Culler - Narrative 1 - What do stories do__230915_134637

Jonathan Culler
LITERARY
THEORY
A Very Short Introduction
1
What stories do
Theorists also discuss the function of stories. I mentioned in Chapter 2
that ‘narrative display texts’, a class which includes both literary
narratives and stories people tell one another, circulate because their
stories are tellable, ‘worth it’. Story-tellers are always warding off the
potential question, ‘So what?’ But what makes a story ‘worth it’? What
do stories do?
First, they give pleasure – pleasure, Aristotle tells us, through their
imitation of life and their rhythm. The narrative patterning that
produces a twist, as when the biter is bitten or the tables are turned,
gives pleasure in itself, and many narratives have essentially this
function: to amuse listeners by giving a new twist to familiar situations.
The pleasure of narrative is linked to desire. Plots tell of desire and what
befalls it, but the movement of narrative itself is driven by desire in the
Narrative
form of ‘epistemophilia’, a desire to know: we want to discover secrets,
to know the end, to find the truth. If what drives narrative is the
‘masculine’ urge to mastery, the desire to unveil the truth (the ‘naked
truth’), then what of the knowledge that narrative offers us to satisfy
that wish? Is that knowledge itself an effect of desire? Theorists ask such
questions about the links between desire, stories, and knowledge.
For stories also have the function, as theorists have emphasized, of

teaching us about the world, showing us how it works, enabling us –
through the devices of focalization – to see things from other vantage
points, and to understand others’ motives that in general are opaque to
us. The novelist E. M. Forster observes that in offering the possibility of
perfect knowledge of others, novels compensate for our dimness about
others in ‘real’ life. Characters in novels
are people whose secret lives are visible or might be visible: we are
people whose secret lives are invisible. And that is why novels, even when
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they are about wicked people, can solace us; they suggest a more
comprehensible and thus a more manageable human race, they give us
the illusion of perspicacity and of power.
Through the knowledge they present, narratives police. Novels in the

Western tradition show how aspirations are tamed and desires adjusted
to social reality. Many novels are the story of youthful illusions crushed.
They tell us of desire, provoke desire, lay down for us the scenarios of
heterosexual desire, and, since the eighteenth century, they have
increasingly worked to suggest that we achieve our true identity, if at
all, in love, in personal relations, rather than in public action. But as they
coach us to believe that there is such a thing as ‘being in love’, they also
subject that idea to demystification.
In so far as we become who we are through a series of identifications

(see Chapter 8), novels are a powerful device for the internalization of
Literary Theory
social norms. But narratives also provide a mode of social criticism. They
expose the hollowness of worldly success, the world’s corruption, its
failure to meet our noblest aspirations. They expose the predicaments
of the oppressed, in stories that invite readers, through identification, to
see certain situations as intolerable.
Finally, the basic question for theory in the domain of narrative is this: is
narrative a fundamental form of knowledge (giving knowledge of the
world through its sense-making) or is it a rhetorical structure that
distorts as much as it reveals? Is narrative a source of knowledge or of
illusion? Is the knowledge it purports to present a knowledge that is the
effect of desire? The theorist Paul de Man observes that while no one in
his right mind would try to grow grapes by the light of the word day, we
find it very hard indeed to avoid conceiving of our lives by patterns of
fictional narratives. Does this imply that narratives’ clarifying and
consoling effects are delusory?
To answer these questions we would need both knowledge of the world
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that is independent of narratives and some basis for deeming this
knowledge more authoritative than what narratives provide. But
whether there is such authoritative knowledge separate from narrative
is precisely what’s at stake in the question of whether narrative is a
source of knowledge or of illusion. So it seems likely that we cannot
answer this question, if indeed it has an answer. Instead we must move
back and forth between awareness of narrative as a rhetorical structure
that produces the illusion of perspicacity and a study of narrative as the
principal kind of sense-making at our disposal. After all, even the
exposure of narrative as rhetoric has the structure of a narrative: it is a
story in which our initial delusion yields to the harsh light of truth and
we emerge sadder but wiser, disillusioned but chastened. We stop
dancing around and contemplate the secret. So the story goes.
Narrative
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Jonathan Culler

For stories also have the function, as theorists have emphasized, of

Through the knowledge they present, narratives police. Novels in the

In so far as we become who we are through a series of identiﬁcations

To answer these questions we would need both knowledge of the world

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