Delving into the Narratological

“Toolbox”
Concepts and Categories in Narrative heory

Paul Dawson
University of new soUth wales

aBstraCt: Narrative theory is habitually characterized as a “toolbox” or “toolkit” for

the analysis of narratives. What does the prevalence of this metaphor tell us about the
disciplinary aspirations of narratology? Whether explicitly or not, whenever the narrato-
logical toolbox is invoked it operates as a methodological or metadisciplinary statement.
This article traces diferent uses of the metaphor to establish how narratology has con-
structed its disciplinary history and situated itself in relation to broader directions in
literary and cultural studies, before addressing some of the paradoxes and limitations
the reliance on this metaphor give rise to, particularly concerning the role of interpre-
tation. It seeks to clarify our understanding of the methodological procedures involved
in narratological analysis by distinguishing between theoretical concepts and formalist
categories, and it addresses this distinction in the context of debates about the ontology
of iction.
KeyworDs: narrative theory, narratology, interpretation, close reading, ontology

One of the most common ways to characterize narrative theory is that it

ofers a “toolbox” for the analysis of narratives. I ind this to be an egre-
giously banal dead metaphor, but what is interesting is how the prevalence
of this metaphor tells us much about the disciplinary aspirations of narratol-
ogy itself. his is because every time the narratological toolbox is invoked it
operates as a methodological or metadisciplinary statement. Hence, in this
article I plan to trace diferent uses of the metaphor to establish how narra-
tology has constructed its disciplinary history and situated itself in relation
to broader directions in literary and cultural studies, before addressing some
of the paradoxes and limitations the reliance on this metaphor give rise to,
particularly revolving around the role of interpretation. Ultimately, I hope
to clarify our understanding of the methodological procedures involved

Style, Vol. 51, No. 2, 2017. Copyright © 2017 he Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
 Paul Dawson 229

in narratological analysis by suggesting the importance of distinguishing

between theoretical concepts and formalist categories. his will lead to a
discussion of ontological levels in Salman Rushdie’s he Satanic Verses in
relation to the question of ictionality.
Narratology, as we know, has traditionally distinguished itself by its the-
oretical focus on the deep structure of narratives, on the construction of a
grammar of narrative, on the search for what features constitute any and
only narratives. However, we know it has often been and continues to be
perceived as an abstract theoretical enterprise characterized by a neologiz-
ing obsession with formalist categories. To counteract these perceptions,
narratologists often promote the export value of narrative theory in terms
of the transferable utility of its method. And here is where the metaphor
of the “toolbox” becomes important. he metaphor invites us to imagine
the theoretical ediice of narratology as in fact a kind of practical hands-on
enterprise, busily developing a number of concepts and categories that we
can use when working on a narrative. So, for instance, in the online resource
Narratology: A Guide to the heory of Narrative, Manfred Jahn writes: “his
chapter builds a toolbox of basic narratological concepts and shows how to
put it to work in the analysis of iction.” What gives the metaphor its osten-
sible dynamism, and hence its importance to the discipline, is that, like the
iPhone, the toolbox can always get bigger and better. here are three broad
reasons typically ofered for tinkering with the toolbox:

(1) We need to reine existing tools, especially when we encounter new

narratives upon which the tools do not work. For instance, Gerald
Prince, in the collection Analyzing World Fiction, argues that if a mul-
ticultural text “involved narrative features that the toolkit supplied by
classical narratology (or a richer and more powerful postclassical nar-
ratology) did not envisage and was unable to handle . . . he kit should
be modiied so as to accommodate these features” (38). Or we might
see the value of other disciplinary paradigms such as cognitive science
for conceptualizing our tools, which is what Jahn does in his essay “he
Mechanics of Focalization: Extending the Narratological Toolbox.”
(2) We need to produce new tools, especially if we want to expand our
object of study to include a whole range of diferent media. In “On
the heoretical Foundations of Transmedial Narratology,” Marie-Laure
Ryan ofers a critique of radical media relativism, pointing out that this
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approach insists upon the unique qualities of each medium, “thereby

