Scattered Voices. Some Remarks on a Narrative Theorv of Postcolonial Storytelling SUSANNE KNALLER

Scattered Voices. Some Remarks

on a Narrative Theorv of J Postcolonial Storytelling

SUSANNE KNALLER

When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are

not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror

and saw nothing.

-Adrienne Rich, Invisibility in Academe

I have always seen narrative as a political issue, but for different reasons at different

times. 99

in contrast to poems

or philosophical treatises, narratives may be translated into other cultures and understood

without loss. 100

How can the universality of the instrument of such a task (which is narration) be

translated into the content (which is history/culture), whose origin is always

found in the same indifference of the open, the fragmentary, the raw? How, in the

end, can the linguistic material that serves narration achieve anything but a construct-

like differentiation? 100

The endowment

of meaning is shifted from finding to discovering: Historical events are

no longer interpreted as generally subject to narrative form. Rather, it is important

to discover preferences even in the undifferentiated material itself, to extract

with determination a difference a priori from it, and thereby to legitimate the will

to truth. 101

difference between ideological (nonobjective) and

historical (true) narrative lies neither in the substance and form of the expression

(plot and discourse) nor in the form of the content, but rather on the level of the

substance of the content. 101

human culture can only be understood

as an arsenal of narratives. 101

Tamed by grammars of narrative, the discourse becomes

the determining cause of narration. Why, though, is narrative subjugated, on the

one hand to the order of the signifier, and on the other to that of the signified? 102

Rather, it

means the opening of a space for conflict, above all when one thinks of the relationship

of form to meaning-or, specific to narration, of discours to histoireas

one of irritation, whereby proliferation can be made graspable as narration’s

form-determined, inherent invitation to continually new semiotic processes-alteration

through rcpetition. This opens up the possibility of altered perspectives

and positions. 103

In contrast to the modern novel, for instance, such textslh could be tied to everyday

experience in new ways beyond established aesthetic ties-“melting personal

experience and political desire. . . . In other words, these writings suggest that

it is not a special perception that lends credence to these artists’ writings, but a

porricular culfurd position-f simultaneous marginality and authority.”’’ Having

recourse to already available images, stories, and myths, we can refer to the

positions less often considered by the official history, forgottcn or excluded facts,

persons, or spaces. The semiotic processes triggered by repetition prove to be an

imtation (translocation), insofar as appropriation (variation) and repetition provoke

readings that make a confrontation between official and marginalized discourses

possible. ‘T’he language of the “minor” penetrates the dominant narration,

deterritorializes, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, the master language 103

a temporal displacement that establishes a space of difference where a twofold

destruction takes place: In the confrontation of autobiography, oral narrative, and

chronicles, a situation of rereading occurs, a situation that discovers that the

grappling with an objectification of facts and events that dwells seemingly in

chronicles and reports is a writing that exercises power. 104

What Djebar presents here is the quality of the minor culture as a culture of

survival, containing in its complexity, as Bhabha puts it, an act of transnationalism

as well as one of translation and forestalling by the unifying discourse of

people, nation, and tradition. 105

What Djebar presents here is the quality of the minor culture as a culture of

survival, containing in its complexity, as Bhabha puts it, an act of transnationalism

as well as one of translation and forestalling by the unifying discourse of

people, nation, and tradition. 111

“If one looks at the history of ,post-Enlightenment theory, the

major problem has been the problem of autobiography: how subjective structures

can, in fact, give objective truth. . . . The person who knows has all of the problems

of selfhood. The person who is known somehow seems not to have a problematic

self.”66 111

The treatment of the Filipinos seen in the archival material, where they are presented

to the Americans as zoo animals or freaks 112

Knaller, Susanne. “Scattered Voices. Some Remarks on a Narrative Theory of Postcolonial Storytelling.” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, vol. 74, no.2, 1999, pp. 99-115. Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, DOI: 10.1080/00168899909597392