Narratology and Ethical Criticism: Strange Bed-Fellows or Na
Ansgar Nünning
Institute for English Studies, Justus-Liebig-University
Otto-Behaghel-Str. 10, 35394 Giessen, Germany
Email: [email protected]
Abstract Exploring the relation between narratology and ethical criticism, this
article argues that these two approaches to the study of narrative fiction are neither
strange bed-fellows nor as incompatible as the fact that most of their respective
practitioners tend to ignore each other’s work may suggest. It is argued that
narrative theory and ethical literary criticism could and should be seen as natural
allies in that their respective concepts and perspectives present complementary and
mutually illuminating approaches to an understanding of the ethics and politics of
narrative form. The essay provides a brief overview of both the different trajectories
of narratology and ethical literary criticism, and of recent attempts at reconciling
and synthesising narratological and ethical approaches. Moreover, it attempts to
sketch out some of the premises and concepts of an ethical narratology that puts the
analytical toolkit developed by narrative theory to the service of context-sensitive
interpretations of novels that focus on the question of how narratives serve to
disseminate norms and values. An alliance between the two approaches could
arguably be an important force in the current reconceptualisation of literary studies
and the ongoing development of new forms of ethical literary criticism.
Key words classical and postclassical narratology; ethical criticism; narratives as
cultural ways of worldmaking; dissemination of values; the ethics and politics of
narrative forms
Author Ansgar Nünning is professor of English and American Literature and
Cultural Studies at the University of Giessen. He is the founding director of the
“Giessener Graduiertenzentrum Kulturwissenschaften” (GGK), of the “International
Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture” (GCSC), and of the European PhD
Network “Literary and Cultural Studies”. He has published widely on narrative
theory, English and American literature, cultures of memory, and literary and
cultural theory, including 15 monographs and text books as well as more than 200
scholarly articles in refereed journals and collections of essays. His narratological
publications include articles on narratological approaches and concepts, e.g.
unreliable narration, the implied author, multiperspectivity, description, and
meta-narration. Recent publications include a special issue on “Recent Trends in
Narratology” of the journal GRM: Germanisch-Romanische-Monatsschrift (2013).
1. Prologue: Strange Bed-Fellows or Natural Allies? Introducing the Aims and
Scope
At first sight, narratology and ethical criticism seem to be strange bed-fellows
at best, incompatible approaches to the study of narrative fiction at worst: While
classical narratology largely ignored questions concerning context, history,
interpretation, norms and values, mainly focussing on formal and structural features
of narrative texts ever since its invention in the 1960s, ethical criticism has not
been much concerned with formal issues or narrative technique. Practitioners of
ethical literary criticism do not often avail themselves of narratological concepts
and models, often skirting such formal issues involved in narrative representations
as narration, focalisation, multiperspectivity, polyphony, and the dialogic
orchestration of norms and values. Although we have recently witnessed a great
revival of interest in the study of narratives across various disciplines and domains,
narratology and ethical interpretations of narratives still seem to be oceans apart.
This holds especially true for classical narratology, whereas rhetorical approaches
to narrative like those championed by James Phelan and some of the more welldeveloped
recent approaches in narrative theory, e.g. feminist narratology, are much
more interested in interpretative concerns.
Against this backdrop, this essay will argue that narratology and ethical
criticism, despite their contrary theoretical and methodological assumptions, are
not as incompatible as the fact that most of the practitioners of the two approaches
tend to ignore each other’s work may suggest. I will argue that narrative theory
and ethical literary criticism could and should be seen as natural allies rather
than strange bedfellows in that their respective concepts and perspectives present
complementary and mutually illuminating approaches to an understanding of the
ethics and politics of narrative form. More specifically, the article pursues two
goals: First, it will try to provide a brief overview of both the different trajectories
of narratology and ethical literary criticism, and of recent attempts at reconciling
and synthesising narratological and ethical approaches. Secondly, it will attempt to
sketch out some of the premises and concepts of an ethical narratology that puts the
Narratology and Ethical Criticism: Strange Bed-Fellows or Natural Allies / Ansgar Nünning 17
analytical toolkit developed by narrative theory to the service of context-sensitive
interpretations of novels that focus on the ways in which narratives serve to
represent, disseminate and critique norms and values (cf. Erll/Grabes/Nünning). By
doing so, I hope to show how narratological categories can be used in order to tease
out the ethical implications of narrative fiction, arguing that ethical interpretations
of narratives would stand to gain a lot by actually applying the categories provided
by narratology. By the same token, the toolkit of the latter could be put to the
service of ethical and political concerns that are generally considered to be more
vital for literary and cultural studies than structuralist analyses and taxonomies.
I should like to hasten to add, however, that this article is by no means the
first attempt to align narratology and ethical criticism. On the contrary, as the next
section will show, there have been a number of fruitful attempts at reconciling
and synthesising narratological approaches and ethical criticism, and the present
essay is, of course, very much indebted to the work of those colleagues whose
contributions are briefly reviewed in section 2. Moreover, I neither intend to
ignore the theoretical and methodological differences between them nor do I want
to suggest that they have a similar agenda, because they obviously do not. The
overarching objective and gist of the argument is rather very similar to the main
goal of an excellent recent collection of articles on postclassical narratology: “This
is not a call for a prescriptive unity of methods and models but an attempt to align
the many disparate ways of doing postclassical narratology [...] and to check out
their moments of overlap as well as the extent of their incompatibilities” (Alber/
Fludernik, “Introduction” 5).
One of the main reasons why the project of an ethical narratology is
arguably both desirable and promising is because narrative fiction is one of the
most important means of disseminating norms and values. As Andrew Gibson,
for example, shrewdly observed, “[i]t is literature and the novel [...] rather than
philosophy, that best express contradictions between significant values or systems
of values” (Gibson 8). As Barbara Herrnstein Smith observes at the beginning of
her fine essay on the intricate and thorny topic of “Value/Evaluation,” “[i]ssues
of value and evaluation tend to recur whenever literature, art, and other forms of
cultural activity become a focus of discussion, whether in informal or institutional
context” (177). Debates about value(s) and evaluation, and the ethical dimension of
literature have indeed been perennial issues in literary criticism and literary theory,
even “central to Western critical theory for at least the past two hundred years”
(ibid.).
The last two decades, however, have witnessed a renewed interest in the
relationship between literature and values and the ethical dimension of literature,
culminating into what has been dubbed ‘the ethical turn’ and the reemergence of
a reemergence of ethical criticism. While the developments and new perspectives
subsumed under such umbrellas as ‘the ethical turn’ and ‘ethical criticism’ have
been mapped by a number of fine surveys (cf. e.g. Eaglestone; Davis/Womack;
Hadfield/Rainsford/Woods), the complex and reciprocal relationship between
literature and value has not received as much attention as it arguably deserves: “the
importance of literature and other media for the dissemination of ethical values
within a culture has not yet been duly acknowledged and submitted to scrutiny”
(Grabes 3-4). The development of a narratologically-grounded form of ethical
literary criticism could thus be an important force in the current reconceptualisation
of literary studies and the ongoing development of new forms of ethical literary
criticism.
2. Why and Where Narratology and Ethical Criticism Have So Far Largely
Failed and Occasionally Managed to Meet: Attempts at Reconciling
Narratological and Ethical Approaches despite Different Agendas and
Trajectories
To present the outlines of what I have provisionally called an ethical narratology,
we need to at least briefly historicise and contextualise the debates in which I shall
make a modest attempt to intervene. When narratology was invented in the late
sixties, four of the things that were lost were context, history, interpretation, and
ethics. Classical narratology was first and foremost geared towards the formalist
analysis of narratives, providing a host of neologisms and ingenious typologies
of narrative forms and techniques. Ethical criticism, on the other hand, is mainly
concerned with content rather than form, focussing as it does on questions of
morality and the norms and ethical values represented in, and disseminated by,
works of literature.
As already observed above, narratology and ethical criticism, at least at first
sight, therefore seem to be very strange bed-fellows that have hardly got anything
in common. While narratologists largely eschew ethical and ideological issues,
practitioners of ethical criticism and approaches that are considered to be mainly
interested in ideological issues have not displayed much interest in either questions
of representation or formalist or structuralist analysis: “Ideological critique often
opposes itself to formalist narrative analysis, and this opposition filters into
university English classes, where formalisms are like the slightly odd cousin no one
Narratology and Ethical Criticism: Strange Bed-Fellows or Natural Allies / Ansgar Nünning 19
invites for holidays” (Elias 281).
By trying to align narratology and ethical criticism, I should like to argue
that such dichotomies as the one between “the uncontaminated fields of ‘classical’
narratology” and the “contextualist dimensions of contemporary ‘postclassical’
narratological scholarship” should not be exaggerated (Darby 423). They arguably
present us with a set of false choices: between text and context, between form
and content as well as form and context, between formalism and contextualism,
between bottom-up analysis and top-down synthesis, and between “neutral”
description and “ideological” evaluation. The problem with such binarisms is not
so much the ingrained structuralist fear that the formalist and descriptivist paradigm
will inevitably be polluted by the invasion of ethical and ideological concerns, as
the failure of such rigid distinctions to do justice to the aims and complexities of
textual analysis, interpretation, and cultural history.
It is the attempt to address these complexities, to cross the border between
textual formalism and historical contextualism, and to close the gap between
narratological bottom-up analysis and cultural top-down synthesis that is the
motivating and driving force behind such projects as an applied cultural narratology
(cf. Nünning, “Where Historiographic Metafiction and Narratology Meet”), which
is sensitive to the cultural contexts and ideological and epistemological implications
of narratives, and the topic at hand, i.e. the development and refinement of an
ethical narratology.
The refinement of an ethical narratology can follow in the footsteps of quite
a number of the “new narratologies” (cf. Nünning, New Narratologies) that have
demonstrated what the point of narratology might be by applying its insights and
categories to the analysis and cultural interpretation of a broad range of texts. Cases
in point include e.g. feminist narratology, intercultural narratology, and postcolonial
narratology (cf. Sommer). Shifting their attention to the ways in which narrative
functions as an active cognitive force in its own right which is involved in the
actual generation of attitudes, discourses, ideologies, values, and ways of thinking,
such cultural narratological approaches focus on what structuralist narratology
ignored and left unanswered: the crucial question “of how literary production
is engaged in the ongoing process of cultural construction” (Bender, Imagining
xv). For want of a better term, I have elsewhere suggested that one might call
such an approach “cultural and historical narratology” (see Nünning, “Towards”;
“Surveying”).
Like feminist narratology and gender-oriented narrative theory, such a cultural
narratology could be a model for aligning narratology and ethical criticism. In the
clarion-call article for the development of what has by now become a blossoming
and important approach, the founding mother of feminist narratology, Susan Lanser,
delineated what the agenda and the main theoretical moves of such a narratology
were:
A narratology for feminist criticism [...] would be willing to look afresh at the
question of gender and to re-form its theories on the basis of women’s texts
[...]. In both its concepts and its terminology, it would reflect the mimetic as
well as the semiotic experience that is the reading of literature, and it would
study narrative in relation to a referential context that is simultaneously
linguistic, literary, historical, biographical, social and political. (345)
With the benefit of hindsight, one can only admire both the vision delineated
by Lanser and the impressive subsequent achievements of the approach she has
championed and further refined ever since. What is more, the highly successful
manner in which she managed to integrate seemingly incompatible, but actually
complementary approaches to the study of narrative pointed and paved the way for
analogous projects like postcolonial narratology.
