View of Toward a Critical Ethical Narratology for Literary Reportages: Analyzing the Story Ethics of A. Fuller’s 'Scribbling the Cat'

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Abstract

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how narrative techniques impact on the construction and negotiation of values in art-journalism. Located on the borderland between journalism and literature, literary journalism’s epistemology is such that the construction of values is subject to a dialectical-relational approach to social reality. In my paper, I argue that since narratological categories like narrative situation, narrative time, narrative mood, and character-space that shape the poetics of literary reportages are of some ethical import, it is important to foster dialogue between classical, structuralist narratology and ethical criticism proper so as to be able to critically examine the story ethics of literary reportages. The model that I propose for the analysis of literary reportages, Critical Ethical Narratology (CEN), is an integrative, context-sensitive and generically-specific framework, based on a holistic understanding of narrative as a vehicle of both ethics and aesthetics. By applying this methodological armature to Alexandra Fuller’s reportage Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier, I will show that CEN can serve as a prolific model if one wants to account for the intimate link between value construction and narrativity.

Résumé

L’objectif de cette étude est de montrer comment des techniques narratives influencent la construction et la négociation des valeurs dans l’art-journalisme. Située à l’intersection entre journalisme et littérature, l’épistémologie du journalisme littéraire soumet la construction des valeurs à une approche dite dialectique-relationnelle de la réalité sociale. Dans la mesure où des catégories narratologiques comme la situation narrative, le temps narratif, le mode narratif et l’espace-ca- ractère, qui poétisent les reportages littéraires, ont des conséquences sur le plan éthique du récit, il est important de nouer un dialogue entre la narratologie classique, voire structuraliste, et l’éthique afin de pouvoir examiner, de façon critique, l’ethos textuel des reportages littéraires. Le modèle que je propose pour l’analyse éthico-narratologique des reportages littéraires, Éthico-Critiquo Narratologie (ECN) a vocation intégrative et vise à prendre en considération le contexte et le genre. Il se base sur une conception holistique du texte comme dispositif éthique et esthétique.

En appliquant cette armature méthodologique au reportage d’Alexandra Fuller Scribbling the Cat:

Travels with an African Soldier, il s’agit de montrer qu’ECN peut servir comme modèle opératoire pour une approche de la construction solidaire des valeurs et de la narrativité.

Nora B

^erning

Toward a Critical Ethical Narratology for Literary Reportages:

Analyzing the Story Ethics of Alexandra Fuller’s Scribbling the Cat

To refer to this article :

Nora B^erning, “Toward a Critical Ethical Narratology for Literary Reportages : Analysing the Story Ethics of Alexandra Fuller’s Scribbling the Cat”, in: Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties, November 2011, 7, Myriam B^oucharenc, David

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Geneviève FaBry (UCL) Anke gilleir (KULeuven) Gian Paolo giudiccetti (UCL) Agnès guiderdoni (FNRS – UCL) Ortwin de graeF (Kuleuven) Jan herMan (KULeuven) Marie holdsworth (UCL) Guido latré (UCL) Nadia lie (KULeuven)

Michel lisse (FNRS – UCL)

Anneleen Masschelein (FWO – KULeuven) Christophe Meurée (FNRS – UCL)

Reine Meylaerts (KULeuven) Olivier odaert (UCL)

Stéphanie vanasten (FNRS – UCL) Bart vanden Bosche (KULeuven) Marc van vaecK (KULeuven) Pieter Verstraeten (KULeuven)

Olivier aMMour-Mayeur (Monash University – Merbourne) Ingo BerensMeyer (Universität Giessen)

Lars Bernaerts (Universiteit Gent & Vrije Universiteit Brussel) Faith BincKes (Worcester College – Oxford)

Philiep Bossier (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) Franca Bruera (Università di Torino)

Àlvaro ceBallos viro (Université de Liège)

Christian cheleBourg (Université de Lorraine – Nancy II) Edoardo costadura (Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena) Nicola creighton (Queen’s University Belfast) William M. decKer (Oklahoma State University)

Dirk delaBastita (Facultés Universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix – Namur)

Michel delville (Université de Liège)

César doMinguez (Universidad de Santiago de Compostella

& King’s College)

Gillis dorleijn (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) Ute heidMann (Université de Lausanne)

Klaus H. KieFer (Ludwig Maxilimians Universität München) Michael Kolhauer (Université de Savoie)

Isabelle KrzywKowsKi (Université Stendhal-Grenoble III) Sofiane laghouati (Musée Royal de Mariemont) François lecercle (Université de Paris IV - Sorbonne) Ilse logie (Universiteit Gent)

Marc MauFort (Université Libre de Bruxelles) Isabelle Meuret (Université Libre de Bruxelles) Christina Morin (Queen’s University Belfast) Miguel norBartuBarri (Universiteit Antwerpen) Andréa oBerhuBer (Université de Montréal)

Jan oosterholt (Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg) Maïté snauwaert (University of Alberta – Edmonton)

C^onseil^de^rédaCtion – redaCtieraad

David Martens (KULeuven & UCL) – Rédacteur en chef - Hoofdredacteur

Matthieu sergier (FNRS – UCL & Factultés Universitaires Saint-Louis) – Secrétaire de rédaction Laurence van nuijs (FWO – KULeuven) – Redactiesecretaris

Elke d’hoKer (KULeuven)

Lieven d’hulst (KULeuven – Kortrijk) Hubert roland (FNRS – UCL)

Myriam watthee-delMotte (FNRS – UCL)

Interférences littéraires / Literaire interferenties KULeuven – Faculteit Letteren Blijde-Inkomststraat 21 – Bus 3331

B 3000 Leuven (Belgium)

