A Bone to Pick

Josh Fish

Dr. Eric Heyne

Engl 601

Feb. 12, 2012

The Nature of Narrative

First, a bone to pick: On page 221, the passage, "One concerns the change myth undergoes as the concept of time current in a culture shifts from a primitive, cyclical view to a more sophisticated linear concept," irks me as it argues that the notion of humanity heading from a less perfect to a more perfect state is more advanced somehow and not just as much as an imposed narrative as believing in a cyclical concept of time. I don't know if anyone else felt this way and maybe I'm reading way too much into it as the word sophisticated holds connotations of betterment that I'm not sure the authors intended. However, this book is very much assigning a narrative to the history of narrative which is fine but the authors use language that suggest history is a progression toward an inevitable better state. Some examples of this include, "Plots Progress" on page 302 and "because narrative theory has continued to subscribe to Scholes and Kellogg's dictum, it's greatest advances in the past forty year have been the study of narrative discourse." Maybe my critique is more with Western thought in general, which is a big and somewhat ridiculous argument to make here, but I just want to draw attention to the fact that we are at one moment in history that may not be any better than any other moment, just different, and our idea of the progression of history may not in fact be as sophisticated as we think, just different than other perceptions of history. Okay, I'll stop now.

What else I found interesting:

Page 133:

When we ask, therefore, what meanings might have been stipulated by Christian Anglo-Saxon culture for the images in Beowulf we are asking a question about the audience of the poem that cannot be answered simply. As for the poem itself, nowhere is Christ mentioned. Nor is any clear conception of anything approaching Christian salvation expressed... If Beowulf is a Christian narrative - and scholars are almost unanimous in affirming it - then it is so in the same sense in which Hercules dragging Cerberus from the underworld is a Christian image: emptied by its learned audience of pagan significance.

This giving of meaning making and narrative assigning power to the audience is interesting. It reminds me of "The Death of the Author" and Reader Response Criticism in the same sense, that it gives the reader control over interpretation of the text. I suppose the difference is that in the case of the mythographers, the audience was a cultural one, the Christians, not individual readers and also that they took control and reassigned relatively objective meaning to the text, instead of merely being allowed to interpret it through their own lens.

Page 217:

The artistically minded historian or biographer, even before he writes a word, is looking for esthetically satisfying patterns in the people and events he considers as potential subjects for his work. And every historian or biographer who hopes to reach an audience beyond his fellow professionals is to some extent artistically minded.

Several thoughts come to mind when I read this. First of all, as a writer of creative nonfiction I've been thinking of the idea of "truth" in both the capital and lowercase "t" sense. Where is the line between artistically organized and fictitious. Anyone who's heard of John D'Agata and the liberties he takes in the name of drama while writing essays will know what I'm talking about. Secondly, this is kind of like the discussion of middle brow criticism we had on the first day of class and how the Eliot piece was presented to a lay audience. I'm hoping to write a middle brow piece of criticism on Fun Home for this class and it brings me to the idea of how writing criticism itself can be a creative act which I suppose is obvious but also how writing history can be a creative act, which may be obvious as well. But what does this do to the initial split Sholes, Phelan, and Kellogg give us between fictional narrative and historical narrative in the beginning of the book. Is a creative history still a historical narrative, just tweaked a little. I'm not sure.