To talk about first-person consciousness this much runs the risk of implying that the consciousness is the only thing that matters, not its embodiment. But this is not the case in storytelling, which necessarily highlights a holistic view of persons. Paul Ricoeur begins his analysis of narrative identity by arguing that the category “person” is a basic particular that cannot be reduced, and the “priority given to bodies is of the highest importance for the notion of person.” He does so to resist Cartesian descriptions of selfhood, as if who we are is best explained by mental activity, not by our experiences in the world. Storytelling, which cannot exist without giving ultimate priority to experience, proves Ricoeur correct. In his well-known essay “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin laments that the rise of the novel, and the book as its technology, has served to move storytelling away from the idea of wise counsel given to others in a community of listeners and toward the idea of sharing information. If this is true, it is much more the case in our information age, which offers the temptation to abandon the book in favor of an even more disembodied technology. It is thus easy to see why we tend to forget the fact that the author is a particular person who has written a particular text with singular events that take place in a locatable space and time. It is also easy to forget that the inventive act of writing (or telling) this story presumes an audience, as Derek Attridge tells us, so that the creation of any particular text is also best described as an event, not a thing.
But we can and should remember it. Consider again the story of the baby shoes. “For Sale: baby shoes. Never worn.” The arrangement of these words in this way is singular. These six words in this order and with this exact punctuation can be reiterated, of course, even with different meanings. But the singularity of these words arranged this way still remains, and is the condition for the possibility of their repetition in a way that would be recognizable as repetition. This simple fact is recognized by our legal system, which enables writers to sue individuals who take phrases from their work and use them without attribution. That our legal system can do this points to the irreducible particularity of a given utterance—even to the absurdity of trying to coin and protect a single word like threepeat. When we recognize that someone somewhere (maybe Hemingway) said or wrote “For Sale: baby shoes. Never Worn,” we recognize it as an utterance in place and time: what theorists call parole. Parole is opposed to the word langue, which refers to the abstract way that language has continuity across space and time. The conversation you had with your spouse this morning highlights the event of parole, whereas a mythic story handed down from generation to generation highlights the idea of langue. A single event of parole may not have a traceable origin, but that fact does not erase its particular and personal origin altogether. Regardless of the question of origin, contemporary American novels and short stories are not typically mythic, and their authors certainly do not want their origins to be forgotten or erased. In our most valued stories abstraction gives way to concrete particularity, a particularity that is always personal. The focal point of the story—the protagonist or hero, in this case, the parents of the baby—even though they are not real, cannot be considered abstractly. Stepping into a particular story reifies the particular stepper, too, at least in relation to this singular story. This “becoming particular” in a story can even be seen in the famous children’s book The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics. The book and film prove very simply that when put in the context of a story the dot and the line cease to be mathematical and become personal and particular, even with the sound turned off. And when they become personal and particular, we also have a personal and particular reaction to them. We can have multiple reactions when we reencounter the text, but each one is also limited to a particular body (the reader) in a particular place and time.
Tellingly, the artists who have been the most eager to challenge or defy this basic fact of storytelling have not been novelists. Usually they are abstract poets enthralled by Mallarmé, whose poetry illustrates how far the artist must move away from narrative in order to inhabit the impersonal realm of “pure poetry.” When fiction writers try to challenge the irreducibly personal particularity of stories, the result is usually called metafiction, which is notoriously parasitic on conventional fiction for its effects. John Barth, for example, reduces story to grammatical abstraction in “Title.”: “Oh God comma I abhor self-consciousness. I despise what we have come to; I loathe our loathsome loathing, our place our time our situation, our loathsome art, this ditto necessary story. The blank of our lives. It’s about over. Let the dénouement be soon and unexpected, painless if possible, quick at least, above all soon. Now now! How in the world will it ever . . .” Metafiction’s pleasures are therefore almost entirely intellectual, and it (ironically) makes the authorial presence even more intrusive. Its stories are exceptions that prove the rule: we do not usually read novels to play a game of Mad Libs. We read to pay attention to a particular person whose story is being told by a particular other person who is gifted in the art of storytelling. Barth’s rebellion depends on it.
(excerpted from chapter 1)