forcing the theorist to rebuild the analytical toolbox of narratology
from scratch for every medium” (3), which of course no one wants to
do. he ideal, then, is a toolbox designed for all narratives, and one
important tool here is the concept of storyworlds. In the introduction
to Storyworlds Across Media, Ryan and Jan Noel-hon write: “Whether
logical or imaginative, however, the concept of storyworld will only
earn a legitimate place in the toolbox of narratology if it opens new
perspectives on the relations between media and narrative” (5).
(3) We need to make narratology more relevant to and useful for other
critical practices.1 his generally comes down to arguing that we need
to engage with nonformalist approaches, such as ideological or histor-
ical criticism, not only to reine the toolbox, but to demonstrate the
broad applicability of our tools to other disciplines or ields. Ansgar
Nunning, in “Surveying Contextualist and Cultural Narratologies,”
argues that “in the age of interdisciplinary narrative research, narratol-
ogy would stand to gain a lot by taking various contexts into account,
and that cultural analyses and context-sensitive interpretations of
narratives would stand equally to gain by actually applying and rein-
ing the categories provided by narratology” (50). Hence he wants to
develop a cultural narratology that “puts the analytical toolkit devel-
oped by narratology to the service of a context-sensitive interpretation
of narrative” (50). he upshot is that “any literary or cultural historian
who wants to address ethical, ideological, or political issues raised in
or by narratives can, therefore, proit from the toolbox that narratology
provides” (63).

A inal variation on the metaphor concerns how narratology relates to

the art of producing narratives. Frederick Luis Aldama’s work demonstrates
the symbiotic double function of the toolbox as a mode of both critical
analysis and authorial construction. In his edited collection, Multicultural
Comics (2010), Aldama includes a section entitled “A Multicultural Comic
Book Toolbox,” with essays that focus “on developing and deploying sets
of tools for analyzing and evaluating the visual and verbal elements used
by author-artists to cue, trigger, and move readers-viewers to engage with
complex schemas of race and ethnicity” (20). However, in his book Mex-Cine
 Paul Dawson 231

(2013), Aldama has a chapter entitled “he Nuts and Bolts of Mexican Film”
which includes a section entitled “he Toolbox in Action” where he analyzes
how “[t]he implied director uses all the devices in the toolbox” to portray a
ictional world (22). he claim here, then, is that critics can use the toolbox for
analyzing how authors use the toolbox. he double application of the meta-
phor is awkward, but it indicates Aldama’s attempt to shift emphasis from
the relation between theory and criticism to that between theory and creative
practice, a view of poetics with a much longer tradition than narratology.
he relationship between theory and criticism has always been an issue
of debate in structuralist poetics, but the increased visibility of the toolbox
metaphor can be mapped onto the historical development of the discipline
since the 1990s, a development pervasively understood in terms of post-
classical narratology. Echoing Nunning’s account of the ield, Jan Alber and
Per Krogh Hansen suggest that “in contrast to structuralist theorists, post-
classical narratologists no longer try to develop a grammar of narrative;
rather, they seek to put the narratological toolbox to interpretive use” (1). In
the introduction to Postclassical Narratology, Alber and Monika Fludernik
point out that much of the impetus for reconceptualizing narratology as a
discipline is a consequence of the narrative turn across the humanities and
social sciences: “he motives for such a reconceptualization of the theoreti-
cal models and even the discipline of narratology often relate to the conse-
quences of the narrative turn. Put diferently, it is because narrative theory
can now service many diferent sciences (or serve quite diverse masters) that
an adaptation of its theoretical bases becomes necessary” (3–4). While they
do not explicitly use the toolbox metaphor, both editors employ it in other
work, which is salient for understanding its disciplinary signiicance. In her
contribution to Encyclopaedia of the Novel, Fludernik seeks to make clear the
methodological value of narratology for novel studies by claiming that: “On
a very pragmatic level, narratology provides a toolkit for historical analysis,
for the precise description of individual texts, and for the examination of
generic modes” (904). And in Unnatural Narrative, Alber distinguishes his
work by saying: “In contrast to some unnatural narrative theorists, I try to
put the narratological toolbox to interpretative use vis-à-vis narratives that
feature unnatural elements” (18), arguing that this is what makes his work
postclassical. he focus on interpretation in particular is signiicant both for
how it addresses an ostensible neglect or lacunae in classical narratology,
232 Style

and for how it seeks to make postclassical iterations more relevant and atten-
tive to contemporary movements in literary and cultural studies.

