Modes and Forms of Narrative Narcissism: Introduction of a Typology

Modes and Forms of Narrative Narcissism: Introduction of a Typology

LINDA HUTCHEON

The text reprinted here belongs to chapter 1 of Narcissistic Narrative ( 1980). In it, Linda Hutcheon underlines the intrinsic fictionality and artificiality of all kinds of narrative, from the classic realist novel to the nouveau nouveau roman, and sets out to define what she calls 'narcissistic narrative' as the kind that transforms the process of its own making into part of the shared pleasure of reading. Hutcheon's narcissistic narrative is more or less equivalent to such terms as Robert Scholes's 'fabulation'. William H. Gass's 'metafiction', Raymond Federman's 'surfiction' and Ronald Binn's 'anti-novel', all of which were coined to account for the widespread tendency to introversion and self-referentiality of much postmodernist fiction. Hutcheon's contention is that narcissistic or metafictional narrative is as mimetic as any other narrative genre, including classic realism. Central to her definition of the new genre is a rejection of the traditional definition of parody as a necessary movement away from mimesis and towards mockery, ridicule or mere destruction. Following the formalist theorists, she defines parody as the result of a conflict between realistic motivation and an aesthetic motivation which has become weak and obvious, resulting in the unmasking and defamiliarization of the system. Deconstruction of the old conventions does not, however, involve destruction of the genre, but rather (as John Barth contended in ''The Literature of Exhaustion'' and ''The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodernist Fiction'') brings about a revitalization of the old 'exhausted' forms, their transformation into a new literature of 'replenishment'.

Hutcheon also undertakes to refine Jean Ricardou's typology of metaficational modes. She proposes a typology based on a fourfold axis: overt and covert narcissism; linguistic and diegetic narcissism. Analysis of these basic theoretical modes or metaphoric patterns is complemented by an awareness of the central role of the reader, who is forced to control, organize and interpret the self-reflective text actively and effortfully. Hutcheon's taxonomy, like all such structuralist models, inevitably becomes problematic in many practical cases of analysis, but it remains useful as a measuring grid for metafictional structures.

[. . . .] If self-awareness is a sign of the genre's disintegration, then the novel began its decline at birth. [. . .]

What narcissistic narrative does do in flaunting, in baring its fictional and linguistic systems to the reader's view, is to transform the process of making, of poiesis, into part of the shared pleasure of reading. [. . .]

Despite both the hostile accusations of 'preening narcissism' of many reviews, and the increasing number of self-reflective novels that appear, very little systematic study has been devoted thus far to determining the types, much less the causes of such literary introversion. [. . .]

Jean Ricardou conveniently provides us with a horizontal and vertical auto-representational cross ¹ on which to crucify -systematically -- metafictional modes. [. . . ] Ricardou presents a system which is structured on two types of self-reflectiveness, or, to use his term, auto-representation -- vertical and horizontal. The vertical variety is interdimensional, operating between the 'fiction' (what is said) and the 'narration' (how it is said). Horizontal autorepresentation is intradimensional. There are two sub-groups within these types, yielding four separate modes; (1) 'auto-reprsentation verticale, descendante, expressive': here the 'fiction' is in control of the 'narration,' as it is traditionally in realistic texts in which the referential dimension dominates; (2) 'auto-reprsentation verticale, ascendante, productrice': this is in operation when it is the 'narration' that controls, or at least influences, the 'fiction.' This is what Ricardou earlier ² had labelled as a 'littrature du faire' or 'scripturalisme,' for the text points to itself allegorically or metaphorically as a written text, as an active production of writer and reader; (3) 'auto-representation horizontale, rfrentielle, productrice' operates on the level of the 'fiction' only, in the form of structural event repetition, mise en abyme, or perhaps microcosmic sabotages of chronology and suspense; (4) 'auto-representation horizontale, littrale, productrice' functions on the 'narration' level alone and indeed the 'narration' becomes the 'fiction.'

