Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel

by D.A. Miller

The description for this book, Narrative and Its Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel, will be forthcoming.

Genres: Criticism

320 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1981

Reviews

[samantha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Preface
• the theory of the novel ideally ‘no less than a theory of the conditions that make narrative possible’ the implex of the novel—a cluster of latent potentialities that permit a narrative to unfold
• While such a theory will not be developed in the study that follows, I have taken its possibility as a charter for my readings of three nineteenth-century novelists: Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Stendhal.
• These will focus not so much on narrative as on what I shall be calling the “narratable": the instances of disequilibrium, suspense, and general insufficiency from which a given narrative appears to arise.
• The term is meant to cover the various incitements to narrative, as well as the dynamic ensuing from such incitements, and it is thus opposed to the "normarratable" state of quiescence assumed by a novel before the beginning and supposedly recovered by it at the end.
• It is my hope that the shift of emphasis一from narrative to its underlying impulsions in the narratable一will better allow us to identify and account for a central tension in the traditional novelistic enterprise: namely, a discomfort with the processes and implicatiosn of narrative itself.
• underlying instability of desire, language, and society, and as such, they are inevitably felt to threaten the very possibility of this definitive, "finalizing" state of affairs
• OPPOSITE OF NARRATIVE IS FINALIZING x closure
• My real argument, of course, is not that novels do not “build" toward closure, but that they are never fully or finally governed by it.
• The ultimate subject of this study is the uneasiness raised in the novel text by its need for controls, an uneasiness of which problems of closure would only be the most visible symptom.
• Closure thus becomes an impossibility on principle, even as it urgently takes place.
1. The Danger of Narrative in Jane Austen
• The narrative of happiness is inevitably frustrated by the fact that only insufficiencies, defaults, deferrals, can be “Told” Even when a narrative "prepares for" happiness, it remains in this state of lack, which can only be liquidated along with the narrative itself.
• Narrative proceeds toward, or regresses from, what it seeks or seems most to prize, but it is never identical to it.
• What I have called the nonnarratable in a text should not be confused with what is merely unnarrated by it.
• Limits and lacunae
• What I am calling the nonnarratable elements of a text are precisely those that (like Emma's marriage) serve to supply the specified narrative lack, or to answer the specified narrative question.
• The nonnarratable is not the unspeakable. What defines a nonnarratable element is its incapacity to generate a story. Properly or intrinsically, it has no narrative future
• Retrouvé, “all that had been lost" comes to supplant "all Suspense & Indecision"； and inversely, it is only because "all that had been lost" did get lost that "all Suspense & Indecision" have been able to crop up in the first place. The closural settlement accommodates the narratable only by changing its status, that is, by putting it in a past perfect tense a.nd declaring it "over." Closure can never include, then, the narratable in its essential dimension: all suspense and indecision.
• The pathos of a dispensable narrative is nothing next to the pathos of an unending narratability, indispensable because there are no safe grounds on which to dispense with it. No longer kept within limits and roundly terminated at the end, narrative would implicitly become all there is.
2. George Eliot: “The Wisdom of Balancing Claims”
• we find ourselves embarrassed by those aspects of the text that put a question mark before its own traditional form.
• I have already charted what I think are the two basic requirements of traditional novelistic form： a moment of suspense and instability, and a moment of closure and resolved meaning. The first institutes the narratable disequilibrium, which the second converts back to a state of non-narratable quiescence.
• constructional categories (nonnarratability, narratability, closure)
• projected ends are forever lost in the incessant “retarding friction” of the means
• In general, the forms of closure managed by the protagonists ratify either a surrender of desire or its reductive rescaling.
• The vision thus risks being lost in the effort to find itself.
• The various attempts to end Middlemarch, then, issue in a compromise formation between a fully narrated closure and an unlimited narratability that can never be all told.
3. Narrative “Uncontrol” in Stendhal
• The moral desirability of closure in Austen and Eliot is inseparable from a reluctance to entertain the pleasures of narrative suspensiveness.
• “elision of downbeats'' accompanied by an ^accentuation of accessory circumstances, and this is a congenial way of describing Stendhal’s syncopated rhythms.
4. Afterword
• TLDR
• what discontents the traditional novel is its own condition of possibility. For the production of narrative一what we called the narratable—is possible only within a logic of insufficiency, disequilibrium, and deferral, and traditional novelists typically desire worlds of greater stability and wholeness than such a logic can intrinsically provide. Moreover, the suspense that constitutes the narratable inevitably comes to imply a suspensiveness of signification, so that what is ultimately threatened is no less than the possibility of a full or definitive meaning.
• One might say, of course, that this merely reformulates a truth generally acknowledged in every manual for aspiring writers—namely, that there must be conflict to generate a story and resolution to end it. Less simplistically, one might say that the traditional novelist gives play to his discontent only to assuage it in the end, much as the child in Freud makes his toy temporarily disappear the better to enjoy its reinstated presence.
• Charles Grivel has even argued that the noveFs whole reason for being is precisely to negate the negativity that is its narrative.
• There is no need to deny the novel’s attempt to master the narratable. The only real question is whether we can take it for granted that such an attempt perfectly succeeds.
• The novel may be a game of Fort!/ Da!, turning on the disappearance and return of a full meaning, but in the cases we have considered, the game seems to have gone beyond this simple ground rule and begins to look like a symptom of the anxiety that its purpose was to master.
• FORT/DA: The anxiety of disappearance is intrinsically stronger than the gratification of return, for the former is not merely a moment in the game, it is the underlying inspiration for the game itself. Even the gratification of return belongs to the logic of disappearance,
• Similarly, I have implied, the narratable is stronger than the closure to which it is opposed in an apparent binarity.
-. For the narratable is the very evidence of the narrative text, while closure (as, precisely, the nonnarratable) is only the sign that this text is over.
• Oscillation of cure and disease
• Even, therefore, when one thinks closure impossible, one may never be able to think it away.