A Red-Letter Day for Jargon and Shtuff

The site posted below on narratology, by Jahn, and the mind-bending journey across the internet that ensued has filled my head with an immovable, solid mass of various interconnected terminologies. My father would approve. He, the first-generation immigrant, claims that any pursuit of any discipline revolves around the internalization of the language of that discipline, and that of its practitioners. But the cataloguer's discipline is not the discipline of the narratologist, and the wild intersection of our narratologist lives and our cataloguer lives is resulting in a mild MARCatastrophe.

The challenge is to come up with a way to simply catalogue "narrative form", the infamous 592 field. In dreams, I reach out to all the unreachable mass of literary works in the decade of 1740-1749 and flip through those pages, unable to come up with a conveniently small number of narratological classifications for these particular works. As I attempt to list some classifications, the books endlessly expand, their 200+ year old bindings bulging, falling apart, until the texts transform into nightmarish Rolodexes of nigh-infinite possibilities. But I digress.

Two thoughts about the field-

1) We must generate a finite list of labels that consistently describe predictable variations of certain parts of narration, if our aim is to classify and make searchable narratological occurrences. We cannot label one thing "heterodiegetic" and the other "figural narration", so we are restricted to a specific set of ideas. If we had four fields, one for "presence of certain specific characterization techniques", "presence of certain specific modes of focalization", "overt or covert narrator" and "heterodiegetic v. homodiegetic narrator", we could split our classifications. As it is, we have one field, and therefore we are limited to comparing apples to apples, without bringing in the entire aisle of narratological fruit.

Our current list of labels/labeling system consists of "third-person, first-person, and epistolary"

2) Each work of prose fiction needs to be labeled in under a reasonable amount of time. This disqualifies narratological classifications that are very specific, rely on close reading, or aren't representative of a text - the detailed tree of characterization, for example, while universal, is potentially too specific for us to use. For example, "figural characterization" may not representative of an entire work's characterization, and ""public explicit figural autocharacterization". In this way, "epistolary" is actually a nice categorization, because despite the fact that we might worry about how epistolary a given novel is, we have a sense that if letters permeate through an entire work, it's epistolary, hands-down, without question, just by the presence of many epistles.

The de facto current practice for the 592 field is a simple process, and one that actually makes a lot of sense for its simplicity and minimal profit-gained-to-time-expended ratio.

Subfield A:

1) Open the book. Page through it.
2) Look for letters (epistles). If there are letters, proceed to 2a. If not, proceed to 3.
2a) Does the book have a lot of letters? If so, the book is now epistolary! Proceed to step 4.
3) Look for pronouns. Are these mostly first or third-person? If the former, the book is now first-person! If the latter, the book is now third-person! Proceed to step 4.

Subfield B:

4) Put anything that isn't included in subfield b.

While we are labeling the presence of letters, first-person pronouns, and third-person pronouns, we're saying virtually nothing about what the 592 field actually has been theoretically designed to mean. The 592 is labeled as the field for "narrative form", but narrative form isn't necessarily dependent on pronouns. The closest thing which pronouns-as-evidence approximates is homodiegetic narration vs. heterodiegetic narration. While all books can be said to possibly have homodiegetic or heterodiegetic narrators, while at least having one, resolving our cataloguer's needs, classifying narration as simply homodiegetic or heterodiegetic, while easy, might not satisfy us.

In fact, our current practice already suggests the limitation and insufficiency of classification via that convenient binarism. Labeling things as first-person, third-person, as well as "epistolary" might seem less advanced in a jargonistic kind of way, but it actually reflects our concern with greater, more generic conventions, not necessarily narrative. As a result, I feel sort of torn between labeling things from the bottom-up narratologically (suggested by subfield B, the labels third-person, and first-person) and labeling things from the top-down (suggested by subfield A, and the label of "epistolary").

I've been thinking about the 592 field for awhile now, and reading the Jahn article sort of crystallized a suspicion that I just don't understand our objective of the 592 field, which is why we keep running into snags regarding relative magnitude like "How much of the book is epistolary and does it matter?" These books are pretty idiosyncratic, it seems, and the confusion of texts makes me take cautious baby-steps with the 592 field, just noting down third and first-person. And while this is satisfactory to some degree for now, every time I run into a novel with mostly mixed narration, it's going to induce some kind of fugue state where I can't simplify things from these two different fields.