Lucian Blaga University, Sibiu

MA in English Language and Literature

Trends and Methods in 20th-century Anglo-American Criticism
Course convenor: Ana-Karina Schneider, PhD

Lecture III: Narratology and the Rhetoric of Fiction

Narratology has been defined as a theory that views myth as the organising principle of the
narrative, and a companion in the development of literary theories of the movement from
syntax to rhetoric to discourse. It focuses on all possible kinds of narratives, from literature to
stain-glass windows and graffiti, and from dance to pantomime and relief sculpture. It is “a
term used since 1969 to denote the branch of literary study devoted to the analysis of
narratives, and more specifically of forms of narration and varieties of narrator. Narratology
as a modern theory is associated chiefly with European structuralism, although older studies
of narrative forms and devices, as far back as Aristotle’s Poetics (4th century BC) can also be
regarded as narratological works. Modern narratology may be dated from Vladimir Propp’s
Morphology of the Folktale (1928), with its theory of narrative functions” (The Oxford
Dictionary of Literary Terms http://www.answers.com/topic/narratology). Avatars of
narratology have been variously classified under Formalism, Structuralism, Post-
structuralism, Anthropological Criticism and Postmodern theory.
Jonathan Culler describes narratology as comprising many strands “implicitly united
in the recognition that narrative theory requires a distinction between ‘story,’ a sequence of
actions or events conceived as independent of their manifestation in discourse, and
‘discourse,’ the discursive presentation or narration of events.” (The Pursuit of Signs:
Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction 2001: 189). “Story” and “discourse” variously feature
as “sjuzhet” and “fabula” in Russian structuralism. In Todorov’s view, structural theory is
nuanced, comprising “three major categories of narrative analysis: study of narrative syntax,
study of theme, study of rhetoric” (1969: 75). Of these three, the study of rhetoric has had the
richest and most influential tradition in Anglo-American narratology.
Etymologically, rhetoric is “the art or study of using language effectively and
persuasively” (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
http://www.thefreedictionary. com/rhetoric). The rhetoric of fiction is broadly understood as
the way in which fictional works achieve their effects on readers, whether by directly
addressing a hypothetical reader, using irony and parody, orchestrating competitions between
divergent narratives, inviting intertextual readings or openly taking issue with traditional
conventions and the readers’ expectations. The rhetorical approach has had a long and
prestigious history that hails all the way back to Aristotle and then Horace in the classical
antiquity. The three elements of persuasive and memorable speech, according to Aristotle,
are: logos, pathos, ethos. Ethos refers to the authority of the value system upheld by the
author, foregrounding the rhetorical construction of identity as a central thematic
preoccupation, whether it concerns the individual or the community/ nation. Pathos concerns
what Wayne C. Booth in his seminal Rhetoric of Fiction calls “control of distance,” i.e., the
way in which the author controls the reader’s emotional responses to the protagonist/
characters. Logos refers to the organisation of the argumentation, the challenging of
established narrative conventions, and the orchestration of competing narratives and
discourses. The content of a communication is thus no less important than the formal aspects
in a rhetorical approach, nor are these separate matters, although the degree to which
questions of structure and technique or questions of culture and politics are privileged varies
from one text to another.
Northrop Frye’s definition of literature, in his groundbreaking Anatomy of Criticism
(1957), is revealing of the dialectics of literature and rhetoric: to him, literature is “the
rhetorical organisation of grammar and logic.1 … Persuasive rhetoric is applied literature, or
the use of literary art to reinforce the power of argument” (245). The fundamental assumption
is that literature is a form of communication which aims to achieve certain effects; it is an
exchange between speaker/ narrator and audience, as explained by rhetorician John Rodden:
“the listeners are always ‘measuring the speaker up,’ bending toward him or resisting him. He
projects a certain image to them, and as his discourse proceeds, they reconsider their
impressions of him, filling in the missing links of his argument, placing it within the context
of their own experience and relating to it in their own idiosyncratic way” (2008: 154).
Narratives invite such evaluations, as another leading rhetorician, James Phelan, points out,
by being themselves “a way of interpreting and evaluating” experience, of endowing that
experience with “shape and meaning by setting it off from other experiences, placing it in the
grooves of an intelligible plot, and judging its agents and events” (2008: 167). What is more,
implicit in each narrative are competing alternatives which may take the same experience and
shape and interpret it differently, for different purposes. These potential alternatives, Phelan

