Where Historiographic Metafiction and Narratology Meet: Towards an Applied Cultural Narratology

1. The histories and respective achievements of structuralist and German contributions to narrative theory (Erzahltheorie) have recently become subject of a controversy. While David Darby's article Form and Content: An Essay in History of Narratology pits classical against history of German narrative theory, arguing that should be remodeled into a theory of interpretation, other narratologists have criticized both his presentation of German narrative theory and his suggestion that such a contextualist narratology necessarily requires ill-defined concept of implied author. Monika Fludernik has pointed out that German contributions to narrative studies are much broader and more varied than Darby's essay suggests (History). Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Muller have taken Darby to task for failing to provide convincing reasons for his claims regarding purported need for a change in narratology's aims and for widening its research domain (Narratology). This controversy and different accounts participants have offered of history of narrative theory are interesting not only from point of view of light they shed on complex developments and international ramifications of narratology. They also metonymically illustrate what is at slake in current debates about directions into which is moving. Hardcore structuralist narratologists are very sceptical about several of so-called collected in David Herman's recent volume Narratologies, suspecting that they will inevitably lead to a contamination that infects pure and neutral description with taint of ideology and relativism. In contrast to purists who want to make the world safe for as John Bender aptly put it (Making), practitioners of various postclassical narratologies intrepidly rush in where structuralists fear to tread. Whether or not they are fools in so doing may be an open question, but their work has arguably opened up productive lines of research. Nonetheless, one cannot rail to notice that question asked in title of an illuminating collection of articles edited by Kindt and Muller (What is Narratology?) has recently received quite different and even contradictory answers. There no longer seems to be a consensus about either main aims or objectives of or about extension of its research domains. Echoing Christine Brooke-Rose's title Whatever Happened to Narratology? one may at this stage well ask Whither narratology? Instead of reviewing these debates, providing yet another survey of recent developments in narratology, (1) of trying to act as arbiter of hostilities, present essay pursues three more modest goals: to sketch out some of premises and concepts of an applied cultural that puts analytical toolkit developed by in service of context-sensitive interpretations of novels, to provide a typological overview of new kinds of historical fiction partly based on narratological categories, and to indicate how latter may be used in order to tease out epistemological and ethical implications of what has come to be known as metafiction. I hope to show that cultural analyses and interpretations of narratives in general, and research on historiographic metafiction in particular, would stand to gain a lot by actually applying categories provided by narratology. Using historiographic metafiction as a case study for testing usefulness of a new kind of cultural narratology, I would like to argue that such dichotomies as one between the uncontaminated fields of 'classical' narratology and contextualist dimensions of contemporary 'postclassical' narratological scholarship (Darby, Form and Context Revisited 423) should not be exaggerated. They arguably present us with a set of false choices: between text and context, between form and content as well as form and context, between formalism and contextualism, between bottom-up analysis and top-down synthesis, and between neutral description and ideological evaluation. …