Q: Will Life Survive on Earth?

WHADD’YA MEAN, “NARRATIVE?”

Q: Will life survive on earth?

A: Life will survive. We may not.

(James Lovelock, inventor of the Gaia

hypothesis, to an interviewer.)

There’s a certain technique in writing which strongly resembles both a Net-search and a consultation at the Delphic oracle. You have a topic of interest. You try to formulate a question that will draw a pertinent answer from the consciously-inaccessible matrix, Muse, source of inspiration, somewhere in your brain. Then you feed in the query, sit back and wait. In a while, the search engine announces a number of hits – or no hits – on the topic you chose. Not necessarily intelligible, mind you. (One pictures the Athenians tramping away down that precipitous road, scratching their heads and muttering, “Wooden walls, you say anything about walls? Musta spelt Persians wrong. And what’s it got to do with Salamis?”[1]) So when I began this article I asked my internal Net/oracle, “What is the future of narrative?” But for answer I kept getting this short and crusty, “Whadda ya mean, narrative?”

Bear with me, gentle interlocutor. We won’t re-invent the wheel of narrative theory, let alone the taxonomies of narratology. We are just going to avoid the play-full linguistic confusion that threatens if I don’t explain, as I had to for the oracle, precisely what I mean, limiting the parameters in approved Net fashion, by “the nature and function of narrative.”

Ready-made answers naturally abound. Aristotle, literally writing the book on narrative theory: the “fable” for narrative poetry should “concern a single whole and complete action with a beginning, middle and end” (23.12-15) (51). Picture the ensuing two millennia of modifications for yourself. A 1990 work on narrative theory lists thirty-six recent predecessors in America alone (Chatman, 205.) Let us recommence with Alexander Marshack, in 1972: “’Story’ refers to the nature of the communication of meaning, and even more, to a certain sort of meaning which is time-factored, relational, and concerns process” (cited Roemer, 395). Throw in Todorov’s well-known but clearer description from 1977: “An ‘ideal’ narrative begins with a stable situation which is disturbed by some ... force ... by the action of a force directed in the opposite direction, the equilibrium is re-established” (111). Then Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, assembling the narratology primer for New Accents in 1983: “By narrative fiction I mean the narration of a succession of fictional events” (2). And Steven Cohan and Linda M. Shires, updating in 1988: “A narrative recounts a story, a series of events in a temporal sequence” (1).

Certain patterns emerge: there is a play between “narrative,” “fiction” and “story” – both Roemer’s and Cohan and Shires’ title is Telling Stories. Rimmon-Kenan refers to fiction, Aristotle takes for granted that narrative poetry has a “fable,” in both senses. As important is the consensus on temporality: beginning, middle and end, process, temporal sequence, succession of events. Whatever its other attributes, then, a narrative requires sequence. It may be convoluted in all sorts of fancy ways with even fancier narratological names (I’m a sucker for parataxis, myself), but sequence is its sine qua non. “The man stood on the moon.” Statement. “The man stood on the moon. He said ‘One short step...’” Narrative.

But the play between narrative, story and fiction also implicates re-counting, re-presentation: the past prospect Roemer insists on with “[e]very story is over before it begins” (3), the possibilities for mediation, subjectivity, ideology and all the other baggage carried in modern theory by “representation.” The tie of “fiction” to “story” reaches “history” on the one hand, the reputed summit of objective and truthful world-narration, and on the other, the “films, television shows, myths, anecdotes, songs, music videos, comics, paintings, advertisements ... that structure the meanings by which a culture lives” (Cohan and Shires 1). Stories are fiction, representation, therefore ideology. But if they shape the meanings of a culture, they are implicated not only in its cognitive maps, but in the contests that structure those maps: the operations of power.

Yes, another cliche, gentle etc. Foucault, of course, instituted – in both senses – the idea of discourses that speak us. Donna Haraway and Evelyn Fox Keller, among many, show how the branches of science, that supposedly most objective of pursuits and most powerful of current hegemonic discourses, internally contest and externally impose the “narratives of scientific fact” (Haraway, 5) that “explain” our material reality. Less famously, Kate Ellis illustrates how the story of the virtuous but uncloseted heroine in Old Gothic rewrote Paradise Lost and naturalized the rise of the English bourgeoisie as “history” (33-52). Tell the best story, and you run the world. In the most literal sense.