C^omitésCientifique – WetensChappelijkComité

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Alexandra Fuller’s non-fiction novel Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier – part of which first appeared in The New Yorker in 2004 under the title The Soldier – was reviewed as some of the most compelling contemporary long- form reportage literature.¹ In 2005, Fuller was awarded the Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage² for her book which was labeled alternatively as memoir or travelogue by reviewers.³ On a trip to her native Africa, Fuller revisits the places of her childhood and travels with a white Rhodesian war veteran named ‘K’ from Zambia, through Zimbabwe, into Mozambique to discover “the things that make us war-wounded the fragile, haunted, powerful men-women that we are”.⁴ The story which revolves around the inner and outer journey of K and the narrator functions as a narrative of displacement – both in the literal and in the symbolic sense of the term. The literary reportage defies easy classification not least because white Africans are depicted as simultaneously oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized.⁵

Fuller’s Scribbling the Cat is a narrative “based upon personal experience, perception, and anecdotal evidence, representing a combination of the best of journalism and of creative non-fiction”.⁶ According to Fuller, it serves as a counter- narrative to the mass media’s stereotypical images and formulaic narrative frames⁷. Fuller seeks to dispel the “Out of Africa” myth as well as romanticized accounts of the Black Continent by relying heavily on the creative use of language so as to excite the reader both intellectually and emotionally, as Tom Wolfe would say.⁸ Her

1. Harry Mount, “White Man’s Burden”, in: The Telegraph, September 5, 2004; Malcom j^ones,

“War Wounds”, in: Newsweek, May 17, 2004.

2. Between 2003 and 2006, the prize was awarded to “reporters whose courage, curiosity, and integrity drive them to create in-depth, well-researched texts, bringing unknown, forgotten, and hidden realities to light”. See the official website of the Lettre Ulysses Award.

3. On the similarities between travel narratives and literary reportages see inter alia: Isabel

soares, “South: Where Travel Meets Literary Journalism”, in: Literary Journalism Studies, 2009, 1, 1, 17-30; John hartsocK, A History of American Literary Journalism: The Emergence of a Modern Narrative Form, Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 2000.

4. Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier, New York, Penguin, 2004, 251. 5. Antje rauwerda, “Exile Encampments: Whiteness in Alexandra Fuller’s Scribbling the Cat:

Travels With an African Soldier”, in: The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2009, 44, 2, 51-64.

6. See the official website of the Lettre Ulysses Award.

7. Dave weich, Author Interviews: Back to Africa with Alexandra Fuller, 2004, s.p., [online],

<http://www.powells.com/authors/fuller.html> (last accessed: May 15, 2011).

8. Tom wolFe, The New Journalism, New York, Harper & Row, 1973.

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reportage work resonates with Bell’s call for a “journalism of attachment”⁹ and gives new impetus to the debate on care as a virtue for journalists¹⁰. In his keynote speech at the Lettre Ulysses Awards inaugural ceremony in 2003, the Polish writer Ryszard Kapuściński made a case for the reportage as a form of writing based on a virtue ethics. For Kapuściński, solidarity and humanitas are at the heart of reportage literature. The essence of literary reportages lies in the struggle for justice and in the quest for social equality.

The adoption of a caring ethic by journalists which could possibly serve as a remedy for what Moeller calls “compassion fatigue”¹¹ does not come without controversy, though. While its proponents argue that the kind of autonomy that a virtue ethics could grant reporters acting simultaneously as ethical decision-makers and moral agents¹² is indispensable in an increasingly globalizing world – especially when it comes to reporting war, disaster, and human misery – such a professional self-understanding is anathema to reporters who hold dear notions like objectivity, impartiality, and balance that loom large in conventional codes of ethics for journalists. With the debate on reporters qua “custodians of conscience”¹³ come to the fore important questions regarding literary journalism’s ontology, epistemology, and axiology. I will address these questions in this essay through the lens of what I call a Critical Ethical Narratology (CEN), i.e. a generically-specific narratology with which I seek to address the difficult issue of the construction of values and norms in literary reportages.

CEN, as I will define it, is critical in two senses: First of all, it is critical because it is based on an orientation to difference. CEN is grounded in a Relational Dialec- tics, i.e. an interpretative theory of meaning-making that harkens back to Bakhtin’s dialogical theory of language.¹⁴ Literary reportages are, by definition, dialogical insofar as “any utterance is a link in a very complexly organized chain of other utte- rances” with which it “enters into one kind of relation or another”.¹⁵ Apart from it being intra-discursive, CEN is a critical and reflexive narratology in the sense that it seeks to advance critical-rational debate in the literary public sphere.¹⁶ Further- more, CEN is ethical because it is fundamentally concerned with the construction of values and norms in discourse and narration. The underlying assumption of CEN is that literary reportages, like literary fiction, are primary vehicles of values and

9. Martin Bell, “The Journalism of Attachment”, in: Matthew Kieran (ed.), Media Ethics, New York: Routledge, 1998, 15-22. The former BBC correspondent defines journalism of attachment as “a journalism that cares as well as knows; that is aware of its responsibilities; that will not stand neutrally between good and evil, right and wrong, the victim and the oppressor.” (16)

10. Linda Linda steiner and Chad M. oKrusch, “Care As a Virtue for Journalists”, in: Journal of Mass Media Ethics, 2006, 21, 2&3, 102-122.

11. Susan Susan d. Moeller, Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death, New York, Routledge, 1999.

12. Edmund Edmund B. laMBeth, Committed Journalism: An Ethic for the Profession, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1986.

13. James James s. etteMa and Theodore l. glasser, Custodians of Conscience: Investigative Journalism and Public Virtue, New York, Columbia University Press, 1998.

14. Mikhail Mikhail M. BaKhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1981; id., Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1986.