The recent diversification of approaches in narratology has resulted in an
increasing interest in the forms and functions of narrative worldmaking and a
shift of attention towards the question of how narrative forms contribute to our
understanding of such phenomena as gender, ideology and ethics. While the
mere systematic and formalist analysis of narrative, once the central point of
narratology, has largely gone out of fashion, narrative theorists have begun to turn
their attention to cultural, ethical and ideological issues. Many practitioners of such
new contextualist approaches as feminist narratology, intercultural narratology or
postcolonial narratology have begun to apply the analytic tools of narratology to a
broad range of narrative texts and media beyond literature in a narrow sense and to
research questions associated with the domain of ethical literary criticism.
The main reason why I am drawing attention to such approaches as feminist
narratology, cultural narratology and postcolonial narratology is that they
demonstrate how the study of the mimetic and semiotic dimension of literary texts
can be productively combined in the analysis of narratives. These approaches can
thus provide models that scholars working in the fields of ethical literary criticism
could fruitfully adapt and emulate. More specifically, they show how the respective
blind spots and shortcomings of narratology and ethical criticism can be overcome.
Although there are always exceptions that confirm the rule, ethical criticism has
largely failed to come to terms with questions of narrative form, as Gibson has
rightly emphasised: “But the most crucial problem with the criticism I have been
discussing is the extent to which it ignored all the various problematisations of
narrative and narrative ‘form’ [...] in novel theory from the 1960s onwards” (11).
He goes on to elaborate on how theorists and practitioners of ethical criticism have
mainly been interested in the philosophical dimension of ethics, while largely
eschewing the complex issues involved in literary representation:
The theorists and critics avail themselves of the latter [i.e. philosophers
like Rorty, MacIntyre and Nussbaum] — or of the debates as cast by the
philosophers — to skirt a lot of the inconvenient problems that continue
to haunt the theory of the novel in the wake of structuralism and poststructuralism.
This is the case, above all, with regard to three issues: narration,
representation and the unity of the work. (Gibson 12)
Other theorists have also noticed that ethical literary criticism has largely ignored
or skirted what Hayden White and others have called “the content of the form.”
Terry Eagleton, for instance, wryly observes: “It is remarkable how often the
philosophy of literature ignores the morality of form in its high-minded pursuit of
ethical content” (Eagleton 46). It is only fair to add, however, that narratology has
also got many blind spots, having largely failed to take into consideration questions
of content, history, ethics and ideology.
However, there have been a number of interesting and successful attempts
at reconciling and synthesising narratological approaches and ethical criticism.
Although an all-too-brief account cannot do justice to their theoretical
sophistication, at least four approaches deserve to be briefly reviewed because of
their relevance for the topic at hand: James Phelan’s rhetorical narrative theory,
Andrew Gibson’s postmodern ethics of the novel, Wolfgang G. Müller’s ethical
narratology, and, most recently, Nora Berning’s project of a “critical ethical
narratology. ”
Exploring narrative as a rhetorical act, James Phelan’s rhetorical narrative
theory serves to shed new light on the ethics of reading and the treatment of
ethical problems in narrative fiction. In contrast to most work in ethical literary
criticism, Phelan’s comprehensive approach not only takes into consideration a
broad range of elements of any narrative, including characters, narrators, setting,
plot structrure, and progression, it also manages to bridge the gap that has so far
separated narratology from ethical criticism, to the detriment of both, one might
add. As Alber and Fludernik have pointed out, “[r]ecent rhetorical narratology [...]
can be regarded as an important contextualising venture that opens the text to the
real-world interaction of author and reader, and hence provides a perfect model for
discussing the ethics of reading and the treatment of ethical problems in narrative
fiction” (“Introduction” 11). Since Shang Biwu has provided a detailed account
of Phelan’s rhetorical theory of narrative in his book In Pursuit of Narrative
Dynamics, it may suffice to refer the reader to his excellent monograph.
Although it is not as much informed by the concepts of narrative theory as
Phelan’s approach, Andrew Gibson’s postmodern ethics of the novel provides
a stimulating attempt at aligning philosophy and contemporary literary theory.
Gibson clearly delineates what the main concerns of his approach are: “For the
ethics and the ethical temporality which interest me emerge from contemporary
theory, and this study is precisely concerned with the elaboration of a postmodern
or post-theoretical ethics of the novel” (5). Taking the philosophy of Levinas as
a point of departure, Gibson not only delineates how an ethics of fiction has been
emerging out of literary theory itself, he also develops an interesting approach for
coming to terms with the “ethics in literature” (cf. also Hadfield/Rainsford/Woods).
In contrast to Gibson’s abiding interest in literary theory and his notion of
a postmodern ethics of the novel, Wolfgang G. Müller’s ethical narratology is
much more informed by the concepts and methods of classical narratology. Müller
manages to align the study of point of view with an exploration of the ethics of
storytelling: “The following attempt to lay a basis for an ethical narratology [...] is
grounded on the hypothesis that the specific ways of telling a story and narrative
point of view can have important ethical implications” (117). In doing so, he shows
how useful narratological tools can be for coming to a better understanding of how
narrative techniques serve to mould ethical concerns.
Drawing on Phelan’s rhetorical narrative theory, Müller’s ethical narratology
and a host of other recent approaches in literary and cultural theory, Nora Berning’s
“critical ethical narratology” constitutes the most recent and detailed attempt at
integrating structuralist narratology, postclassical narrative theory, mediality and
the multi-level story ethics of narrative. Her project explicitly focuses on the ways
in which a broad range of narrative techniques contributes to the dissemination of
ethical and moral values: “In order to make sense of literary non-fiction as a genre
that is heavily involved in the representation, construction, and dissemination of
moral values, it is necessary to analyse the ways in which authors make use of
narrative techniques and strategies in their narratives” (Berning 137). Berning’s
methodological framework for applying her “critical ethical narratology” includes
a broad range of analytical concepts from the narratological toolbox, ranging as it
does from narrative situations and time to character-spaces and narrative bodies.
Despite its brevity this overview may suffice to show that there have been a
number of very successful attempts at reconciling and synthesising narratological
approaches and ethical criticism, on which an attempt to refine ethical narratology
can fruitfully draw. Moreover, interest in ethical questions is also obvious in the
case of approaches that are oriented to contexts, ideological issues, and norms
and values like feminist narratology, gender oriented narratological theory, and
intercultural and postcolonial narratology. The following attempt at delineating
some of the main premises and concepts for an ethical narratology is thus indebted
to, as well as informed by, the approaches briefly reviewed above. Let us now turn
our attention to the question of how the interface between cultures, narratives, and
norms and values can be conceptualised.
3. Cultures, Narratives, and Norms and Values: Premises for an Ethical
Narratology and a Narratological Study of the Dissemination of Values
An ethical narratology proceeds from the general assumption that narratives
are very important and powerful cultural ways of worldmaking (cf. Goodman;
Nünning/Nünning/Neumann) in that they do not merely describe or represent a
world but actually serve to generate events, stories and worlds, including endowing
them with meaning and values. As Jerome Bruner observed, “narrative, including
fictional narrative, gives shape to things in the real world and often bestows on
them a title to reality” (Bruner 8). Using the insight into the performative, realityconstituting,
or worldmaking function of narratives as a point of departure, this
section will outline some of the most important concepts and building blocks
that narratology can contribute to the development of an ethical literary criticism.
Instead of giving a wide overview of the historical development of narrative theory
or of the main differences between classical narratology and the new post-classical
narratologies (see Herman; Nünning, New Narratologies), an attempt is made to
clarify which premises, concepts and perspectives developed by narratology could
benefit ethical literary criticism.
However, one of the many questions which was largely ignored by structuralist
narratology but which deserves to occupy centre stage in both cultural and ethical
narratology concerns the functions that narratives can fulfil in various contexts,
discourses and domains. A central point of convergence shared by the different
narrativist approaches which have been developed in many disciplines across the
humanities and social sciences is the insight that narratives are one of the most
important cultural ways of meaning-making (see Bruner, Acts) and worldmaking
(see Nünning/Nünning/Neumann). This basic insight, which goes some way to
explain the broad interest that narratives and storytelling have had for some time
in many different disciplines, emphasises the performative quality or power of
narration, bringing the reality-constituting power of narratives and storytelling into
focus. Elaborating on the title of his book, Jerome Bruner explains what is at issue:
“I have called it Acts of Meaning in order to emphasise its major theme: the nature
and cultural shaping of meaning-making, and the central place it plays in human
action” (Bruner, Acts xii). If one understands narratives as a way of meaning-,
value- and indeed worldmaking, then a question also has to be asked about the
elements, processes, and practices which are involved in narrative worldmaking
and by which meanings, norms and values are created and negotiated within a
community. Since I have elsewhere provided a detailed account of how narratives
serve to make events, stories and worlds (see Nünning, “Making”), it may suffice to
refer the reader to this essay and to other recent accounts of narrative worldmaking
(see Herman, “Narrative Ways of Worldmaking”; “Time”; “Principles”) and the
making of fictional worlds (see V. Nünning, “The Making”).
While an ethical narratology proceeds from the general assumption that
narratives fulfil a performative or worldmaking function, it also needs a more
nuanced conceptualisation of the relation between the hierarchies of values that
pertain in the real world and those that are projected in fictional storyworlds. The
fundamental notion of the conception of the relation between literature and reallife
values presented here is a three-dimensional model, which draws on Paul
Ricoeur’s concept of a ‘mimetic circle’ with its three levels — prefiguration,
configuration, and refiguration (cf. Ricoeur 1984 [1983]). Literature is first of all
related to and preformed out of a pre-existent, extra-literary reality, which Ricoeur
calls prefiguration: Literary works come into being in the context of cultures, in
which symbolic orders already circulate certain versions of life, norms and values
(manifested e.g. in social interaction, texts in the literary tradition, and media
of other symbolic systems). Secondly, literary texts can represent alternative or
different norms and values by textual means and literary techniques, something
which Ricoeur subsumes under the general umbrella term of configuration: Literary
works often disseminate, generate or project socially unsanctioned, excluded and
repressed forms of life as well as the values and norms that underpin them. In
George Eliot’s phrase, they can therefore be viewed as “experiments in life” (cf.
Nünning, “George Eliot’s Aesthetic Theory”), i.e. as models and test-cases that
generate possible worlds as well as alternative hierarchies of values through a
series of specifically aesthetic procedures or literary forms. In turn, such literary
productions of norms and values are, thirdly, able to have an effect on extra-literary
reality (refiguration): Literature has contributed, to no insignificant degree, to
forming norms and values, and social conceptions of the good life.
Ethical narratology and ethical literary criticism at large should try to
take into consideration both the representation of cultural norms and values in
literature, and the construction-aspect of literature as an active medium in the
dissemination, generation or production of norms and values (cf. Baumbach,
Grabes, and Nünning). What also needs to be emphasised is that the stages between
prefiguration and configuration on the one hand, and between configuration and
refiguration on the other are always inextricably intertwined. The first question to
be addressed is of how, and with what literary methods or techniques, prevailing
cultural notions of norms and values are represented in a given text. From this
perspective, literature comes into view as a medium of the representation of extraliterary
norms and values and as a medium that is capable of constructing or
generating new or alternative hierarchies of norms and values. Secondly, literature
has always served as a medium for the dissemination of norms and values, be it
those generally accepted by society or alternative values. Thirdly, literature appears
as a medium for the construction of norms and values. Another question to be
addressed concerns the connections between configuration and refiguration: What
functions can literature fulfil for the development, modelling, alteration, critique,
and even destruction of norms and values?
Two dimensions of the relations of literary works to extra-literary norms
and values — and thus also two fundamental directions for the special potential
of literature in culture — should therefore come into focus: The first dimension
concerns the specific potential of the medium of literature, through its aesthetic
forms, to thematise, represent, and disseminate norms and values in their cultural
contexts. Secondly, and deriving from the aesthetic form, the potential of the
medium of literature to actively construct and generate norms and values, as well as
to question and critique prevailing value-hierarchies and collective views of what
constitutes the ‘good life’, is also of interest. In short, the focus is on exploring the
role of literature as a medium of the representation and reflection, the dissemination
and problematisation, and the modelling and construction of norms and values.
