The Newest Narratological Frontier

by
F. Bartleby Seaguppy

Among the many fields opened alongside the trail blazed through the wilds following the Linguistic Turn, narratology is perhaps the least heralded by others besides its practitioners. Nevertheless, the field has been fertilized with numerous publications that have sought to explicate the role of narratives in human affairs and distinguish the many varieties of narrative, such as legal narrative, literary narrative, street sign narrative (with its nascent breakout field of Burma Shave narrative), and shaggy dog narrative, all with varying degrees of reference to the cold hard facts of reality (such as the paucity of tenured positions) versus the highest flights of fancy (such as the genius of 99% of those seeking tenure). This has led to a narrative of the field and subnarratives of each subfield that by bouncing between these poles promise great things ex umbilico ad astra. Thus, for example:

Far from being one code among many that a culture may utilize for endowing experience with meaning, narrative is a meta-code, a human universal on the basis of which transcultural messages about the nature of a shared reality can be transmitted.¹

A narrative, by stating, positing, postulating, indeed imposing a chain of implied cause-and-effect upon the successive events it concerns, thus structures human knowledge, and shapes human life.²

And so we see, as implied by what is unstated yet present, as it is only through narrative that we understand the world, we can say that the world itself is given shape by narrative.³

For truly it is Humpty-Dumpty whose methodological approach is most superior here, for it is only through such flexibility of reference that the world can come into agreement with the system of our narratives.⁴

Narrative must be understood as a dialectic that confronts the customary ideas of humanity with strange new vistas of possible experience, the oldest folk art of all and too the spur of all new things. Any novelty, any advance must be and indeed can only be truly understood through narratology.⁵

Desire as Eros, desire in its plastic and totalizing function, appears to me central to our experience of reading narrative, and if in what follows I evoke Freud—and, as a gloss on Freud, Jacques Lacan—it is because I find in Freud’s work the best model for a ‘textual erotics.’⁶

It has been noted that the same has been said of every form of critical theory, rather like the latest iteration of a game of Acad-Libs in the faculty lounge with blanks eliciting “[Name of discipline].” Curiously, however, few have discussed the narrative of narratology itself despite so many adeptly, or perhaps blithely, following its carefully balanced contradictions through the twisty bowels of the critical Leviathan. The fruitfulness of the approach is perhaps best indicated by the fact that when you as an outsider examine the narratives of the field, yet other branches of narratology spontaneously leap to mind. The most common branch of narratology so evoked, despite never recognized by narratologists themselves, is Matrifocal Duodecimal Narratology.

This oversight is especially egregious in light of its remarkable history as a pre-existing narrative type. Early prototypes have been found in Ancient Egypt and Babylonia as well as Ancient China (“Alas! For your mother was a slave-girl,” King Wei of Qi, Zhan Guo Ce) and European antiquity (“Again, in a dispute with Cicero, Metellus Nepos asked repeatedly ‘Who is your father?’ ‘In your case,’ said Cicero, ‘your mother has made the answer to this question rather difficult,’ ” Plutarch’s biography of Cicero), and occur throughout the oldest scriptures: “You are a true daughter of your mother, who despised her husband and her children; and you are a true sister of your sisters, who despised their husbands and their children” (Ezekiel 16:45), for example, and “Saul’s anger flared up at Jonathan and he said to him, ‘You son of a perverse and rebellious woman!’ ” (1 Samuel 20:30).

From these beginnings, Matrifocal Duodecimal Narratology was first shaped by the great wits of the Renaissance: “No longer from head to foot than from hip to hip, she is spherical, like a globe, I could find out countries in her” (Dromio, The Comedy of Errors; Act 3, Scene 2), “Thy mother’s name is ominous to children” (Queen Elizabeth, Richard III; Act 4, Scene 1), and “[Chiron] Thou hast undone our mother. [Aaron] Villain, I have done thy mother” (Titus Andronicus; Act 4, Scene 2), for example. However, it awaited the modern world for Matrifocal Duodecimal Narratology to be pursued systematically as the first of the three major components of Sigmund Freud’s thought, together with hydraulic metaphors and micturitory competitions into campfires. Matrifocal Duodecimal Narratology then trickled down into the works of the artists of his day (on the wall of a school bathroom in Oxford, Mississippi, for example, little Billy Faulkner’s first feeble effort in this line is preserved: “Yo mama’s a fish!”), who were soon surpassed by the refined folk art form that inspired the genre’s name.

In doing so, Matrifocal Duodecimal Narratology far transcends the pedestrian social concerns of most narrative to focus on the fundamental make-up of the world: time (“Yo mama so old, she still pissed Judas swiped her tip at the Last Supper”) and space (“Yo mama so big, each of her ass cheeks has its own ZIP code”), mind (“Yo mama so dumb, she has to give change from a penny for her thoughts”) and matter (“Yo mama so fat, climbers use Mount Everest to practice scaling her”), thereby situating the human community, as reflected in the lineage of the individual, within the physical world.⁷ Other varieties of Matrifocal Duodecimal Narrative focus on the fundamental facts of human life: health (“Yo mama so sick, Yersinia pestis gets inoculated against her”), wealth (“Yo mama so poor, she drives out bad money”), and appearance (“Yo mama so ugly, when Edmund Burke saw her, he changed it to A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas on the Sublime and Hideous”).

While some branches of narrative may be restricted entirely to the bare facts of reality, from which it selects and conjoins certain events in a significant pattern, literary narrative in particular adds the unreal, the unexpected, to the mix, conjoining the true and the false in a combination judged not by truth but verisimilitude—or so standard narratology holds. However, Matrifocal Duodecimal Narrative is judged by other standards than verisimilitude, for there is often no truth and little verisimilitude in the image of a woman so large she covers houses when she sits. As narrative has the fundamental property of imposing a sequence of cause and effect on the events selected from reality and the imagination, such as the extreme size of the interlocutor’s mother causing astronomically implausible shadows in residential areas, this type of narrative greatly expands the imaginative world of the human species to annex heretofore unimagined realms in which the interlocutor’s mother’s navel travels a quarter hour in advance of her feet.

Standard narratology sees memory and imagination as supplementing and consuming each other and narrative as created by the copresence and fusion of reality and imagination, much as the field itself is created by the copresence and fusion of the fanciful joys, Brooks’ Eros, of tenure and genius and the reality, Brooks’ Thanatos, of colleague glut and academic exploitation. However, Matrifocal Duodecimal Narrative goes beyond this in seeing your mother, or at least those of narratologists, supplementing the gravitational effect of the moon on the tides and consuming the whole bucket on the roof of the KFC.

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	SpecGram Vol CXCIV, No 3 Contents