15. Ibid., 69.

16. J�rgen J�rgen haBerMas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1962.

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norms¹⁷. For the purpose of this essay, values will be defined as “critère qui fonde une préférence, qui fait que quelque chose est désirable, souhaitable, bon etc.”¹⁸, whereas norms, following Korthals-Altes, refer to “la forme prescriptive de la valeur”.¹⁹ To study the values and norms of a narrative, whether it be fiction or non-fiction, means to use the text as a “propédeutique à l’éthique”²⁰, that is, as a kind of laboratory for moral and ethical judgment. Since “individual narratives explicitly or more often impli- citly establish their own ethical standards in order to guide their audiences to particular ethical judgments”²¹, the role of the narratologist does not consist in applying a set of values and norms to the text, but rather to ask the question “par quels procédés le texte rend-il sensible les valeurs dont il se réclame?”²². Hence, “[é]tudier un texte dans la perspective des valeurs qu’il véhicule, conduit également à examiner son organi- sation stratégique, qui détermine la valeur des valeurs”.²³ What is central to CEN then is the close linkage between textuality and values. It is a kind of narratology that stands in the tradition of both Jouve’s and Phelan’s body of work insofar as it combines narrative form and aesthetics with narrative ethics. It is based on the idea that aesthetics and ethics are fundamentally complementary and that “interpretive, ethical, and aesthetic judgments overlap and reinforce each other”.²⁴

Since it is grounded in the basic assumption of the narrative nature of all discourse, CEN is a narratology that wants to be understood as both theory (narrative theory) and methodology. As such, CEN is a form of critical inquiry that Phelan refers to as “theorypractice”²⁵ which is a particularly congenial way of combining the theoretical dimension of narrative theory with the practical dimension of interpretation. Precisely because literary reportages go against our common sense perception that journalism and literature are separate spheres which are clearly distinguishable from each other, scholars need to be equipped with a conceptual framework for dealing with these hybrid forms of narrative. It is my belief that CEN is able to address not only many of the pressing questions that a stand-alone ethical analysis or critical theory could not resolve, but that it can also “raise the question of the nature of narrative,” thereby inviting “reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself ”.²⁶

Alexandra Fuller could be seen as belonging to the second generation of literary journalists, the so-called “New New Journalists”.²⁷ With her reportage

17. Vincent Vincent jouve, “L’autorité textuelle”, in: Karl canvat and Georges legros (eds.), Les Valeurs dans/de la littérature, Namur, Presses Universitaires de Namur, 2004, 89-100.

18. Liesbeth Liesbeth Korthals-altes, Le salut par la fiction?: sens, valeurs et narrativité dans Le roi des Aulnes de Michel Tournier, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1992, 10 (italics in the original).

19. Ibid., 11 (italics in the original).

20. Paul Paul ricœur, Soi-même comme un autre, Paris, Seuil, 1990, 139.

21. James James Phelan, “Narrative Judgments and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative: Ian McEwan’s Atonement”, in: James Phelan and Peter j. raBinowitz (eds.), A Companion to Narrative Theory, Malden, Blackwell Publishing, 2005, 325 (italics in the original).

22. Vincent Vincent jouve, Poétique des valeurs, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 2001, 7.

23. Liesbeth Liesbeth Korthals-altes, Le salut par la fiction?, 12 et seq.

24. James James Phelan, Narrative Judgments, 327.

25. id., Living to Tell About It, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005, ^x.

26. Hayden Hayden white, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality”, in: Critical Inquiry, 1980, 7, 1, 5.

27. “Rigorously reported, psychologically astute, sociologically sophisticated, and politically “Rigorously reported, psychologically astute, sociologically sophisticated, and politically aware”, these writers share “a devotion to close-to-the-skin reporting as the best way to bridge the gap between their subjective perspective and the reality they are observing.” Robert s. Boynton, The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers, New York, Vintage, 2005, 10.

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work she makes a significant contribution to the “rise of true fiction”²⁸ at the turn of the twenty-first century. Like the New Journalists in the 1960s and 70s, the writing of this emerging second generation of literary journalists is said to have as its touchstone critical constructivism.²⁹ Accordingly, literary journalists like Fuller tend to take the constructed nature of reality as their axioms for writing.³⁰ Hence, it could be argued that literary reportages are as much cultural constructions as literary fiction. Precisely because literary reportages blur the boundaries between journalism and literature in this way, I argue that this form of writing has the potential to reinvigorate the view of communication as culture.³¹

Throughout the essay, I will shed light on the genre’s ontological specifi- city. The primary goal of this exploratory study, however, is to demonstrate how narrative techniques impact on value construction in literary reportages. I will use Fuller’s book-length reportage as an example to illustrate how my conceptual framework for CEN can be applied to the narrative. I will show how such narratological categories as narrative situation, narrative time, narrative mood, and character-space function as vehicles for value construction in literary reportages.

Through my close reading of Scribbling the Cat I wish to tackle the following research questions: How does the construction and negotiation of values function in literary reportages? What is the ethical import of such narratological categories as narrative situation, narrative time, narrative mood, and character-space in Fuller’s Scribbling the Cat? What values are thematized, problematized, and / or foregrounded in the reportage?

Examining the story ethics of Scribbling the Cat in this way, i.e., through its ethical and narrative fulcra, requires one to carefully scrutinize dominant narratological categories in terms of both relevance and applicability and to critically interrogate the value of ethical codes in literary journalism. Hence, the aim of the following chapter will be to first of all theorize literary reportages and to elucidate the genre’s features from a decidedly interdisciplinary vantage point (chapter 1). In a chapter on methodology, I will discuss the combined ethico-narratological model that I propose for a critical examination of the story ethics of literary reportages (chapter 2). In chapter 3, I will apply the theoretical and methodological armature to Fuller’s reportage Scribbling the Cat. The findings of the textual analysis will be discussed in terms of the contribution of CEN to the understanding of literary reportages as a form of writing that – as the committee of the Lettre Ulysses Award maintains – presents us with an “enlightened interpretation of world affairs”. I will conclude with a reflection on literary journalism’s role in a rapidly globalizing world and make suggestions for guiding principles in terms of an ethical code for literary journalists.

28. Alissa Alissa Quart, “The Rise of True Fiction”, in: Columbia Journalism Review, November 2009, 47, 20.

29. Caterina Caterina Konstenzer, Die literarische Reportage: Über eine hybride Form zwischen Journalismus und Literatur (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2009).