In order to avoid possible misunderstandings it should be stressed that my
general understanding of “mimesis” in the present context is not restricted to a
naïve concept of mere reflection, but emphasises the active creation of realities
or world-models, or of norms and values, through literary texts. Though literary
narratives are simultaneously characterised by a reference to extra-literary reality,
as emphasised unanimously, albeit with a basis in different concepts, by e.g. Paul
Ricoeur, Wolfgang Iser and Jürgen Link, they never merely reflect cultural models
or norms and values (cf. Baumbach/Grabes/Nünning; Kövecsces, “Metaphor”,
Language, Mind, and Culture). Ricoeur (1984 [1983] makes clear that the creation
of world-models or versions of reality through literary works rests on dynamic
transformation processes – on an interaction among the “prefiguration” of the text,
that is, its reference to the pre-existent extra-textual world (mimesis I), the textual
“configuration” that creates a fictional object (mimesis II) and the “refiguration” by
the reader (mimesis III). The literary process thus appears as an active constructive
process, in which cultural systems of meaning, literary processes of formal
configuration and practices of reception are equally involved and in which reality is
not merely reflected, but instead first poetically created (cf. 107) and then “iconically
enriched” (cf. 127).
To sum up: The symbolic order of the extra-literary reality, e.g. of norms
and values that actually exist in the real world, and the literary or possible worlds
created within the medium of literature enter into a relationship of mutual influence
and change. Ricoeur’s “circle of mimesis” can thus contribute to a differentiation
among different levels of the relationship between literature and values: First,
literary works are related to extra-literary norms and values (i.e. prefiguration);
second, they represent norms and values, their content and functioning, in the
medium of fiction (i.e. configuration); and third, they can help to form new norms
and values (refiguration). What perspectives are opened up through such an
examination for the analysis and interpretation of novels, plays and poetry from
the point of view of a literary studies focussing on the value(s) and functions of
literature? And how can we actually analyse, and come to terms with, the complex
processes involved in the prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration of norms
and values?
To begin with, there are several narratological axes of configuration and
dimensions of narrative worldmaking that have to be taken into consideration if one
wants to get to grips with the ways in which values are represented, constructed
and disseminated through narratives. First of all, the selection and weighting of
the narrated elements leads to a hierarchisation of values on the paradigmatic axis
of selection. Secondly, the methods of plot configuration and emplotment on the
syntagmatic axis, i.e. the arrangement, combination, and causal interconnections,
are crucial for the processes of narrative worldmaking and the hierarchisation
of values through configuration, order and the privileging of narrated elements.
Thirdly, the discursive axis of discourse and narrative mediation plays a pivotal role
for narrative worldmaking because the explicit and implicit constitution of meaning
and the hierarchisation of values also greatly depend on narrative mediation.
Focalisation, point of view techniques, and the configuration and distribution of
perspectives deserve special attention as important acts or procedures of narrative
worldmaking in their own right because they all shape the dissemination of norms
and values.
Shifting its attention to the ways in which narrative functions as a way of
worldmaking, i.e. a cognitive force in its own right which is involved in the actual
generation of attitudes, discourses, ideologies, hierarchies of norms and values, and
structures of feeling and thinking, ethical narratology focuses on what structuralist
narratology has ignored and left unanswered: the crucial question of how narratives,
both literary and non-literary, are engaged in the ongoing cultural construction and
negotiation of moral norms and ethical values. The ways in which narrative fiction
serves to contribute to the dissemination of ethical and moral values is, of course,
a crucial part of this process of cultural construction in that it serves to contribute
to the formation of communities, and to the definition of what a given culture
regards as good, bad, and normal. The following suggestions are offered as a means
to sketch some conceptual, terminological and methodological premises for a
context-sensitive and ethically informed approach to narratives that is still rooted in
narratology but that is geared towards the analysis of the ways in which narratives
serve to represent, disseminate and critique cultural, ethical and moral values.
By “ethical narratology” I mean an integrated interdisciplinary approach that
puts the analytical tools provided by narratology to the service of ethical literary
criticism and that goes far beyond the formalist or structuralist analysis of narrative
fiction. Focussing on “the study of narrative forms in their relationship to the
culture which generates them” (Onega/García Landa 12), such a culturally-oriented
ethical narratology explores “cultural experiences translated into, and meanings
produced by, particular formal narrative practices” (Helms 14). Interest in ethical
narratology thus centres around the interfaces and mutual relations between the
respective objects of study in both narrative theory and ethical literary criticism, i.e.
the types, structures and functions of narrative phenomena, on the one hand, and
the dissemination of ethical and moral values through literature, on the other hand.
Linking questions pertaining to narratology and the study of ethics, ethical
narratology explores both the narrativity of cultures and the culturality of narratives.
Focussing on the narrativity of cultures and on cultures as narrative communities,
such an approach is mainly concerned with theoretically conceptualising and
empirically studying the functions that narratives can fulfil as a cultural way of
worldmaking in general and as a medium for the dissemination of ethical and moral
values in particular. It explores the roles that narratives play in the construction of
cultural phenomena like ideologies, hierarchies of norms and values, structures
of feeling and thinking, collective memory, and cultural identity and alterity.
The premise of the culturality of narratives, however, also turns the attention of
cultural and ethical narratologists to a question which structuralist narratology
systematically ignored, viz. the question of how far narratives and the elements that
constitute them (e.g. certain plot patterns, preferred narrative forms, linear or cyclic
time structures) themselves depend on cultural norms and values and may thus be
variable and specific to a given culture.
Ethical narratology can therefore be defined as a context-sensitive and
diachronic theory and analysis of narrative that does justice to the cultural
dependency and historical variability of both narrative forms and ethical and moral
values. Not only is the category of ‘gender’ relevant for an analysis of all the
elements that constitute narratives, but also other difference categories like “race,”
“class,” “generation,” “religion” and “nationality” that are imbued with ethical
choices and moral values.
Unlike classical structuralist narratology, which was mainly concerned with
the systematic formalist description of narrative techniques, the focus of ethical
narratology is not only placed on using narratological categories of analysis to
examine historically and culturally variable forms and functions of narrative as
a means for disseminating norms and values. It is also on the expansion of the
theoretical framework, the range of methods and the analytical tools of classical
narratology to link up narrative theory to ethical literary criticism and its main
research questions and concepts.
In order to explore the interfaces between narratives and culturally specific
ethical values, and between narratology and ethical literary criticism, ethical
narratology integrates the formalist analysis of narratives with the study of
ethical choices and moral values in literature. Ethical narratology is particularly
interested in generic repertoires and culturally available plots. Though it leaves the
narrow confines of structuralist taxonomy, the contextual, cultural and historical
narratological framework that provides the backbone of ethical narratology is
informed by a critical practice that the toolbox of classical narratology and the
training in the precise semiotic analysis of narratives can provide.
Moreover, questioning the traditional notion that the relationship between
narratives and reality is based on mimesis, ethical narratology proceeds from the
assumption that it is more rewarding to conceptualise narrative as an active force
in its own right which is involved in the actual generation of ways of thinking, of
attitudes and of hierarchies of norms and values, thus, of something that stands
behind historical developments. In his seminal work Imagining the Penitentiary,
in which he argued that widespread attitudes toward prison were formulated
in English fiction which facilitated the conception of the eighteenth-century
penitentiary, Bender sums up this new understanding of the active and constitutive
role that narrative fictions can play in the process of forming institutions and
shaping mentalities: “I consider literature and the visual arts as advanced
forms of knowledge, as cognitive instruments that anticipate and contribute to
institutional formation. Novels as I describe them are primary historical and
ideological documents; the vehicles, not the reflections, of social change” (Bender,
Imagining 1). By the same token, narratives can also be conceptualised as ways of
worldmaking that contribute to the formation of hierarchies of norms and values.
Let us therefore turn our attention to the ways in which narratives are involved in
the representation, dissemination and critique of norms and values.
4. Representation, Narrative Techniques, and Norms and Values: Concepts
for an Ethical Narratology and a Narratological Study of the Dissemination of
Values
Proceeding from the assumption that an analysis of narrative forms can shed new
light on the ethical, ideological and epistemological implications of narrative,
ethical narratology strives to cross the border between textual formalism and
historical contextualism, and to close the gaps between narratological bottomup
analysis and cultural top-down synthesis. In doing so, it seeks to put the
analytical toolkit developed by narratology to the service of context-sensitive
interpretations of the ethical concerns negotiated in and by novels. Though the
ubiquity of narratives makes it difficult to establish the boundaries of such a
culture-oriented ethical narratology, it is possible to outline some of the conceptual
and methodological consequences that it entails. First, though it leaves the narrow
confines of structuralist taxonomy, it is informed by a critical practice that only the
toolbox of classical narratology and the training in the precise semiotic analysis of
narratives can provide. Denying or ignoring the many achievements of structuralist
narratology would thus arguably be foolish, a way of throwing the analytical and
conceptual babies out with the formalist bathwater. As the controversy between
Dorrit Cohn and John Bender (“Making”) in New Literary History (1995) has
shown, it does make a difference whether we can establish a consensus about
textual features or not, and it is the descriptive toolkit of narratology that provides
us with the terminological categories needed as the basis for rational argument.
Other important premises and concepts of the kind of ethical narratology
envisioned include the notions of the content of the form as delineated by Hayden
White, the ideology of form (F. Jameson), and the ethics and politics of narrative
forms (T. Eagleton), which will be briefly discussed below.
Some of the key concepts and insights of cultural narratology can also serve
to further develop and refine the kind of ethical narratology that Phelan, Müller,
and Berning have delineated. As Gabriele Helms has convincingly demonstrated
in her brilliant monograph on dialogism and narrative technique in Canadian
novels, the framework of a cultural narratology is arguably germane to both
Bakhtin’s intense concern with social norms and values and to his perceptive
attempts to relate the dialogic structure of novels to the world views, ideologies
and hierarchies of values of the societies from which they originated. The way in
which Helms describes her project also serves to shed intersting light on the kind of
ethical narratology that I am trying to delineate. She argues that the “term ‘cultural
narratology’ describes the place where dialogism and narrative theory meet,
allowing the analysis of formal structures to be combined with a consideration of
their ideological implications” (Helms 10). In contrast to other narrative theorists
who use the term ‘cultural narratology’ without developing or explaining it, Helms
is one of the first narratologists to provide a conceptual and methodological outline
of a cultural narratology and to actually test its usefulness (for an earlier attempt,
see Nünning, “Towards”). The approach christened cultural narratology implies
that formal narrative techniques are not just analysed as structural features of a
text, but as narrative modes which are highly semanticised and engaged in the
processes of cultural construction and worldmaking. As Helms emphasises, “a
cultural narratology would enable us to recognise that narrative techniques are not
neutral and transparent forms to be filled with content, and that dialogic relations in
narrative structures are ideologically informed” (7).
The same holds true for an ethical narratology that is mainly concerned with
exploring the role of narrative techniques for the representation, dissemination and
critique of moral norms and ethical values. An analysis of narrative forms is key
for getting to grips with how ethical choices and competing values are orchestrated
in novels and short stories. In this respect the project of an ethical narratology can
draw on Fredric Jameson’s fruitful concept of the “ideology of the form” (Jameson
141), which implies that “form is immanently and intrinsically an ideology in its
own right”:
What must now be stressed is that at this level ‘form’ is apprehended as
content. The study of the ideology of form is no doubt grounded on a technical
and formalistic analysis in the narrower sense, even though, unlike much
traditional formal analysis, it seeks to reveal the active presence within the
text of a number of discontinuous and heterogeneous formal processes. But at
the level of analysis in question here, a dialectical reversal has taken place in
which it has become possible to grasp such formal processes as sedimented
content in their own right, as carrying ideological messages of their own,
distinct from the ostensible or manifest content of the works. (Jameson 99)
If one accepts the idea of a semanticisation of narrative forms, any literary and
cultural historian who wants to address ethical, ideological or political issues raised
in or by narratives can profit from the application of the toolbox that narratology
provides. Context and form, content and narrative technique, are, after all, more
closely intertwined than structuralist narratologists, or most of the practitioners of
ethical criticism, for that matter, have tried to make us believe. It is not only the
problem of the reception of literary character that inevitably draws critics’ attention
to the interrelationship between ethics and aesthetics, but also key questions that
ideological approaches like postcolonial, feminist and African-American studies
are concerned with.
