CHAPTER I: Methodology
1.2 Performativity in narrative
While the narratological and performative strands of theory have substantial histories
as individual disciplines, synthesising the two conceptual frameworks is a relatively new
approach. The critical premises of narratological performativity (or, more simply,
narrative performance) have been more-or-less implicitly suggested in works such as
Wolfgang Iser’s Prospecting (1989), Seymour Chatman’s Coming to Terms (1990), James
Loxley’s Perfomativity (2007), and Monika Fludernik’s Narrative and Drama (2008).
However, it was only recently that German theorist Ute Berns explicitly and
systematically outlined its possible scope in her article “The concept of performativity in
narratology: mapping a field of investigation” (2009). Berns shows that the otherwise distinct fields can be employed synchronously to investigate both the story-level of a
narrative (how it functions as a text) and its broader pragmatic and cultural foundations
(how it functions within a context). Indeed her configuration for the study of narrative-
performativity is a two-way project: not restricted to working from strictly formal
grounds, nor from extrinsic generalisations. In combining the theoretical modes, one is
able to move between the poles of text and context freely, opening up new areas of
discourse and functional hypotheses:
In this narratological context, the descriptive force of the concept is paramount,
even though the transfer may raise questions regarding the status of fictional
discourse in speech act theory. However, when that same concept of
‘performativity’ is appropriated for the analysis of a whole novel as a metaphorical
new objects of investigation, which, incidentally, raises new questions of method.
(Berns, 2009, pp. 94-95)
Berns article is given more attention in the following conceptual framework section, but it
is worth noting how her post-Derridean usage of “descriptive” and “operative” language
functions in the previous quote. For Berns, as for McDonald - and as we will see for New
Zealand literary historian Warwick Slinn - the connection between illustrative and active
aspects of language provides a site wherein the act of narration can be “considered in a
wider pragmatic or cultural context” (p. 93). Berns gestures to a variety of contexts where
the “citational and re-signifying potential” (p. 95) of Derridean conceptions of
performativity have taken root, such as studies of gender and the “gendering force” of
speech (Felman 2003; Butler, 1990), in semiotics (see Elam, 1987; De Marinis, 1993), and in studies focussed on the body, or the materiality of the cultural situation (Butler,
1993; Carlson, 2004). In collapsing text and context, Berns aligns her understanding of
performativity with that of Mary-Louise Pratt, Sandy Petrey and other theorists who
oppose the “parasitic” view of fictional language proposed by Austin/Searle, and who treat
literary discourse as “speech contexts” in which an individual text is interpreted or decoded
according to culturally-shared understanding of implicit conventions.
Interestingly, Berns’ methodological solution to the problem of relating text to
context is mirrored in reverse in a similar proposition made a decade earlier by New
Zealand literary historian Warwick Slinn. In “Poetry and Culture: Performativity and
Critique”, Slinn proposes a performative model in order to overcome what he terms the
problem of “extrinsic referentiality” in the study of poetics (1999, p. 59). He reasons that
interpretive readings of the thematic, ideological, and political varieties that begin, not
within the text, but from remote and often disconnected grounds:
This orientation towards the culture rather than the work, the general rather than
the specific, or towards quick diagnosis rather than elaboration of the symptom,
continually privileges extrinsic referentiality, as if cultural meaning is always found
in discourses from institutions outside literature (medicine, law, politics). The
consequential tendency to simplify literary effects is obvious. (p. 58)
Slinn gestures toward a wave of literary studies in the latter half of the 20th century which
tend to diminish (or, perhaps, completely ignore) aspects of texts which do not sit
comfortably within their extrinsic frames of reference – a process which tends to
circumvent the more intricate components of literary practices and forestall discussions of more multifaceted or dynamic instances of language performance. The problem for Slinn
(like Berns and McDonald) is how to stay berthed on solid text-based (and perhaps neo-
structuralist) ground, while releasing the formalist anchor enough to explore the broader
cultural horizons implied by the reading. As a solution, Slinn also evokes Derrida’s
critique of Austin and Searle, and incorporates iterability into his description of the
performative in order to link verbal form with culture and convention: “performatives are
inseparable from the possibilities and practices of semiotic and thence cultural repetition
(or citation), their successful enactment depending upon recognition of the
appropriateness of their verbal form (or formula). As much as a singular act,
performativity is the reiteration of a set of norms” (1999, p. 62). For Slinn, performativity
provides a solution to the potential text/context dualisms by tendering a “dynamic”
text should no longer be read as a passive mimic of social discourse to be mined by
extrinsic vantage points, but an active “cultural event” which participates in reconstructing
and refashioning reality, even as it recapitulates those cultural conventions and practices.