30. Literary reportages present us with “a story about reality, not reality itself ”. Elizabeth Literary reportages present us with “a story about reality, not reality itself ”. Elizabeth

Bird and Robert w. dardenne, “Myth, Chronicle, and Story: Exploring the Narrative Qualities of News”, in: James w. carey (ed.), Media, Myths, and Narratives: Television and the Press, London: Sage, 1988, 82.

31. James James w. carey, Communication as Culture: Essay on Media and Society, Winchester, Unwin Hyman, 1989.

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In the Anglophone academy, literary reportages are variously subsumed under such umbrella terms as literary journalism, literary non-fiction, creative non- fiction, art-journalism, and literature of fact or non-imaginative literature.³² The abundance of terms (used more or less synonymously by scholars) testifies to the genre’s epistemological fluidity.³³ The view of literary reportages as an open, fluid, indeterminate system of signs is, according to Hartsock³⁴, inextricably linked to the

“form’s attempt to mirror a shifting reality rooted in the interplay of consciousness and phenomenal experience”. For the purpose of this essay, I will follow Hartsock’s conceptualization of literary reportages as an “epistemological moving object”³⁵, i.e. “a kind of narrative chameleon that shifts according to the critical perspective brought to bear on it”.³⁶

Such an understanding of the genre allows scholars to accommodate a di- verse range of narratologies (e.g. cultural, ethical, feminist, etc.) when dealing with literary reportages.³⁷ Moreover, this view accounts for what Zavarzadeh means by

“the epistemological crisis of our age of suspicion”³⁸, namely the ongoing erosion of the distinction between fact and fiction. Conceiving of literary reportages as an epistemological moving object means, on the one hand, acknowledging the fact that the fact/fiction dilemma is nothing but a myth and, on the other, embracing the subjective nature of all cognitions. By grounding the analysis of literary reportages in the “fictuality”³⁹ of our life-world, it becomes possible to conceive of literary reportages as bi-referential narratives.⁴⁰ This means that literary reportages are re- garded as narratives that are directed, to an equal degree, toward the self-contained world of the narrative (i.e. inward) and toward the external world of material reality (i.e. outward). Following Zavarzadeh, I understand the literary reportage as

a unique mode of apprehending and transcribing reality, requiring its own particular set of critical assumptions which can deal with such central problems in the phenomenology of reading it as the tension created by the centrifugal energy of the external reality and the centripetal force of the internal shape of the narrative.⁴¹

32. Ronald Ronald weBer, The Reporter As Artist: A Look at the New Journalism Controversy, New York, Hastings House, 1974, 1; W. Ross winterowd, The Rhetoric of the ‘Other’ Literature, Carbondale, Southern Illinois Press, 1990, ix; Jan whitt, Settling the Borderland: Other Voices in Literary Journalism, Lanham, University Press of America, 2008, 2.

33. John John hartsocK, “Literary Journalism as an Epistemological Moving Object within a Larger ‘Quantum’ Narrative’”, in: Journal of Communication Inquiry, 1999, 23, 4, 432-447.

34. Ibid., 435.

35. Ibid., 432.

36. Ibid., 433.

37. Ansgar Ansgar nünning, “Narratology or Narratologies? Taking Stock of Recent Develop- ments, Critique and Modest Proposals for Future Usages of the Term”, in: Tom Kindt and Hans- Harald Müller (eds.), What is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory, Berlin, de Gruyter, 2003, 239-275.

38. Mas’ud Mas’ud zavarzadeh, The Mythopoeic Reality: The Postwar American Nonfiction Novel, Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1976, 41.

39. Ibid., 145.

40. “Through its bi-referential narrative mode, the nonfi ction novel registers the ontological “Through its bi-referential narrative mode, the nonfiction novel registers the ontological ambiguity of events and in doing so moves beyond the polar perspectives which view experience as either factual or fictional.” (Ibid., 226)

41. Ibid., 57.

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Central to this dialectical-relational approach to literary reportages is the argument that the perceiver and the perceived, the focalizer (i.e. subject) and the focalized (i.e. object), do not exist independently.⁴² Furthermore, experientiality and referentiality are to be seen as the genre’s main distinctive features.⁴³ The literary journalist arranges facts not according to an a priori order but in such a way that they

“enact, in their totality and entirety, the ambiguity, unpredictability, and disorder – in short, the entropy – of the actual”.⁴⁴ What follows from this is that verifiability, authenticity, and accuracy are the most contested notions in literary reportages.⁴⁵

“Literary journalism is dangerous precisely because it challenges us to rethink what we believe about the lines between fact and fiction and between truth and falsehood and because it redefines and expands the idea of truth beyond the definitions of

‘objectivity’, ‘veracity’, or ‘accuracy’.”⁴⁶

The prime strategy of legitimation in literary reportages is “mythopoesis”⁴⁷ which means that the narrative writer’s ordering of facts is “not endorsive (au- thenticating) but mythopoeic”.⁴⁸ Facts, following Zavarzadeh, are not to be seen as carriers of journalistic “objectivity” but bring “ambiguity, unpredictability, and disorder”⁴⁹ into sharper focus. Since story-telling in Zavarzadeh’s view is also always part mythmaking, the mythopoeic reality that is characteristic of the genre of literary reportages is such that it subverts the correspondence theory of truth that un- derlines factual journalism’s binding axiom of objectivity. Consequently, the genre also undermines the logical positivist view of communication as implied in the conventional transmission model of communication. The categorization of literary reportages is further complicated by the issue of artistic selectivity. Narrative writers take liberties in recounting events and experiences, and there are differently drawn boundaries in terms of what is permissible in literary journalism.

