2012 — Seymour Chatman
The International Society for the Study of Narrative is delighted to confer its Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award on Seymour Chatman. We are fortunate to have Seymour here today to accept this award in person.
By honoring Seymour Chatman with the Lifetime Achievement Award, the Society recognizes first of all the foundational contribution his work has made to the discipline of narrative theory. By this estimation, the brilliance and impact of Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (1978) is the achievement of a lifetime and beyond. Story and Discourse is one of those rare books whose vision and execution is so potent and provocative as to have been instantly influential and to have remained profoundly generative. Putting into relation lines of inquiry developed in structural linguistics, narratology, and Russian and Anglo-American formalist theories of fiction, Story and Discourse forwards its own original theory of narrative structure even while it brought the field of narratology into a new stage of articulation through a brilliant act of synthetic imagination. What is more, Story and Discourse’s high lucidity and unfailing wit, the literary examples drawn from every century and from all the major western literary traditions, and the dazzling micro-readings of specific films and novels, immediately distinguished it as the book of theory that even non-theorists were eager to read. Story and Discourse has by this point in time been firmly established as one of the primary texts of “classic narratology.” One can simply not imagine the field taking shape without it, nor can one imagine the field going forward without reference to it.
But to review Seymour’s scholarly activity from 1956 (when he received his PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) to his retirement in 1993 as Professor of Rhetoric and Film at the University of California, Berkeley is also to follow the career-long habits of critical inquiry, theoretical creativity, and professional engagement that helped create a scholarly world in which books like Story and Discourse could matter. Tracing the abiding interest in problems of language, form, style, and structure that led early in his career to the study of meter, poetics and Milton’s “participial style”(1968); and tracking the leap to his study of fictional forms via The Later Style of Henry James (1972)—we find that such breakthrough turns in Seymour’s thinking are first performed in symposia that themselves have become landmark events along with the volumes of essays that resulted from these gatherings. These include the controversial 1971 Literary Style: A Symposium; the 1973 Approaches to Poetics from that year’s English Institute; the 1974 Proceedings of the First International Congress on Semiotics, edited with Umberto Eco; and the watershed special issue of Critical Inquiry, edited by W.J.T. Mitchell and published as On Narrative (1981). The excitement and consequentiality of the arguments collected in these volumes attest both to the rigor of the intellectual exchange at those meetings and to the strength of the professional community that could push their debate with one another into disciplinary transformation.
That Seymour has been at the center of such turning points for the field reflects, of course, the value placed upon his work throughout his career. But his active participation in such communities is also constitutive of the way he works. As a theorist, Seymour seeks not to invent ex nihilo but to move a collective project forward. Some of Seymour’s most famous ideas come out of his desire to repair or improve the ideas of fellow narrative theorists. We might think in this regard of the refinements that Seymour has made in our understanding of point of view, taking us beyond Genettian focalization with concepts such as “slant” and “filter”; or of his defense of Booth’s implied author, revisioned as detached from Booth’s ethical agenda. But it is also part of Seymour’s openness to intellectual exchange that he good naturedly enters into debate with theorists who are hostile to the project of narratology—and in reading his replies to, say, “contextualist” or deconstructivist attacks on the field, one appreciates how Seymour gives the best account he can of what these critiques might be, even as he delineates their limits and finds new ways to reiterate the value of structuralist narratology.
In Story and Discourse and Coming to Terms (1990) as well as a host of articles, Seymour seeks to theorize deep narrative structure as something belonging to a variety of media and not just to linguistic forms. Working with film as literary fiction’s visual other, Seymour has provided both a general account of Narrative and particular accounts of what is distinctive to cinematic and literary narrative forms. In focusing on the “salient, controversial, or difficult” in narrative structure, he has given us terms that have been especially useful in accounting for the narrative innovations of modernists like Woolf and Joyce and avant-gardists like Robbe- Grillet. The difficulty that Seymour has always loved in literature and that drew him to Milton and James seems to have met its match in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni. Seymour’s book-length engagements with Antonioni, including Antonioni: The Surface of the World (1985) and the beautiful Michelangelo Antonioni: The Complete Films (brought out by Taschen) have given us not only a lexicon for understanding the particular aesthetic effects and ideological investments of Antonio’s oeuvre, but also concepts such as cinematic description and “contingent narration” that add to the theoretical understanding of film as a narrative medium.
Seymour has, happily, worked out many of his ideas through his active participation in the Narrative Society. He was a plenary speaker at the first official Narrative Conference in 1986 and appeared in the pages of the first issue of Narrative. In 2003, he helped organize the annual conference at Berkeley. He has been in between and beyond a regular contributor to the society and to its journal. Always moving forward, Seymour’s recent essay “Backwards,” an investigation of the narrative structure of reverse chronology narratives, appeared in Narrative in 2009.
Through the publication with Macmillan of his Reading Narrative Fiction (1992) as well as other edited volumes, Seymour also has opened the study of narrative to a audience of general readers and nonprofessional students. As a dedicated and inspiring teacher at Berkeley for over 30 years, he brought narratology from the Parisian center to the Pacific rim. But in the classroom, the end of high theory is for Seymour to give his students a finer-grained understanding of textual meaning. We see this pedagogic concern raised as the ultimate stake at the close of his introduction to Story and Discourse: “It is at the “reading out’ level that occurs the problems of the elementary literature class, where students understand the meaning of every sentence in isolation but cannot make any sense (or any satisfying sense) out of the whole narrative text.” Thanks to Seymour’s work, narrative text as a whole could begin to be thought, and students could know what to do with it.
The award our Society presents today joins the roll call of honors that Seymour has already received: the Fulbright, ACLS, Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and NEH. But it is with a special sense of gratitude for his particular contribution to both the study of Narrative and to this Narrative society that we today confer on Seymour Chatman the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award.
-- Dorothy J. HaleUniversity of California, Berkeley