More Fun with Repetition (But Seriously, This is Different…)

Megan Minarich

Narrative Theory

Prof. Jay Clayton

Response 9

22 OCT 2008

 

 

In his seminar response to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” Jacques Lacan attempts a psychoanalytic reading of the short “detective story” (which is a point to which I will return) wherein he traces various characters’ responses to and actions involving a letter which must not be found. In this story, we are presented with two camps of persons: those invested in keeping the letter hidden (i.e. the Minister) and those interested in finding the letter (i.e. the police, M. Dupin). Lacan seeks to demonstrate how the subject (signified) is constituted in relationship to the letter (signifier). Drawing upon Freud, he asserts that “it is the symbolic order which is constitutive for the subject” and illustrates “in a story the decisive orientation which the subject receives from the itinerary of a signifier” (Lacan 28).

 

 

Repetition, particularly following from Freud’s idea of the repetition automatism, is one aspect of “The Purloined Letter” that Lacan engages. On page 32, Lacan introduces the idea of intersubjective repetition: although an action is repeated, this repeated action is performed by different persons for different reasons with different results. Taking the example of the glance, Lacan identifies three instances of repetition with different contexts: a glance that “sees nothing,” one that “sees that the first sees nothing and deludes itself as to the secrecy of what it hides, “ and the third glance that “sees that first two glances leave what should be hidden exposed to whoever would seize it” (32). This kind of intersubjective repetition allows variations within the repeated action to inform the subjective development of those engaged in later instances of repetition. Gérard Genette, in Narrative Discourse, also raises the issue of repetition not being a direct replication of something original (such as an action); because each repeated action occupies a different moment in time, the actions cannot be exactly the same, which, as we discussed, goes against Walter Benjamin’s concept of repetition. How does Lacan’s addition of the psychoanalytic element to the repetition of an action further complicate the relationship between repetition and reproduction? What is at stake in producing a psychoanalytic reading of a structural choice within the narrative? And perhaps I’m jumping the gun, but how might a Lacanian reading of “The Purloined Letter” differ from a cognitive theoretical reading?

 

 

A last little tidbit from this essay that caught my eye is Lacan’s fleeting mention of genre and convention. What of “the fact that the story is told to us as a police mystery?” (Lacan 33) Lacan mentions how a certain genre, such as the mystery, can “provok[e] a specific interest in the reader,” yet he backtracks, saying that, with regard to Dupin’s tale, “even if the genre were established in the first, it is still a little early for the author to play on a convention” (33). What is the relationship between genre and convention for Lacan? If the genre has been established early on, what prohibits the authors from using generic convention?  

Chatman: Genre, Cinema, and Other Problems

Megan Minarich

Narrative Theory

Prof. Jay Clayton

10 SEPT 2008

Response 3

 

In the Introduction of Seymour Chatman’s Story and Discourse, I must say that I was a bit surprised by Chatman’s quick quasi-dismissal of genre: “No individual work is a perfect specimen of a genre—novel or comic epic or whatever. All works are more or less mixed in generic character” (18). While Chatman isn’t positing that we ignore genre altogether, he also isn’t pushing its importance (as the “or whatever” indicates). By describing genres as “constructs or composites of features,” he reduces genre from an identifying category capable of placing a text in an ongoing developmental history of the novel, to an almost empty tag that will allow us a few formal assumptions about a narrative text (18). It’s not so much that we should expect every text to fall neatly into a generic category, but rather that those categories help us to read (or, in Chatman’s terms, “read out”) a narrative text as much as the Structuralist story and discourse schema that Chatman uses. In what ways is Chatman’s subordination of genre helpful or detrimental to the study of narrative (as he sees it)?