Conceptualising narratives as cognitive cultural forces, ethical narratology
explores the ways in which the formal properties of narratives reflect, and
influence, the unspoken mental assumptions and the prevailing norms and values of
a given culture, community or period. It focuses on the power of narrative fictions
“to represent a medley of voices engaged in a conversation and/or a struggle for
cultural space” (Scholes 134). Such problems as the relationship between the
polyphonic structure of novels, as well as complex narratives in other genres and
media, and their challenge to dominant cultural discourses require narratological
tools for their description and analysis.
Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism and polyphony, which has only recently been
incorporated into feminist and cultural narratology (see e.g. Helms), provides
useful conceptual and methodological tools for coming to terms with central
issues of ethical literary criticism. To study the way in which narratives represent
or orchestrate the ethical norms and values of a given culture, one could refer
to Bakhtin’s notions of the novel “as a diversity of social speech types” and “a
diversity of individual voices” (Bakhtin 262), to his remarks on discourse in the
novel (see ibid. 259-422), and especially to his felicitous concepts of dialogism,
heteroglossia and polyphony. Of particular relevance in the present context is
Bakhtin’s understanding of the ways in which novels orchestrate their themes,
which also applies to moral norms and ethial values:
The novel orchestrates all its themes, the totality of the world of objects
and ideas depicted and expressed in it, by means of the social diversity of
speech types [...] and by the differing individual voices that flourish under
such conditions. Authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres,
the speech of characters are merely those fundamental compositional
unities with whose help heteroglossia [...] can enter the novel; each of them
permits a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and
interrelationsships (always more or less dialogized). These distinctive links
and interrelationsships between utterances and languages, this movement of
the theme through different languages and speech types, its dispersions into
the rivulets and droplets of social heteroglossia, its dialogization — this is the
basic distinguishing feature of the novel. (Bakhtin 263)
Such a cultural and social understanding of novelistic discourse provides a
very fruitful framework for coming to terms with the interconnections between
narratives, cultural contexts and ethical values, and for gaining insights into the
complex ways in which narratives function as a cultural way of worldmaking and
of disseminating norms and values. From a narratological point of view, however,
Bakhtin’s inspiring and suggestive, but also notoriously vague musical metaphors
are in need of translation in order to gain the precision needed for textual analysis.
As pertinent narratological work on the subject has shown, Bakhtins’s metaphors
can be translated into the terminology that narratology has developed for a study of
the discourse level of narratives, viz. the various categories to analyse narration and
focalisation as well as the forms and functions of multiperspectival narration (see
Helms; Nünning/Nünning).
Proceeding from the assumption that content and narrative technique are
closely intertwined, ethical narratology could show that the narratological concepts
of multiperspectivity and perspective structure (see Nünning, “On the Perspective
Structure”) provide fruitful analytical tools and heuristic keys for coming to
terms with ethical and ideological issues raised in narratives, and for analysing
both the relations between the different perspectives delineated in a novel and the
narrative construction and negotiation of moral norms and ethical values. Such
an ethical narratology explores the interfaces between a narratological model of
the perspective structure of narrative texts and the ways in which ethical concerns
and moral issues are negotiated in narrative fiction. A narratological analysis of
the “perspective structure of a novel reveals above all — as a model, something
in process, not laid down or fixed — how the novel envisages its handling of
divergent viewpoints” (Bode 203), including the conflicting norms and values that
each perspective and viewpoint represents.
Moreover, cultural and historical analyses of narratives require thicker
descriptions than those offered by structuralist narratology, descriptions which take
into account both thematic and formal features of texts. The main reason for this
is that the ways in which epistemological, ethical, moral and social problems are
articulated is inextricably linked with the forms of narrative representation. Scholes
has done an excellent job at explaining why ideological and political approaches,
and ethical literary criticism, one could just as well add, cannot afford to ignore a
detailed analsis of all the issues involved in literary representation and narrative
form: “The political enters the study of English primarily through questions of
representation: who is represented, who does the representing, who is object, who
is subject — and how do these representations connect to the values of groups,
communities, classes, tribes, sects, and nations?” (153)
This is a very important insight for anyone interested in the development of
an ethical narratology and for ethical literary criticism in general. Such questions
as who the subjects or objects of narrative representations are have always
been genuine concerns of narratology, whose categories and models for the
analysis of narratives provide useful tools for getting to grips with such issues.
Key narratological concepts like focalisation, unreliable narration and narrative
perspective have proved very fine descriptive tools, but they need to be applied
and further refined before they can yield insights considered vital for ethical
literary criticism. As Monika Fludernik, Vera Nünning, Bruno Zerweck and other
proponents of a cultural, diachronic or historical narratology have convincingly
shown, the development of narrative forms (e.g. unreliable narration) can fruitfully
be interpreted as a reflection of changing cultural discourses and shifts in the
hierarchies of norms and values.
Another important insight that ethical narratology can derive from cultural and
historical approaches is that narrative forms do not merely reflect cultural, ethical,
ideological and social values, they are also active cultural forces in their own
right in that they serve to articulate, and negotiate between, conflicting voices and
values. As Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck have demonstrated, ideology manifests
itself not only on the level of the story (e.g. in the constellation of the characters
or the actantial network, and in the semanticisation of space and movement within
the narrated world), but also on the level of discourse, for example in the structure
of narrative transmission, the choice of point of view or perspectives, the temporal
organisation of narratives, and the ways in which events, characters and the setting
are presented (cf. Herman/Vervaeck). Ethical literary criticism would be wise
to remember that all of these as well as other narrative forms are more than just
techniques in that they are explicit or implicit carriers of cultural meaning, ideology
and moral values.
The application of narratological concepts can also serve to shed new light
on other central concerns of ethical literary criticism like the representation, or
rather construction, of those hierarchies of norms and values that shape identity
and alterity in and by narratives. The narrative construction of social and cultural
differences is not just one of the central issues in feminist and postcolonial studies,
but also one of the key concerns and research fields of ethical literary criticism and
the study of culture at large. Narratives are a powerful cultural way of worldmaking
in that they not only construct images of selves and others, but also serve to
disseminate the norms and values that a cultural formations lives by. Narratology
thus provides important analytical tools for ethical literary criticism that allow
such an approach to come to terms with key cultural issues like the ways in which
prevailing notions of identity and alterity, or otherness, are created in and through
narratives (see Fludernik, “Identity/Alterity”).
5. Epilogue: The Ethical Significance of Narratives and Narrative Techniques
and the Promises and Potential Usefulness of (Classical and Postclassical)
Narratology for Ethical Criticism — Some Suggestions for Further Research
What I hope to have shown is that it is pointless to belabour the old oppositions
between form and content, between formalism and contextualism, or between
formalist approaches like narratology and approaches that are mainly concerned
with the manifest content of literary works like ethical criticism. Anyone who is
genuinely interested in getting to grips with the complex ways in which narratives
in general and narrative fiction in particular is engaged in the ongoing cultural
conversation about, and dissemniation of, moral norms and ethical values, should
rather avail her- or himself of the benefits that both narratology and ethical literary
criticism afford. The main reason for this is that, as Terry Eagleton recently
emphasised, “moral value lies in the form of literary works as much as their
content. [...] There is an ethics and politics of form at stake here, of which the
philosophy of literature has been for the most part quite oblivious” (60). What
Helms observed about the promises of a cultural narratology therefore applies just
as much to the project of an ethical narratology as delineated above:
A cultural narratological framework holds two distinct promises: (1) the
semanticizing of narrative forms will move narratology beyond its notorious
a-historicity; and (2) by providing adequate descriptive tools, it will
enable cultural critics to attend to the specific tools and strategies that are
characteristic of narratives in a wide range of media. (Helms 2003: 15)
Moreover, an ethical narratology can provide insight into the complex ways in
which cultural norms and ethical values are represented in, and disseminated
through, fictional and factual narratives. It can thus serve to illuminate what Jerome
Bruner felicitously called a “culture‘s ongoing dialectic” (Bruner, Making Stories
100), i.e. “the dialectic between its norms and what is humanly possible” (ibid.
16). An ethical narratology can therefore not only throw new light on the ways in
which narratives can represent cultural values and serve to confirm moral norms,
it can also illuminate the equally complex ways in which stories can negotiate the
dialectic between dominant hierarchies of values and deviations from them, e.g. in
the form of broken narratives and the representation of disrupted lives: “The study
of disrupted lives enables us to look at the disparity between cultural notions of
how things are supposed to be and how they are, a disparity that is highlighted by
disruption” (Becker 190).
In his seminal monograph The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By,
the renowned psychologist Dan P. McAdams has pointed out how important it is for
any culture to learn more about the ways in which both the living of our lives and
the telling of our stories (cf. Phelan 205) are framed and shaped by cultural models,
moral norms and ethical values: “Beyond making vague references to things like
‘my religious heritage’ or ‘the American Dream,’ we tend to have remarkably little
insight into the ways our lives are framed by cultural categories, values, and norms”
(271). This is all the more deplorable because stories are arguably constitutive
of cultures, largely moulding our understanding of good and bad behaviour and
characters:
I would submit that life stories are more reflective of and shaped by culture
than any other aspect of personality. Stories are at the centre of culture. More
than favored goals and values, I believe, stories differentiate one culture from
the next. I have argued throughout this book that the stories people live by say
as much about culture as they do about the people who live and tell them. Our
own life stories draw on the stories we learn as active participants in culture
— stories about childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and aging. Stories capture
and elaborate metaphors and images that are especially resonant in a given
culture. Stories distinguish between what culture glorifies as good characters
and vilifies as bad characters. (McAdams 284)
A cultural and ethical narratology promises to provide the conceptual and
methodological tools that neither classical narratology nor ethical criticism on
their own have so far developed. It is thus arguably high time that ethical literary
criticism began to acknowledge the great usefulness of the narratological toolbox
and that narratology fully realised the need to move beyond a merely descriptive
poetics of narrative. If we accept the ideas that “culture is constructed through
ideological narratives, that there is no preexisting or universally accepted model
for a cultural world, and that prose fiction uniquely raises questions about the
interrelatedness of social and textual worldmaking” (Elias 281), then an integration
of the analytical and interpretive tools of narratology and ethical literary criticism
promises to provide rich insights into the complex ways in which literary and
factual narratives can serve to represent, disseminate and critique moral norms
and ethical values. In contrast to the purists who want to make “the world safe for
narratology”, as John Bender (“Making”) aptly put it, ethical narratologists, just
like practitioners of the various postclassical narratologies, should intrepidly rush
in where structuralists fear to tread. Whether or not they would be fools in doing
so, may be an open question, but the approach delineated above could arguably
open up productive lines of research for literary and cultural studies. Putting it in
a nutshell, one might thus conclude that the more narratological ethical literary
criticism becomes, and the more interested in ethics and the dissmeniation of values
narratology becomes, the better for both.
* For this article I have drawn on, and adapted, ideas and formulations developed in some
previous publications (cf. Nünning, “Towards”; “Where Historiographic Metafiction”;
“Surveying”) and some passages that I contributed to the introduction of a collection of essays on
the topic of Literature and Values (cf. Baumbach, Grabes and Nünning).
