Narrative

The focus on the concept of narrativity in Gerald Prince’s work demonstrates a keen interest in uncovering the ways by which a narrative can interest or fascinate the reader. Studying narrativity involves the investigation of the relative effectiveness or tellability of particular narratives, or what Prince has also called “narratability” (“Narrativehood” 23). In the minimal narratives he developed to explore and compare individual narratives, he is like a narrative engineer: testing different models, looking at the complex mechanisms of narrative and inquiring how—and how well—they work, and thereby pinpointing their mechanisms more sharply. One of my favorites among these groups of minimal narratives, which never fails to provoke smiles and laughter of recognition and insight when used in the classroom, is the contrast between the mechanical “the cat sat on the mat” and the potentially explosive “the cat sat on the dog’s mat” (Narratology 147). This example never fails to alert students’ minds to two core aspects of narrativity and tellability: first, that conflict is central to interesting narrative, and second, that anticipation of future events fuels readerly interest.

One of the remarkable and beneficial strengths of Gerald Prince’s gift to narrative studies is his ability to provoke thought on narrative in ways that open up possible [End Page 304] new lines of exploration. His academic writing is characterized by great versatility and originality, both in its theoretical substance and its rhetorical form. The wry or enigmatic titles of some articles (e.g., “Recipes,” “The Long and the Short of It,” or “How New is New?”) denote a mind that would, even with the title of an essay, like to get the reader thinking—or guessing—even about the overall content of the essay to come, thus creating suspense at a meta-discourse level.

In this provocative and thought-stimulating style, an excellent case in point is Prince’s “Forty-One Questions on the Nature of Narrative,” which consists of two pages of short questions. These questions not only raise key issues about narrative and narrativity but they also constitute a deliberate departure from the standard mode of the essay. Eschewing analysis and argument, Prince turns from a discursive mode to one of continuous questioning, a move that conveys his indirect argument that narrative theorists still have much to decide about the nature of narrative. At the same time, Prince’s provocative questions represent a new level of achievement in his already admirably succinct essay style. In two pages he manages to articulate whole ranges of narratological concern.

Prince begins with questions that invite the reader to review fundamental aspects and patterns of discourse, as in question one: “What is the difference, if any, between narrative, nonnarrative, and antinarrative?” (317). Note the mischievous “if any” at the center of the question, in which Prince for a moment pretends a complete lack of knowledge and feigns innocence in the face of his own question—either to encourage debate or to provoke response. I have always had a tremendous appreciation for this kind of rhetorical strategy—one that instead of parading knowledge and the authority of knowledge, actually backgrounds it in order to move others to think and formulate ideas. On another level, this “if any” is characteristic of the little humorous winks that Prince gives the reader in much of his writing and which provide the relatively rare pleasure of humor within the reading of academic discourse.

From these and other key questions, the reader of “Forty-One Questions on the Nature of Narrative” moves on down the list to find more elusive and searching questions—for example number 11, “Is a memory (a) narrative?” and number 12, “Is a dream (a) narrative?” (317). These are questions which move the focus away from general inquiry and suggest far more complex subjects and realms of narrative analysis. By the time the reader reaches question 25, she or he encounters a rather different field of inquiry—that of the different modalities and virtualities of narrative: “Is the representation of future change (a) narrative?” Questions 26 and 27 then ask, “Is the representation of hypothetical...