Close r ea D in g a n D t he toolBox

Alber makes his argument for methodological distinctiveness in a section

on the “role of interpretations and close readings” and it is instructive to
note how often the toolkit metaphor is used synonymously with the concept
of close reading. For instance, in her introduction to the edited collection
Narrative heory (2004), Mieke Bal argues that narrative theory “is primarily
a toolbox, not a philosophy of a discursive genre, mode or attitude” (7), with
its value lying in the fact that it ofers an “analytical instrument” for “close
reading or micro-stylistic analysis,” along with “concrete demonstration of
abstract theories,” political critique, and interdisciplinary method (1).
he term “close reading” comes with a lot of baggage, though, and to
invoke it means to buy into much larger debates in literary studies, which
has posited close reading as its methodological core, from the practical crit-
icism of Leavis and the American New Critics to the symptomatic reading
governed by the hermeneutics of suspicion ushered in by deconstruction,
feminism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Close reading typically means: (1)
attention to the words on the page, a kind of material attention to form as
encoded in the discourse; (2) revelation of hidden meanings, whether of the
text itself or of its political unconscious. I suspect most narratologists would
like to invoke the irst, ostensibly neutral meaning, but it is diicult to avoid
the second, especially when discussing the role of interpretation.
To demonstrate the interpretive value of narratological close reading,
we would beneit from more explicitly situating its methods in relation to
various challenges to symptomatic criticism in literary studies, from Eve
Sedgwick’s “reparative reading” to Rita Felski’s “postcritical reading,” and the
diferent types of “surface” reading articulated by Stephen Best and Sharon
Marcus in their introduction to a special issue on the topic in the journal
Representations. In fact, Best and Marcus do this for us when they include
narratology alongside thematic criticism, genre criticism, and discourse
analysis as one type of reading which sees “[s]urface as the location of pat-
terns that exist within and across texts” (11).
One of the most well known critiques of close reading is Franco
Moretti’s call for distant reading. Moretti famously wrote that distant
 Paul Dawson 233

reading is a condition of knowledge, enabling us to focus on units far

larger or smaller than the text, as opposed to the “theological” exercise of
close reading an extremely small canon of works, and one can easily see
how this relates to narratology. Indeed, quantitative analysis has been at
the heart of narratology, from Propp’s seminal study of Russian folk tales
to Gerard Genette’s analysis of temporal order in Proust, to the computa-
tional narratology championed by Jan Christoph Meister. In this sense,
narratology could more productively be understood as a toolkit for dis-
tant reading rather than close reading. In this light, it is interesting to see
what Meister says about the narratological toolbox. His main argument
is that: “we should learn to appreciate (instead of defending or excusing
half-heartedly) the formal and context-free nature of structuralist nar-
ratology’s fundamental concepts. It is exactly the level of formalisation
and abstraction that has made the ‘narratologial toolkit’ so accessible to
related disciplines” (69). In support of what he calls conceptual funda-
mentalism, he argues:

Toolkits are sacrosanct. Smuggling a cognitivist, hermeneutic, psychoanalytical

or otherwise -isted, -ized, or -alled high-level lexible conceptual spanner into our
fundamental “toolbox” amounts to a breach of the procedural rules that deine any
discipline—and not just narratology—on the systemic and functional level. Let us
take the “toolkit” metaphor seriously. (69)

For Meister, taking the metaphor seriously means to ask what is the tool-
kit itself, not how the tools are applied and used “in context,” because with-
out a shared procedure for identifying an empirical object, and terminology
for describing it, the study of this object cannot constitute a discipline.
Furthermore, in line with protocols for scientiic research, this procedure is
what constructs the object of study itself, which is why narratology is dis-
tinct from other disciplines that also study narratives. He goes on to say:
“if narratology is indeed a discipline, then there can by deinition be one
narratology only” (69). Nunning, a prime advocate of the toolkit metaphor,
is himself aware of this dilemma when he points out that while some post-
classical developments “have demonstrated that they can enrich both inter-
pretations and literary history, illustrating the heuristic uses and usefulness
of the narratological toolkit, not all of them arguably fall within the purview
of narratology” (260).
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So we have a curious bind here: there is no point building a toolkit if no

one puts those tools to use by “actually” analyzing narratives, because that,
as Bal argues, is the point of narratology; but if all you do is put the toolkit to
use then you are not doing narratology. What I suggest is that the metaphor
of the toolbox is itself part of the problem, because of the way we rely on it
to conceptualize the discipline. It operates with a crude distinction between
theory and practice, and a reductive view of practice as something involving
the interpretation of individual works. he tendency to privilege interpre-
tation is inlected with a curious mixture of egotistical boasting, wounded
neglect, and eager supplication: we are actually the best at conducting ine-
grained textual analysis, and can ofer these skills to other disciplines, if only
they realized how much good service we could provide. If we are to take the
toolkit metaphor seriously, we might think less about how narratology can
service literary and cultural studies, than about how interpreting an indi-
vidual work can be part of the disciplinary procedure of narratology itself.