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Institute for English Studies, Justus-Liebig-University
Otto-Behaghel-Str. 10, 35394 Giessen, Germany
Email: [email protected]
Abstract Exploring the relation between narratology and ethical criticism, this
article argues that these two approaches to the study of narrative fiction are neither
strange bed-fellows nor as incompatible as the fact that most of their respective
practitioners tend to ignore each other’s work may suggest. It is argued that
narrative theory and ethical literary criticism could and should be seen as natural
allies in that their respective concepts and perspectives present complementary and
mutually illuminating approaches to an understanding of the ethics and politics of
narrative form. The essay provides a brief overview of both the different trajectories
of narratology and ethical literary criticism, and of recent attempts at reconciling
and synthesising narratological and ethical approaches. Moreover, it attempts to
sketch out some of the premises and concepts of an ethical narratology that puts the
analytical toolkit developed by narrative theory to the service of context-sensitive
interpretations of novels that focus on the question of how narratives serve to
disseminate norms and values. An alliance between the two approaches could
arguably be an important force in the current reconceptualisation of literary studies
and the ongoing development of new forms of ethical literary criticism.
Key words classical and postclassical narratology; ethical criticism; narratives as
cultural ways of worldmaking; dissemination of values; the ethics and politics of
narrative forms
Author Ansgar Nünning is professor of English and American Literature and
Cultural Studies at the University of Giessen. He is the founding director of the
“Giessener Graduiertenzentrum Kulturwissenschaften” (GGK), of the “International
Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture” (GCSC), and of the European PhD
Network “Literary and Cultural Studies”. He has published widely on narrative
theory, English and American literature, cultures of memory, and literary and
cultural theory, including 15 monographs and text books as well as more than 200
scholarly articles in refereed journals and collections of essays. His narratological
publications include articles on narratological approaches and concepts, e.g.
unreliable narration, the implied author, multiperspectivity, description, and
meta-narration. Recent publications include a special issue on “Recent Trends in
Narratology” of the journal GRM: Germanisch-Romanische-Monatsschrift (2013).
1. Prologue: Strange Bed-Fellows or Natural Allies? Introducing the Aims and
Scope
At first sight, narratology and ethical criticism seem to be strange bed-fellows
at best, incompatible approaches to the study of narrative fiction at worst: While
classical narratology largely ignored questions concerning context, history,
interpretation, norms and values, mainly focussing on formal and structural features
of narrative texts ever since its invention in the 1960s, ethical criticism has not
been much concerned with formal issues or narrative technique. Practitioners of
ethical literary criticism do not often avail themselves of narratological concepts
and models, often skirting such formal issues involved in narrative representations
as narration, focalisation, multiperspectivity, polyphony, and the dialogic
orchestration of norms and values. Although we have recently witnessed a great
revival of interest in the study of narratives across various disciplines and domains,
narratology and ethical interpretations of narratives still seem to be oceans apart.
This holds especially true for classical narratology, whereas rhetorical approaches
to narrative like those championed by James Phelan and some of the more welldeveloped
recent approaches in narrative theory, e.g. feminist narratology, are much
more interested in interpretative concerns.
Against this backdrop, this essay will argue that narratology and ethical
criticism, despite their contrary theoretical and methodological assumptions, are
not as incompatible as the fact that most of the practitioners of the two approaches
tend to ignore each other’s work may suggest. I will argue that narrative theory
and ethical literary criticism could and should be seen as natural allies rather
than strange bedfellows in that their respective concepts and perspectives present
complementary and mutually illuminating approaches to an understanding of the
ethics and politics of narrative form. More specifically, the article pursues two
goals: First, it will try to provide a brief overview of both the different trajectories
of narratology and ethical literary criticism, and of recent attempts at reconciling
and synthesising narratological and ethical approaches. Secondly, it will attempt to
sketch out some of the premises and concepts of an ethical narratology that puts the
Narratology and Ethical Criticism: Strange Bed-Fellows or Natural Allies / Ansgar Nünning 17
analytical toolkit developed by narrative theory to the service of context-sensitive
interpretations of novels that focus on the ways in which narratives serve to
represent, disseminate and critique norms and values (cf. Erll/Grabes/Nünning). By
doing so, I hope to show how narratological categories can be used in order to tease
out the ethical implications of narrative fiction, arguing that ethical interpretations
of narratives would stand to gain a lot by actually applying the categories provided
by narratology. By the same token, the toolkit of the latter could be put to the
service of ethical and political concerns that are generally considered to be more
vital for literary and cultural studies than structuralist analyses and taxonomies.
I should like to hasten to add, however, that this article is by no means the
first attempt to align narratology and ethical criticism. On the contrary, as the next
section will show, there have been a number of fruitful attempts at reconciling
and synthesising narratological approaches and ethical criticism, and the present
essay is, of course, very much indebted to the work of those colleagues whose
contributions are briefly reviewed in section 2. Moreover, I neither intend to
ignore the theoretical and methodological differences between them nor do I want
to suggest that they have a similar agenda, because they obviously do not. The
overarching objective and gist of the argument is rather very similar to the main
goal of an excellent recent collection of articles on postclassical narratology: “This
is not a call for a prescriptive unity of methods and models but an attempt to align
the many disparate ways of doing postclassical narratology [...] and to check out
their moments of overlap as well as the extent of their incompatibilities” (Alber/
Fludernik, “Introduction” 5).
One of the main reasons why the project of an ethical narratology is
arguably both desirable and promising is because narrative fiction is one of the
most important means of disseminating norms and values. As Andrew Gibson,
for example, shrewdly observed, “[i]t is literature and the novel [...] rather than
philosophy, that best express contradictions between significant values or systems
of values” (Gibson 8). As Barbara Herrnstein Smith observes at the beginning of
her fine essay on the intricate and thorny topic of “Value/Evaluation,” “[i]ssues
of value and evaluation tend to recur whenever literature, art, and other forms of
cultural activity become a focus of discussion, whether in informal or institutional
context” (177). Debates about value(s) and evaluation, and the ethical dimension of
literature have indeed been perennial issues in literary criticism and literary theory,
even “central to Western critical theory for at least the past two hundred years”
(ibid.).
The last two decades, however, have witnessed a renewed interest in the
relationship between literature and values and the ethical dimension of literature,
culminating into what has been dubbed ‘the ethical turn’ and the reemergence of
a reemergence of ethical criticism. While the developments and new perspectives
subsumed under such umbrellas as ‘the ethical turn’ and ‘ethical criticism’ have
been mapped by a number of fine surveys (cf. e.g. Eaglestone; Davis/Womack;
Hadfield/Rainsford/Woods), the complex and reciprocal relationship between
literature and value has not received as much attention as it arguably deserves: “the
importance of literature and other media for the dissemination of ethical values
within a culture has not yet been duly acknowledged and submitted to scrutiny”
(Grabes 3-4). The development of a narratologically-grounded form of ethical
literary criticism could thus be an important force in the current reconceptualisation
of literary studies and the ongoing development of new forms of ethical literary
criticism.
2. Why and Where Narratology and Ethical Criticism Have So Far Largely
Failed and Occasionally Managed to Meet: Attempts at Reconciling
Narratological and Ethical Approaches despite Different Agendas and
Trajectories
To present the outlines of what I have provisionally called an ethical narratology,
we need to at least briefly historicise and contextualise the debates in which I shall
make a modest attempt to intervene. When narratology was invented in the late
sixties, four of the things that were lost were context, history, interpretation, and
ethics. Classical narratology was first and foremost geared towards the formalist
analysis of narratives, providing a host of neologisms and ingenious typologies
of narrative forms and techniques. Ethical criticism, on the other hand, is mainly
concerned with content rather than form, focussing as it does on questions of
morality and the norms and ethical values represented in, and disseminated by,
works of literature.
As already observed above, narratology and ethical criticism, at least at first
sight, therefore seem to be very strange bed-fellows that have hardly got anything
in common. While narratologists largely eschew ethical and ideological issues,
practitioners of ethical criticism and approaches that are considered to be mainly
interested in ideological issues have not displayed much interest in either questions
of representation or formalist or structuralist analysis: “Ideological critique often
opposes itself to formalist narrative analysis, and this opposition filters into
university English classes, where formalisms are like the slightly odd cousin no one
Narratology and Ethical Criticism: Strange Bed-Fellows or Natural Allies / Ansgar Nünning 19
invites for holidays” (Elias 281).
By trying to align narratology and ethical criticism, I should like to argue
that such dichotomies as the one between “the uncontaminated fields of ‘classical’
narratology” and the “contextualist dimensions of contemporary ‘postclassical’
narratological scholarship” should not be exaggerated (Darby 423). They arguably
present us with a set of false choices: between text and context, between form
and content as well as form and context, between formalism and contextualism,
between bottom-up analysis and top-down synthesis, and between “neutral”
description and “ideological” evaluation. The problem with such binarisms is not
so much the ingrained structuralist fear that the formalist and descriptivist paradigm
will inevitably be polluted by the invasion of ethical and ideological concerns, as
the failure of such rigid distinctions to do justice to the aims and complexities of
textual analysis, interpretation, and cultural history.
It is the attempt to address these complexities, to cross the border between
textual formalism and historical contextualism, and to close the gap between
narratological bottom-up analysis and cultural top-down synthesis that is the
motivating and driving force behind such projects as an applied cultural narratology
(cf. Nünning, “Where Historiographic Metafiction and Narratology Meet”), which
is sensitive to the cultural contexts and ideological and epistemological implications
of narratives, and the topic at hand, i.e. the development and refinement of an
ethical narratology.
The refinement of an ethical narratology can follow in the footsteps of quite
a number of the “new narratologies” (cf. Nünning, New Narratologies) that have
demonstrated what the point of narratology might be by applying its insights and
categories to the analysis and cultural interpretation of a broad range of texts. Cases
in point include e.g. feminist narratology, intercultural narratology, and postcolonial
narratology (cf. Sommer). Shifting their attention to the ways in which narrative
functions as an active cognitive force in its own right which is involved in the
actual generation of attitudes, discourses, ideologies, values, and ways of thinking,
such cultural narratological approaches focus on what structuralist narratology
ignored and left unanswered: the crucial question “of how literary production
is engaged in the ongoing process of cultural construction” (Bender, Imagining
xv). For want of a better term, I have elsewhere suggested that one might call
such an approach “cultural and historical narratology” (see Nünning, “Towards”;
“Surveying”).
Like feminist narratology and gender-oriented narrative theory, such a cultural
narratology could be a model for aligning narratology and ethical criticism. In the
clarion-call article for the development of what has by now become a blossoming
and important approach, the founding mother of feminist narratology, Susan Lanser,
delineated what the agenda and the main theoretical moves of such a narratology
were:
A narratology for feminist criticism [...] would be willing to look afresh at the
question of gender and to re-form its theories on the basis of women’s texts
[...]. In both its concepts and its terminology, it would reflect the mimetic as
well as the semiotic experience that is the reading of literature, and it would
study narrative in relation to a referential context that is simultaneously
linguistic, literary, historical, biographical, social and political. (345)
With the benefit of hindsight, one can only admire both the vision delineated
by Lanser and the impressive subsequent achievements of the approach she has
championed and further refined ever since. What is more, the highly successful
manner in which she managed to integrate seemingly incompatible, but actually
complementary approaches to the study of narrative pointed and paved the way for
analogous projects like postcolonial narratology.
The recent diversification of approaches in narratology has resulted in an
increasing interest in the forms and functions of narrative worldmaking and a
shift of attention towards the question of how narrative forms contribute to our
understanding of such phenomena as gender, ideology and ethics. While the
mere systematic and formalist analysis of narrative, once the central point of
narratology, has largely gone out of fashion, narrative theorists have begun to turn
their attention to cultural, ethical and ideological issues. Many practitioners of such
new contextualist approaches as feminist narratology, intercultural narratology or
postcolonial narratology have begun to apply the analytic tools of narratology to a
broad range of narrative texts and media beyond literature in a narrow sense and to
research questions associated with the domain of ethical literary criticism.
