Fictions of Discourse: Reading Narrative Theory

by Patrick O'Neill

The fundamental principle upon which contemporary narratology is constructed is that narrative is an essentially divided endeavour, involving the story (`what really happened') and the discourse (`how what happened is presented'). For traditional criticism, the primary task of narrative discourse is essentially to convey the story as transparently as possible. Patrick O'Neill investigates the extent to which narrative discourse also contains the counter-tendency not to tell the story, indeed to subvert the story it tells in foregrounding its own performance. The systemic implications of this perspective for narrative and for narrative theory are examined within the conceptual framework provided by classical French narratology. O'Neill ultimately attempts both to expand and to problematize the structural model of narrative proposed by this centrally important tradition of narrative theory. O'Neill describes narrative as functioning in terms of four interacting story, narrative text, narration, and textuality. Using a range of examples from Homer to modern European fiction, he discusses traditional narrative categories such as voice, focalization, character, and setting, and reinscribes them within the contextual space of author and reader to bring out narrative's potential for ambiguity and unreliability. He also discusses the implications of translation for narrative theory.

Paperback

First published June 1, 1996

Reviews

[Theryn Fleming · Rating 4 out of 5]

Patrick O’Neill sees pure narrative theory as play (applied theory OTOH = work). It’s an open-ended kind of game, like a game of make-believe, where the goal is to keep the game going as long as possible. He proposes four narrative levels: story, text, narration, and textuality (process of text’s production by an author and its reception by readers). It’s the last that’s most interesting, especially in conjunction with his discussion of the different ways of reading narrative texts, i.e. the primacy of authorial intentionality vs. textual intentionally vs. readerly intentionality vs. the interactivity of authorial, textual, and readerly intentionality.