There are at least, three potential problems with Ricardou's structure here. In the first place, it is hard to see how his initial category qualifies as any kind of auto-representation except in his example of alliteration, a not particularly important technique in narrative. He does separate it from the others by its pejorative label of 'expressive' (as opposed to the modern 'productrice'), but one must still question its usefulness as a category of auto-representation. The second limitation of this system lies in Ricardou's lack of distinction between texts which are self-conscious about their diegetic or narrative processes and those which are linguistically self-reflective. This causes distinct problems in Ricardou's own analyses of, for example, Raymond Roussel, in which he confuses and combines the author's generative linguistic procd with the different but equally selfreflective structural narrative mirrorings, a confusion he senses but does not clarify in his more recent writing on Roussel. ³ Both language and narrative structures are included in his category of 'narration,' but some texts -- such as John Barth Chimera -- reveal their own diegetic operations, while others -- Ricardou's own fiction -concentrate on their own linguistic functioning. It is true that, in the latter case, language often works to order diegetic modes, but as this is not necessarily so in the reverse instance (that narrative structures determine language), there would seem to be a need for a distinction between the two.

The third difficulty with Ricardou's cross of horizontal and vertical auto-representative categories lies in its very neatness, its a priori deductive nature. It has already been suggested that its fearful symmetry is rather questionable in allowing (or rather, requiring) the presence of what he calls the 'auto-repr6sentation verticale, descendante, expressive.' However, one would still be left with a pleasantly structured triangle of types, were it not for the fact that there seem to be more kinds of metafictional self-consciousness than it can account for. There are texts which are, as has been mentioned, diegetically self-aware, that is, conscious of their own narrative processes. Others are linguistically self-reflective, demonstrating their awareness of both the limits and the powers of their own language. In the first case, the text presents itself as diegesis, as narrative; in the second, it is unobfuscated text, language.

A further distinction must be made, however, within these two modes, for each can be present in at least two forms, what one might term an overt and a covert one. Overt forms of narcissism are present in texts in which the self-consciousness and self-reflection are clearly evident, usually explicitly thematized or even allegorized within the 'fiction.' In its covert form, however, this process would be structuralized, internalized, actualized. Such a text would, in fact, be self-reflective, but not necessarily self-conscious. One is left again with a four-part system, this time of overt diegetic and linguistic types of literary narcissism, and their covert counterparts, both diegetic and linguistic. In order to clarify and expand this system and to see its diachronic as well as synchronic implications, it is necessary to deal with each mode and form in turn.

In its most overt form the serf-consciousness of a text often takes the shape of an explicit thematization -- through plot allegory, narrative metaphor, or even nartational commentary. This latter possibility opens up again the entire question of the modernity and origins of recent metafiction. It has already been suggested that these new manifestations are rooted in a tradition of literary selfawareness that dates back, through Romantic inner mirroring to the eighteenth-century garrulous, guiding narrator to Don Quixote's Cide Hamete Benengeli. That is to say, that there would appear to be a developing tradition of narcissism, rather than a definite rupture out of which sprang metafiction. [. . .] Perhaps each novel has always had within itself the seeds of a 'narcissistic' reading, of an interpretation which would make it an allegorical or metaphorical exploration of the process of articulating a literary world.

This admittedly appears more convincing a speculation if one does accept Don Quixote (rather than Pamela, the voyage tale, the fabliaux, etc.) as the first novel, since its parodic intent is essential to its formal identity. The Russian formalist concept of parody as an autonomous art, based on the discovery of 'process' would therefore be of interest to the study of the novel's dialectic growth. Parody, according to the formalist theoreticians, is the result of a conflict between realistic motivation and an aesthetic motivation which has become weak and been made obvious. The consequence is the unmasking of the system or of the creative process whose function has given way to mechanical convention. It is as if a dialectic were established, as if this parodied material were backgrounded to the new forms and thus a formal synthesis effected. If a new parodic form does not develop when an old one becomes insufficiently motivated, the old form tends to degenerate into pure convention; witness the popular traditional novel, the best-seller.