1
This is a reference to the classical trivium, the three fundamental subjects of the liberal education: grammar,
logic and rhetoric.
shows, both encourage contrastive analyses of the selections and features of the narrative and
sometimes may even shape the telling itself, as “tellers are likely to construct their tales at
least partly in response to or anticipation of one or more possible alternatives” (2008: 168).
Two kinds of alternatives are anticipated in every narrative: the ones that sometimes coexist
explicitly within the covers of a novel, as when competing versions of a story are told by
several narrators or characters, and the analytical kind of counter-narratives that (critical)
readers devise.
Wayne C. Booth’s Rhetoric of Fiction is so far the most influential study in the
Anglo-American tradition in the field. It proposes to recuperate rhetoric, or the art of
persuasion, to the study of narrative. Booth’s interest is primarily in the ways in which
rhetorical persuasion is achieved through the stylistic devices and narrative strategies
deployed by fiction writers to establish and control the relationship between their subject
matters and/or characters, on the one hand, and the reader on the other. Yet Booth
distinguishes between two notions of rhetoric: “the rhetoric in fiction as overt and
recognizable appeal (the most extreme form being authorial commentary) and fiction as
rhetoric in ‘the larger sense, an aspect of the whole work viewed as a total act of
communication’” (415). In other words, he opposes technical matters (rhetorical conventions)
to “the whole art of storytelling viewed as rhetorical” (416).
On the latter view, narrative is defined as an enunciative act rather than a structured
world, and, moreover, as “purposive communication” (Phelan 2008: 167) which combines
narration or statement of the case with argument and narratorial commentary in order to
achieve a specific aim that involves the addressee. The novel’s foregrounding of the
argumentative mode, couched generically in a proliferation of discursive registers (cf.
Bakhtin’s term, heteroglossia), contributes to a displacement of the category of “story” from
the realm of history as representation (both as grand narrative and petite reçue) abstractable
from the text, to the etymologically sanctioned concatenation of the legitimating discourse of
metafiction and of story as performance (< Gk. theoria, etymologically the root of theatre as
well as theory), that is, to telling. This approach to narration as communication, which
acknowledges the narrator’s mediation, does not exclude the discussion of showing (cf. Percy
Lubbock’s polarisation of showing vs. telling, privileging the former). Rather, along the lines
set by Booth and summarised by David Herman, it views showing itself as a “localized effect
... promoted by certain, deliberately structured, kinds of telling, organized in such a way that
a narrator’s mediation (though inescapably present) remains more or less covert” (Herman
15). As Herman observes, Booth privileged telling over showing because explicit narratorial
commentary can achieve “important rhetorical effects ... for example, relating particulars to
norms established elsewhere in the text, heightening the significance of events, or
manipulating mood” (15). These and other rhetorical effects are deployed by novels in the
process of proposing to the reader a certain account of an age, an ethos, a cultural identity, or
an epistemological enquiry, inviting interpretation and involving him in value judgments.
Booth also discusses the various voices, or “presences” in the novel. The writer,
according to Booth, has the purely mechanical function of putting down the story, and has
therefore no importance in this discussion. The implied author is the one who makes the
decisions about what story should be told and how it should be told so as to achieve the effect
desired by the author; his voice is usually supremely objective and it establishes the ethos
against which the incidents in the story are to be judged. The narrator may be a participant in
the action of the book (1st person narrator), or an objective observer and recorder of the
participant’s mind (3rd person narrator), or he may be the omniscient writer, a god-like figure
moving the characters around. The characters, too, may have different positions in the book:
they can be active participants, they may constitute something like the Greek chorus,
commenting on other characters’ actions, or they may be what Henry James had called
“reflectors,” helping the reader get a grip of what does not happen in front of him/ her. In this
context, the persuasiveness of a literary work is a matter of controlling the distance between
reader and the different voices, and that often requires creating deliberate confusion in the
reader by using a narrator or observer who is himself confused, misinformed or simply
dishonest.
Rhetorical criticism tends to focus on genres, generic conventions, generic
hybridisation etc. – after all, Northrop Frye’s Fourth Essay in The Anatomy of Criticism is
titled “Rhetorical Criticism: Theory of Genres.” In this, and in many other respects, rhetorical
criticism becomes almost inseparable from narratology, such that many of its representatives
are claimed by both critical schools.
More recent narratologists such as James Phelan, David Herman, Mark Currie etc.
point out that there is much to be learned from Booth’s insights and distinctions. Others
develop those distinctions further, showing how an understanding of narrative as mimetic
representation or fictional world differs from narrative viewed as communicative act and how
Booth conceived of rhetoric “not primarily as argumentation but as technique or style”
(Rodden 2008: 154-155). Most of Booth’s followers however would agree that Booth did
conceive of narrative as communication between implied author and reader – whether they
understand the author’s role as setting the standards against which the events and characters
of the novel are to be judged (Herman 15), doing the judging himself (Bialostosky 212), or
overcoming the reader’s resistances by controlling narrative distance (Currie 2010: 58) – as
well as between narrator and reader.

Representatives: Northrop Frye, Wayne Booth, R.S. Crane, Peter Rabinowitz, Don
Bialostosky, James Phelan, David Herman, John Rodden, Wendy Olmsted, etc.