On Deconstructing Narratology

Author(s): Seymour Chatman

Source: Style, Vol. 22, No. 1, Narrative Theory and Criticism (Spring 1988), pp. 9-17
Published by: Penn State University Press
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 Seymour Chatman

On Deconstructing Narratology

Deconstruction has encouraged general skepticism about language, which

it finds innately shifty, ambiguous- in its central term, différant. If every text
necessarily contains its own deconstructive seeds, crucial questions arise for
narratology, which, like any discipline, is the sum of the theoretical texts which
it has generated. Is narratology a futile project? Deconstruction attempts to
allay such apprehensions: Theorizing should go on, as long as it understands
that it is subject to the fate of all textuality. "We are all," Derrida likes to say,
"in the same boat." This only sounds like the chuckling observation of phi-
losophers that "Philosophy doesn't change anything." For not all philosophers
are skeptics, and there is a special pall cast over theoretical endeavor by a truly
resolute skepticism. It cannot but dampen enthusiasm to believe that one's
projects are inevitably doomed to logical self-dismantlement. Even if narra-
tology is not futile, we are told, it is "a tragic practice" (Godzich xiii). In such
a scenario, it is more tempting (and academically safer) to be the deconstructor
than the deconstructed. Culturally, this seems to me a rather sad state of affairs.
It is not a new idea that texts are full of ambiguities, tensions, irresolu-
tions. One whole branch of New Criticism celebrated ambiguity as poetry's
chief prize. Critics like Richards and Empson clearly anticipated Derrida and
the Yale school of deconstruction. The difference is that for Richards and
Empson, semantic slippage was a matter of pleasure, of richness. In The Phi-
losophy of Rhetoric Richards wrote: "Where the old Rhetoric treated ambiguity
as a fault in language, and hoped to confine or eliminate it, the new Rhetoric
sees it as an inevitable consequence of the powers of language and as the
indispensable means of most of our important utterances . . ." (40). For some
deconstructors, however, it seems a gloomier, even a hand-wringing matter,
entailing all kinds of "tragedies," "crises," "discouragements," "catastrophes,"
"burdens," "negativities," "painfulnesses," ending in a "displaced existential
pathos."1 Further, one hears, at least in some less gifted deconstructive efforts,
the same debunking tone used by early Freudian critics. Novice hands find it
too easy to deconstruct, as it was to psychoanalyze characters and authors: the
resultant work tends not so much to explain texts as to explain them away.
But more urgent to narratology and to literary theory in general is the
question, What next? What do we get from deconstruction? Is literary theory,
like any text, fated to anything more than an endless demonstration of its own
deconstructability? And what should theoreticians do in the face of that pros-
pect? If it is impossible to avoid différance, why struggle for terminological

Style: Volume 22, No. 1, Spring 1988 9

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 10 Seymour Chatman

precision? Why continue the effort to reduce semantic slippage by coining and
redefining terms? The narratologist, like the theorist of any subject, is con-
cerned to minimize terminological confusion. Should she or he disown the
simple assumption that a technical term can be defined to mean precisely so-
and-so? And that if dissent arises, it is meaningful to argue the term's suita-
bility?
Without denying the value of deconstructive analysis of literary texts, we
should not, I believe, give up the project of improving theoretical distinctions
and terms. As deconstructors themselves have argued, far from invalidating
the structuralist project, deconstruction presupposes structuralist efforts to un-
derstand the complex codes amidst which we live and cannot itself exist apart
from them:

Without that specific tension between "practice" and "promise" exemplified in structuralist
thought, Derrida could hardly have broached the questions that animate his own writing.
Deconstruction is a constant and vigilant reminder of what structuralism must be if it is
to avoid the traps laid down by its seductive concepts of method.2

The opposite is no less true: without the structuralist "seduction," deconstruc-

tors would run out of grist for their mill.
Since literary theory does not primarily concern interpretation,3 1 would
also like to think it less subject to the impact of diffêrance than is the literary
text. Or perhaps less interestingly subject to it. The "infinite" indeterminacy
of poetic texts is one problem, the question of defining terms for theoretical
discussion quite another. Semantic crosscurrents of great subtlety doubtless
create the deconstructive force of Yeats's rhetorical or not-so-rhetorical ques-
tion:

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?4

Clearly those crosscurrents are worth investigating, and if deconstructive

inquiry can enrich them, so much the better. But literary theory, like any
theory, needs the security of its terminology if it is to be of any use at all. If
a narratologist wants, for example, to argue that "filter" is a better term than
"focalization,"5 should he or she have to shift from one foot to another won-
dering what the deconstructors are going to say?
Hence my concern with Jonathan Culler's challenge to the central nar-
ratological distinction between story and discourse (fabula and sujet, récit and
discours ).6 Culler has written so intelligently and usefully about narratology
from the structuralist point of view that his deconstructive concerns must be
examined with respect and care. His position, as I understand it, is to accept
the necessary separation of story and discourse but to argue that the dichotomy
entails a deconstructive tension. Narratology, he observes, necessarily assumes

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 On Deconstructing Narratology 1 1

the priority of story, however this priority is expressed: as "ground," "invariant

core," "something that exists independently of narrative presentation," the
"true" or "original" order, "something given, a constant, a sequence . . . which
the narrative presupposes," "a non-textual substratum," and so on. "Priority"
does not mean some literal pre-occurrence of the events:

I am not, of course, suggesting that narcologists believe that the events of a Balzac story
actually took place or that Balzac conceived the events first and then embodied them in
narrative discourse. I am claiming that narcological analysis of a text requires one to treat
the discourse as a representation of events which are conceived of as independent of any
particular narrative perspective or presentation and which are thought of as having the
properties of real events. (Pursuit of Signs 171)

So his is a logical priority: "The analyst must assume that the events reported
have a true order, for only then can he or she describe the narrative presentation
as a modification or effacement of the order of events." (The order of the
discourse, of course, may also simply parallel that of the story. Presumably
this "zero-case" is presupposed by Culler's formulation.)
But, Culler goes on to argue, beside the traditional priority given to story
as some "natural" sequence of events, there coexists a quite opposite and
indeed irreconcilable priority. Events, he maintains, may be the effects, not
the causes of the discourse. In other words, discourse may be prior and story
anterior: "Positing the priority of events to the discourse which reports or
presents them, narratology establishes a hierarchy which the functioning of
narratives often subverts by presenting events not as givens but as the products
of discursive forces or requirements ( Pursuit of Signs 172). He gives these
various names: "the demands of signification," "the logic of signification,"
"meaning" ( tout court), "theme," "narrative coherence," "the ethical and re-
ferential dimension of the narrative," "the ethical import," "the point," "the
evaluation," the "implicit argument that is common to narrative," the need
to make the story "truly tellable" (so as to avoid the reader's potential mocking
question "so what?") and the like.
He offers several illustrations of this reversal. Let us just consider that
of the Oedipus myth. On the one hand, Culler writes, there is the sequence of
events as normally perceived:

Oedipus is abandoned on Mt. Cithaeron; he is rescued by a shepherd; he grows up in

Corinth; he kills Laius at the crossroads; he answers the Sphinx's riddle; he marries Jocasta;
he seeks the murderer of Laius; he discovers his own guilt; he blinds himself and leaves
his country. ( Pursuit of Signs 1 72)

"Standard" narratology would explain these as "events, conceived as prior to

and independent of their discursive representation." In this case, the "prior
event [his actual murder of Laius] has made Oedipus guilty, and when this is
revealed he attains tragic dignity in accepting the meaning imposed by the
revealed event" (173).

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 12 Seymour Chatman

But, Culler reminds us, the only eyewitness to the murder claimed that
it was a group of robbers- several, not one- who killed Laius, so there remains
the possibility, urged by Jocasta, that Oedipus is innocent. Yet Oedipus rejects
this argument and accepts his guilt without even questioning the eyewitness
about what he saw.

Oedipus himself and all his readers are convinced of his guilt but our conviction does not
come from the revelation of the deed. Instead of a revealed prior deed determining meaning,
we could say that it is meaning, the convergence of meaning in the narrative discourse,
that leads us to posit this deed as its appropriate manifestation. . . .
[Oedipus's] conclusion is based not on new evidence concerning a past deed but on the
force of meaning, the interweaving of prophesies and the demands of narrative coherence.
The convergence of discursive forces makes it essential that he become the murderer of
Laius, and he yields to this force of meaning. Instead of saying, therefore, that there is a
sequence of past events that are given and which the play reveals with certain detours, we
can say that the crucial event is the product of demands of signification. Here meaning is
not the effect of a prior event but its cause. ( Pursuit of Signs 1 74)