nar r ati v e t heory a nD int er p r etat i o n

To determine the extent to which postclassical narratological close read-

ing constitutes a methodological procedure of the discipline, the irst step
would be to avoid the assumption that textual analysis is limited to the
practice of interpretation. Of course narratology “actually” analyses texts: it
could not construct a grammar of narrative without doing so. For Roland
Barthes, the structural analysis of narrative requires a deductive procedure:
devising a theoretical model, “a single descriptive tool” (81), which can then
be employed to “describe and classify the ininite number of narratives”
(82). Genette deliberately eschews the distinction between theory and crit-
icism in his study of Proust, presenting Narrative Discourse as a method of
analysis. For Genette, though, the point of such analysis was to understand
the formal features of Proust’s narrative, not its meaning. Analysis is not the
issue here, it is what is being analyzed: the relation of one work to many
others and the system of narrative; or the meaning of the individual work
through the application of narratological tools. In his Introduction to Poetics
(1981), Tzvetan Todorov points out that the “relationship between poetics
and interpretation is one of complementarity par excellence. A theoretical
relection upon poetics that is not sustained by observations of existing
works always turns out to be sterile and invalid” (7). At the same time, he
 Paul Dawson 235

argued, a “massive imbalance in favour of interpretation characterizes the

history of literary studies: it is this disequilibrium that we must oppose, and
not the principle of interpretation” (12).
In other words, the structuralist analysis of narrative did not so much
neglect or avoid interpretation as deliberately challenge the limits of its
function, in the same way distant reading does today. Prince makes this clear
in a 1995 survey of the intellectual achievements of the discipline, point-
ing out that “narratology has proven to be an important participant in the
assault against viewing literary studies as devoted above all to the interpre-
tation of texts” (129–30). He goes on to say that by examining what elements
constitute all possible narratives, narratology has also contributed to ques-
tioning the exclusionary nature of the canon. Reining the toolbox through
textual analysis of new narratives makes sense in this context, but to make
the interpretation of these narratives the “point” of narratology, and its post-
classical raison d’être, encapsulates the disciplinary paradox I discussed ear-
lier, for it seeks to reconceptualize the discipline by incorporating that which
it deined itself against, and thus has to defend its value by recourse to its
relevance to other disciplines.
Nonetheless, the impetus toward interpretation was present in early
narratology, and in a survey of the ield Liesbeth Korthals-Altes suggests
“developments in narratology might be mapped according to the role of
interpretation, moving from ‘hard’ theorizing to the interpretation of indi-
vidual works” (95). While Todorov pointed to the complementarity of theory
and interpretation, his argument that literary studies must not rely on exter-
nal disciplines such as history, sociology, and psychology for its methods
indicates a strict formalist conception of interpretation, eschewing the con-
textual considerations which would come to deine postclassical methods
as outside the discipline. Bal’s work marks an early shift in this regard. In
the preface to the 1985 edition of Introduction to Narratology, which builds
upon Genette’s taxonomy, Bal writes: “Conceived as a set of tools, as a means
to express and specify one’s interpretative reactions to a text, the theory pre-
sented here holds no claim to certainty” (x), making clear her aim of using
narratology for political and aesthetic criticism.
One postclassical movement for which interpretation performs a vital,
deining function is rhetorical narratology. In his preface to Living to Tell
About It, James Phelan asserts that his book is an example of what he and
Peter Rabinowitz call “theorypractice,” a term that “describes a critical
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inquiry that has both a theoretical and a practical dimension and that devel-
ops a feedback loop between those two dimensions. heory helps illumi-
nate narrative texts even as elements of those texts challenge theory and
lead to its extension or revision” (x). On this basis, Phelan goes on to argue,
“[n]arrative theory and interpretation are both collective enterprises” (xi).
On the surface, this methodological statement does not seem to difer from
Todorov’s argument that “[i]nterpretation both precedes and follows poetics:
the notions of poetics are produced according to the necessities of concrete
analysis, which in its turn may advance only by using the instruments elab-
orated by doctrine” (7–8). However, Phelan’s understanding of “interpreta-
tion” and its importance is fundamentally diferent. he rhetorical approach
to narrative is based on a desire to understand the “experience of iction”;
that is, how can a reader’s aesthetic, cognitive, and especially ethical encoun-
ter with a work of narrative iction be illuminated by analyzing the rhetorical
strategies employed by authors. As opposed to the deductive method pro-
posed by classical narratologists, Phelan outlines, in Experiencing Fiction, an
a posteriori approach, reasoning back from efects to causes, and predicated
upon the idea of a feedback loop between readers, texts, and authors.
Phelan speciically shies away from the aspiration for a universal gram-
mar of narrative, emphasizing the need to be responsive to individual narra-
tives. In this sense, there is no methodological disjunction between a toolkit
and its application because his “conceptual tools” (87) are designed specii-
cally for the purpose of interpreting and judging individual works. However,
it is signiicant to note that the rhetorical approach to narrative is in dialogue
with literary criticism in the American academy as much as it is with narra-
tology. Indeed, Phelan’s critical program is an attempt to employ narratology
to develop the Neo-Aristotlean tradition of the Chicago School beyond its
challenge to New Criticism, combining its earlier poetic and later rhetorical
focus, and reining it in relation to subsequent movements in critical theory
from deconstruction to cultural studies.
It is clear that we cannot dismiss interpretation as beyond the province
of narratology, but I suggest we do need to think more carefully about what
it means for the discipline than the toolbox metaphor and its historical nar-
rative of a postclassical trajectory allows. Before we can apply narratological
tools for interpretive purposes, we need to consider the theoretical assump-
tions informing these tools and their relation to the toolkit itself. If we recall
Alber and Krogh Hansen’s claim that postclassical narratology seeks to put
 Paul Dawson 237