The main reason why I am drawing attention to such approaches as feminist
narratology, cultural narratology and postcolonial narratology is that they
demonstrate how the study of the mimetic and semiotic dimension of literary texts
can be productively combined in the analysis of narratives. These approaches can
thus provide models that scholars working in the fields of ethical literary criticism
could fruitfully adapt and emulate. More specifically, they show how the respective
blind spots and shortcomings of narratology and ethical criticism can be overcome.
Although there are always exceptions that confirm the rule, ethical criticism has
largely failed to come to terms with questions of narrative form, as Gibson has
rightly emphasised: “But the most crucial problem with the criticism I have been
discussing is the extent to which it ignored all the various problematisations of
narrative and narrative ‘form’ [...] in novel theory from the 1960s onwards” (11).
He goes on to elaborate on how theorists and practitioners of ethical criticism have
mainly been interested in the philosophical dimension of ethics, while largely
eschewing the complex issues involved in literary representation:
The theorists and critics avail themselves of the latter [i.e. philosophers
like Rorty, MacIntyre and Nussbaum] — or of the debates as cast by the
philosophers — to skirt a lot of the inconvenient problems that continue
to haunt the theory of the novel in the wake of structuralism and poststructuralism.
This is the case, above all, with regard to three issues: narration,
representation and the unity of the work. (Gibson 12)
Other theorists have also noticed that ethical literary criticism has largely ignored
or skirted what Hayden White and others have called “the content of the form.”
Terry Eagleton, for instance, wryly observes: “It is remarkable how often the
philosophy of literature ignores the morality of form in its high-minded pursuit of
ethical content” (Eagleton 46). It is only fair to add, however, that narratology has
also got many blind spots, having largely failed to take into consideration questions
of content, history, ethics and ideology.
However, there have been a number of interesting and successful attempts
at reconciling and synthesising narratological approaches and ethical criticism.
Although an all-too-brief account cannot do justice to their theoretical
sophistication, at least four approaches deserve to be briefly reviewed because of
their relevance for the topic at hand: James Phelan’s rhetorical narrative theory,
Andrew Gibson’s postmodern ethics of the novel, Wolfgang G. Müller’s ethical
narratology, and, most recently, Nora Berning’s project of a “critical ethical
narratology. ”
Exploring narrative as a rhetorical act, James Phelan’s rhetorical narrative
theory serves to shed new light on the ethics of reading and the treatment of
ethical problems in narrative fiction. In contrast to most work in ethical literary
criticism, Phelan’s comprehensive approach not only takes into consideration a
broad range of elements of any narrative, including characters, narrators, setting,
plot structrure, and progression, it also manages to bridge the gap that has so far
separated narratology from ethical criticism, to the detriment of both, one might
add. As Alber and Fludernik have pointed out, “[r]ecent rhetorical narratology [...]
can be regarded as an important contextualising venture that opens the text to the
real-world interaction of author and reader, and hence provides a perfect model for
discussing the ethics of reading and the treatment of ethical problems in narrative
fiction” (“Introduction” 11). Since Shang Biwu has provided a detailed account
of Phelan’s rhetorical theory of narrative in his book In Pursuit of Narrative
Dynamics, it may suffice to refer the reader to his excellent monograph.
Although it is not as much informed by the concepts of narrative theory as
Phelan’s approach, Andrew Gibson’s postmodern ethics of the novel provides
a stimulating attempt at aligning philosophy and contemporary literary theory.
Gibson clearly delineates what the main concerns of his approach are: “For the
ethics and the ethical temporality which interest me emerge from contemporary
theory, and this study is precisely concerned with the elaboration of a postmodern
or post-theoretical ethics of the novel” (5). Taking the philosophy of Levinas as
a point of departure, Gibson not only delineates how an ethics of fiction has been
emerging out of literary theory itself, he also develops an interesting approach for
coming to terms with the “ethics in literature” (cf. also Hadfield/Rainsford/Woods).
In contrast to Gibson’s abiding interest in literary theory and his notion of
a postmodern ethics of the novel, Wolfgang G. Müller’s ethical narratology is
much more informed by the concepts and methods of classical narratology. Müller
manages to align the study of point of view with an exploration of the ethics of
storytelling: “The following attempt to lay a basis for an ethical narratology [...] is
grounded on the hypothesis that the specific ways of telling a story and narrative
point of view can have important ethical implications” (117). In doing so, he shows
how useful narratological tools can be for coming to a better understanding of how
narrative techniques serve to mould ethical concerns.
Drawing on Phelan’s rhetorical narrative theory, Müller’s ethical narratology
and a host of other recent approaches in literary and cultural theory, Nora Berning’s
“critical ethical narratology” constitutes the most recent and detailed attempt at
integrating structuralist narratology, postclassical narrative theory, mediality and
the multi-level story ethics of narrative. Her project explicitly focuses on the ways
in which a broad range of narrative techniques contributes to the dissemination of
ethical and moral values: “In order to make sense of literary non-fiction as a genre
that is heavily involved in the representation, construction, and dissemination of
moral values, it is necessary to analyse the ways in which authors make use of
narrative techniques and strategies in their narratives” (Berning 137). Berning’s
methodological framework for applying her “critical ethical narratology” includes
a broad range of analytical concepts from the narratological toolbox, ranging as it
does from narrative situations and time to character-spaces and narrative bodies.
Despite its brevity this overview may suffice to show that there have been a
number of very successful attempts at reconciling and synthesising narratological
approaches and ethical criticism, on which an attempt to refine ethical narratology
can fruitfully draw. Moreover, interest in ethical questions is also obvious in the
case of approaches that are oriented to contexts, ideological issues, and norms
and values like feminist narratology, gender oriented narratological theory, and
intercultural and postcolonial narratology. The following attempt at delineating
some of the main premises and concepts for an ethical narratology is thus indebted
to, as well as informed by, the approaches briefly reviewed above. Let us now turn
our attention to the question of how the interface between cultures, narratives, and
norms and values can be conceptualised.
3. Cultures, Narratives, and Norms and Values: Premises for an Ethical
Narratology and a Narratological Study of the Dissemination of Values
An ethical narratology proceeds from the general assumption that narratives
are very important and powerful cultural ways of worldmaking (cf. Goodman;
Nünning/Nünning/Neumann) in that they do not merely describe or represent a
world but actually serve to generate events, stories and worlds, including endowing
them with meaning and values. As Jerome Bruner observed, “narrative, including
fictional narrative, gives shape to things in the real world and often bestows on
them a title to reality” (Bruner 8). Using the insight into the performative, realityconstituting,
or worldmaking function of narratives as a point of departure, this
section will outline some of the most important concepts and building blocks
that narratology can contribute to the development of an ethical literary criticism.
Instead of giving a wide overview of the historical development of narrative theory
or of the main differences between classical narratology and the new post-classical
narratologies (see Herman; Nünning, New Narratologies), an attempt is made to
clarify which premises, concepts and perspectives developed by narratology could
benefit ethical literary criticism.
However, one of the many questions which was largely ignored by structuralist
narratology but which deserves to occupy centre stage in both cultural and ethical
narratology concerns the functions that narratives can fulfil in various contexts,
discourses and domains. A central point of convergence shared by the different
narrativist approaches which have been developed in many disciplines across the
humanities and social sciences is the insight that narratives are one of the most
important cultural ways of meaning-making (see Bruner, Acts) and worldmaking
(see Nünning/Nünning/Neumann). This basic insight, which goes some way to
explain the broad interest that narratives and storytelling have had for some time
in many different disciplines, emphasises the performative quality or power of
narration, bringing the reality-constituting power of narratives and storytelling into
focus. Elaborating on the title of his book, Jerome Bruner explains what is at issue:
“I have called it Acts of Meaning in order to emphasise its major theme: the nature
and cultural shaping of meaning-making, and the central place it plays in human
action” (Bruner, Acts xii). If one understands narratives as a way of meaning-,
value- and indeed worldmaking, then a question also has to be asked about the
elements, processes, and practices which are involved in narrative worldmaking
and by which meanings, norms and values are created and negotiated within a
community. Since I have elsewhere provided a detailed account of how narratives
serve to make events, stories and worlds (see Nünning, “Making”), it may suffice to
refer the reader to this essay and to other recent accounts of narrative worldmaking
(see Herman, “Narrative Ways of Worldmaking”; “Time”; “Principles”) and the
making of fictional worlds (see V. Nünning, “The Making”).
While an ethical narratology proceeds from the general assumption that
narratives fulfil a performative or worldmaking function, it also needs a more
nuanced conceptualisation of the relation between the hierarchies of values that
pertain in the real world and those that are projected in fictional storyworlds. The
fundamental notion of the conception of the relation between literature and reallife
values presented here is a three-dimensional model, which draws on Paul
Ricoeur’s concept of a ‘mimetic circle’ with its three levels — prefiguration,
configuration, and refiguration (cf. Ricoeur 1984 [1983]). Literature is first of all
related to and preformed out of a pre-existent, extra-literary reality, which Ricoeur
calls prefiguration: Literary works come into being in the context of cultures, in
which symbolic orders already circulate certain versions of life, norms and values
(manifested e.g. in social interaction, texts in the literary tradition, and media
of other symbolic systems). Secondly, literary texts can represent alternative or
different norms and values by textual means and literary techniques, something
which Ricoeur subsumes under the general umbrella term of configuration: Literary
works often disseminate, generate or project socially unsanctioned, excluded and
repressed forms of life as well as the values and norms that underpin them. In
George Eliot’s phrase, they can therefore be viewed as “experiments in life” (cf.
Nünning, “George Eliot’s Aesthetic Theory”), i.e. as models and test-cases that
generate possible worlds as well as alternative hierarchies of values through a
series of specifically aesthetic procedures or literary forms. In turn, such literary
productions of norms and values are, thirdly, able to have an effect on extra-literary
reality (refiguration): Literature has contributed, to no insignificant degree, to
forming norms and values, and social conceptions of the good life.
Ethical narratology and ethical literary criticism at large should try to
take into consideration both the representation of cultural norms and values in
literature, and the construction-aspect of literature as an active medium in the
dissemination, generation or production of norms and values (cf. Baumbach,
Grabes, and Nünning). What also needs to be emphasised is that the stages between
prefiguration and configuration on the one hand, and between configuration and
refiguration on the other are always inextricably intertwined. The first question to
be addressed is of how, and with what literary methods or techniques, prevailing
cultural notions of norms and values are represented in a given text. From this
perspective, literature comes into view as a medium of the representation of extraliterary
norms and values and as a medium that is capable of constructing or
generating new or alternative hierarchies of norms and values. Secondly, literature
has always served as a medium for the dissemination of norms and values, be it
those generally accepted by society or alternative values. Thirdly, literature appears
as a medium for the construction of norms and values. Another question to be
addressed concerns the connections between configuration and refiguration: What
functions can literature fulfil for the development, modelling, alteration, critique,
and even destruction of norms and values?
Two dimensions of the relations of literary works to extra-literary norms
and values — and thus also two fundamental directions for the special potential
of literature in culture — should therefore come into focus: The first dimension
concerns the specific potential of the medium of literature, through its aesthetic
forms, to thematise, represent, and disseminate norms and values in their cultural
contexts. Secondly, and deriving from the aesthetic form, the potential of the
medium of literature to actively construct and generate norms and values, as well as
to question and critique prevailing value-hierarchies and collective views of what
constitutes the ‘good life’, is also of interest. In short, the focus is on exploring the
role of literature as a medium of the representation and reflection, the dissemination
and problematisation, and the modelling and construction of norms and values.
