The Imposition of Form: Studies in Narrative Representation and Knowledge

by Claudia J. Brodsky

Overview

Claudia Brodsky skillfully combines close readings of narrative works by Goethe, Austen, Balzac, Stendhal, Melville, and Proust with a detailed analysis of the relation between Kant's critical epistemology and narrative theory.

Originally published in 1987.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691637426
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #800
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d)

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The Imposition of Form

Studies in Narrative Representation and Knowledge

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By Claudia J. Brodsky

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1987 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06717-9

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

This work investigates narrative as a literary form composed of and presenting a particular paradox. That paradox, which the following chapters attempt to describe through analyses of specific eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century texts, can perhaps be best introduced by a brief summation of the basic directions I perceive the study of narrative to take.

As the term "narratology," used currently to signify a broad variety of analytic methods, succinctly conveys, narrative is the literary form most generally understood to foster its own logical understanding. Defined as the means by which a story is told, narrative is seen to combine all the elements necessary to a coherent presentation of experience by way of a governing, sequential development of thought. The elements of knowledge a narrative omits, whether or not such omissions are deemed intentional, are themselves first perceived and thus simultaneously, at least in part, explained, as salient absences within a logical sequence. The "picaresque" classification of such early narratives of experience as La Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes and Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus, the later dominant motif of the Bildungsroman, as well as the popular genre of the detective story may all be seen to offer progressive variations upon this conception of knowledge as the goal to which narrative, by infinite, individual roads, tends. Experiments in narrative technique, relying on complexities of narrative voice or structure, such as those of Faulkner, Broch, and their contemporary successors, Cortazar, Vargas Llosa, and Marqués, or on more fundamental disruptions of the syntactic ordering of understanding, as attempted, a century after the innovations of Flaubert, by the French New Novelists, all rely first on the supposition that understanding itself is primarily narrative in nature: that similar to the "performance" of syntax in language, narrative provides the form by which any transformations of or deviations from the norm can be understood. Thus, "narratologists," whose theoretical models range in origin from Aristotle to A. J. Greimas, are commonly inclined, by a shared perception of narrative logic, to formulate a definitive "science" of narrative. Whether by way of reference to the Poetics' founding principle of an underlying unity of action in dramatic plot; the Russian formalists' distinction between plot itself (sjuzet), and the sequential story (fabula) from which it is shaped; the semiotic conception of an internally coherent, self-contained network of signs; the structuralist identification of binary oppositions developed in Lévi-Strauss' study of myth; or Greimas's related notion of a "semiotic rectangle," or combinatoire, analysts of narrative form calculate their own knowledge of the object they study according to the density of internal logic their particular methods can display. The presupposition that knowledge itself coincides with an identification of form, and that such form can be recognized and reconstructed by way of a generative narrative "grammar" — much as a skillful detective would piece together the parts and uncover the motive of a criminal plot — is as implicit to narratology as its working analytic assumption that the words — or linguistic "parts" — composing a narrative "plot" can only mean what their formal grammatical function prescribes they must say.

This latter assumption links formal analyses of narrative to an opposed and equally prevalent approach: the study of narrative as a primarily representational medium. Seen as a means of representing material reality, narrative seems especially dependent upon the extratextual referents which narratological analyses, in concentrating upon structural factors, necessarily discount. Extending from Plato and Aristotle to the essays of Erich Auerbach, the roots of mimetic criticism, as of narratology, underlie the history of literary criticism and can only be indicated cursorily here. But the selection of narrative as the literary form which best serves an interest in "realism," and in which the referential rather than formal function of language is seen in turn to hold sway, bears directly upon the conflicting concerns of narratology. For just as the diachronic and causal dimensions of a story lend themselves most readily to logical delineation, so the fact that a story is being told depends, at a minimum, upon some referential perception of its subject. Thus questions of biography, history, political ideology, personal psychology, and countless others to which the proposition of mimetic narrative gives way focus upon the power of narrative not to order but to illustrate. Analogously, whereas formal analyses reflect a methodological predilection for texts already conceived to be "pure fictions" — myths, folk and fairy tales, and scientific and Utopian fantasies, whose so-called "referents" are always understood to remain between quotation marks — mimetic critics often equate the rise of narrative as a literary form with that of the referentially laden "realist" novel. As narratologists strive toward a more fully formalized knowledge of their object of study, mimetic critics seek, as if reflected in that object, a fuller understanding, or practical knowledge, of a nonnarrative world. The division between these two approaches is, of course, not as clean (nor are the approaches themselves as all-inclusive) as these summary comments may at first suggest. It is helpful to recall, for example, that the description of "a novel" as "a mirror one walks along the length of a road," was first formulated as an epigraph to Le Rouge et le noir. That description is all the less easy to dismiss when one considers that its author (who attributes it to another source, with which it shares only the word "mirror") is generally recognized as one of the least mimetically inclined "realist" novelists of his century. Just as Stendhal presents the principle of mimesis as the definition of his literary form, proceeding to invoke that definition later in the novel as its narrator's defense against moral attacks, and yet offers almost no evidence in his own narratives of its validity, so the critical problem of the relation between the logical and referential dimensions of narrative may be more readily obscured than solved by their severing.