Indeed, Culler argues, if this were not the case- if, say, Oedipus had demanded
more evidence or convinced himself that " 'the fact that he's my father doesn't
mean that I killed him' "-Oedipus could neither "acquire the necessary tragic
stature" nor even be said to suffer from an Oedipus complex. From this and
other examples- Daniel Deronda, Freud's story of the Wolfman, Labov's black
vernacular tales- Culler concludes

that every narrative operates according to this double logic, presenting its plot as a sequence
of events which is prior to and independent of the given perspective on these events, and,
at the same time, suggesting by its implicit claims to significance that these events are
justified by their appropriateness to a thematic structure. (Pursuit of Signs 178)

It is easy to grant that Oedipus Rex would be distinctly poorer, both in

tragic power and psychological subtlety, hence in "meaning" or "point," if
Oedipus did not accept his guilt so readily and in the absence of further proof.
What is questionable, however, is the justice of equating "force of meaning,"
"point," "theme," "demands of signification," and the like with discourse, of
assuming that these are its particular domain. In mainstream narratology,
"discourse" is simply the telling or showing, that is, the presenting of that
which is told or shown, that is, the "story." There is no more reason to identify
it as the unique repository of theme, moral, or overall meaning than to identify
"story" as that repository. Theme, like any other large dimension of textual
meaning, emerges not as or from discourse, but from the totality, from story-
as-discoursed. (In any case, these can never be separated except in a purely
theoretical way.)
To my mind, a phrase like "the convergence of discursive forces" entails
a slippage of reasoning. It would seem useful to distinguish the discoursive
from the discursive. Narrative "discourse" is a concept in narratology, a branch

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 On Deconstructing Narratology 13

of poetics or literary theory. "Discursive" convergence, as Culler apparently

uses the term, seems rather a literary-critical than a narratological concept.
Oedipus Rex would still be a narrative if Oedipus had sought more evidence
before accepting his guilt, since the order of events and causations would still
be in place. His doing so or not hardly affects the narrative structure of the
text. The "discursive convergence" that leads to his not doing so may make
the narrative better, but that is a matter of value, the province of literary
criticism, not of narratology. Culler points out Oedipus's own understanding
of his sense of guilt:

Once we are well into the play, we know that Oedipus must be found guilty, otherwise the
play will not work at all; and the logic to which we are responding is not simply an esthetic
logic that affects readers of literary works. Oedipus, too, feels the force of this logic.7

Surely he does, and the play is magnified by that consciousness. But there is
no evidence that the play would not function at the simple narrative level if
he did not. Narrative qua narrative can hardly be said to deconstruct just
because a character knows or has a premonition that the past was other than
he had previously imagined. The narrative would still "work," however inferior
its literary merit. A character's knowledge cannot "cause" prior events. Only
the implied author has that power. Only the implied author is the overseer of
the relations between story and discourse. By definition.
Culler's two logics do not operate within the same conceptual universe.
He lumps together crucially different activities, one presupposed by narrative
structure as such and one by a critical interpretation of a given narrative. The
view of plot as a sequence of events logically prior to their presentation is
simply a working convention of the class of texts we call narratives. After-the-
fact decisions about meaning, appropriateness to theme, and the like are not
part of that convention but are separate evaluative activities that we can per-
form on any text- not only narratives, but arguments, expositions, and de-
scriptions as well. Such evaluative activity is part of literary criticism as it is
traditionally conceived. But a character's performance of such an evaluation
simply constitutes one more event in the plot. The search for larger meanings
may legitimately be called "discursive," but it cannot be called "discoursive"
without depriving that term of any precision it might have gained in narra-
tology.
Culler must make this equation if he is to find the ubiquitous specter of
self-deconstruction. Narrative- the entire code, the very structure of narrative
as a type of text- is fated eternally, like any mere text, to deconstruct itself.
Even the notion of causation is subject to this bold claim:

Causation involves a narrative structure in which we posit first the presence of a cause and
then the production of an effect. Indeed, the very notion of plot, as E. M. Forster taught
us, is based on causation: "the king died, then the queen died" is not a narrative, although