Another operation is at work in metafictional parody, however, and this the formalists called 'defamiliarization.' The laying bare of literary devices in metafiction brings to the reader's attention those formal elements of which, through over-familiarization, he has become unaware. Through his recognition of the backgrounded material, new demands for attention and active involvement are brought to bear on the act of reading. [. . . ]

[Thus,] one finds John Fowles narrator in The French Lieutenant's Woman parodying the conventions of the Victorian novel -- but doing so as a means to a new and relevant, modern synthetic form. Yet this play could well be seen as the very essence of the novel genre: Quixote imitates Amadis of Gaul, Cervantes pretends to be Don Quixote. [. . .]

Indeed, the techniques of the 'littrature citationneue' can be seen as both parodic and generative. Quotations from one text, when inserted in the context of another, are the same and yet new and different, a microcosmic version of T. S. Eliot's concept of 'tradition' in literature. The parodic creation of new fiction through the rewriting of old is itself the narcissistic subject of metafictional parody in Borges' tale of Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote.

Parody is, therefore, an exploration of difference and similarity; in metafiction it invites a more literary reading, a recognition of literary codes. But it is wrong to see the end of this process as mockery, ridicule, or mere destruction. ⁴ Metafiction parodies and imitates as a way to a new form which is just as serious and valid, as a synthesis, as the form it dialectically attempts to surpass. It does not necessarily involve a movement away from mimesis, however, unless by that term is meant only a rigid object-imitation or behaviouristic-realistic motivation.

A text may self-consciously present its own creative processes, perhaps as a model of man's exercise of language and meaning production. And, it may do so, as Jonathan Culler suggests in Structuralist Poetics, with an eye to disarming attacks on its vraisemblance by admitting its artificiality. However, it might also be done in order to make a specific demand upon the reader, a demand for recognition of a new code, for a more open reading that entails a parodic synthesis of back- and fore-grounded elements.

There is yet another reason, of course, why modern self-informing fiction is not anti-mimetic. The 'psychological realism' of early twentieth-century fiction, made possible by Romantic selfconsciousness, expanded (again through a kind of dialectic movement) the meaning of novelistic mimesis to include process as well as product. For many social or philosophical reasons, Joyce, Proust, Virginia Woolf, Pirandello, Svevo, Gide, and many others began to question the increasingly narrow view of fictional realism that had grown out of the naturalism of the preceding century. [. . . ]

Their new 'subjective realism' had two major effects on the reified novelistic tradition of the preceding century that are significant here, especially for overt forms of narcissism. The once important detailed presentation of external reality became somewhat atrophied or, at least, stylized as the focus of attention shifted to the character's inner processes -- imaginative and psychological. Secondly, the role of the reader began to change. Reading was no longer easy, no longer a comfortable controlled experience; the reader was now forced to control, to organize, to interpret. [. . .]

What, then, is the difference between this type of autorepresentation and what has here been named modern metafiction? It is not a matter of date, for William Saroyan's self-consciousness is in the service of traditional realism in stories such as ''Seventy Thousand Assyrians'' or ''Myself Upon the Earth,'' and it is not quite what has here been called overt narcissism. [. . . ] One difference seems to lie in the role allotted to the reader. In its concern about writers and about novels, the 'expressionistic' novel focuses on its own idea; ⁵ the main interest is in the writing process and its product. In both the covert and overt forms of metafictional narcissism, this focus does not shift, so much as broaden, to include a parallel process of equal importance to the text's actualization -- that of reading. The reader is explicitly or implicitly forced to face his responsibility toward the text, that is, toward the novelistic world he is creating through the accumulated fictive referents of literary language. As the novelist actualizes the world of his imagination through words, so the reader -- from those same words -- manufactures in reverse a literary universe that is as much his creation as it is the novelist's. This near equation of the acts of reading and writing is one of the concerns that sets modern metafiction apart from previous novelistic self-consciousness.

It is certainly true that from its origins the novel has displayed an interest in moulding its reader, but few earlier texts win grant or demand of the reader, his freedom. Tristram Shandy constantly worries about his reader's qualifications and needs. In Tom Jones, it is almost as if the reader's primary relationship were meant to be with the guiding narrator-writer, rather than with the characters. Rovani and Manzoni chide their female readers; Diderot is quite amusingly rude to his presumed impatient readers. The epistolary novel form, in general, explicitly places the reader as letter reader within the structure of the novel, a convention neatly parodied by Gide in Les Faux-monnayeurs: everyone in that novel reads the letters and journals of others, forestalling and defamiliarizing many possible reader responses en route.