the narratological toolbox to interpretive use rather than develop a grammar

of narrative, presumably the “toolbox” refers to the grammar of narrative
itself, the sum of all possible narrative features from which individual nar-
ratives are produced. his toolbox tends to be construed as a kind of objec-
tive construct supplying methodological tools that can be applied in various
interpretive contexts, by irst describing the formal elements of a text, and
then proceeding to interpret that text by recourse to “contextual” elements
such as authorial intent, historical location, and cultural framing.
he key word here tends to be “heuristic,” in which the value of the
toolbox resides in its capacity to help us discover something signiicant in
our interpretation. For instance, Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Muller seek
to preserve the scientiic basis of narratology by suggesting it can ofer a
“heuristic for interpretation,” the main condition for this being that “the
concepts of narrative theory should be ‘neutral’ with regard to the theory
of interpretation, so that their use remains independent of the choice of
a concrete interpretive, i.e., so that it does not imply a decision in favour
of a speciic conception of meaning” (213). However, this heuristic pro-
cedure depends precisely on how we understood the toolkit itself. For
instance, reconiguring the classical paradigm of structuralist linguistics
from the “postclasical” perspective of cognitive science means focaliza-
tion becomes less a question of the “regulation of information” than of
how readers are deictically oriented by textual cues that help produce
mental models of the world. Depending on how the “tool” (focalization) is
conceptualized, we will produce diferent interpretations, or rather, this
dictates the interpretative questions we ask. But it also depends on how
we deine our object of study itself, and in what follows I will focus on the
question of what constitutes narrative iction.

ConCept s a n D Cat egor ies

To clarify our methodological procedures, I think it is worth making a dis-

tinction between concepts and categories that comprise the disciplinary
apparatus we call the narratological toolbox. A concept is a macro-tool
informing theoretical approaches, such as possible worlds; a category is a
micro-tool enabling formalist analysis, such as metalepsis. I have chosen
these two examples because they are both typically framed by the question
of ontology. However, while it makes sense at the conceptual level to debate
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the ontology of iction, to deine narratological categories in ontological

terms strikes me as metaphorical as the toolbox itself. To me, ontology is a
question of the truth status we assign to a statement, not a function of for-
mal properties. So, for instance, when we characterize the metaleptic trans-
gression of diegetic levels established by embedded narrating instances as
an ontological impossibility I think we are using the wrong concept to frame
an analytical category.
An ontological conception of metalepsis has emerged from the applica-
tion of modal logic derived from possible worlds theory to ictional nar-
ratives, particularly as a means to explain the experiments of postmodern
iction (see McHale). One prominent proponent of this approach is David
Herman, who argues that “(f )unctionally speaking, metalepsis signiies a
transgression of the ontological boundaries pertaining to the diegetic and
more broadly illocutionary levels structuring a given narrative text” (134).
Ryan emphasizes the signiicance of this ontological transgression for the
referential status of iction: “he manifestations of ontological impossibility
are known in narratology as metalepsis, a device which exploits the recur-
sive character of ictionality” (“Impossible Worlds and Aesthetic Illusion”
135). While Genette explained the efects of metalepsis as either fantastic or
humorous, the “theory” of metalepsis is that its presence always foregrounds
the ictionality of a work, and on this basis Ryan (Avatars of Story) has
sought to reine Genette’s original category by establishing the now accepted
distinction between rhetorical and ontological metalepses, where one trans-
gression of levels is metaphorical or virtual (“Dear reader, let me take you
into the character’s bedroom”) and the other is “real” (“And so I stepped into
the world and ate a hamburger with my character”). he distinction makes
taxonomic sense, but in logical terms it seems to establish a kind of dou-
ble layer of ictionality: these things cannot happen in real life, so they are
even more ictional than the things that can. To me this betrays a procedural
disjunction between the conceptual framing of the object of study and the
explication of an analytical category. And the disjunction is revealed in the
very act of interpretation in which thematic concerns (i.e., this book raises
ontological questions) are considered to inhere in the form itself.
he question for me is: do diferent narrative levels have diferent ontolog-
ical relations to the world of existence? his question assumes interpretive
urgency when we consider works of iction that cause large public contro-
versies, such as American Psycho and he Satanic Verses. What happens in
 Paul Dawson 239