In order to discuss this point I will briefly diverge from the theoretical to the pragmatic,
and mention another study of New Zealand fiction, in the hopes of reiterating – by way
of contrast – the possible value of the performative-narratological methodology in limiting
possible problems of extrinsic referentiality.
At the time of writing, the most recent and – arguably – most significant attempt to
discuss current New Zealand and literary culture is Patrick Evans’ study The Long
Forgetting (2007), which utilizes conceptual tools from neo-Marxist, psychoanalytical and
gender-based criticism, as well as concepts derived from contemporary feminism and queer theory, to examine the country’s literature in English from a post-colonial position.
The resulting study is a perceptive critical account of New Zealand literary culture since
the 19th century, which traces economic, social and cultural patterns of Pākehā
ideological dominance, and reveals ways in which settler culture sought to normalise,
euphemise and aestheticise its destructive European-capitalist presence in New Zealand.
While the study is undoubtedly, as Lawrence Jones puts it, “a witty and coherent synthesis
of the poststructuralist criticism of New Zealand literary culture of the past 25 years”
(Jones, 2008) from its critical reception, it also appears to suffer in part from the
limitations of its extrinsically referential standpoint. In fact two of the most prominent
critics to have reviewed the study - Jones and Stafford – have taken Evans to task for
precisely this problem: what Jane Stafford terms his all-pervasive “postcolonial
According to both reviewers, The Long Forgetting errs in circularity - by taking an
approach which follows an established critical system, mining its texts for evidence which
will re-enforce that system. Stafford charges Evans with using a theoretical framework
which “flattens and homogenises” (2008) the literature, and Jones arraigns Evans for a
“singleness of focus” which “twists [the literature] to suit his argument” (2008).
Given the political implications of The Long Forgetting, it is striking that it omits
nearly all of the works by the authors in the present study. C.K. Stead and Michael
Jackson do not figure at all, which seems an unusual oversight given that Stead has always
been outspoken about his position on the conservative side of cultural-politics, and that
Jackson is producing some of the most interesting socio-cultural work from the liberal
left. Jackson, for example, has consistently produced fiction that would contradict the narrowness of the Pākehā worldview described in Evans’ thesis – indeed, he has even
sought to uncover what Graeme Lay termed, in a review of his work, the “official
amnesia” (1989) of Pākehā injustices to Māori in the Taranaki area. Evans does include
Wendt in his study, who is praised for his determination to exclude “complacent” (2007,
p. 206) Western readers and baffle literary critics - although presumably not all literary
critics. Russell Haley is not on Evans’ cultural map at all, and Charlotte Randall, one of
our most lively talents, is only mentioned briefly. Evans censures her for submitting to
the pressures of globalised capitalism which “efface the localised referent” (p. 181) in her
work and for producing novels that are “homogenized” - as if it should naturally be her
aim to document national characteristics. Of course Evans includes Frame in his study,
but I would concur with Jane Stafford that his treatment of her seems “strangely
autobiographical work and what Evans sees as yet another reshaping of the old colonial
nationalist paradigm - the thorny crown of her “victimhood” (Evans, 2007, p. 154).
