Maclean, Marie. Narrative as Performance: The Baudelairean Experiment. London: Routledge, 1988.
Maclean’s text is 16 years old now, but it seems particularly relevant in its focus on narratives as interactions: “I realized that narrative could not be satisfactorily explored except as the site of an interaction, just as a body or mind can only be fully appreciated when seen in interplay with those of another” (xi).
Maclean investigates the interaction inherent in performance and attempts to use it as a context through which other forms of narrative, particularly written narrative, can be read. Performance is inherently “subject to variation” in its participants, its context, and in the expectations brought to the performance (what Rabinowitz might call its genre) (xii). An audience can give in to or resist the performance as presented: “Through a narrative text I meet you in a struggle which may be co-operative or may be combative, a struggle for knowledge, for power, for pleasure, for possession” (xii).
Maclean immediately cites Caillois to describe an “arena of play” that circumscribes teller, hearer, and mediating narrative in an act of narration, and proposes a focus on “the teller-hearer nexus inherent in all narrative” (1). She then establishes narrative as a state of play, where “the variables introduced by the context of each particular hearer, interacting with both the context of the teller and that of the telling, are in shifting interplay with repeated factors of the text” (2). She depicts this state of play as competitve; the narrator strives to maintain authority over the narrative, not only in terms of the content related but the rules of context that govern relation, but the fluidity of variables makes this authority contingent. Of course, the narrator has some preexisting advantages:
Each [narrator and narratee] experiences an invasion of his or her territory by the other. The narrator has an advantage in that a map of the territory (a self-reflexive segment) can be included in the text. This is a means by which the narrator can control the advance of the other, turn it into desired paths, and ultimately even persuade him or her to cede territory. (17-18)
I’m piqued by negentropy as Maclean uses it: narrative is an ordering force, “a marshalling of the resources of language against the seeemingly random dispersion of our experience” (2), and reception is equally negentropic; it deploys genre and formula as expectations to reinforce a cultural order in narrative (2). “So the teller must constantly balance redundancy, or the many varied forms of repetition of the message, against entropy, or the danger that the new may be dispersed at random before it can be recognized” (3).
Maclean historicizes written narrative as we understand it:
…the problematics of the ’stable’ text are seen in part as a constantly frustrated attempt to achieve proprietorial control. The advent of the named author, the titled and genre-labelled text, the imprimatur of printing and publication, have all tended to turn the previously fluid relationships of narrative performance into a static relationship of possession. (19)
still reading…