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 14 Seymour Chatman

"the king died, then the queen died of grief' is. . . . This, one might say, is the fabula of
the causal narrative: first, there is cause; then, there is effect; first a mosquito bites one's
arm, then one feels pain. But, says Nietzsche, this sequence is not given; it is constructed
by a rhetorical operation. What happens may be, for example, that we feel a pain and then
look around for some factor we can treat as the cause. The "real" causal sequence may be:
first pain, then mosquito. It is the effect that causes us to produce a cause; a tropological
operation then reorders the sequence pain-mosquito as mosquito-pain. This latter sequence
is the product of discursive forces, but we treat it as a given, as the true order.
(Pursuit of Signs 183)

With all due respect to Nietszche, the reasoning seems a bit questionable.
Remember that originally we were only asked to accept logical, not actual,
temporal priority. To say that in narrative, events are "prior" to their expres-
sion is not the same as to say that they literally exist before that expression
takes place. From the theoretical point of view, narratology is resolutely syn-
chronic. It does not assume that either telling or told "precede" each other:
they are coexistent, cotemporal parts of the model. But in Culler's sentence,
words like "first" and "then" seem to shift the ground of discussion from logic
to chronologic. Mosquitoes bite, and then we feel the consequences. Our per-
ception neither precedes the event nor causes the mosquito to bite in the first
place, as might be implied by the mysterious "tropological operation" that
"reorders the sequence pain-mosquito as mosquito-pain." Culler's sentence,
"The 'real' causal sequence may be: first pain, then mosquito," omits, in its
excessive succinctness, some crucial elements: the experience of pain prompts
the search for the cause of the pain; the search, in turn, does not "cause" the
original source of the pain but rather leads to the discovery of that original
source. Discovering is not causing. The discovery of the pain cannot but follow
upon the pain itself. The hyphens connecting "pain-mosquito" and "mosquito-
pain" conceal more than they reveal. However goes the narrative order, whether
the telling is congruent with the told:

A mosquito bit his arm;

he felt the pain,

or, "anachronic" to it:

He felt a pain in his arm;

a mosquito had bitten him,

the cause can never be other than the mosquito's bite and the effect never
other than "his" pain. "He" did not "produce" the mosquito-as-cause in any
sense of "cause" useful to narratology. A narrative can present the story of an
inquiry in to a series of events, but that does not "cause" the events in the
way that event A of a story is said to be the cause of event B. Remember, too,
that the "he" who is bitten is a character (that is, in the story), whereas the
narrator, who provides the information that a mosquito was responsible, is

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 On Deconstructing Narratology 1 5

not in the story but out in the discourse. By a parallel logic it was not Oedipus
(only a character in the story and subject to its laws) who "caused" the murder
of his father "by bowing to the demands of narrative coherence and deeming
the act to have taken place" ( Pursuit of Signs 174) but rather the implied
author who caused these events to befall this character, so configuring them
and their discoursive representation that Oedipus should first unknowingly
murder his father and then accept his guilt without making any further inquiry
into the facts of the matter. Whatever Culler, and Nietzsche behind him, might
mean by the "non-givenness" of the causal sequence, or by its "metonymical"
character, causality is no mere rhetorical operation. Nor, from the purely nar-
ratological perspective, an easily reversible one.
Like those from Oedipus Rex and Daniel Deronda, Culler's mosquito
example seems to confuse psychological and logical orderings of events. Prud-
ence suggests that we keep these separate. From the logical point of view,
causality always entails sequence or temporal following- by definition.8 Culler
blurs the logical condition of causality with the possibility of someone's (Oed-
ipus's, the audience's) discovering the causal sequence. But that discovery can
only be after the fact. When we discover a causal sequence, the order of our
discovery, whether it proceeds from cause to effect or vice versa, is irrelevant
to the logical structure of the sequence, which presumes for narratives (except
fantasies and the like) the ordinary laws of nature. The order of logical en-
tailment bears no necessary relation to the psychological experience, the dis-
covery procedure, if you will, of what caused the events. One may, of course,
anticipate the effect before the cause occurs, as when we see the mosquito
alight on our arm before it has yet bitten. Here a discovery does precede the
event, but it is not the discovery of pain but simply of the mosquito's presence.
Or one may first feel the pain, then deduce the cause. But it is obviously not
the case (except in fantasy) that the order of causality can itself be reversed.
Again, the pain did not cause the mosquito to bite the arm.
In short, Culler's use of the word "cause" is not felicitous from the nar-
ratological point of view. Narratology takes it as axiomatic that event A causes
or has some other, contingent relation with B. To say that event B "causes"
A in the sense that the story would not otherwise have a "point" or "meaning"
does not seem to me a narratological observation. It is, rather, literary-critical,
an evaluation performed by reader or critic as he or she situates the digested
text in the universe of meanings and values. Readers must agree, if they are
to read a narrative at all, that event A precedes event B in the story. But they
may differ about what the point of that precedence is. To ignore the distinction
is precisely to reintroduce interpretation into narratology and thus into poetics
in general.9 Narratology may indeed be deconstructible; it may even need to
be deconstructed. But one would hope for a logically more secure demonstra-
tion which pinpointed problems in our current narratological suppositions
without undermining important and hard-earned distinctions on questionable