As already outlined, the narratological-performative framework suggests two possible
reasons for the omissions made by extrinsically referential studies. On one level, it is
possible that the critical tools of extrinsic studies fail to engage the complicating formal
and technical strategies of metafictional writing. For instance, Janet Frame’s metafictions
are embedded with irony and diffused by manifold layers of voice, point-of view,
duplicity, imposture and derivation through which Frame destabilizes notions of authority
– and even meaning. Even some of Frame’s most perceptive critics find the levels of
reference and meaning in her novels “elusive, ambiguous” (Cronin, 2009, p. 4) or
“paradoxical and inconclusive” (Michell, 2009, p. 129) or as Evans himself has previously described them, like “a riddle to solve” (Evans, 2004, p. 23). Not surprisingly, the single
focuses of psychoanalytic, post-colonial, and gender-based theories may entail
oversimplifications of Frame’s complex structures. As Jennifer Lawn has argued, critics
who treat Frame’s work as passive in their imposition of theory may fail to engage the
text’s own heuristic self-interpretation and conceptual density: “The critic who imposes
theory on the text – bearing in mind the more or less explicit equation between vulnerable
text and vulnerable author in so much commentary on Frame – risks replicating the role
of the ‘bad doctor’ who misdiagnoses the textual signs” (2009, p. 28). Or as Marc Delrez
has it, the elusive “linguistic constructs” which are constitutive of Frame’s oeuvre mean
that an overall view of Frame’s work “can only be had through a kind of sensitive
diaphragm, as it were: one that keeps opening and contracting as both writer and reader
On another, more abstract level, it is conceivable that extrinsically-referential points
of view tend to overlook the innately operative force of language to transform, stage,
reiterate and act – even despite a texts possible position in a hegemonic cultural structure.
If we agree with Derrida, every individual speech-act is distinct and valuable due to its
specificity - its ability to “break [...] with its context” (1988, p. 9). And in this sense it is
impossible to define the entire context of a speech act – context cannot be “exhaustively
determinable” and the “conscious intentions” of the author are never completely present
or transparent in a text (p. 18). A performative utterance is not constituted solely by
intentions or purposed meanings as Austin/Searle propose, but also by the complex
structure of language. In excluding, for example, the possibility of parodic or playful
citation of language, many of the fluid, contingent and plural meanings of a text may remain obscured by extrinsic (colonial-postcolonial, rational-nonrational) binary
oppositions.
The point is not to propose a set of false choices between narratology and
contextualism, or between unbiased formalism and loaded ideological interpretation.
Rather, this study hopes to attend to the complexities of textual form while remaining
aware of, and responsive to, the socio-cultural and literary-cultural implications of the
texts it examines. Instead of inspecting literature for thematic features which reflect
hegemonic social patterns already delineated in other spheres of the social sciences and
literary studies, this study operates from within the texts, using performativity as operative
concept within the general field of narratology. The discussion within each chapter works
bidirectionally from one bearing to another. On one trajectory, the novels serve as
narratology, and, in this sense, the texts answer the purpose of theory to a small degree.
From this direction I hope to investigate a number of concepts, taxonomies, and models
that are currently under debate in narratological and performative studies – concepts that
have bearing on the way fiction is performed, produced, viewed, and discussed in New
Zealand and internationally: from issues pertaining to the various understandings of post-
modernism and realism, to micro-level issues of authorship, the nature of the narrator,
models of character “focalisation”, parodic modes, matters of narrative framing, patterns
of internalisation, and theories of the implied reader or “narratee”.
On the other hand, as this summary of performative theory suggests, the texts should
not be seen as necessarily subordinated to theory, acting as convenient illustrations of
greater extrinsic or even formalist generalities. From the other trajectory, I hope the methodology and theoretical framework will lend itself to the task of elucidating and
particularizing the texts – examining and clarifying them as distinct and individual
performances of speech. By examining their specific features I hope to discover whether
or not these examples of New Zealand metafiction are able to contribute to literary culture
despite thematic aspects which may or may not reveal varying levels of immersion in
dominant cultural codes of understanding. In other words, this study attempts to bring
the intrinsic qualities of some of the country’s more modally complex fiction into balance
with the existing body of extrinsically referential studies. Performativity thus functions as
an interpretative approach within the larger narratological schema or framework.
In the broadest possible sense then, the questions of the thesis then are both
performative and narratological: How do Frame/Stead/Haley/Jackson/Wendt/Randall
realism/post-modernism et al.) sensibly explain their textual projects? What space in
narratology does the metafictional mode of their stories occupy? How do the authors see