For it must be significant of narrative as a literary form that while logical causation most determines its shape, the fact that it has a shape, that it is a carefully plotted fiction, appears at once incidental to the perceived life of its referents. Conversely, the fact that the medium of narrative is discourse, i.e., signs whose meaning can be either referentially or figurally (formally) understood, appears eradicated at the moment their formal function is hypostatized. Thus, as opposed to the identification of a dialectic between content and form which has continued to orient the interpretation of poetry (before, during, and after the New Criticism), the critical route departing from narrative seems to have taken the stranger contour of a single direction doubling upon itself. That doubleness, in distinction from the dialogical, differential structure ascribed to narrative by the late Russian formalist Mikhail Bakhtin, appears more like an internal repetition of the same. Narratological analysis seems condemned by the vigor of its commitment to a "science" of literature to mirror or subdivide form by form. Thus Greimas's recent hypothesis of "levels of grammar" not only doubles a "conceptual" or "fundamental" grammar with that of its "anthropomorphic" or "narrative surface," but proposes the doubling of accompanying semantic levels as well. Meaning, rather than being made manifest through the transformations of a semiotic model, would reside at the formal level of the model itself. If the distinction between semiotics and semantics appears all but nominally lost in the process, it is because the elaboration of a narrative grammar can only account for narrative meaning as constitutive of the very model of that grammar. According to the logic of narratological analysis, semantics and semiotics must be reduced to formal reflections of each other. Similarly, mimetic approaches to narrative which appeal directly to formal considerations tend to redefine form as the expressive medium of a referential-historical context. The most formally sensitive and methodologically sophisticated of these approaches today is thus, significantly, and I think not accidentally, Marxist in orientation. Extraordinarily detailed historical and psycho-biographical studies, such as those by Barbéris of Balzac and Sartre of Flaubert, locate the conditions of narrative "production" in those of "le mal du siècle" or "de la Famille." Outstanding contributions to a Marxist understanding of literary form, prepared for in the Hegelian analysis of Lukács's seminal — and in significant ways still unsurpassed — Theory of the Novel (first published in 1916), afforded technical methods of analysis in the early narratological work of the Russian formalists, reanalyzed in relation to social forms by Adorno and Horkheimer, and presently being advanced by way of psychoanalytic and semiotic categories in the work of such contemporary American critics as Frederic Jameson, astutely replace the notion of a narrative mirror upon the world with a perception of form as a plotting of social opacity, or ideology. As described by Jameson in the hybrid terminology required by a "textual" analysis of historical ideology, the "referential subtext," rather than objective content, of narrative is "reconstructed" by Marxist methods. Those methods may differ among themselves — as Jameson's use of Freud, Greimas, Lacan, and Althusser indicates — but not in the purpose toward which they are employed: the reproduction of a historical moment which representation itself can only deform. Yet while representation, mimetically or referentially conceived, is discounted as a means of practical knowledge by Marxist theorists, the twin principles of ideology and history, each conceived as univocally significant, are posed instead as referents in its place. Narrative, understood as an inherently distortive form, is analyzed as the ideological counterpart of the unrepresentable, historical, real. Thus narrative, as a literary form, ultimately serves the ends of its contents, as much for the aspects it deletes as for those it includes from a social context. In order for a formal investigation to be significant of historical "praxis," it must signify knowledge of a referent: knowledge which is itself practical. Whether that referent is seen to be embodied in a particular historical moment which the narrative, as literary "history," documents, or in "History" as such, unrealized at any particular moment but ideologically represented in narrative form, the recognition of narrative as form is used finally to underscore the practical relevance of narrative content.

