The narrative construction of reality - Narrative Intelligence - page 52

than referring to “reality,” may in fact create or constitute it, as when “fiction”
creates a “world” of its own - Joyce's “Dublin” where places like St.Stephen's
Green or Grafton Street, for all that they bear familiar labels, are no less real or
imaginary than the characters he invents to inhabit them. In a perhaps deeper
sense, indeed, it may be that the plights and the intentional states depicted in
“successful” fiction sensitize us to experience our own lives in ways to match.
Which suggests, of course, that the distinction between narrative fiction and
narrative truth is nowhere nearly as obvious as common sense and usage would
have us believe. Why comon sense insists practically upon such a sharp distinc-
tion being drawn is quite another problem, perhaps related to the requirement
of “bearing witness.” But that lies beyond the scope of this essay.
What does concern us, rather, is why the distinction is intrinsically dif-
ficult to make and sustain. Surely one reason lies in what I earlier called the
hermeneutic composability of narrative itself. For such composability creates
problems for the conventional distinction between “sense” and “reference.”
That is, the “sense” of a story as a whole may alter the reference and even the
referentiality of its component parts. For a story's components, insofar as they
become its “functions” or captives, lose their status as singular and definite
referring expressions. St. Stephen's Green becomes, as it were, a type rather
than a token, a class of locales including the locus so named in Dublin. It is
an invented referent not entirely free of the meanings imparted by the real
place, just as a story that requires a “betrayal” as one of its constituent func-
tions, can convert an ordinarily mundane event recounted into something that
seems compellingly like a betrayal. And this, of course, is what makes circum-
stantial evidence so deadly and so often inadmissible in courts of law. Given
hermeneutic composability, referring expressions within narrative are always
problematic, never free of the narrative as a whole. What is meant by the “nar-
rative as a whole”? This leads us to the so-called “law of genres,” to which we
turn next.
7. Genericness. We all know that there are recognizable “kinds” of narrative:
farce, black comedy, tragedy, the Bildungsroman , romance, satire, travel saga,
etc. But as Alastair Fowler so nicely puts it, “genre is much less a pigeonhole
than a pigeon” (Fowler 1982: 37). That is to say, we can speak of genre both as
a property of a text or as a way of comprehending narrative. Mary McCarthy
wrote short stories in several literary genres. She later gathered some of them
together in an order of the increasing age of the chief female protagonist, added
some interstitial “evaluation” sections, and published the lot as an autobiogra-
phy entitled, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood . Thereafter (and doubtless to her