘order to stabilise one’s identity as narrative and thus to denounce one’s schism of the past by concealing the schism between the present and the past’. Currie annotates that self-narration’s reliability is depending on temporal distance between narrator and what is narrated, but that it had to donate the frankness of ‘narrative self-consciousness’ if one is to belive the narrative. He discusses “that the postmodern narrator may not be reliable, but he is extremely innovative as far as narrative stances are concerned”(p.118) and thinks it not being an overstatement to say that ‘all narration exists as true lies’.

Currie continues by concentrating on inner distance. He demonstrates that moral distance is achieved as a result of structural distance and that it is the simplest and most common strategy for this purpose to use temporal as moral distance, since it substitutes for distance in the third person point of view. He clarifies his argument with the example of Dr. Jekylls confession in Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but hereafter explains that Dr. Jekyll faces a quick compression of distance between narrator and narrated. The author emphasizes this argument of decline by outlining the obvious metaphor of doubleness in Jekyll’s metamorphoses into Mr. Hyde and the much less obvious doubleness of narrator and storytelling. Currie illustrates that several aspects seem to collaborate, seeing that Jekyll is referring to himself in the third person “as if the relationships between Jekyll and Hyde and Jekyll and Jekyll are operating in parallel”. (p.120) He states that the splittings are connected because they shift self-narration into the third person and allow moral judgements and he points out that this is a kind of ‘doubled doubleness’, which may appear in a flash at the beginning of Jekylls confession. A main point herein is that the logical trouble for the reader deepens because of the advent of the unconscious self-consciousness about the complications of self-narration which may, to Currie’s opinion, as well be a warning that the idea of self-consciousness cannot be maintained, because too many different levels of the logic of narration are described. The author states, that in spite of its complications he wants to insist upon unconscious self-consciousness, as it encompasses all the people envolved to describe a situation in narrative that is not a carefully plotted authorial invention, but that is ‘produced by the collision’ of the different levels as mentioned above.

Now Currie goes on with the argument of narrative shipwreck, mainly supporting this with the example of Jekyll and Hyde. He states that Jekyll in the story is condemned to moral shipwreck because two parts of one person have seperated into two bodies and that this functions as metaphor for self-narration, since Jekyll and Hyde cannot be understood as an allegory, but rather as the problems of narration itself. Currie explains that first the bodily split of Jekyll, still being a human built of good and evil, and Hyde as the pure evil seems to be a division of labour between good and evil. But the division of good and evil is far from being simple, since in case of the story it means the split between new and old Jekyll, as well as the internal parts in old Jekyll and finally the split between Jekyll and Hyde. What remains unclear, so Currie, is at what time Jekyll becomes Hyde, since the gap between Jekyll and Hyde is reducing with the same speed as the gap between the time of the storytelling and the told time. Thus, Currie assumes that narrator and narrated cannot both exist in the same moment, indicating this by referring to the story of Jekyll and Hyde who are converging at th moment of death. Regarding narration, nothing would be left to narrate except narration itself and it is this collision of past and present after which narration is no longer possible what the author calls the ‘narratological shipwreck’. Currie declares that it could be as well Hyde at times doing the narrating and that the reader is left in doubts about this fact, since there are two objections to this point: On one hand, this would make no moral sense at all within the terms of the story, but this runs into the problem of reliabilty of the narrative at every turn, on the other hand it is simply an unappropriate question to be asked, since the answer is undecidable. Therefore, it may be logical that Hyde is narrating, but has to remain an open possibility as there is no reference for any solution; hence, it is as if the storytelling moves on towards a truth that is the collapse of subjectivity in narrative form.

Currie then presses on to his idea of writing and seeing, arguing that basically seeing something means believing it. He fosters this argument by showing the effects of filmic narration since there is another correlation at work between filmic text and the authority of verbal storytelling. The author illustrates that a power of words to create an imageexists and that there is new interest in the interaction of words and images. He continues by professing that he himself is interested “in a new division of labour between texts and images […] which creates fascinating internal tensions within writing.”(p. 127) Currie says that identity has a climbing cursory and visual projection of meaning and that the importance of naration to identity is questioned. He supports this by declaring that one interesting thing about Dr. Jekyll is that the emergence is used as metaphor for the soul’s morality and that within the story there exists a problem to convey the identity since no character of the story is able to authenticly describe Mr. Hyde. The author elucidates that horror is usually generated by suggestion and not description and this is also the intention of the nondescript appearance of Mr. Hyde.

The writer then directs the interest of the reader to the mirror that is used as a clue to the unsolved mystery in the story as well as a metaphor for the vision to which the reader has no acces throughout the text. Utterson complicates the metaphor by his statement that the mirror witnessed nothing more strange than itself. This is to be seen as a reversal of the roles of the miror and a face, as a mirror looks into the face of someone and sees itself in it, which acts as a metaphor for someone seeing his face in a mirrorcausing a kind of confound identification. The metanarrative use of the mirror is thus positioned between the eckphrastic hope that all will be unveiled and the eckphrastic fear that text is uncapable of full disclosure, precisely as it is not decided between seeing and writing as the most reliable clue to the depth of the happening. The author comments that the narrative itself is a journey into its insides and that it stages a conflict between image and text as methods of subjectivity and identification, as a mirror oppotite self-narration.

Currie ends the chapter defining his ideas about self-conscious self-consciousness referring to what he stated at the beginning. He thinks that self-consciousness is put in the same logical position as lying and explains that one must deny inventing oneself in the process of first person narrative to believe that one is discovering oneself and declares that the same is true about the relationship of narrative and narratology and it is the only way to make sense of the idea associated with critics like Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller, that deconstruction is done by text to itself without intervention by the critic. He then expounds that the reading he has offered imitates a whole generation of critics who see texts as allegories and who imply that this is what text is about. Currie confesses that he rewrote a text as if it were about literary and cultural theory and that he did not choose the text himself but that it was chosen by the editor of the transition series and he only made it co-operate. He admits that he forced the text to say what he wanted it to and selected the parts according to his theory and he interprets the relation between a text and its reading as the poles of of objectivity and subjectivity which are bound together in interaction. Finally, Currie professes that he wanted to “observe that criticism, for all its recent self-consciousness about its active production of the object, has never really escaped the dualism of subject-object relations and has resorted to a strategy which is much more pernicious.”(p.134) The prescriptive theory has been substituted with something completely non-theoretical, however this idea of non-theoretic theoretical metaphor is an unwanted side effect and his reading proposes Stevenson’s mirror being such a metaphor as an “unwitting allegory for everything”.(p. 134)

Left Questions and Doubts:

Any reader of Currie’s Postmodern Narrative Theory , who has fundamental knowledge of the English language will be able to follow his easy way of argumentation throughout his work. What struck me most is his way of reading of the story of Stevenson’s story Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which made me curious so that I will have to read the story from his point of view to see if I can still follow the mainstream as well. Also, an open question seems to me whether or not new forms of time and chronology really do exist and how they affect the narrative at all.

Works cited:

Currie, Mark: Postmodern Narrative Theory, Macmillan Press Ltd., Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and London 1998.

Amazon.com (on Feb. 20th, 2009)
http://www.amazon.com/Postmodern-Narrative-Theory-Transitions-Currie/.

Fußnoten:
[1] See also.: http://www.amazon.com/Postmodern-Narrative-Theory-Transitions-Currie/
[2] Currie, Mark: 117-134