The assessment of an edited volume is a daunting enterprise. Since any review must address—early on, if not immediately—the intended audience for a work, the reviewer of an edited volume has much to take into account. For whom is the book intended? Who else might find it worthwhile? What might they do with it? These questions must be considered as usual, but the edited volume raises the question if anyone can or should take it as a whole. Is the whole work more or less than the sum of its parts?
The best editors give readers an introduction that describes how the rest of the volume works as a whole. They lay out the rationale for section divisions and tease out the themes that the chapters in each have in common. Marina Grishakova and Maria Poulaki, the editors of Narrative Complexity, divide the contributions into four parts: (1) Narrative Complexity and Media; (2) Cognition and Narrative Comprehension; (3) Experience, Subjectivity, and Embodied Complexity; and (4) Narrative Complexity and Cultural Evolution. Much of the book, especially Part 1, consists of attempts to apply understandings of complexity to narrative in what used to be called new media. Digital platforms allow readers more control over their experience of a narrative, and authors have proven to be capable of exploiting the affordances of new technologies. These attempts are largely successful. The editors’ goals for the volume as a whole are to take “another step toward establishing narrative studies of complexity and explore how narrative complexity differs in terms of mind and body engagement and embeddedness in social and cultural practices”; they hope to achieve “a new synthesis, including the interplay of agent-and system-oriented perspectives” (1-2).
Furthermore, the introduction—after giving an overview of complexity as understood from several philosophical and scientific perspectives—discusses the volume’s place in narratology. Interestingly, the editors characterize narratology in a way that folklorists might find sympathetic: narratology, they write, tends to “reinvent itself” by using theories of meaning borrowed from other disciplines (9). Part of the value of focusing on narrative as a complex phenomenon, in fact, seems to be that it offers a means to integrate inter-disciplinary perspectives.
Folkloristically, the most useful sections of the book are Parts 3 and 4, which place more emphasis on the cultural conditions surrounding narrative, both diachronically, in terms of the evolutionary development of human cognition and expression, and synchronically, by examining embodiment. The writers here construe narrative broadly; whereas several writers in the previous sections pay lip service to the notion that narrative encompasses more than mediated modes of communication, most of the chapters deal with textual analysis—relying on the texts themselves to display complexity. This is not to say that addressing narrative complexity requires attention to orality and social context, merely that there remain numerous possibilities for folklorists to explore using the theoretical tools described throughout this volume.
Some chapters provide more applicable frameworks than others. Ellen J. Esrok’s contribution (“Body Forth in Narrative”) seeks to challenge the notion that the body doesn’t matter in the act of reading, a perspective that might easily converge with performance studies. Martin E. Rosenberg’s “Jazz as Narrative: Narrating Cognitive Processes” explores improvised creativity in a way that feels intuitively folkloristic. José Angel García Landa’s concluding chapter, “In Hindsight: Complexity, Contingency, and Narrative Mapping,” serves as a fitting conclusion to the book. The author stresses the narrative possibility of every object, every artifact, and every human creation. In emphasizing the capacity to interpret any narrative of the past, we are reminded that everything we have just read in this volume deserves to be re-read, to be reconsidered. Taken individually, the contributions to this book feel as though they might be just as well off on their own. Yet taken as a whole, they complement each other, turning the lens so that readers might view subjects from different perspectives.
Narrative, as conceptualized by Grishakova and Poulaki, is an “interface of complex adaptive systems” (16). They thus decentralize the author, providing space for ambiguity and uncertainty: “to approach complexity means to dive into this ambiguity and explore its convolutions” (19), a statement of purpose that resonates with an ethnographic approach to narrative quite well. Perhaps it is obvious that narrative—a communicative act stretching across potentially every aspect of human experience—is a complex process, but the discussion of the variable nature of that complexity as demonstrated in this volume is worth considering at length.
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[Review length: 735 words • Review posted on April 16, 2020]