According to Zavarzadeh, the overall configuration of a literary reportage depends on the narrative situation which refers to the narrator’s position relative to the events of the story. Zavarzadeh distinguishes between testimonial (the narrator is a witness to the events), exegetical (the narrator is not a witness to the events), and notational (the narrator’s voice resembles a polyphonic choir) narrative non- fiction. However, based on the textual analysis of Scribbling the Cat, I will argue that this threefold typology is not sufficient to describe such complex narratives as Ful- ler’s. Since the narrative journalist invites the reader to make a decision about the text’s factual adequacy according to his or her own rules, it is important to analyze the narrative situation in tandem with the narrative’s broader “web of facticity”.⁵⁰

42. Mieke Mieke Bal, On Story-Telling. Essays in Narratology, Sonoma, Polebridge Press, 1991.

43. Monika FluderniK, “Fiction vs. Non-Fiction. Narratological Differentiations”, in: Jörg helBig (ed.), Erzählen und Erzähltheorie im 20. Jahrhundert. Festschrift für Wilhelm Füger, Heidelberg, C.

Winter, 2001, 85-103; Michael geisler, Die literarische Reportage in Deutschland. Möglichkeiten und Gren- zen eines operativen Genres, Königstein, Scriptor, 1982.

44. Mas’ud Mas’ud zavarzadeh, The Mythopoeic Reality, 66.

45. Beate Beate josePhi and Christine Müller, “Differently Drawn Boundaries of the Permissible in German and Australian Literary Journalism”, in: Literary Journalism Studies, 2009, 1, 1, 67-78.

46. Jan Jan whitt, Settling the Borderland, 17.

47. Norman Norman Fairclough, Analysing Discourse, London, Routledge, 2003, 99.

49. Ibidem.

50. Gaye Gaye tuchMan, Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality, New York, The Free Press, 1978, 82.

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In other words, the aim should be to assess the relation between the truth-claims being made and the writer’s overall intention. In order to establish narratorial authority and credibility, Alexandra Fuller prefaces her story as follows:

This is a true story about a man and about the journey that I took with that man. It is a story about the continuing relationship that grew between the man and me and it is a story about the land over which we journeyed. But it is only my story; a sliver of a sliver of a much greater story. It is not supposed to be an historic document of fact. […] You will not be able to trace our steps.⁵¹

Literary journalists work out ethical contracts not only with their sources but also with their readers.⁵² “The charm of literary non-fiction is that it is a personal ordering of a universe which, though it already exists, is nonetheless given shape by the author’s own experience.”⁵³ But the narrator whose character, actions, and outlook are of some “ethical import”⁵⁴ is only one central narratological category that shapes the poetics and story ethics of literary reportages. In order to uncover the ethico-narratological dimension of literary reportages in its totality, it becomes necessary to go beyond the concept of the narrator and to read reportages over a dialectical edge, that is, to “read the complexities of narrative presence against authorial strategy”.⁵⁵ If we want to understand literary reportages as social narratives that are directly involved in the construction of reality⁵⁶, it is deemed imperative to unravel the narrative’s morali- zing impulse since narrative writers generally tend to endow “events with a significance they do not possess as a sequence or set of sequences in the order of existence”.⁵⁷

Even though the ethical implications of narrative techniques are, as Craig⁵⁸ points out, significant, no attempt has thus far been made to approach these issues from an integrative perspective.⁵⁹ Korthals-Altes⁶⁰ explains that one of the

51. Alexandra Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat, Author’s Note.

52. Mark Mark KraMer, Breakable Rules for Literary Journalists. Nieman Storyboard, January 1, 1995, [online], <http://niemanstoryboard.us/1995/01/01/breakable-rules-for-literary-journalists> (last accessed: February 15, 2011). “[L]iterary journalists count on readers to understand their vantage point and to trust their narrative precisely because they confess their precon- ceptions and their points of view” (Jan whitt, Settling the Borderland, 8, italics in the original).

Following Fisher, humans have an innate capacity to determine narrative “fidelity,” i.e. to assess whether a story rings true or not (Walter r. Fisher, “The Narrative Paradigm: In the Begin- ning”, in: Journal of Communication, 1985, 35, 4, 87). Fisher’s view is compatible with Bruner’s argument that the question of narrative ‘truth’ is essentially about textual coherence (Jerome Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality”, in: Critical Inquiry, 1991, 18, 1, 1-21). For Bruner, truth “is judged by its verisimilitude rather than its verifiability”. (13)

53. Henk Henk hoeKs, “The Vulnerability of Literary Non-Fiction”, in: Publishing Research Quarterly, 2000, 16, 1, 39.

54. Tilmann Tilmann KöPPe, “On Ethical Narratology”, in: Amsterdam International Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology, Autumn 2009, 5, [online], <http://cf.hum.uva.nl/narratology/a09_Ko- eppe.htm> (last accessed: May 15, 2011).

55. Daniel Daniel lehMan, Matters of Fact: Reading Nonfiction over the Edge, Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 1997, 37.

56. James James w. carey and Marilyn Fritzler, “News as Social Narrative”, in: Communication, 1987, 10, 1, 1-3.

57. Mary Mary s. Mander, “Narrative Dimensions of the News: Omniscience, Prophecy, and Mo- rality”, in: Communication, 1987, 10, 1, 64.

58. David David craig, The Ethics of the Story: Using Narrative Techniques Responsibly in Journalism, Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006.

59. “Narrative theory [�] has yet to account, adequately or fully, for the ethical in the nar- “Narrative theory [�] has yet to account, adequately or fully, for the ethical in the narrative process as either a formal property [�] or a constitutive force” (Adam Zachary newton, Narrative Ethics, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1995, 29).