In order to avoid possible misunderstandings it should be stressed that my
general understanding of “mimesis” in the present context is not restricted to a
naïve concept of mere reflection, but emphasises the active creation of realities
or world-models, or of norms and values, through literary texts. Though literary
narratives are simultaneously characterised by a reference to extra-literary reality,
as emphasised unanimously, albeit with a basis in different concepts, by e.g. Paul
Ricoeur, Wolfgang Iser and Jürgen Link, they never merely reflect cultural models
or norms and values (cf. Baumbach/Grabes/Nünning; Kövecsces, “Metaphor”,
Language, Mind, and Culture). Ricoeur (1984 [1983] makes clear that the creation
of world-models or versions of reality through literary works rests on dynamic
transformation processes – on an interaction among the “prefiguration” of the text,
that is, its reference to the pre-existent extra-textual world (mimesis I), the textual
“configuration” that creates a fictional object (mimesis II) and the “refiguration” by
the reader (mimesis III). The literary process thus appears as an active constructive
process, in which cultural systems of meaning, literary processes of formal
configuration and practices of reception are equally involved and in which reality is
not merely reflected, but instead first poetically created (cf. 107) and then “iconically
enriched” (cf. 127).
To sum up: The symbolic order of the extra-literary reality, e.g. of norms
and values that actually exist in the real world, and the literary or possible worlds
created within the medium of literature enter into a relationship of mutual influence
and change. Ricoeur’s “circle of mimesis” can thus contribute to a differentiation
among different levels of the relationship between literature and values: First,
literary works are related to extra-literary norms and values (i.e. prefiguration);
second, they represent norms and values, their content and functioning, in the
medium of fiction (i.e. configuration); and third, they can help to form new norms
and values (refiguration). What perspectives are opened up through such an
examination for the analysis and interpretation of novels, plays and poetry from
the point of view of a literary studies focussing on the value(s) and functions of
literature? And how can we actually analyse, and come to terms with, the complex
processes involved in the prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration of norms
and values?
To begin with, there are several narratological axes of configuration and
dimensions of narrative worldmaking that have to be taken into consideration if one
wants to get to grips with the ways in which values are represented, constructed
and disseminated through narratives. First of all, the selection and weighting of
the narrated elements leads to a hierarchisation of values on the paradigmatic axis
of selection. Secondly, the methods of plot configuration and emplotment on the
syntagmatic axis, i.e. the arrangement, combination, and causal interconnections,
are crucial for the processes of narrative worldmaking and the hierarchisation
of values through configuration, order and the privileging of narrated elements.
Thirdly, the discursive axis of discourse and narrative mediation plays a pivotal role
for narrative worldmaking because the explicit and implicit constitution of meaning
and the hierarchisation of values also greatly depend on narrative mediation.
Focalisation, point of view techniques, and the configuration and distribution of
perspectives deserve special attention as important acts or procedures of narrative
worldmaking in their own right because they all shape the dissemination of norms
and values.
Shifting its attention to the ways in which narrative functions as a way of
worldmaking, i.e. a cognitive force in its own right which is involved in the actual
generation of attitudes, discourses, ideologies, hierarchies of norms and values, and
structures of feeling and thinking, ethical narratology focuses on what structuralist
narratology has ignored and left unanswered: the crucial question of how narratives,
both literary and non-literary, are engaged in the ongoing cultural construction and
negotiation of moral norms and ethical values. The ways in which narrative fiction
serves to contribute to the dissemination of ethical and moral values is, of course,
a crucial part of this process of cultural construction in that it serves to contribute
to the formation of communities, and to the definition of what a given culture
regards as good, bad, and normal. The following suggestions are offered as a means
to sketch some conceptual, terminological and methodological premises for a
context-sensitive and ethically informed approach to narratives that is still rooted in
narratology but that is geared towards the analysis of the ways in which narratives
serve to represent, disseminate and critique cultural, ethical and moral values.
By “ethical narratology” I mean an integrated interdisciplinary approach that
puts the analytical tools provided by narratology to the service of ethical literary
criticism and that goes far beyond the formalist or structuralist analysis of narrative
fiction. Focussing on “the study of narrative forms in their relationship to the
culture which generates them” (Onega/García Landa 12), such a culturally-oriented
ethical narratology explores “cultural experiences translated into, and meanings
produced by, particular formal narrative practices” (Helms 14). Interest in ethical
narratology thus centres around the interfaces and mutual relations between the
respective objects of study in both narrative theory and ethical literary criticism, i.e.
the types, structures and functions of narrative phenomena, on the one hand, and
the dissemination of ethical and moral values through literature, on the other hand.
Linking questions pertaining to narratology and the study of ethics, ethical
narratology explores both the narrativity of cultures and the culturality of narratives.
Focussing on the narrativity of cultures and on cultures as narrative communities,
such an approach is mainly concerned with theoretically conceptualising and
empirically studying the functions that narratives can fulfil as a cultural way of
worldmaking in general and as a medium for the dissemination of ethical and moral
values in particular. It explores the roles that narratives play in the construction of
cultural phenomena like ideologies, hierarchies of norms and values, structures
of feeling and thinking, collective memory, and cultural identity and alterity.
The premise of the culturality of narratives, however, also turns the attention of
cultural and ethical narratologists to a question which structuralist narratology
systematically ignored, viz. the question of how far narratives and the elements that
constitute them (e.g. certain plot patterns, preferred narrative forms, linear or cyclic
time structures) themselves depend on cultural norms and values and may thus be
variable and specific to a given culture.
Ethical narratology can therefore be defined as a context-sensitive and
diachronic theory and analysis of narrative that does justice to the cultural
dependency and historical variability of both narrative forms and ethical and moral
values. Not only is the category of ‘gender’ relevant for an analysis of all the
elements that constitute narratives, but also other difference categories like “race,”
“class,” “generation,” “religion” and “nationality” that are imbued with ethical
choices and moral values.
Unlike classical structuralist narratology, which was mainly concerned with
the systematic formalist description of narrative techniques, the focus of ethical
narratology is not only placed on using narratological categories of analysis to
examine historically and culturally variable forms and functions of narrative as
a means for disseminating norms and values. It is also on the expansion of the
theoretical framework, the range of methods and the analytical tools of classical
narratology to link up narrative theory to ethical literary criticism and its main
research questions and concepts.
In order to explore the interfaces between narratives and culturally specific
ethical values, and between narratology and ethical literary criticism, ethical
narratology integrates the formalist analysis of narratives with the study of
ethical choices and moral values in literature. Ethical narratology is particularly
interested in generic repertoires and culturally available plots. Though it leaves the
narrow confines of structuralist taxonomy, the contextual, cultural and historical
narratological framework that provides the backbone of ethical narratology is
informed by a critical practice that the toolbox of classical narratology and the
training in the precise semiotic analysis of narratives can provide.
Moreover, questioning the traditional notion that the relationship between
narratives and reality is based on mimesis, ethical narratology proceeds from the
assumption that it is more rewarding to conceptualise narrative as an active force
in its own right which is involved in the actual generation of ways of thinking, of
attitudes and of hierarchies of norms and values, thus, of something that stands
behind historical developments. In his seminal work Imagining the Penitentiary,
in which he argued that widespread attitudes toward prison were formulated
in English fiction which facilitated the conception of the eighteenth-century
penitentiary, Bender sums up this new understanding of the active and constitutive
role that narrative fictions can play in the process of forming institutions and
shaping mentalities: “I consider literature and the visual arts as advanced
forms of knowledge, as cognitive instruments that anticipate and contribute to
institutional formation. Novels as I describe them are primary historical and
ideological documents; the vehicles, not the reflections, of social change” (Bender,
Imagining 1). By the same token, narratives can also be conceptualised as ways of
worldmaking that contribute to the formation of hierarchies of norms and values.
Let us therefore turn our attention to the ways in which narratives are involved in
the representation, dissemination and critique of norms and values.
4. Representation, Narrative Techniques, and Norms and Values: Concepts
for an Ethical Narratology and a Narratological Study of the Dissemination of
Values
Proceeding from the assumption that an analysis of narrative forms can shed new
light on the ethical, ideological and epistemological implications of narrative,
ethical narratology strives to cross the border between textual formalism and
historical contextualism, and to close the gaps between narratological bottomup
analysis and cultural top-down synthesis. In doing so, it seeks to put the
analytical toolkit developed by narratology to the service of context-sensitive
interpretations of the ethical concerns negotiated in and by novels. Though the
ubiquity of narratives makes it difficult to establish the boundaries of such a
culture-oriented ethical narratology, it is possible to outline some of the conceptual
and methodological consequences that it entails. First, though it leaves the narrow
confines of structuralist taxonomy, it is informed by a critical practice that only the
toolbox of classical narratology and the training in the precise semiotic analysis of
narratives can provide. Denying or ignoring the many achievements of structuralist
narratology would thus arguably be foolish, a way of throwing the analytical and
conceptual babies out with the formalist bathwater. As the controversy between
Dorrit Cohn and John Bender (“Making”) in New Literary History (1995) has
shown, it does make a difference whether we can establish a consensus about
textual features or not, and it is the descriptive toolkit of narratology that provides
us with the terminological categories needed as the basis for rational argument.
Other important premises and concepts of the kind of ethical narratology
envisioned include the notions of the content of the form as delineated by Hayden
White, the ideology of form (F. Jameson), and the ethics and politics of narrative
forms (T. Eagleton), which will be briefly discussed below.
Some of the key concepts and insights of cultural narratology can also serve
to further develop and refine the kind of ethical narratology that Phelan, Müller,
and Berning have delineated. As Gabriele Helms has convincingly demonstrated
in her brilliant monograph on dialogism and narrative technique in Canadian
novels, the framework of a cultural narratology is arguably germane to both
Bakhtin’s intense concern with social norms and values and to his perceptive
attempts to relate the dialogic structure of novels to the world views, ideologies
and hierarchies of values of the societies from which they originated. The way in
which Helms describes her project also serves to shed intersting light on the kind of
ethical narratology that I am trying to delineate. She argues that the “term ‘cultural
narratology’ describes the place where dialogism and narrative theory meet,
allowing the analysis of formal structures to be combined with a consideration of
their ideological implications” (Helms 10). In contrast to other narrative theorists
who use the term ‘cultural narratology’ without developing or explaining it, Helms
is one of the first narratologists to provide a conceptual and methodological outline
of a cultural narratology and to actually test its usefulness (for an earlier attempt,
see Nünning, “Towards”). The approach christened cultural narratology implies
that formal narrative techniques are not just analysed as structural features of a
text, but as narrative modes which are highly semanticised and engaged in the
processes of cultural construction and worldmaking. As Helms emphasises, “a
cultural narratology would enable us to recognise that narrative techniques are not
neutral and transparent forms to be filled with content, and that dialogic relations in
narrative structures are ideologically informed” (7).
The same holds true for an ethical narratology that is mainly concerned with
exploring the role of narrative techniques for the representation, dissemination and
critique of moral norms and ethical values. An analysis of narrative forms is key
for getting to grips with how ethical choices and competing values are orchestrated
in novels and short stories. In this respect the project of an ethical narratology can
draw on Fredric Jameson’s fruitful concept of the “ideology of the form” (Jameson
141), which implies that “form is immanently and intrinsically an ideology in its
own right”:
What must now be stressed is that at this level ‘form’ is apprehended as
content. The study of the ideology of form is no doubt grounded on a technical
and formalistic analysis in the narrower sense, even though, unlike much
traditional formal analysis, it seeks to reveal the active presence within the
text of a number of discontinuous and heterogeneous formal processes. But at
the level of analysis in question here, a dialectical reversal has taken place in
which it has become possible to grasp such formal processes as sedimented
content in their own right, as carrying ideological messages of their own,
distinct from the ostensible or manifest content of the works. (Jameson 99)
If one accepts the idea of a semanticisation of narrative forms, any literary and
cultural historian who wants to address ethical, ideological or political issues raised
in or by narratives can profit from the application of the toolbox that narratology
provides. Context and form, content and narrative technique, are, after all, more
closely intertwined than structuralist narratologists, or most of the practitioners of
ethical criticism, for that matter, have tried to make us believe. It is not only the
problem of the reception of literary character that inevitably draws critics’ attention
to the interrelationship between ethics and aesthetics, but also key questions that
ideological approaches like postcolonial, feminist and African-American studies
are concerned with.