cases such as these is that intraictional or pseudo-ontological distinctions

within a work become a way of evading public debate by arguing that ofen-
sive sections occupy a diferent level of ictionality which should mitigate its
ofensiveness: they are the pornographic delusions of an unreliable narrator
who is only a cipher rather than a character; they are the dream sequences
of a paranoid schizophrenic undergoing a crisis of faith. hese may be valid
interpretations but diegetic levels exist on the same discursive plane, with
the same material presence in public discourse. An example of the prob-
lems this raises for literary criticism can be found in Elizabeth Young’s 1991
defense of American Psycho. After criticizing the public condemnation of
this book, Young writes that “it remains for the street-cleaners of literature,
the academics, to come along now and try and soothe everyone with a spot
of textual analysis,” on the basis that Easton Ellis’ work is a novel, “not a
‘How-to-manual,’ nor true crime, not a manifesto or a tract” (92–93).
To me, this is a territorial assertion of professional expertise where “actu-
ally analyzing” a text demonstrates nothing more than the limits of close
reading by reserving for iction, by virtue of its ontological status, the right
to be taken seriously for its inconsequentiality. Young herself identiies the
problem of an interpretation that relies upon diferent ontological levels
within iction when she points out that the efect of reading the detailed
murder scenes is the same regardless of whether Patrick actually commit-
ted them: “Whether Patrick’s murders are fantasies or not, within iction,
they are all ictional. hus we are forced by the author to confront the dei-
nition and function of ictionality itself ” (116). Yet once she pinpoints this
problem, Young never confronts the issue, except to say that Patrick himself
does not exist as a character. By grounding her analysis in the claim that
the authorial voice “constantly foregrounds the ictionality and rhetoricity—
the artiiciality—of the book” (92), she seems to suggest that this in itself is
enough to foreclose criticisms of the novel’s misogynistic violence, even as
she highlights its critique of 1980s capitalism.
he most underwhelming claim a critic can make about self-relexive ele-
ments in a novel is that they draw attention to the ictionality of the work. If
narratology were to ofer a “neutral” concept of ictionality as a “heuristic for
interpretation,” Young’s unanswered question would be paramount: what is
the deinition and function of ictionality itself? his requires a concept of
ictionality that would make meaningful the analysis of categories that fore-
ground the concept itself, such that the interpretation of a work is not only a
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“test” of the eicacy of the concept, but part of the procedure of deining it.
To explore this further, I will address the controversy surrounding Rushdie’s
he Satanic Verses. Can interpreting this novel, with the category of (ontolog-
ically distinct) narrative levels in mind, help us develop a conceptual under-
standing of ictionality?

ontologiCa l lev els in T he SaTa n i c V e r S e S an D t h e

l i mi ts of int er p r etat ion

Much of the controversy about he Satanic Verses can be understood in rela-

tion to the question of ictionality itself, for debates over the novel’s ostensi-
ble blasphemy revolve around competing assumptions about the truth status
of iction, in terms of both speech act theory (should the novel be taken as
an assertion in which Rushdie commits to the truth of his critique of Islam)
and possible worlds theory (should this nonreferential narrative be subject
to the standard of historical falsiiability?). he Satanic Verses has two paral-
lel narratives: the magic realist world in which two Indian migrants, Saladin
Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta, struggle for identity in multicultural London;
and the dream sequences of Gibreel, occasioned by his crisis of religious
faith, which provide a satirical revision of the Koran, in which the business-
man Mahound establishes a new religion. Within the ictional world, then,
there are two “ontological” levels in which the dream narrative is embed-
ded within the frame narrative. As M. Keith Booker says, in Techniques of
Subversion: “he action of he Satanic Verses occurs on a number of diferent
ontological levels, and the angel-devil dichotomy represented by Gibreel and
Saladin is reproduced in a number of ways throughout the book” (60).
he “ontologically” distinct level of the embedded narrative does not
occupy a diferent diegetic level for both sections are narrated by the same
third person narrator. However, there is a key metaleptic scene in which
God appears to Gibreel in human form: “he heard a noise like the burst-
ing of a dam, and as the spirits of the world of dreams looded through the
breach into the universe of the quotidian, Gibreel Farishta saw God” (318).
his “myopic scrivener” (319), whose description (close-cropped salt and
pepper beard, balding pate, and bespectacled visage) invokes the image of
Rushdie himself, points out testily that Gibreel’s dreams were Revelations
sent to prove to him the existence of God. Alleluia Cone, Gibreel’s lover, does
not perceive this apparition, seeing only Gibreel talking to himself, lending
 Paul Dawson 241