60. Liesbeth Liesbeth Korthals-altes, “Présentation”, in: Études littéraires, 1999, 3, 31, 7-13.

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reasons why the development of an ethical narratology proper has been hampered is because the continuing influence of structuralism in the field of narratology made it difficult for ethical criticism to enter the study of narrative. The fact that structuralist or classical narratology is formalist in its orientation – or to put it in the words of Korthals-Altes, “l’orientation épistémologique et esthétique du structuralisme”⁶¹ – has if anything reinforced the artificial opposition between aesthetics and ethics. But especially in art-journalism, aesthetics and ethics build a productive relationship with each other. “[L]es deux sont souvent intimement liés, puisque les positions esthétiques les plus extrêmes se laissent décrire comme une éthique qui tient à se démarquer de la morale ou des mœurs courantes, au nom d’une idée plus élevée de la responsibilité de l’art.”⁶² Hence, it is all the more important to establish a dialogue between classical narratology and ethical criticism. To investigate literary reportages with the help of narratological categories that originated in structuralist narratology “is not to bring them into some academic discipline which happens to ask ethical questions. It is to bring them into connection with our deepest practical searching”.⁶³

Despite the “ethical turn” that narrative theory has undergone since the 1980s, the body of literature on ethical narratology is surprisingly small.⁶⁴ Especially in France where the long-standing tradition of structuralism makes itself even more felt than in the United States for instance⁶⁵, the move towards integration and synthe- sis is virtually inexistent. My aim is to bridge this gap in extant research by proposing CEN as a prolific framework for a critically oriented, ethico-narratological analysis of literary reportages. “[I]l ne s’agit de demander à la littérature des solutions, mais de montrer comment elle enrichit notre compréhension de l’homme par sa représen- tation complexe et profonde des problèmes moraux.”⁶⁶ Following Korthals-Altes, I argue that a combined methodological framework that is context-sensitive and generically specific is needed to account for the intimate link between value construction and narrativity.⁶⁷ What CEN ultimately wants to get at is the “textual ethos”⁶⁸, because “[t]he telling itself – the selection of genre, formal structures, sentences, vocabulary, of the whole manner of addressing the reader’s sense of life – all of this expresses a sense of life and of value, a sense of what matters and what does not, of what learning and communicating are, of life’s relations and connections”.⁶⁹

Before discussing the narratological categories central to my framework, some remarks on what I mean by ethics and the negotiation of values in literary re-

61. Ibid., 8.

62. I Id., “Le tournant éthique dans la théorie littéraire”, in: ibid., 39-56.

63. Martha Martha nussBauM, Love’s Knowledge. Essays on Philosophy and Literature, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990, 24.

64. Liesbeth Liesbeth Korthals-altes, “Ethical Turn”, in: David herMan, Manfred jahn and Marie- Laure ryan (eds.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London, Routledge, 2005, 142-146.

On the serious neglect as regards the study of the relationship between fact and value, see also Barbara herrnstein sMith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1988, 17 et seq.

65. Liesbeth Liesbeth Korthals-altes, “Présentation”.

66. id., “Le tournant éthique dans la théorie littéraire”, 46.

67. Gerald Gerald Prince, “Narrativehood, Narrativeness, Narrativity, Narratibility”, in: John Pier

and José Ángel garcía landa (eds.), Theorizing Narrativity, Berlin, de Gruyter, 2008, 19-28.

68. “Cette phase initiale peut déboucher sur la confrontation de l’ “Cette phase initiale peut déboucher sur la confrontation de l’ethos textuel dégagé avec d’autres conceptions éthiques, y compris celles du critique. À ce moment-là, celui-ci sort de son rôle descriptif pour participer au débat éthique.” (Liesbeth Korthals-altes, “Le tournant éthique dans la théorie littéraire”, 54, italics in the original).

69. Martha Martha nussBauM, Love’s Knowledge. Essays on Philosophy and Literature, 5.

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portages are necessary. I follow Weidle⁷⁰, via Korthals-Altes, in the sense that CEN is rooted in a rather loose concept of ethics as a practice embedded in medial and cultural contexts. Understood in this way, CEN may be seen as a subfield of a much broader cultural narratology since narrative is somehow always concerned ontologi- cally with the cultural world and its arrangements.⁷¹ Yet I regard CEN not so much as a specific strand of narratology, but rather as “a narratology in the service of particular ends, and in the company of ethics. In particular, it is convenient to think of narratology and ethics as providing a heuristics for the pursuits of these ends”.⁷² To examine literary reportages in this way, that is, by having recourse to classical narratology that extends into ethical criticism and vice versa, has the advantage that

“l’œuvre n’est pas réduite à quelque vérité morale”.⁷³ Rather, the narratologist is confronted with the complex task of discovering the “vision du monde”⁷⁴ hidden beneath the aesthetic totality of the literary reportage.

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In order to arrive at a holistic understanding of the negotiation of values in literary narratives, Weidle proposes a typology that distinguishes between different narrative techniques available to different types of media. Literary reportages that contain images and photographs (like Scribbling the Cat) are classified as polysemiotic media since they engage multiple sign systems (linguistic, symbolic, iconic) in the process of meaning-making. Furthermore, literary reportages are spatio-temporal media, because they extend both in the spatial and temporal dimension. In terms of their sensory appeal, literary reportages fall under the category of one-channel media since they engage the visual sense only. According to Weidle, seven narrative techniques that are immediately relevant for an ethico-narratological analysis are characteristic of polysemiotic, spatio-temporal, one-channel artifacts: sub-ordinary relations, temporal relations, participation, perceptibility, reliability, focalization, and speech representation.

Since Weidle’s model neither accounts for the ontological status of specific genres nor for the diegetic / mimetic qualities of a medium, it will be modified in such a way that it is better suited to tackle the complexity of literary reportages. The kind of methodological approach that I take requires researchers to move back and forth between the general and the particular in order to be able to grasp the dialectical tension between a literary reportage and its “larger “quantum” narrative”.⁷⁵ Such an approach will allow researchers to focus simultaneously on the uniqueness of the text under investigation and on the larger structuring principles available to literary jour-

70. Roland Roland weidle, “Value Constructions in Narratives Across Media: Towards a General Ty- pology”, in: Amsterdam International Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology, Autumn 2009, 5, [online],

<http://cf.hum.uva.nl/narratology/a09_Weidle.htm#_ednref21> (last accessed: May 15, 2011).