Conceptualising narratives as cognitive cultural forces, ethical narratology
explores the ways in which the formal properties of narratives reflect, and
influence, the unspoken mental assumptions and the prevailing norms and values of
a given culture, community or period. It focuses on the power of narrative fictions
“to represent a medley of voices engaged in a conversation and/or a struggle for
cultural space” (Scholes 134). Such problems as the relationship between the
polyphonic structure of novels, as well as complex narratives in other genres and
media, and their challenge to dominant cultural discourses require narratological
tools for their description and analysis.
Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism and polyphony, which has only recently been
incorporated into feminist and cultural narratology (see e.g. Helms), provides
useful conceptual and methodological tools for coming to terms with central
issues of ethical literary criticism. To study the way in which narratives represent
or orchestrate the ethical norms and values of a given culture, one could refer
to Bakhtin’s notions of the novel “as a diversity of social speech types” and “a
diversity of individual voices” (Bakhtin 262), to his remarks on discourse in the
novel (see ibid. 259-422), and especially to his felicitous concepts of dialogism,
heteroglossia and polyphony. Of particular relevance in the present context is
Bakhtin’s understanding of the ways in which novels orchestrate their themes,
which also applies to moral norms and ethial values:
The novel orchestrates all its themes, the totality of the world of objects
and ideas depicted and expressed in it, by means of the social diversity of
speech types [...] and by the differing individual voices that flourish under
such conditions. Authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres,
the speech of characters are merely those fundamental compositional
unities with whose help heteroglossia [...] can enter the novel; each of them
permits a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and
interrelationsships (always more or less dialogized). These distinctive links
and interrelationsships between utterances and languages, this movement of
the theme through different languages and speech types, its dispersions into
the rivulets and droplets of social heteroglossia, its dialogization — this is the
basic distinguishing feature of the novel. (Bakhtin 263)
Such a cultural and social understanding of novelistic discourse provides a
very fruitful framework for coming to terms with the interconnections between
narratives, cultural contexts and ethical values, and for gaining insights into the
complex ways in which narratives function as a cultural way of worldmaking and
of disseminating norms and values. From a narratological point of view, however,
Bakhtin’s inspiring and suggestive, but also notoriously vague musical metaphors
are in need of translation in order to gain the precision needed for textual analysis.
As pertinent narratological work on the subject has shown, Bakhtins’s metaphors
can be translated into the terminology that narratology has developed for a study of
the discourse level of narratives, viz. the various categories to analyse narration and
focalisation as well as the forms and functions of multiperspectival narration (see
Helms; Nünning/Nünning).
Proceeding from the assumption that content and narrative technique are
closely intertwined, ethical narratology could show that the narratological concepts
of multiperspectivity and perspective structure (see Nünning, “On the Perspective
Structure”) provide fruitful analytical tools and heuristic keys for coming to
terms with ethical and ideological issues raised in narratives, and for analysing
both the relations between the different perspectives delineated in a novel and the
narrative construction and negotiation of moral norms and ethical values. Such
an ethical narratology explores the interfaces between a narratological model of
the perspective structure of narrative texts and the ways in which ethical concerns
and moral issues are negotiated in narrative fiction. A narratological analysis of
the “perspective structure of a novel reveals above all — as a model, something
in process, not laid down or fixed — how the novel envisages its handling of
divergent viewpoints” (Bode 203), including the conflicting norms and values that
each perspective and viewpoint represents.
Moreover, cultural and historical analyses of narratives require thicker
descriptions than those offered by structuralist narratology, descriptions which take
into account both thematic and formal features of texts. The main reason for this
is that the ways in which epistemological, ethical, moral and social problems are
articulated is inextricably linked with the forms of narrative representation. Scholes
has done an excellent job at explaining why ideological and political approaches,
and ethical literary criticism, one could just as well add, cannot afford to ignore a
detailed analsis of all the issues involved in literary representation and narrative
form: “The political enters the study of English primarily through questions of
representation: who is represented, who does the representing, who is object, who
is subject — and how do these representations connect to the values of groups,
communities, classes, tribes, sects, and nations?” (153)
This is a very important insight for anyone interested in the development of
an ethical narratology and for ethical literary criticism in general. Such questions
as who the subjects or objects of narrative representations are have always
been genuine concerns of narratology, whose categories and models for the
analysis of narratives provide useful tools for getting to grips with such issues.
Key narratological concepts like focalisation, unreliable narration and narrative
perspective have proved very fine descriptive tools, but they need to be applied
and further refined before they can yield insights considered vital for ethical
literary criticism. As Monika Fludernik, Vera Nünning, Bruno Zerweck and other
proponents of a cultural, diachronic or historical narratology have convincingly
shown, the development of narrative forms (e.g. unreliable narration) can fruitfully
be interpreted as a reflection of changing cultural discourses and shifts in the
hierarchies of norms and values.
Another important insight that ethical narratology can derive from cultural and
historical approaches is that narrative forms do not merely reflect cultural, ethical,
ideological and social values, they are also active cultural forces in their own
right in that they serve to articulate, and negotiate between, conflicting voices and
values. As Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck have demonstrated, ideology manifests
itself not only on the level of the story (e.g. in the constellation of the characters
or the actantial network, and in the semanticisation of space and movement within
the narrated world), but also on the level of discourse, for example in the structure
of narrative transmission, the choice of point of view or perspectives, the temporal
organisation of narratives, and the ways in which events, characters and the setting
are presented (cf. Herman/Vervaeck). Ethical literary criticism would be wise
to remember that all of these as well as other narrative forms are more than just
techniques in that they are explicit or implicit carriers of cultural meaning, ideology
and moral values.
The application of narratological concepts can also serve to shed new light
on other central concerns of ethical literary criticism like the representation, or
rather construction, of those hierarchies of norms and values that shape identity
and alterity in and by narratives. The narrative construction of social and cultural
differences is not just one of the central issues in feminist and postcolonial studies,
but also one of the key concerns and research fields of ethical literary criticism and
the study of culture at large. Narratives are a powerful cultural way of worldmaking
in that they not only construct images of selves and others, but also serve to
disseminate the norms and values that a cultural formations lives by. Narratology
thus provides important analytical tools for ethical literary criticism that allow
such an approach to come to terms with key cultural issues like the ways in which
prevailing notions of identity and alterity, or otherness, are created in and through
narratives (see Fludernik, “Identity/Alterity”).
5. Epilogue: The Ethical Significance of Narratives and Narrative Techniques
and the Promises and Potential Usefulness of (Classical and Postclassical)
Narratology for Ethical Criticism — Some Suggestions for Further Research
What I hope to have shown is that it is pointless to belabour the old oppositions
between form and content, between formalism and contextualism, or between
formalist approaches like narratology and approaches that are mainly concerned
with the manifest content of literary works like ethical criticism. Anyone who is
genuinely interested in getting to grips with the complex ways in which narratives
in general and narrative fiction in particular is engaged in the ongoing cultural
conversation about, and dissemniation of, moral norms and ethical values, should
rather avail her- or himself of the benefits that both narratology and ethical literary
criticism afford. The main reason for this is that, as Terry Eagleton recently
emphasised, “moral value lies in the form of literary works as much as their
content. [...] There is an ethics and politics of form at stake here, of which the
philosophy of literature has been for the most part quite oblivious” (60). What
Helms observed about the promises of a cultural narratology therefore applies just
as much to the project of an ethical narratology as delineated above:
A cultural narratological framework holds two distinct promises: (1) the
semanticizing of narrative forms will move narratology beyond its notorious
a-historicity; and (2) by providing adequate descriptive tools, it will
enable cultural critics to attend to the specific tools and strategies that are
characteristic of narratives in a wide range of media. (Helms 2003: 15)
Moreover, an ethical narratology can provide insight into the complex ways in
which cultural norms and ethical values are represented in, and disseminated
through, fictional and factual narratives. It can thus serve to illuminate what Jerome
Bruner felicitously called a “culture‘s ongoing dialectic” (Bruner, Making Stories
100), i.e. “the dialectic between its norms and what is humanly possible” (ibid.
16). An ethical narratology can therefore not only throw new light on the ways in
which narratives can represent cultural values and serve to confirm moral norms,
it can also illuminate the equally complex ways in which stories can negotiate the
dialectic between dominant hierarchies of values and deviations from them, e.g. in
the form of broken narratives and the representation of disrupted lives: “The study
of disrupted lives enables us to look at the disparity between cultural notions of
how things are supposed to be and how they are, a disparity that is highlighted by
disruption” (Becker 190).
In his seminal monograph The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By,
the renowned psychologist Dan P. McAdams has pointed out how important it is for
any culture to learn more about the ways in which both the living of our lives and
the telling of our stories (cf. Phelan 205) are framed and shaped by cultural models,
moral norms and ethical values: “Beyond making vague references to things like
‘my religious heritage’ or ‘the American Dream,’ we tend to have remarkably little
insight into the ways our lives are framed by cultural categories, values, and norms”
(271). This is all the more deplorable because stories are arguably constitutive
of cultures, largely moulding our understanding of good and bad behaviour and
characters:
I would submit that life stories are more reflective of and shaped by culture
than any other aspect of personality. Stories are at the centre of culture. More
than favored goals and values, I believe, stories differentiate one culture from
the next. I have argued throughout this book that the stories people live by say
as much about culture as they do about the people who live and tell them. Our
own life stories draw on the stories we learn as active participants in culture
— stories about childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and aging. Stories capture
and elaborate metaphors and images that are especially resonant in a given
culture. Stories distinguish between what culture glorifies as good characters
and vilifies as bad characters. (McAdams 284)
A cultural and ethical narratology promises to provide the conceptual and
methodological tools that neither classical narratology nor ethical criticism on
their own have so far developed. It is thus arguably high time that ethical literary
criticism began to acknowledge the great usefulness of the narratological toolbox
and that narratology fully realised the need to move beyond a merely descriptive
poetics of narrative. If we accept the ideas that “culture is constructed through
ideological narratives, that there is no preexisting or universally accepted model
for a cultural world, and that prose fiction uniquely raises questions about the
interrelatedness of social and textual worldmaking” (Elias 281), then an integration
of the analytical and interpretive tools of narratology and ethical literary criticism
promises to provide rich insights into the complex ways in which literary and
factual narratives can serve to represent, disseminate and critique moral norms
and ethical values. In contrast to the purists who want to make “the world safe for
narratology”, as John Bender (“Making”) aptly put it, ethical narratologists, just
like practitioners of the various postclassical narratologies, should intrepidly rush
in where structuralists fear to tread. Whether or not they would be fools in doing
so, may be an open question, but the approach delineated above could arguably
open up productive lines of research for literary and cultural studies. Putting it in
a nutshell, one might thus conclude that the more narratological ethical literary
criticism becomes, and the more interested in ethics and the dissmeniation of values
narratology becomes, the better for both.
* For this article I have drawn on, and adapted, ideas and formulations developed in some
previous publications (cf. Nünning, “Towards”; “Where Historiographic Metafiction”;
“Surveying”) and some passages that I contributed to the introduction of a collection of essays on
the topic of Literature and Values (cf. Baumbach, Grabes and Nünning).
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