Narrative style: the inseparability of self, style and text

Abstract

This paper arose in response to a request from my colleague who supervised my doctoral thesis. He suggested that I explain my choice of narrative style. I discovered that, contrary to my immediate reaction that I did not use a particular style, I had made textual decisions about style throughout the writing process. When I looked at my other writings, they too revealed a choice of style. The question I had to ask was how did I make these choices and decisions, and to what extent were such choices conscious and deliberate decisions and what were the political implications, if any, of my style. I make a single point in this paper: that narrative style cannot be separated from the self and the inscriptions of the text. The point is founded on two parallel and current discussions on feminisms and postmodernism. I argue that the feminist call to de‐center the self while simultaneously seeking self reflexivity in order to fulfill the mandate of resistance postmodernism to transform society, do not necessarily sit comfortably with each other. The disjuncture that these two imperatives, to de‐center and to transform, may reveal, points to the need for a recognition of a form of essentialism that seeks to call the writer to assume responsibility for the text she writes. It is this responsibility for the text that forms the core of the politics of narrative style.

Notes

1. See the book that emerged from this project: Lather and Smithies (1997).

2. Two South American novelists who made magic realism into a literary style.