71. Mieke Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, Toronto, Toronto University Press, 1985; Astrid erll, “Naive, Repetitive, or Cultural: Options of an Ethical Narratology”, in: Amsterdam International Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology, Autumn 2009, 5, [online],

<http://cf.hum.uva.nl/narratology/a09_Erll.htm> (last accessed: May 15, 2011).

72. Tilmann Tilmann KöPPe, “On Ethical Narratology”, s.p. See also Tom K^indt and Hans-Harald Müller, “Narrative Theory and/or/as Theory of Interpretation”, in: What is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory, Berlin, de Gruyter, 2003, 205-215.

73. Liesbeth Liesbeth Korthals-altes, “Le tournant éthique dans la théorie littéraire”, 46.

74. Ibidem.

75. John John hartsocK, “Literary Journalism as an Epistemological Moving Object”, 432.

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nalists.⁷⁶ It is a method that helps determine the ways in which the parts of a narrative serve as “functions” of the broader structure of the narrative⁷⁷. Hence, “the best hope of hermeneutic analysis is to provide an intuitively convincing account of the meaning of the text as a whole in the light of the constituent parts that make it up”.⁷⁸ Close reading methods are particularly useful for discerning the latent meanings of texts.

Mander refers to this approach as “exegetical”⁷⁹, because it is directed toward tracing and explicating characteristic dimensions of a text that belongs to a specific genre.

My ethico-narratological exegesis of Fuller’s reportage Scribbling the Cat will be based on a number of categories whose operational definitions I will sketch out in the remainder of this chapter. The categories can be grouped under the following four headings: narrative situation, narrative time, narrative mood, and character-space. The narrative situation in general – and voice in particular – is one of the most elemental categories of the story ethics of a literary reportage. Narrative writers “listen to stories of most extraordinary life experience; and they retell these stories, thus giving a voice to a particular other and generating a narrative laboratory of (a)moral action”.⁸⁰ For the purpose of this paper, I will distinguish between three subcategories that together define the narrative situation: voice, perspective, and level.

Regarding the first category, voice (i.e. participation in Weidle’s classification), I will make use of both Genette’s⁸¹ and Chatman’s⁸² typologies. Genette differenti- ates between homodiegetic narration and heterodiegetic narration, that is, the narrator is either present (homodiegetic) or absent from the story (heterodiegetic).

Autodiegetic narration (the narrator is the protagonist of the story) is a specific form of homodiegetic narration. Apart from this threefold model, I will draw upon Chatman’s distinction between overt and covert narrators. What he means by this is that a narrator is either more or less overt depending on the degree of perceptibility of his voice in the text. The second narratological category, perspective, refers to focalization. Focalization is defined by Genette as the ratio of knowledge between the narrator and the characters. In Genettean terminology, there are three different types of focalization: zero focalization (the narrator’s knowledge exceeds that of the characters), internal focalization (the narrator’s knowledge equals that of the characters), and external focalization (the characters know more than the narrator).

The third category, level, refers to Genette’s distinction between extradiegetic and intradiegetic narration and concerns a narrative’s sub-ordinary relations (first vs.

second-level order of the event-story).⁸³

The category of narrative time is also made up of three analytical components:

order, speed, and frequency. As regards order, the equivalent of Weidle’s category of “temporal relations”, I distinguish between chronological and achronological

76. Tzvetan Tzvetan todorov, The Fantastic, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1975.

77. Vladimir Vladimir ProPP, Morphology of the Folk Tale, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1968.

78. Jerome Jerome Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality”, 7.

79. Mary Mary s. Mander, “Narrative Dimensions of the News”, 53.

80. Astrid Astrid erll, “Naive, Repetitive, or Cultural”, s.p. See also Susan Rubin s^uleiMan, Le Roman à thèse, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1983, 2.

81. Gérard Gérard genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, New York, Cornell University Press, 1980.

82. Seymour Seymour chatMan, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1978.

83. See also Shlomith See also Shlomith riMMon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, London, Routledge, 1983.

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narration. Following Genette, the latter is divided into analeptic narration (anachronies that reach into the past) and proleptic narration (future-oriented anachronies).

The second element, speed, addresses the question of whether a narrator passes quickly over an event (summary), lingers over it (pause) or omits it entirely (ellipsis).

Absolute correspondence between narrative time and story time (scene) is typical of dialogic sequences only. The three kinds of frequencies that are possible in a narrative refer to the fact that a literary reportage “may tell once what happened once (singulative), n times what happened n times (repetitive), n times what happened once (basically irrelevant to literature), once what happened n times (iterative)”.⁸⁴

Narrative mood, according to Genette, expresses the distance between the nar- rator and the text. The category is primarily concerned with the issue of the representation of speech in a narrative. This, in turn, refers to the question of whether a character’s words are integrated into the narration (narratized speech), reported by the narrator and presented with his / her interpretation (transposed speech, indirect style), reported by the narrator but without his interpretation (transposed speech, free indirect style) or cited verbatim in the text (reported speech). The distance between the narrator and the text increases progressively in these four types of speech representation. The category sheds light on the ways in which narratives

“accommodate conflicting voices, thoughts and aspects of interiority that can assist in shaping the construction, affirmation and questioning of value positions”.⁸⁵ Re- liability is closely connected to the category of narrative distance. For the purpose of this essay, I appropriate Phelan’s conceptualization of reliability in the sense that I examine reliability along three axes: the axis of facts, the axis of values and ethics, and the axis of knowledge.⁸⁶

In addition to the aforementioned three main categories, character-space will be added as a fourth narratological concept to my framework for the analysis of literary reportages. I adapt the notion of character-space which implies the close connection between characters and their surrounding environments (narrative space) from Woloch.⁸⁷ Following Woloch, much of the dramatic tension in literary narratives as well as their social significance emerges out of the characters’ movements through narrative space. In other words, characters and their spaces are important vehicles for the negotiation of meaning and, by implication, for value constructions in literary reportages. I conceive of characters and their bodies as textual sites of ideo- logical struggle and power.⁸⁸ Through the depiction of characters and their bodies writers can strategically advance norms and values. Hence, the body is “far from being an irrepressibly individual “other” to narrative representation”.⁸⁹

Having outlined the operational definitions underlying my CEN (for a summary see table 1 in the appendix), I will now briefly explain my rationale for choosing Alexandra Fuller’s literary reportage Scribbling the Cat as my object of study. First, it was chosen because it is an award-winning book that brings together such sensitive

84. Gérard Gérard genette, Narrative Discourse, 114 (italics in the original).

85. Roland Roland weidle, “Value Constructions in Narratives Across Media”, s.p.

86. James James Phelan, Living to Tell About It.

87. Alex Alex woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2003.

88. Michel Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. I: An Introduction, New York, Vintage, 1990.

89. Daniel Daniel Punday, Narrative Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Narratology, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, viii.