I intended a nice cleancut division between “nature” and “function,” but they have already blurred. Narrative, then, is what it does. It re-counts events, re-presents the past, structures meaning, mediates reality. And more. The newest theoretical positions are much taken with the notion of constituted subjectivities, and in that constitution, narrative is central. To Rimmon-Kenan in 1996 narrative offers “a complex access” both to the possibility of “constituting a self” (130) and to “reality” (131). And not just in fiction: we tell our own stories, re-counting our lives to make ourselves. We understand oppression by its narration, from Sally Morgan’s My Place to Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Nor does it stop with individuals, and nor is Roemer right to consider every story over before it starts. If Marxist and Enlightenment metanarratives have been discredited, it is constantly retold, updated, unending story which maintains that fragile, fractured, slippery concept, national identity.

This drifts us to the present-tense stories narrated by prolonged media coverage, from the World Cup to the O.J. Simpson trial to the Vietnam and Gulf Wars. On this scale, the narrative of nations is concerned not only with identity but with the global struggle for power, and especially its subtler aspects of face and standing in the international community. Spectators in my remote part of Australia read the US-Iran match in the World Cup both as a return bout for the Teheran embassy debacle, and a rematch of the Gulf War. As much as the fans who achieved rapprochement on-screen, they collapsed world politics onto the soccer field, made the result a (momentary) happy ever after, and found in it a complex satisfaction of desires: cosmetic peacemaking, repaid debts; but also a superpower symbolically humbled, with the underdog victorious in a “safe” field for such a triumph. Yet if this event had a past, it was by no means a future’s closure. Rather it functioned as one more episode in the soap opera of The World Out There.

This view derives from Tania Modleski’s formulation of soap opera as the closureless story of married women (88-91), but it could include the reception of many popular films, where every viewer understands a sequel is possible. And as Rosalind Coward long since recognised (163), there is the soap opera of The House of Windsor, which has just closed its Princess Phase, beginning in 1983 with the Wedding of the Year, culminating in 1997 with the Funeral of the Century. But, I hear you saying, gentle writer, what has all this well-trampled generalization to do with the future of narrative, at least within the parameters which that call for papers framed?

Firstly, it takes us back to Lovelock’s retort. On the terms of the miniature survey above, narrative is implicated in the foundations of discourse, subjectivity, nationality, power. The fashionable sense that postmodernism has destroyed “narrative,” turns out to be another slippage between narrative and fiction – in the bookseller’s sense – or narrative as historical metanarrative, or as something with a beginning, middle, and, particularly, end. But narrative as constructed above will be around so long as nations seek identity or individuals tell more than one-line jokes. To paraphrase Lovelock, “Narrative will survive. We may not.”

Lovelock’s first sentence explains the original glitch: my Net/oracle stumbled over the assumption that narrative was limited to literary “fiction.” The second instantly raises another question: Hey, Kemosabe, whadda you mean, “we?”

With the broader sense of narrative re-established, the Net/oracle was quite ready to focus on specifics. So let’s consider the future of narrative in “fiction” – bookseller’s sense – and let’s limit that to the popular genres, because isn’t that what this journal’s all about? No high-flying excursions into postmodern or metafiction, and no films either. Which makes “we” the writers, readers, critical analysts and publishers who depend on the market for popular fiction. And avoiding the cultural-studies mare’s nest about what is and is not “popular”[2], let’s limit popular fiction to that Siamese couplet of SF and fantasy.

Here my narrative tried frantically to bifurcate. Even as it burned to run after theorists like Brooks Landon and Veronica Hollinger, it also itched to wallow in the implications of electronic publishing, interactive readership, Net authors, roleplaying spinoffs, subversion of the capitalist system in the current book-production structure, even, twisting back onto theory, The Future of the Book. “Book” again with its slippery polysemy, from printed object to novel to verbal as opposed to visual media. Let’s follow the traditional, dare I say phallogocentric structures. Let’s do the reputedly more intellectual twin, science fiction, and let’s take the theoreticians first.