 

Perhaps another tactic might be to question how Chatman is using genre, as his analysis, as the book’s subtitle suggests, encompasses both fiction and film. My perception is that fiction and film both constitute separate genres, but perhaps this is not Chatman’s take. Nonetheless, he draws out copious differences between fiction and film, as well as how these differences affect the narrative structure of each and how each medium is able to utilize certain literary tropes or formal elements. One of the more interesting points he makes about the problematic relationship between fiction and film deals with summary. Having observed that cinema has certain problems with summary, he moves on to deal with the modernist novel: “Contrarily, modernist novels, as Virginia Woolf observed in both theory and practice, tend to eschew summary, to present a series of scenes separated by ellipses that the reader must fill in. Thus, the modernist novel is more cinematic, although I do not argue that it changed under the influence of cinema” (75). This is a pretty loaded statement—a little too loaded not to be followed up with an explanation, particularly when we consider the antagonistic relationship between modernist cinema and literature. On another level, E. M. Forster makes explicit in Aspects of the Novel that a movie audience cannot follow plot, but only the non-causal time-sequence of story (86). And here we have Chatman taking Mrs. Dalloway as his example of a modernist novel that he would consider cinematic insofar as it eliminates summary and reads as “a rhythm of scenes alone” (78); the removal of summary and the presence of only scenes, then, might make Mrs. Dalloway seem as though the causal relationships between events have been removed with the summary. Yet certainly we wouldn’t argue that Mrs. Dalloway lacks causality—quite the contrary, as the web of interrelated characters and actions is quite complex indeed. What, then, do we do with the modernist novel’s cinematic nature? Can we even begin to think about this without considering its relationship to the emergence of film? How might we reconcile Chatman’s criticism as (more or less, or at least comparatively) our contemporary with that of Forster, who approached the modernist film/fiction relationship from a contemporaneous perspective? 

Literary Evolution Along the V Axis

Megan Minarich

Narrative Theory

Prof. Jay Clayton

Response 2

3 SEPT 2008

 

In “An Approach through Genre,” Robert Scholes argues for the creation of a “poetics of fiction” that is generic in nature and that avoids what he identifies as “the establishment of false norms for the evaluation of literary works” (Scholes 43). With the schema that he creates, which he tries to make as quantitative in nature as possible, he attempts to disprove Northrop Frye’s argument that (relatively) objective literary analysis is impossible. The resultant elaborate graphic representation of the history of the novel and the modes in which it can function situates the modal qualities of the novel along the outside of a V, with movements or periods cutting through the center. The center, then, depicts the progression from the novel (fiction) to history (fact). The V situates history as the center point (or mode), with satire and romance positioned at either end. While Scholes’ two separate but related “axes,” (the V and the middle line) make sense, it is unclear whether his definition of history changes depending upon how the chart is read once we graph a novel onto it. Does history transcend or ground the novel? On the vertical axis, history reads as the opposite of the novel, or of fiction; yet along the V axis, history reads more as something that is appropriated by the novel.  If we agree with this difference, how might we reconcile it into Scholes’ schema? Furthermore, how might his V model be compared to or contrasted with the X-Y axis onto which we graph the synchronic and diachronic, among other dyads?             

 

Franco Moretti attempts a similarly quantitative (or at least scientific) approach to the history of the novel and its development in his “On Literary Evolution,” wherein he parallels the development of the novel to Darwin’s theory of evolution. While Scholes is adamant about creating his schema precisely to avoid pigeonholing certain authors or texts, Moretti seems to engage in pigeonholing through arguing for chance and social necessity in literary evolution. By arguing, for example, that the predominance of the Bildungsroman in the 19^th century resulted from it being selected as dominant among other forms, Moretti retroactively categorizes the majority of 19^th century (canonical) European texts as part of the Bildungsroman tradition. Is Moretti employing circular logic here? To what extent is his emphasis on chance and social selection hurting his somewhat empirical argument? Also, Moretti notes that “In Darwinian fashion, the context can select forms—but it cannot generate them” (Moretti 266). What, then, does generate these forms? We might return to Scholes for an answer—that new formal developments result from persons deciding to move from what is established and do something new with it. This, then, puts a great deal of agency in the hands of the author. Does the author have a place in Moretti’s account of literary evolution?