At the odd intersection of narratology and clinical medicine can be found some fresh postings of old questions about the consequences of representational acts for tellers and listeners. The simple practice of guiding health care professionals to write in non-technical language about what they witness patients to go through and what they themselves undergo in caring for the sick has led us contemplate the acts of attention and representation in primal and primary ways. We see the intersubjective affiliation born of narrative transactions, as it were, unadorned, right there in front of us as doctors, nurses, and social workers discover, through acts of writing, what on earth they know and how what they know connects them to their patients.

Like arboreal and nocturnal tarsiers in the Malay Archipelago with their enormous eyes, we are open collecting retinae for the impressions and the assault of that which might be seen. The seer attends—absorbs, composes, puts himself or herself in the way of things to be seen. The simultaneous act of representation expresses, with muscular force, the value of what is seen as if expressing juice from a lemon or, more saliently for my writers, milk from a nipple or secretions from a gland. My conceptual examination of clinical representations rely on Henry James’s theoretical and formal practices that suggest that the self (or consciousness) is constituted by, and not simply made visible by, acts of attention and representation. If indeed the self is the most powerful therapeutic instrument, we need intensive means whereby doctors and nurses, who owe sick people authentic attention and care, can constitute and inhabit that self. Narrative training can expose these fundamental aspects of self to health care professionals, if only so that they can use that self on behalf of the ill.

One of the functions of literary fiction, in particular narrative fiction, is the construction, circulation and maintenance of world-models.  Literature, Lotman taught us, is a secondary modeling system: using the primary modeling system of language as its vehicle, it constructs models of and models for reality.  It also models itself: narrative fictions regularly embed within their own continuums secondary worlds – inset narratives, found manuscripts, ekphrastic descriptions, remediations of non-verbal media, micro-worlds and paraspaces, etc. – that mirror the primary worlds framing them.  Such structures en abyme have typically been treated as uncanny disruptions, fatally compromising fiction’s world-modeling function, at worst summoning up the specters of crippling paradox and infinite regress.  In fact, world-modeling and self-modeling are interdependent functions of fiction; they complement and sustain each other.  Internal scale-models make the “outer” fiction’s model of the world salient.  Far from disrupting the primary world, they hold a mirror up to it, providing the reader with a kind of schematic diagram of it, or an instruction manual for its proper operation. Moreover, the relationship between the “outer” world and the internal scale-model, the way one maps onto the other, can itself serve as a model for the relationship between the fictional world as a whole and the real world – the world “out there,” beyond the text.  So internal scale-models yield knowledge of the fictional world, but also of how the fictional world models the real.

          The paper revisits the literature on mise en abyme, as well as Jameson’s powerful notion, derived from the urban planning literature, of cognitive mapping.  Case-studies include Cervantes’ Don Quixote, read in the light of Fernand Braudel’s cognitive mapping of the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II; micro-worlds and scale-models en abyme in science fiction (Gibson, Sterling), and in the American mega-novel (Sorrentino, Pynchon, Barth).

In the short story “Bluebeard’s Egg” (1983), Margaret Atwood simultaneously replicates the form of one Bluebeard tale, “The Robber Bridegroom,” and recapitulates the content of another, “Fitcher’s Bird,” by having her protagonist recall to herself a tale about three sisters and a sorcerer she recently heard in a course on “Forms of Narrative Fiction.” The recollection of the Grimms’ story of “Fitcher’s Bird” within “Bluebeard’s Egg” is structurally analogous to the climactic scene in their “Robber Bridegroom” in which the robber’s bride is called upon to regale her wedding guests with “a good story.” She gives a first-person account of prior events that is nearly identical to the sequence already described by the third-person omniscient narrator. In other words, the bride whose experiences were the object of narration (at the diegetic level) now engages in narrating the events in which she took part (at the hypodiegetic level). For Atwood, as I propose, the mise en abyme in “The Robber Bridegroom” serves as a point of departure in both senses of the phrase: her text deviates from the structural model it imitates. The hypodiegetic narration in “Bluebeard’s Egg” – namely, the embedded tale of “Fitcher’s Bird” – does not verge on identity with events previously narrated; rather, Atwood literally realizes the rhetorical device of mise en abyme in her story. Things are put into an abyss. Nothing mirrors nothing. Through this inventive deployment of intertextuality, Atwood’s variant of the Bluebeard motif presents a case of negative mise en abyme.

