I Fell in Love With Narratology or How I Got My Geek On

During this past winter, as you know, I took an Introduction to Literary Theory as the first class in my online Masters in Literature program. It was pretty awesome despite the fact I had to read Henry James' Turn of the Screw and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, two books with which I am not at all enamored.

For my final paper in the course, I could choose to analyze either of the books through any of the literary theories studied. I knew I wanted to use Narratology which, as the name implies, is the study of narrative structure; specifically, this theory focuses on the commonalities between all stories. Individual texts are read and analyzed in an effort to identify these commonalities (Barry 214-215). Vladimir Propp, for example, analyzed hundreds of Russian fairy tales and compiled a list of 31 functions by separating out the component parts of the fairy tales (72) (Barry 218-220). These functions are “the basic building blocks” of the narratives within the studied fairy tales (Barry 220). While Propp focused on how the narrative is structured, Gerard Genette tried to analyze how the story is told, posing questions such as from what point of view is the story told, who is telling the story, and how is the story packaged (Barry 227). This type of analysis fascinates me. How disparate parts work together to create meaning is something of a passion of mine whether we are talking about literature or film.

Choosing between James and Conrad was difficult, but I decided that the narrative structure of Heart of Darkness was the teensiest bit more interesting to me. Peter Brooks calls Heart of Darkness “a detective story gone modernist: a tale of inconclusive solutions to crimes of problematic status” (238). This “inconclusive” and “problematic” text has for over one hundred years, intrigued, angered, and confused readers. And damned if it didn't do the same to me.

These emotions can, in part, be attributed to the authorial choices Conrad makes regarding narrative elements, and that is how I chose my paper topic. Through a narratological analysis of Heart of Darkness, I specified the narratological elements, analyzed how they affect reader interpretation, and explored how they contribute to the highly ambiguous nature of the story. I tried to prove that Conrad uses narrative techniques to obfuscate any singular, identifiable meaning in the text. Damn that man. Damn him but good.

I felt pretty successful with the paper, and I received a high A on the paper, so things look good. My professor actually suggested I develop the paper a bit further with a few more sources and submit it for publication. He thinks I have a pretty good chance of getting it published. Very flattering. I'm still wavering on whether or not I'm going to actually do it.

What this assignment did was give me a love of narratology, a literary theory that is certainly not currently in vogue like feminist theory, gender studies, post-colonial, and the so on. I even had a hard time finding sources about narratology outside of the most awesome Mieke Bal, a Dutch cultural theorist, who is pretty seriously awesome. Just a few of the roles she's had: Professor of Semiotics and Women's Studies, Chair of Comparative Literature, Professor of Visual and Cultural Studies, Professor of Literary Theory, and Founding Director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. She has published over 30 books on a wide variety of subjects and she's also a video artist. Seriously, she's who I want to be when I grow up (you know, if I had, like, ambition).

I suppose I'm just sort of sharing with this post, and it does give you the briefest of introductions to narratology and Mieke Bal, so maybe you learned a little something. :) 

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I have the ability to apply narratology to the works I'm reading for my new course, Graduate Studies in Medieval Literature.

Barry, Peter. “Narratology.” Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. 3rd ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. 214-238. Print.

Brooks, Peter. "An Unreadable Report: Conrad's Heart of Darkness." Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1984. 238-263. Print.

Chatman, Seymour. “The Structure of Narrative Transmission.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 97-124. Print.

Propp, Vladimir. “Morphology of the Fairy Tale.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 72-75. Print.