The celebrated ubiquity of “narrative” in culture is both a fecund premise and the bane of narrative studies today. While not outright against narrative, nor narrative studies, the present paper aims to remain skeptical towards broad, overly enthusiastic uses of the notion: not necessarily the most promising stance in a narratological conference. What is more, and no less ominously, the paper might just as well be subtitled “A Boring Story” – though this is in fact the title of the Chekhov text (“Skuchnaia istoriia” 1889) using as an illustration.

The articles surveys some exemplars of the broad usage – albeit briefly: this has been done before – with special regard for repercussions on the domain of literary narratology. This is where the skepticism comes in: either (1) the notion of narrative is stretched disproportionately (“it is simply there, like life itself,” Barthes), becoming synonymous, say, with fiction (e.g. Palmer 2004: “in a sense we are all novelists,” an empty phrase); or (2), conversely, the expansion of narratological approaches to domains such as cultural studies or social sciences may lead to a narrow privileging of the “natural” or quotidian, linear, causal, realistic type of narrative (a bias discerned by Rimmon-Kenan 2002 in her work on illness narratives).

This may be all right for cultural studies. But for literary narratology the way to go seems to be in the opposite direction. Is not it the role of literary narratives to subvert, transgress, make problematic in a thousand and one ways the generalizations thought up by theorists? Chekhov’s “A Boring Story,” an illness narrative in its own right, displaying precisely those anti-linear, anti-causal, iterative features that are ignored by more sweeping definitions. Aside from being a poignant tale of a burnt-out professor, Chekhov’s story also emerges as a meditation on narrative and, if you will, narratology itself. Such subversive narrative tactics add up to what has been termed “weak” narrativity (by McHale 2001, 2004, with regard to a very different set of texts), narrativity sous rature. Possibly, this tendency is always already there, underlying not only post-modernist texts, but seemingly realistic, linear fiction.

Assuming that the “ontological homogeneity” principle is inherent to the literary work and that the fictionalization of literary referents is its logical derivation, I have coined the concept of “pseudo-real referents” and I show how these referents function in two contemporary Chilean novels: Santa María de las flores negras [Holy Mary of the Black Flowers], by Hernán Rivera Letelier, a text that is consistent with an “aesthetics of totality,” and Amuleto [Amulet], by Roberto Bolaño, a work that on some levels displays an “aesthetic of decentralization or instability.”

Alice Munro’s “Prue” (1984) is a formally innovative short story that eschews epiphany or any other sign of change or movement on the part of its protagonist and that nevertheless offers its audience a highly moving experience. I attempt to account for the story’s effective unconventionality by examining the interrelations between its form and its ethical dimension. I locate those interrelations in the interactions of narrative judgment and narrative progression. More specifically, I identify three main kinds of narrative judgment — interpretive, ethical, and aesthetic, and their connections to three main kinds of progression — those we associate with narrativity, lyricality, and what I call portraiture.  Portraiture is a mode, familiar in the dramatic monologues of Browning, in which the main goal is the representation of character. By examining the interaction of judgment and progression in “Prue,” I argue that it is both a highly successful hybrid form, one that synthesizes narrativity and portraiture, and that this understanding leads us to its ethical dimension. I close with some observations about larger implications of the analysis for our understanding of both other hybrid forms and the utility of this rhetorical approach to form and ethics.