Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Writing an introduction to a wide-ranging collection of essays is always a matter of navigating between Scylla and Charybdis — but in this book, the metaphor has more specificity than usual. Scylla, you'll recall, was a monster who inhabited a cave in a cliff on a spit of land jutting off from the coast; her many arms plucked sailors from the boats that came too near. Charybdis was a whirlpool that threatened any boats that tried to evade the cliff. Elements of those images impinge on this introduction — and on narrative theory itself — in several ways. How, for instance, should the introduction be structured? On the one hand, we can aim for clarity, simply summarizing the contents. Such a Cliffs Notes approach may provide a certain stony intelligibility, but it runs the risk of plucking the spirit from both the essays and our readers. On the other hand, we're faced with the ever-expanding whirlpool of self-reflexivity. An introduction, after all, can itself easily become a narrative — and a narrative about the current study of narrative (which in turn includes a history of the study of narrative) risks spinning into an endless loop, especially when written by authors who are, by disciplinary training, acutely self-conscious. The task is made more difficult still because Scylla and Charybdis are not simply potential dangers to be evaded. Like the Sirens (and it's appropriate that ... log in or subscribe to read full text