This earlier kind of thematizing and structuralizing of the reading role is close to that of overt narcissism, but without the necessary mirroring (the reflecting, as of mirrors, in reverse) of the reading process in that of writing. For instance, in Uno, nessuno, e centomila, Pirandello's narrator addresses the reader as if in a soliloquy, bringing him almost onto the stage, as if to invite (but fail at) dialogue. The crisis in human relations that is dramatized in the novel through the characters, is also presented, through the reader, in the form and structure, but the parallelism of the acts of writing and reading is not suggested by Pirandello. [. . . ] Metafiction, however, seems aware of the fact that it (like all fiction, of course) actually has no existence apart from that constituted by the inward act of reading which counterpoints the externalized act of writing.

In the overt form of narcissism, several techniques are employed which are compatible with Ricardou's 'auto-reprsentation horizontale, rfrentielle, productrice' and also with the 'autoreprsentation verticale, ascendante, productrice' -- that is to say, the use of mise en abyme, allegory, metaphor, microcosm to shift the focus from the 'fiction' to the 'narration' by either making the 'narration' into the very substance of the novel's content, or by undermining the traditional coherence of the 'fiction' itself, in the latter case.

The distinction between the two modes of narcissism within this overt form is necessary at this stage. In the diegetic mode, the reader is made aware of the fact that he too, in reading, is actively creating a fictional universe. Often a parodied, backgrounded narrative code will guide his awareness of this fact. In The French Lieutenant's Woman, for instance, Fowles's freedom-granting core plot involving Sarah and Charles is an allegory of the freedom granted the reader, the thematized reader, by another character, the narrator. [. . .]

Other overtly diegetic narcissistic texts, such as Coover 'The Magic Poker,' are also explicitly aware of their status as literary artifacts, of their narrative and world-creating processes, and of the necessary presence of the reader: 'perhaps tomorrow I will invent Chicago and Jesus Christ and the history of the moon. Just as I have invented you, dear reader, while lying here in the afternoon sun.' ⁶ However, the second mode within this form, the linguistic, operates self-consciously at a somewhat more basic stage. In diegetic narcissism, the text displays itself as narrative, as the gradual building of a fictive universe complete with character and action. In the linguistic mode, however, the text would actually show its building blocks -- the very language whose referents serve to construct that imaginative world. That'hat these referents are fictive and not real is assured by the generic code instituted by the word 'novel' on the cover. Mailer Armies of the Night is deliberately schizoid for this reason: it is subtitled both 'the novel as history' and 'history as a novel.' Some linguistic referents in the text will be functional in building up plot and character; others may seem gratuitous but will actually operate towards the creation of what Barthes has called an 'effet de rel.' ⁷ [. . .]

In order to comprehend the language of fiction, the reader must share with the writer certain recognizable codes -- social, literary, linguistic, etc. Many texts thematize, through the characters and plot, the inadequacy of language in conveying feeling, in communicating thought, or even fact. Often this theme is introduced as an allegory of the frustration of the writer when faced with the need to present, only through language, a world of his making that must be actualized through the act of reading: Hilary Burd is not the only 'word child' of Iris Murdoch's novel of that name. Other texts, on the other hand, thematize the overwhelming power and potency of words, their ability to create a world more real than the empirical one of our experience. Paolo Volponi La macchina mondiale is only one instance of this quite common variety of overt linguistic narcissism.

In both the linguistic and diegetic modes the focus is as much on the creative processes of the reader as it is on those of the writer: 'Reader . . . we have roles to play, thou and I: you are the doctor (washing your hands between hours), and L I am, I think, the nervous dreary patient. I am free associating, brilliantly, brilliantly, to put you into the problem. Or for fear of boring you: which?' ⁸ Overtly narcissistic novels place fictionahty, structure, or language at their content's core. They play with different ways of ordering, and allow (or force) the reader to learn how he makes sense of this literary world (if not his own real one). Such texts are not outside the mimetic code. Twentieth-century realism allows for a mimesis of dynamic process, as well as static product, or object. And it is not the rise of structuralism that has brought this about, as some feel, ⁹ but rather metafiction or fiction itself. [. . .]

