Sara Hackenberg, "Serial Narratology"
著者（英） Sara Hackenberg
journal or
publication title
Doshisha studies in English
number 90
page range 239‑243
year 2013‑01
権利（英） The Literary Association, Doshisha University URL http://doi.org/10.14988/pa.2017.0000013271
第1回
講師 Prof. Sara Hackenberg
(Associate Professor at San Francisco State University) 演題 “Serial Narratology”
司会 石塚則子（同志社大学）
2012年8月3日 午後3：00〜4：30 寧静館5階会議室
Synopsis (by Prof. Sara Hackenberg)
In “Serial Narratology,” I argue that viewing all narrative through the lens of seriality allows us a radically different vision of narrative structure and how it works. My talk aims to both historicize and theorize serial narrative.
Historically, I trace the persistence and dominance of the serial format.
Theoretically, I consider, drawing especially on Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House, how using a specifically serial narratology to examine storytelling can importantly disrupt traditional understandings—and provide new understandings—of primary narrative structures, such as aesthetic narrative shape (beginning-middle-end); the role of the protagonist; the idea of the coherent character (“round” or “flat”); and the notion of “authorship”
itself.
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Seriality is at once the most ancient and the most modern of narrative forms. On the one hand, we can trace its mechanics and operations back to the earliest narratives of oral culture: story cycles, trickster tales, and frame narratives are all forms of serial storytelling. On the other hand, we need only take a glance at our twenty-first century narrative culture—
disseminated via such technologies as television, manga, and digital publishing—to see that serial narrative persists as the most popular of narrative formats. Indeed, seriality both manifests in and significantly helps establish virtually every new delivery system for narrative that has developed over the past three centuries, including newspapers, magazines, novels, cinema, radio, television, and the internet.
Such a history makes a compelling case for the importance of the serial format as a form of narrative dissemination. However, seriality is rarely studied in the field of literature as an important narrative form. The serial format is usually associated with the popular and ephemeral: nineteenth- century serial novel publication, for instance, is generally taken as subject for cultural studies, or as a curio of book history, rather than a meaningful narrative structure. Moreover, the volume-format re-publication of most of the originally-serialized novels that we still regularly read can create confusion. If we primarily encounter Bleak House today in a complete volume, or as a digitized document, can it even be considered a serial text anymore?
In attempting to theorize serial narrative, I argue that we first need to resist the dismissal of serial narrative as an unusual, archaic, minor, or too- grossly-popular narrative format. What if, I propose, rather than seeing seriality as a crass market strategy, we instead returned to the ancient roots of serial storytelling and considered seriality to be the fundamental,
foundational form of all narrative, whether it was originally deployed in explicit serial segments or not? Such an approach can illuminate the ways in which we inevitably encounter all narrative serially, in that we encounter it over time: when we put down a book, when we pause in the middle or at the end of a sentence, we’re creating a temporal space in which to encounter the narrative in pieces. For such pieces to remain coherent and to matter to us we must be able to locate them in a cosmological frame that we construct over time. Viewing seriality as the primary modality of all storytelling significantly re-frames the history of narrative transmission and narrative technology: within this lens, the ways in which each new delivery system for narrative embraces serial narrative becomes testament to the persistence and importance of the serial form.
Certainly attending to the explicit seriality of novels such as Bleak House can cause us to reassess how we understand narrative to work. Bleak House explodes Aristotle’s famous “beginning-middle-end” narrative ideal (a pervasive idea for both the discipline of literary analysis and in creative writing departments, where it is taught as the “three act” structure). Bleak House, however, cannot be made to fit into “three acts”: rather, it is a narrative that incessantly begins and ends in the middle of things. In the first installment we’re launched, via the recounting of a disembodied, partially- omniscient narrator, directly into the middle of an interminable court case.
After two chapters, we get a whole new narrator, Esther Summerson, who continues throughout the novel as part-time storyteller. The dual-narrator structure means that we regularly encounter the same events all over again, filtered through the different narrators’ perspectives: when Esther begins her narration in chapters three and four, she takes us up to the very place we originally began, “In Chancery,” and the novel begins yet again right where
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it already started. Just as the novel begins multiply in the middle of things, it also refuses to end: even the final line of the novel breaks off in the middle.
Esther’s final statement, “even supposing—” with its indeterminate m-dash, its absent period, leaves the narrative open, hanging on a word of invention.
We cannot find in this novel a clear moment of final closure, of fixable meaning, through which retrospectively to appreciate its whole coherence.
Rather, to understand Bleak House, we need to develop a narrative methodology that focuses on multiplicity, fragmentation, and a kind of
“supposing” that arises both from authorial and readerly positions. Dickens
“supposes” his narrative, but so does Esther, who invites the reader to continue to “suppose” what will continue to happen in the narrative of Bleak House.
For that matter, Esther herself, part-time voice of the novel, can be most productively read serially. Esther is both a major character—a narrator, one of the fictional “authors” of the story—and a surprisingly minor character:
she is by turns “flat” and “round.” She has caused much critical irritation because of this: much ink has been spilled trying to come to grips with Esther’s interiority, or lack thereof. This criticism, however, depends on seeing narrative and characterization as stable, fixed, coherent: if we resist the need for narrative to exhibit consistency and wholeness—that is, if we treat it serially—we can more readily begin to theorize a character dynamism in which characters aren’t fixed, but occupy different positions in different moments within a narrative’s “character system” (the term is Alex Woloch’s).
These are just a few ways in which serial narratology can transform many totems of narrative theory. A serial narratologist treats narrative as inevitably looser and more fragmented than it is generally thought to be; views
narrative as always simultaneously whole and never fully complete: pays attention to the ways in which narrative continually makes and unmakes itself. Serial narratology offers us new views of structure and character and new ideas about the presence, absence, or even identity of the author; it locates seriality as the fundamental function by which, to quote Paul Ricoeur, narrative renders time and space into human terms.