As a child the Serbian-Jewish author Danilo Kiš witnessed the massacre of the so called “cold days” in Novi Sad in 1942, when thousands of Jewish and Serbian inhabitants were executed by the fascists and their corpses thrown into the Danube, and the disappearance of his father who perished in Auschwitz. As an adult he was witness to the dictatorship of Titoist Yugoslavia. His narratives focus on Fascism and Stalinism insisting on their purely literary representation. Relying on the documentary character of autobiographical testimony (Karlo Stejner’s Seven Thousand Days in Siberia), the “real” story of mystifications (Protocols of the Elders of Zion), the semantic energy of fictive documents, and the charm of story-telling, Kiš creates a multilayered, highly artificial narrative compositum. He combines the literary experience of Russian avant-garde “factography” (literatura fakta, 1929) with the puzzling effect of documentary simulacra without resuming the ludistic implication of this procedure, which – as he is well aware – is an integral element of Borges’s poetics. Without ignoring the intertextual orientation of Kiš’s text, the paper concentrates on the mnemonic dimension of his narratives, on the stylistics of anti-pathos and litotes, on the semantic coalition of “factography” and “thanatography,” and discusses the problem of hyperbole/understatement in virtual documents.

According to Paul Ricoeur’s concept of “narrative identity,” both narrative and self-identity are formed and developed as an outcome of a constant vacillation between sameness and selfhood. The theoretical discussions of narrative identity, including Ricoeur’s, underestimate the threat posed by a radical shift to the pole of sameness, stasis, and stagnation. After clarifying some of the reasons for the asymmetry between the two facets of identity, the paper explores the possibility of sameness taking over selfhood in the constitution of self-identity and narrative. It briefly examines techniques by which such narrative identity is formed and deals with its implications for both self and narrative in Agota Kristof’s The Notebook (Le Grand cahier).

It is assumed that today the novel is the predominant form of narrative. There are many ways that the novelist may use his narrative to think for him. One obvious way is through narratorial commentary, as for instance, in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Another way is through structural manipulation, as in the two narratives of Dickens’s Bleak House. A third possibility, the one to be investigated in the case of Conrad, is to use the sjuzhet to disrupt thoroughly the chronology of the fabula. This is not done merely to enhance the mysteriousness of the text, but to make it think for the novelist by evoking central thematic concerns. This mode of thinking will be discussed in relation to Lord Jim and Nostromo.

As with most narratives of catastrophe, the touchstone and point of departure of the narratives of persecution is a state of equilibrium disrupted by an act of violence. Persecution is a disruption of the normal orbit of history and the rituals of any given social body of social state of mind. In a passage from his major post-World War I novel A Guest for the Night (1939), which predicts World War II and the Holocaust, S. Agnon describes this transition from normalcy to the insecure state of the victims of a historical catastrophe.

            Agnon confronts the potentially idyllic normal narrative of bourgeois and Jewish life with the real state of affairs after the catastrophe: the narrative of normalcy is disrupted by the crisis of war and persecution. The time gets out of joint, and life ceases to accommodate the major stations of the process of human change. The narrative has two permanent actants: the persecutor (singular or plural) as victimizer and the persecuted (singular or plural) as victim. The struggle between them creates a diversity of typologies of persecution, but basically it is the conflict between the powerful and the weak. The moral evaluation of the two sides is not uniform. The cat-and-mouse game is not the only legitimate plot; the conflict can be ambiguous – when, for instance the so-called criminal and an innocent victim are one (Jean Valjean in Hugo’s Les Misérables). In some instances the same plot could be interpreted differently by different witnesses: the representative of justice can be justified by one party and accused of cruelty and injustice by another. Shylock in The Merchant of Venice provides a good example of the diversity of interpretations in different times and under different social circumstances. The archetypes of Cain and Ahasuerus, traditionally understood as the fugitive victims of their sins, were reinterpreted as positively by Byron and Stephan Heym. This paper examines the different aspects of the topos and narrative of persecution.

Born in Vienna, Gershon Shaked (1929-2006) was Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and one of the leading experts on Hebrew literature. 