What has always been a truism of fiction, though rarely made conscious, is brought to the fore in modern texts: the making of fictive worlds and the constructive, creative functioning of language itself are now self-consciously shared by author and reader. The latter is no longer asked merely to recognize that fictional objects are 'like life'; he is asked to participate in the creation of worlds and of meaning, through language. He cannot avoid this call to action for he is caught in that paradoxical position of being forced by the text to acknowledge the fictionality of the world he too is creating, yet his very participation involves him intellectually, creatively, and perhaps even affectively in a human act that is very real, that is, in fact, a kind of metaphor of his daily efforts to 'make sense' of experience.

[. . .] The reader and writer are engaged in acts which are parallel, if reversed in direction, for both make fictive worlds in and through the actual functioning of language. This is the responsibility, the almost existentialist freedom in responsibility, that metafiction offers and requires of the reader. [. . .]

Just as overt narcissism forces a consideration of the origin and 'newness' of metafictional technique, so any discussion of this covert form of literary introversion raises the other important question, that of the outer limits of the novel as a narrative mimetic genre. How far can auto-representation go before it becomes non- or antirepresentation? In order to answer this the two different modes of covert narcissism must be examined.

On this covert level, the self-reflection is implicit; that is to say, it is structuralized, internalized within the text. As a result, it is not necessarily self-conscious. This alters the form it takes and the form of the analysis. Since Ricardou does not separate the diegetic and the linguistic modes, he would probably have to group both of these under his category of 'auto-reprsentation horizontale, littrale, productrice,' for they both operate on the level of his 'narration.' Since the reader is not usually addressed directly here as he might be in the overt form, it is more difficult to generalize concerning the various shapes these two covert modes might adopt. However, one possible approach would be to take note of recurring structural models found internalized in this kind of metafiction.

On the diegetic level there are many models, or what might be termed paradigms, that are discernible. Among these are the following: 1) The detective story (the written plot and the plot to kill). ¹⁰ Based on the general pattern of the puzzle or the enigma, this literary form is itself a very self-conscious one: in fact, the reader of a murder mystery comes to expect the presence of a detective-story writer within the story itself. [. . .] The murder mystery plot also has exiremely strong and obvious structural conventions. There is a crime; it will be solved because of both the characters' psychological consistency and the detective's slightly superior powers. The incriminating evidence is within the text; some details might seem in the end irrelevant to the plot, but they are all functional, even if only in leading the reader astray. However, the cerebral intellectual triumphs of a Sherlock Holmes or a Nero Wolfe, who logically interpret the clues and discover the solution to the enigmas, are in effect the reader's triumphs. [. . .] The hermeneutic gaps of such fiction are explicitly made textually functional. [. . .] 2) Fantasy. Covert narcissistic texts share with all fantasy literature the ability to force the reader (not overtly ask him) to create a fictive imaginative world separate from the empirical one in which he lives. [. . .] Whereas in overt narcissism the reader is explicitly told that what he is reading is imaginary, that the referents of the text's language are fictive, in fantasy (and the covert forms of narcissism for which it acts as model) the fictiveness of the referents is axiomatic. [. . .] 3) Game Structure. At the Cerisy conference of 1971, Robbe-Grillet claimed that all his work was an attempt to bring to fight the structures of 'jeu' and the ideology that its gratuity entafls. ¹¹ The nouveaux romanciers have certainly been the most outspoken in their use of the game model. In their fiction, the concepts of codes, or of rules, known and followed in the acts of writing and reading (and which become ends unto themselves) can be found. The following of these rules, which places the emphasis on the process being enacted and not the product finally attained, can also be seen, however, as a demand made on the reader by the narcissistic use of the actualized game model in general. This is true in texts which differ radically in effect: from the baseball game structure of Robert Coover The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop. to Sollers' chess board in Drame to Sanguineti's more explicit dice shooting by the reader in order to arrange the 111 parts of Il giuoco dell'oca. [. . .] 4) The Erotic. All fictional texts attempt to tantalize, to seduce the reader. As Roland Barthes has suggested in both S/Z and the more recent Le Plaisir du texte, they also seek to escape the desired possession. The essentially erotic relationship of text and reader or of writer and reader is one of the overtly thematized subjects of John Barth Chimera. But the erotic model can be actualized covertly as well. The act of reading becomes both literally sensual and metaphorically sexual in its process of uniting 'all the polarities' in Leonard Cohen Beautiful Losers. [. . .] In Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife, William Gass compares the loneliness of writing to that of sexual encounter. His 'heroine' also invents worlds (and parodies existing literary ones) during intercourse; she sees herself in Beckettian terms as 'imagination imagining itself imagine.' [. . .]