The tendency within the study of narrative to convert form into referential meaning, and meaning into logical form, leads to the point of departure of the present study. The division in narrative theory which narrative by its own nature seems to effect is proposed to structure the nature of all cognition by Kant: the radical theoretical premise of Kant's epistemology is that the very possibility of knowledge must be divided between "pure" and "practical" reason. Similar to the narratological understanding of narrative, Kant's Critique of knowledge, and proposed "science" of metaphysics, understands "pure reason" as an inherently formal and causally ordered faculty. While "practical reason" should provide "positive" access to the "thinking" of "things-in-themselves," the objective claims of "pure reason" are limited to a "negative" knowledge of "phenomena": mere "appearances" of objects as "represented" by the mind according to the a priori mental "forms" of time and space. Thus, viewed from a literary, rather than epistemological, critical standpoint, the world we refer to according to Kant is always prefigured in its meaning. Kant's epistemological system, most remarkably, makes almost no reference to its own cognitive means, language, because more than any other cognitive system, it presupposes an equation of linguistic forms with those of cognition. Kant's theory of knowledge is specifically critical in that it replaces the possibility of pure, or unmediated, experience with experience necessarily mediated formally as representation. Our empirical perceptions, Kant hypothesizes, are themselves a posteriori to the a priori forms of the mind. In the metalanguage of properly linguistic forms, it could be said that perception, for Kant, occurs at the moment when the formalization of "natural" language as literature, of referential as figural meaning, appears as a conceptual activity already at its end. In grounding all empirical knowledge upon its a priori formalization, Kant proposes that all referents already take the form of representations: the given of all empirical reason is to "represent" experience, thus perceiving reality in the figural condition which "literary" or representational language first effects. In accordance with formal or mimetic theories of narrative, Kant's system of knowledge can therefore be seen to describe a system of narrative — and to describe experience as the narrative — par excellence. For it ensures both the referential and formal functions of the mind by excluding the occurrence, for the mind, of that which is not already "known": the formless, the ambiguous, the unrepresented, or unnamed.

The use of an analysis of Kant in relating narrative to knowledge should be seen in opposition both to the New Kantianism (often called "historical materialism") of current philosophies of knowledge, such as Althusser's distinction between "real objects" and "objects of knowledge" in his theory of "theoretical practice," as well as uncritical, aesthetic idealisms (called "Kantianism"), like that of Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Form, which replaces the limited mediating power of aesthetic judgment formulated by Kant with the notion of a "spiritual" synthesis between art form and object. As Althusser uses the Kantian distinction between epistemological and real objects — in Kant, phenomena and things-in-themselves — in order to propose their (entirely non-Kantian) synthesis in "theoretical practice," Cassirer turns Kant's famous dictum concerning the purposelessness of aesthetic objects into grounds for praising the highly intentional forms of symbol and myth. While their debts to Kant are obviously dissimilar — in Althusser's case, apparently not even conscious — the two philosophers present examples of purely speculative and aesthetic derivations from Kant from which the present concern with his distinctly literary relevance should be strongly distinguished. That is, the reading of Kant vis-à-vis a literary form has as little in common with his adaption to exclusively epistemological or aesthetic ends as narrative itself shares either with Althusser's proposed "field of knowledge" or Cassirer's concept of "myth." The emphasis on Kant's grounding of cognition in representations of experience clearly relates to Hermann Cohen's early Kant's Theory of Experience (1871), which later initiated the Kantian Marburg School in German philosophical thought. Among contemporary readers of Kant, however, it is the Marxist philosopher Lucio Colletti whose interest in the theory of knowledge of the Critique comes closest to the approach to Kant presented here. Colletti's unpopular preference for Kant, as epistemological thinker, over Hegel, strictly distinguishes the premises of metaphysical epistemology from those of metaphysical ontology. His recognition of the purely logical-hypothetical status of the Kantian thing-in-itself also directly opposes the uncritical Kantianism of Althusser, who regresses from Kant in claiming that speculative philosophy, as a science, can combine theoretical with practical epistemology. Colletti's important understanding of the essential epistemological distinction between real and phenomenal knowledge for Kant leads him, however, to delete the Second Critique entirely from his consideration of Kant's epistemology. Kant's key deduction of the possibility of practical knowledge — the counterweight with which the present analysis of Kant as epistemological "narratologist" concludes — is viewed by Colletti to belong exclusively to the field of ethics, which, unlike Kant, he dismisses from the field of cognition. Colletti, in other words, coherently reads Kant's speculative theory as the most successful epistemology of science because he knowingly isolates it from the same problem which Althusser fails to regard as a problem at all: the issue of the necessity of real, practical knowledge within Kant's system, a necessity addressed by the explicitly epistemological as well as moral function of the concept of "freedom" in the Second Critique.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• CONTENTS, pg. vii
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, pg. ix
• 1. Introduction, pg. 3
• 2. Kant and Narrative Theory, pg. 21
• 3. The Coloring of Relations: Die Wahlverwandtschaften as Farbenlehre, pg. 88
• 4. Austen: The Persuasions of Sensibility and Sense, pg. 141
• 5. Lucien and Julien: Poetry and Thought in the Form of the Novel, pg. 188
• 6. The Determination of Pierre, Or the Ambiguities, pg. 228
• 7. Remembering Swann, pg. 262
• Coda, pg. 307
• Bibliography, pg. 309
• INDEX, pg. 327