Narrative Fissures: Reading and RhetoricFEATURE
A Discussion with Nita Schechet
What are Narrative Fissures? Narrative fissures are my metaphor for sites of textual entry created by writers to activate reader response. They are thus equally sites for critical readers, providing openings into textual intentionality. Narrative Fissures thus offers a methodology for critically aware reading and writing of narratives, and the book demonstrates this methodology ranging from the level of a single sentence to the extended narratives of ethnography and fiction, in both real and imaginary narratives. Should readers be aware of the ways in which these fissures affect their understanding of a specific text and “speaker”? Both readers and writers should be as rhetorically sophisticated as possible. As the rhetorical concerns of both reading and writing narrative spread through and across disciplines, the reading and writing skills demonstrated in Narrative Fissures will help forge the professionally reflective reader and writer that once belonged exclusively within the literary domain. You mention three different critical strategies for examining a text, narrative analysis, order of events as narrated, and the duration of the narrated events. How do these affect the reader and what might these imply about the author/speaker? Narrative Fissures maps several fissured sites of hermeneutic entry and their implications for both readers and writers. Among these fissures are: order and duration of narrated events, repetition, gaps, lexical selection, universalization, syntax, linguistic register, textual voices, authorial prefacing, narrative frames, and narrative resolution. What type of narrative do you believe to be most effective for the reader? If by "effective" you mean rhetorically persuasive, narrative effect has nothing to do with types of narrative. Narrative Fissures demonstrates how mimetic texts create their readers, viewing the reader as a textual construct. I posit two readers, one resisting and one complicit, as a text's ideal or implied reader. The reader I call "resisting" is one who is cued by a text to resist the text's narrator; the reader I call "complicit" is one who is cued to follow a text's narrator without questioning his/her reliability. Eliciting complicity or resistance to a narrator is a rhetorical strategy always aimed at enhancing the real-world author-reader collaboration essential to realizing the potential of any text. You mention, in the Epilogue, that one measure of ethics seen through the fissure of narrative resolution is questions asked and answers given. What are some other measures that give us a better understanding of the text? In addition to the ethical implications of narrative resolution that is the focus of the epilogue, the preceding section of the book, Part II, extends the critical reading skills surveyed in Part I and applies them to what I call "reflectively reflexive" writing. Reflective-reflexivity describes a move from the merely self-referential toward textually-anchored reflection, a move with profound ethical import for all disciplines and professions working with narrative. Cultural studies, ethnography, psychotherapy, historiography, critical legal studies, education, communication, and medicine are among the fields that share an interest in the epistemological potential of narrative understanding.
--Lorna Marie McManus
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