support to the naturalizing reading of the dreams as the product of Gibreel’s

paranoid schizophrenia. However, the narrator later corroborates God’s visit
by conirming in a direct address to readers that he was the visitor: “Don’t
think I haven’t wanted to butt in; I have, plenty of times. And once, it’s true, I
did. I sat on Alleluia Cone’s bed and spoke to the superstar, Gibreel” (408–9).
All of this suggests that the scene of God’s visit could be both an ascend-
ing metalepsis (the world of Gibreel’s dreams entering the world of the
frame narrative) and a descending metalepsis (the extradiegetic narrator—
and perhaps extraictional author as well—intruding into the world of his
own creation). In responding to criticisms of his category of levels, Genette
(Narrative Discourse Revisited) points out that what he calls the “primary”
level of a narrative is a purely formal denotation, and that to consider the
hierarchy of levels in terms of thematic signiicance is an interpretive ques-
tion beyond the province of narratology. he metalepsis in he Satanic Verses
suggests that Rushdie deliberately seeks to complicate the formal relation
between levels to the extent that this relation can be resolved only by an
interpretive decision: is there a God, or is Gibreel deluded? As Soren Frank
argues, “he psychological interpretation has been deployed in the defense
of Rushdie. he argument is that the blasphemous sections are only dreams.
However, this is a highly problematic argument as it presupposes that the
novel’s ontological levels can be clearly separated” (147). And certainly the
divided reception of this book indicates that for those who take ofence at
the book’s depiction of Islam, the dream sequences have primary thematic
signiicance, while for postcolonial scholars the depiction of migration and
multiculturalism in the “frame” narrative has primary thematic signiicance.
he argument that Rushdie cannot be held responsible for the ofensive
sections of his novel rests upon a formalist claim: the satirical revision of
Islamic history is only a iction, somehow more ictional than the rest of the
novel because it occurs at a diferent ontological level. his is precisely what
the concept of iction underpinning the narratological category of metalep-
sis relies upon, meaning a metaphorical application of philosophical logic
comes to inform yet another interpretation that seeks to dismiss ideological
critique of a novel (while at the same time pointing out the novel’s critique
of multicultural England and all forms of absolutism).
Rushdie himself has suggested that in the face of claims his novel is bad
history or an antireligious tract, “[i]t felt impossible, amid such hubbub,
to insist on the ictionality of iction” (Imaginary 393). In his defense, he
242 Style

argues that “to treat iction as if it were fact, is to make a serious mistake
of categories” (409). In other words, criticism of the novel is founded on a
critical misreading as much as an ideological disagreement. he response of
M. M. Ahsan and A. R. Kidwai, articulating a Muslim perspective, is not that
Rushdie is writing false history or even that he has criticized Islam, but that
“he has deliberately blasphemed against Islam and skillfully disguised this
abuse in the form of a dream, a ictional dream, of a deranged mind” (28). In
this sense, a “naive” reading of the novel afords iction more cultural power
than the defenders of literature would allow.
One of the most productive attempts to engage with the broader contro-
versy of the Rushdie afair in order to reine the concept of ictionality is pro-
vided by Alok Yadav in his article “Literature, Fictiveness, and Postcolonial
Criticism.” Yadav sets out to consider what understanding of ictionality
informs our reading of novels, with the particular aim of responding to
claims that political criticism disregards the distinctiveness of literature by
treating it as a social document. After discussing speech act, possible worlds,
and other modern approaches to ictionality that rely less on the false nature
of ictional content or the unreality of iction than on the explicit or implicit
invitation to read something as iction, Yadav argues that these nonetheless
operate with a “categorical distinction between the experience of ictional
and nonictional discourse” (91). For Yadav, this is mistaken and limiting if
it precludes recourse to contextual facts to frame our reception of iction.
Recognizing the commonalities between the way we read iction and nonic-
tion, he argues, is vital for conducting political criticism.
he value of Yadav’s account of the Rushdie afair is that he traces the
changing use of the ictionality defense in response to the criticisms the
book invoked. Unlike Young’s dismissal of the public reception of American
Psycho, Yadav argues that addressing responses to he Satanic Verses is vital
for interpreting the function of ictionality. Yadav points to Rushdie’s pub-
lic statements in interviews upon the publication of he Satanic Verses, in
which the author emphasized his novel as a story about the beginning of a
religion, and the historical or quasi-historical basis of the dream sequences.
Yet after the fatwa, Yadav contends, both Rushdie and defenders of the novel
sought to downplay the historical context of these sequences in favor of
their fabulistic nature.
Yadav’s brief suggestions for an adequate account of ictionality in
postcolonial criticism do not essentially depart from existing accounts of
 Paul Dawson 243