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 16 Seymour Chatman

grounds. In so doing, deconstruction could make a practical contribution to

narratology, and not merely reduce it to one more of Western metaphysics's
slippery practices.

Notes

1 The last phrase is Christopher Norris's in The Contest of Faculties 85.

2 Norris, Deconstruction 54. Cf. Norris's The Contest of Faculties 221: ". . . struc-
turalism is no more a closed chapter than the Kantian revolution in philosophy, which
continues to set the main terms for debate, even where its claims are most vigorously
contested."

3 The best argument for dissociating literary theory and interpretation is Culler's
"Beyond Interpretation," the first chapter of The Pursuit of Signs. "Structuralism,"
argues Culler, continues to be

committed to large-scale projects, such as elaborating a grammar of plot structure or the

possible relations between story and discourse, and has thus seemed irrelevant except in
so far as its concepts and categories can be "applied" in the activity of interpretation. The
possibility of pursuing these larger projects depends on our ability to resist the assumption
that interpretation is the task of criticism. (17)

4 See Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading 11.

5 1 try to do so in "Characters and Narrators."
6 "Fabula and Sjuzhet in the Analysis of Narrative," and in revised form as "Story
and Discourse in the Analysis of Narrative."
7 Pursuit of Signs 174. Would it really "not work at all?" A devil's advocate
version of Oedipus might challenge the assumption that Oedipus's too-ready acceptance
of guilt ipso facto makes for a better narrative. Imagine a play in which Oedipus does
in fact investigate, indeed, investigates elaborately, obsessively, far beyond reason.
Couldn't it be said that such a play, if done by a great playwright, could give us a
character whose very energies to disprove guilt- and his Oedipal complex- was itself
the source of tragic hubris, a hubris which presumed to challenge inescapable psycho-
logical laws?
8 See, for instance, the article "Causality" in Dagobart Runes's Dictionary of
Philosophy. Nine definitions are offered, each of which takes account of a temporal
factor. The first, for example, is:

a relation between events, processes, or entities in the same time series, such that (a) when
one occurs, the other necessarily follows (sufficient condition), (b) when the latter occurs,
the former must have preceded (necessary condition), (c) both conditions a and b prevail
(necessary and sufficient condition), (d) when one occurs under certain conditions, the other
necessarily follows (contributory, but not sufficient, condition). . . .

Further,

When an entity, event, or process is said to follow from another, it may be meant that it
must succeed but can be neither contemporaneous with nor prior to the other, that it must

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On Deconstructing Narratology 17

either succeed or be contemporaneous with and dependent upon but cannot precede the
other, or that one is dependent upon the other but they either are not in the same time
series or one is in no time series at all.

9 See note 4 above.

Works Cited

Chatman, Seymour. "Characters and Narrators: Filter, Center, Slant, and Interest-Fo-
cus." Poetics Today 7 (1986): 189-204.
Culler, Jonathan. "Fabula and Sjuzhet in the Analysis of Narrative: Some American
Discussions." Poetics Today 1 (1980): 27-37.

Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. 169-87.

de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figurai Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke,
and Proust. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.
Godzich, Wlad. Foreword. Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of
Fiction. By Ross Chambers. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. xi-xxii.
Norris, Christopher. The Contest of Faculties: Philosophy and Theory after Deconstruc-
tion. London: Methuen, 1985.

Richards, I. A. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. New York: Oxford UP, 1936.

Runes, Dagobart. Dictionary of Philosophy. Totowa: Littlefield, 1975.

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