Veronica Hollinger titled a recent paper “Future/Present: The End of Science Fiction.” As she says, the “end” of SF has been proclaimed at regular intervals ever since about 1926. It was the “end” when SF left the magazines for paperback, the “end” when soft overtook supposedly hard SF, the “end” when women (always already) entered the field, as in Charles Platt’s ‘80s diatribe on the rape of SF. For Hollinger, however, science fiction in the ‘90s is not merely “undergoing an identity crisis” but is about to suffer a sea change from “genre to discursive field” (1-2).

Hollinger distinguishes this “collapse” from commercial viability (2). In book and film, the genre is flourishing, and in becoming a discursive field, science fiction, like Gothic in the nineteenth century, “circulates everywhere”(5). But simultaneously, SF has lost its generic marker as a “future-oriented extrapolation” (5) because its future is now the metaphors by which the present thinks itself (3-5). Illustrating this very postmodern perspective, Hollinger cites Arthur Clarke’s new best-seller, 3001: The Final Odyssey, which is “virtually plot free.” If plot is “what drives the heart of the conventional realist text” (2), then

The almost complete lack of narrative drive in Clarke’s novel makes it paradigmatic of the conceptual stasis which has overtaken genre science fiction within the context of contemporary culture. (3)

There are some intriguing correlations here: “narrative drive” is tied to realism, nowadays equated with “traditional narrative” – explicitly, for me this means the Victorian three-decker, with its multiple strands, emphasis on character, cause-and-effect plotline and, to return to Hollinger, “linear narrative development” (2). So linear narrative development equals narrative drive, and from the end of SF, this traditionalism appears a Good Thing. The end of a genre, then, is tied to the end of (one aspect of) narrative. But this is also tied to “conceptual stasis.” So are new ideas only available when tied to narrative drive, or is narrative drive the source of new ideas?

In support, Carol McGuirk, in her “magisterial “ (Latham 269) assay of cyberpunk, remarks that, “If science fiction ever succeeds in weaning itself completely from its linear, pulptransmitted adventure fiction plot lines, it will probably turn into something other than science fiction” (126). In resistance, let’s remember that later critiques of that ultimate postmodern SF novel, Neuromancer, turned on its inability to escape the limits of its “primary narrative” (Moylan, 189) – the armature of the detective thriller (Maddox) – and/or the limits of a cause and effect narrative and humanist subjects with “free will” (Sponsler 636-7).

For a shift in perspective, let’s consider Brooks Landon’s comments on a 1981 SF parody which “joins a long line of uninformed dismissals of the genre based only on its ... weakest works” (3). Like Hollinger, Landon considers “SF thinking” has become “prevalent throughout contemporary culture”(4), though he is less concerned that it means the end of SF (174-79). In response to the parody, however, Landon invokes Theodore Sturgeon’s decrees that 90% of anything is crud, and therefore, the same applies to SF (3). This is certainly so. But however I like them, neither writer’s arguments obviate the fact that it’s still science fiction. And discussing just 10% of a field risks the tunnel vision for which Darko Suvin once indicted “high” literary criticism (vii).

Evidently we have a series of critical and theoretical contradictions. SF is dying as a genre, but it’s never sold better. A symptom of death is failing narrative drive, but one of its most successful specimens is critically flawed precisely because of its narrative drive. 90% of SF is crud, so we should only talk about the other 10%, ignoring the bottom line, the commercial viability of the rest. Is this mere critical diversity, or is something else happening?

Let me give you my story, gentle, etc. In my story, Landon and Sturgeon and implicitly, Hollinger, occupy a position I know well as an academic working in popular fiction, where, even nowadays, you have to defend against canonical Starfighters. If you don’t openly argue that some SF is aesthetically valuable, it will all be dismissed, and that means dismissing 90% before they do. But that also means a basically aesthetic judgement of the genre; so we can only discuss 10% of what is sold as SF, while we find that a genre dying from lack of narrative drive is becoming a common discourse and has never sold better. From logic alone, if SF has never sold better, then much of the 90% crud will survive. Ergo, the genre will survive as a whole.