ictionality: that iction is a “mixed discourse” containing elements of ic-

tion and noniction; and that “the ictionality of ictional discourse resides
not in its representational content as much as in its mode of presentation”
(195). However, he uses the Rushdie afair to emphasize the need to address
how readers engage with iction, and that is by making connections between
iction and “the world of actuality,” and in the process drawing upon some
of the protocols for noniction reading. His claim is that readers by default
hold iction accountable to the criterion of historical falsiiability and allow
it to inform their view of the world, unless it departs signiicantly in its rep-
resentation of the world. Most importantly, Yadav argues that ictions are
consensual airmations: they must be accepted as iction in order to work.
As a result: “A reader for whom the ‘blasphemy’ or ‘sexism’ or ‘racism’ of a
given work destroys its approachability in the spirit of collaboration cannot
legitimately be chided for failing to take the iction as a iction” (195).
he Rushdie afair demonstrates that approaching iction as a mode of
public discourse rather than a formal artifact is vital for understanding
the question of ontological levels. And, in doing so, the ontology of iction
becomes an interpretive problem as much as a philosophical one. Hence,
a “neutral,” strictly ontological, conceptual frame for the category of meta-
lepsis as a signpost of ictionality or “unnatural” element of iction ofers
limited interpretive use for the narratological toolkit if it is not sensitive to
the public circulation of narrative discourse.

ConClUs ion

I have discussed in this essay the pervasive use of the toolkit metaphor
as a means to articulate the methodological relation between poetics and
criticism, or theory and analysis, and by extension, the relation between
narratology and other disciplines. If a central feature of postclassical nar-
ratology is interpretation, and by interpretation we mean a hermeneutic
enterprise involving close reading of individual texts that also takes into
account the “what” as much as the “how” of narrative for the purposes
of evaluation (ethical, political, aesthetic), we ought to consider whether
this presents narratology as a service discipline providing tools for other
disciplines, or whether it radically alters the original deductive approach
of narratology to the extent that interpretation is a necessary procedure
of the discipline itself. I suggest that the former claim is reductive and
244 Style

unsustainable as a justiication, and that the latter currently lacks a

model. Is the point of interpretation to “test” the universal validity of a
narratological concept, or to demonstrate the usefulness of that concept
by showing how it “works” in criticism?
In this context, I have suggested the toolbox metaphor requires a
clearer distinction between theoretical concepts and formalist catego-
ries. his remains an important question of method because the relation
between the two determines the parameters of any hermeneutic enter-
prise. Categories denote the various formal features that can be identi-
ied in a text (such as narrative voice, focalization, metalepsis, analepsis)
while concepts (such as possible worlds, ictionality, heory of Mind)
both frame and make possible the analysis of these categories. Ultimately,
I argue, narratology must be seen as a form of “surface” reading attendant
to the shared features of individual narratives, and that interpretation of
any individual narrative is neither the point of narratology nor a test of its
relevance, but it can perform an important function as a means for inves-
tigating diferent articulations of a formal category in speciic historical
or cultural contexts.

paUl Dawson is the author of Creative Writing and the New Humanities
(Routledge, 2005) and he Return of the Omniscient Narrator: Authorship and
Authority in Twenty-First Century Fiction (OSU Press, 2013). His irst book
of poems, Imagining Winter (IP, 2006), won the national IP Picks Best Poetry
Award in 2006. He is currently an associate professor in the School of the
Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales. (paul.dawson@unsw
.edu.au)

note
1. Ed. Note: Cf. ahead, Phelan in Style, in press.

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