Quite frankly, I had to annotate these readings just to keep up with what was going on. Who was who? When was what? What was when? What did he just say? (And they’re all guys, right up to Barbara Hernstein Smith. What a relief she was, after all that … stuff!)
But seriously. Under Levi-Strauss, I wrote, “Charts! Feels like math!” Beside Bal, I noted, “What is fabula again?” Aristotle: beginning, middle, end. Todorov. I couldn’t think of a thing to say about him. Now that old Russian structuralist, Propp, he traced the Oedipus myth across space and time, looking for the basically basic story, or narrative, underpinning them all. “Interesting!” I wrote, like Spock on Star Trek saying, “Fascinating!”
Barthes, however, set my annotations into real motion. That is, he registered in my brain as familiar, sensible, comfortable. I sidetracked for a bit, though, to remind myself the difference between la langue and le langage, e.g. the French langue vs. the judicial langage. I noted, of course, Barthes’ oft-quoted line, “The narratives of the world are numberless” (109). I pondered his definitions (is discourse “a set of sentences” and, if so, what does that mean?). There’s a perplexing circularity to some of his definitions: “A discourse is a long ‘sentence’ (the units of which are not necessarily sentences), just as a sentence, allowing for certain specifications, is a short ‘discourse’” (111). I appreciated how he brought rhetoric into the narrative, suggesting that rhetoric has “at least two planes of description to discourse: dispositio and elocutio” (112) (in other words, organization and style/eloquence).
I skipped quickly through Forster, also familiar because I’d read his charming little book, Aspects of the Novel, for more than one creative-writing class. Of Culler and Genette, I annotated little, but felt that some definitions and distinctions were settling into place: story vs. plot, narrative vs. story, anachrony/analepses/prolepses. The urge to define – is that the structuralist bent, to categorize, assign these ideas to little boxes? And what of narratologists’ fascination with Oedipus?
Prince brought me back to familiar terrain, that is, a rhetorical twist: “In all narrations, a dialogue is established between the narrator(s), the narratee(s) and the character(s)” (101). That’s the old rhetorical triangle.
Brooks sparked more notes and questions and a frustrating attempt to figure out the shortcut key strokes for getting that little hat ˆ on the z for sjuzet (help, anyone?). In any case, I’m a Sherlock Holmes fan; Brooks' use of a detective story helped untangle the fabula distinction (“the order of events referred to by the narrative” or “what really happened” [147]). I found most interesting his argument that narrative is a dynamic process, “actualized in the reading process” (152). Is there no "narrative" until we read the "story"? Brooks describes plot as “as the interpretive activity elicited by the distinction between sjuzet and fabula”(147). How does he differentiate between plot and narrative?
And finally, Hernstein Smith came in, like the adult in the room — except for the mind-blowing notion that there are more than 1,000 Cinderella stories out there in the world (and her fear about every story being some version of Cinderella). I think I've read her work before. Hernstein Smith bursts the bubble on the idea that every narrative has two parts (a pox on fabula and sjuzet). Hernstein Smith says, “… no narrative version can be independent of a particular teller and occasion of telling and, therefore that we may assume that every narrative version has been constructed in accord with some set of purposes or interests” (142). That is, every version of Cinderella (the “text”) has been created with some underlying purpose-interest by some “particular teller” (the “rhetor”) constrained within a particular “occasion of telling” (the kairos or the exigence?). What of the audience in this somewhat classic rhetorical triangle?
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