These four diegetic models are not intended as exclusive and complete, but only as four already observed models or metaphoric patterns that are structurally internalized in serf-reflective texts. [. . .]

The only type of narcissistic text left to be considered is the covertly linguistic variety. Here part of Ricardou's intradimensional (at the level of 'narration') auto-representation category ('horizontale, littrale, productrice') comes into play. The models here are less easily discussed in generalized non-textual terms. One, however, would be the riddle or joke, a form which directs the reader's attention to language itself, to its potential for semantic duplicity. Language can both convey and conceal meaning. Other generative models are the pun and the anagram. Saussure felt that anagrammatic lay existed in early Latin and Greek texts. [. . .] Such linguistic play can be found too in Hugo ('Gal, amant de la reine, alla, tout magnanime' yielding 'Galamment de l'arne la Tour Magne, Nimes') and in Jules Verne La Jangada or Bourses de voyage ('Rosam angelum letorum' yields 'Rose a mang l'omelette au rhum'). But rarely before the 'textes de jeunesse' of Raymond Roussel did anagrammatic play function as the sole forming model of the 'fiction.' [. . .]

Joyce foregrounding of language in Finnegans Wake is perhaps the real forbear of the nouveau nouveau romancier's creation of 'fiction' in the space between words. In the early Roussel, language begets language which begets a verisimilar narrative 'fiction.' In Joyce, as in Ricardou, language begets language which is the 'fiction.' The difficulty in reading these texts bears witness to the increased demands made on the reader. The creative dynamism and the delight in infinite interpretative possibilities that once were the property of the writer are now shared by the reader in the process of concretizing the text he is reading. In overt narcissism this new role is taught; it is thematized. In the covert form, it is actualized.

This mirroring in reverse of the creative process again raised the important issue regarding the limits of the novel genre. At what stage does auto-representation become anti-representation? [. . .]

The decentralizing of the traditional realistic interest of fiction, away from the story told to the story telling, to the functioning of language and of larger diegetic structures, is important to the nouveau nouveau roman. Language becomes material with which to work, the object of certain transforming operations which give it meaning. There is a self-conscious recognition of the multiple contextual significances yielded by textual selection and organization. As such, this 'new new novel' can remain within the novel genre, since these are the very operations or processes that form the link between reading and writing -- that is, between life and art, reality and fiction -- that seems to be a minimal requirement for a mimetic genre. [. . .]

Notes

Pricksongs and Descants ( New York: New American Library, 1969), p. 40.

''L'Effet de rel,'' Communications 11 ( 1968): 84-9.

DONALD BARTHELME, ''Florence Green Is 81,'' in Come Back, Dr. Caligari ( 1961: reprinted, Boston: Little, Brown and Col., 1964), p. 4.

CULLER, Structuralist Poetics, p. 238.

In Thomas Pynchon V., one of the characters, Herbert Stencil, has the function of plot-building, linking, connecting. But here, the plot-making instinct reveals itself as paranoia, perhaps another structural metaphor for diegetic narcissism.

Nouveau Roman: hier, aujourdhui 1 ( Paris: Union Gnrale d'ditions, 10/18, 1972):127.