The category of narrative space, which was side-stepped by classical narratology and narrative theory in general, has recently become a center of interest for a growing number of literary scholars. Using Bakhtin’s insights with regard to the “interconnectedness” of spatial and temporal relations in literature, the paper attempts to define a category of a “negative” chronotope which structures trauma narratives, suppressing time and foregrounding space. Ida Fink’s short story “traces” serves as an example for the workings of such a chronotope.

Wolfgang Iser (1926-2007) is author of The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication of in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (1974); The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (1978); Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1985); Walter Pater: The Aesthetic Moment (1987); Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (1989); The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (1993), The Range of Interpretation (2000), and How to Do Theory (2006).

Updated in December 2007

The Conservationist is widely regarded as constituting a transition in Nadine Gordimer’s work, from her earlier realistic fiction with its detached stance to the kind of prose which has earned her a respected place as an engaged African writer: fully identified with the materials she is dealing with and, through the delineation of her protagonist, Mehring, exposing the inevitable demise of the white capitalist class in South Africa and the reclamation of the land by the blacks. Moreover, her shift to a more experimental technique, and especially the use of stream of consciousness, has been seen as one of the markers of that transition. Through a close analysis of Mehring’s internal monologue, this paper aims to show that embedded in her prose there can still be found a universalist humanist quest for wholeness which is not subsumed in the ideological and political reading and which exists side by side with it, thus making for a more complex, richer reading.

Following Aristotle’s Rhetoric, the figure of the “enthymeme” is understood as a syllogism in which one of the premises is missing or non-valid. Much of the wit of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is based on this figure, and in Stuart Gilbert’s scheme, the technique of the Aeolus episode on Joyce’s Ulysses is listed as “Enthymemic.” But are there narrative phenomena that can be regarded as enthymemes? The paper argues that the notion of the enthymeme is a useful tool for the analysis of reference and signification. In Joyce’s “The Sisters,” in particular, it is a mechanism through which the external and the internal fields of reference enrich each other.

Leona Toker, editor of Partial Answers, is Professor Emerita in the English Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (1989), Eloquent Reticence: Withholding Information in Fictional Narrative (1993), Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (2000), Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction: Narratives of Cultural Remission (2010), and articles on English, American, and Russian writers. She is the editor of Commitment in Reflection: Essays in Literature and Moral Philosophy (1994); and co-editor of Rereading Texts / Rethinking Critical Presuppositions: Essays in Honour of H.M. Daleski  (1996) and of Knowledge and Pain (2012). Her book Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Inter-Contextual Reading is coming out in the fall of 2019.

The structuralist resistance to character, and the resistance to that resistance, may stem from the nostalgia for the sense of core identity like that conveyed by Renaissance Drama of Nineteenth-century novel.

“Because you cannot act, you find yourself unable to think,” says Anna Blume in Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things. This idea is discussed in connection with thinkers who connect action and narrative, such as Arendt, Ricoueur and Fludernik. If narrative indeed is a way to perceive and interpret action, a world reduced to hazard and behavior seems to leave neither space nor frameworks for thinking.  Looking from this perspective, the narrative way of thinking is a prerequisite for other modes of thinking as well. The discussion of the extreme situation of no narrative and no thinking is related to Dominick LaCapra’s work on trauma and narration.

The relationship between a critic and a living writer, these "opposite shareholders" of the same art, can lead to scenarios of all sorts. In her introduction to A Glance beyond Doubt: Narration, Representation, Subjectivity, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan states that she “endeavor(s) to theorize through literature, to use the novels as, in some sense, the source of theory,” and that this process “can be seen as a fruitful dialogue or interaction between literature and theory.” My long friendship with Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan was indeed such a privileged, on-going interaction.

In the core of our multi-layered relationship lies the shared belief in narrative structures as an unveiling of consciousness and as a powerful means of its shaping. The tumultuous Israeli reality, the loaded Jewish legacy, and not least the changing circumstances of life and disease all kept challenging our notion of narrative. In the intimacy of our “laboratory” I would bring my novels and my writing-dialogue with literary genres, with sacred texts, or with CNN snapshots, and she would be the ideal performative reader. At the same time, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’s deep theoretical considerations culminating in her revelatory exposure of illness narratives were for me a constant source of artistic inspiration, and a stirring reminder of the responsibility of narratives as an access to a changing self and world.