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topics as race and war which are discussed against the backdrop of the Zimbabwean liberation struggle. Hence, it seems intuitively just to examine Fuller’s reportage from an ethico-narratological perspective. Apart from the fact that the book raises fascina- ting questions about guilt, complicity, and responsibility, Scribbling the Cat is intriguing because it is written by an African-American woman who is at home in two cultures.

As one of the few examples of outstanding post-independence Zimbabwean war literature, the book serves as an important counterweight to the bulk of literary journalism that emerges out of an exclusively American context. Since from an ethico- narratological standpoint only relatively little scholarly work has been done on what I call postcolonial literary non-fiction, I wish to offer a corrective to this structural imbalance with my close reading of Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier.

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The voice of a narrator is largely responsible for the narrative’s architectonics (i.e. the way in which the event-story is narrated) as well as for the way in which the story is perceived by the reader. Thus, the narrator’s voice demands a critical ethical narratologist’s attention because it is an ethical issue in the sense that it may stir compassion among readers. If used in a careful and meaningful way, the voice of a narrator may encourage readers to press for social change and civic transformation.

Alexandra Fuller resorts to first-person narration to convey to the reader the complicated nature of her friendship with the war veteran K with whom she embarks on a journey into the past, that is, to the roots of their childhoods. The use of the homodiegetic narrator enables Fuller to project a high degree of subjectivity and to touch such dimensions of actuality as imaginative reality and introspection that objective reporting usually avoids. But a narrative situation in which the reporter is both the teller of the story and a character in the story complicates the construction of values in the narrative. Because the reporter follows her subjects around for a long time, norms and values are endlessly negotiated and renegotiated. Fuller⁹⁰ des- cribes her interaction with K as follows:

I had shaken loose the ghosts of K’s past and he had allowed me into the deepest corners of his closet, not because I am a writer and I wanted to tell his story, but because he had believed himself in love with me and because he had believed in some very specific way I belonged to him. And in return, I had listened to every word that K had spoken and watched the nuance of his every move, not because I was in love with him, but because I had believed that I wanted to write him into dry pages. It had been an idea based on a lie and on a hope neither of us could fulfill. It had been a broken contract from the start.

In this self-reflexive passage, Fuller not only concedes that despite the long period of time that she had spent with her subjects and the strenuous efforts she made in order to fully immerse herself in K’s world, she was not able to fully

‘own’ her subjects and their stories. Moreover, at various points in the literary reportage, Fuller admits that her presence had an effect both on the course of

90. Alexandra Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat, 238.

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events (a.k.a. Heisenberg effect) and on the behavior of her subjects. The fact that Fuller ‘goes native’ does not necessarily compromise her credibility as a narrator, though, because she never feigns omniscience. On the contrary, precisely because she confesses to the reader her own biases and the kinds of limitations that come along with internal focalization, Fuller is able to strengthen her authority as narrator.

I realized that even after all this time with him, I didn’t really know K or what he was capable of. [�] A long time ago, I had supposed that if I walked a mile in K’s shoes, I’d understand what he had been through. I had thought that if I walked where he had walked, if I drank from the same septic sludge of water, if I ate nothing all day and smoked a pack of bitter cigarettes, then I’d understand the man better and understand the war better and there would be words that I could write to show that I now understood why that particular African war had created a man like K.⁹¹

Approaching the issue of epistemic responsibility in this way, that is, by conceding that her thirst for knowledge and quest for truth left Fuller with more questions than answers, is a clever hermeneutical move that has serious consequen- ces for the construction of values. Since the first-person narrator functions as the main fulcrum of the event-story and the reader sees refracted, much like in a prism, the events (mediated by written discourse) through the lens of the narrator’s eyes, values and norms are also subjected to a double mediation.

Consequently, “[t]he witness-participant-narrator is more a medium, an ins- trument, an articulating voice through which the interiority of events experienced by people is registered”.⁹² In Scribbling the Cat, the narrator’s role is not confined to an either-or paradigm. The narrator is at the same time witness and participant, registrar and generator of events. Put differently, the character-narrator combines the functions of an “experiencing I” and those of a “narrating I”.⁹³ The character- narrator’s degree of participation in the story varies between total immersion and detached observation. For the most part of the narrative, though, the narrator’s voice is easily discernible and audible. Even where the “I” is not typographically foregrounded, the voice of the overt narrator dominates the story.

I slumped back into my seat and closed my eyes. [�] Is it possible – from the perspective of this quickly spinning Earth and our speedy journey from crib to coffin – to know the difference between right, wrong, good, and evil?⁹⁴

This rhetorical question with which Fuller confronts the reader midway through her journey is interesting insofar as it casts light on the narrator as a doub- ting subject. The narrator questions the very faculty of human judgment. Rather than consolidating specific moral values and / or norms, the ethical value of this passage lies in the questioning of morality itself. On the one hand, the overt voice of the narrator allows Fuller to familiarize the reader with her own moral philosophy. Hence, the narrator’s voice functions as a mediating hinge between the diegetic universe, Fuller, and the reader. But because voice is transposed here to a kind of

91. Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat, 219.

93. Franz Franz K. stanzel, A Theory of Narrative, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984.

94. Alexandra Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat, 141-142.