On the face of it, Currie’s definition of narrative would appear to be in line with Phelan’s, a rhetorical theory of narrative with credentials dating back to Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961). This is not the case, however, for in a series of principles drawn from pragmatics, relevance theory, Gricean conversational implicatures, logic, the theory of action, communication theory and the cognitive sciences, all crafted to the particularities of narrative, the author systematically specifies the terms of his definition and stakes out their implications for narrative study. The first postulate is that stories, whether fictional or factual, are intentional-communicative artifacts: “intentionally fashioned devices of representation that work by manifesting the communicative intentions of their makers.” [xvii] Like stones axes, stories are made to perform a function and must thus be used/understood in accordance with the intentions of the agents who fashioned them. Unlike (pre-historical) implements, however, stories are representational artifacts: being the products of their makers, they represent events and characters, but this occurs in such a way that characters “are entities that supervene on the making of artifacts rather than being artifacts themselves.” [3] The consequence of this statement (buttressed by others at various points throughout the book) is significant, for among other things it says that while stories can be told about lives, lives themselves are not narratives: “no life is a narrative since no life is a representational artefact.[…] at best, one’s life and one’s narrative of the life overlap, with lots of the life missing from the narrative and, no doubt, plenty of mistakes in the narrative about the life.” [24] (cf. chapter 10: “Narrative and Character” and chapter 11: “Character Scepticism”). This position (also entertained by Galen Strawson in a famous essay entitled “On Narrativity” [2004]) is but one of Currie’s arguments that runs counter to a widely held thesis in contemporary narrative theory which is embraced, among others, by Ricœur, by rhetorical narratology, by proponents of “narrative psychology” and by various currents of cognitive approaches to narrative. The effect of such argumentation, whether one rallies to it or not, is salutary, for it provides grounds for re-examining unspoken articles of faith that too often go unchallenged.

Among the other dimensions of narrative addressed by Currie is “the duality of storytelling”: “the story told – the characters and events – and the vehicle [or mode] of telling, the narrative.” [vi] This reflects the fundamental and familiar distinction between story and discourse – the “content” and “expression” of narrative. The unity of narratives, Currie contends, is partly a matter of causal unity or “causal connectedness” such that, in a first approximation, narratives are characterized “by what they represent: sustained temporal-causal relations between particulars, especially agents.” [27] Causation, however, is a notion with a long and complex history that covers a wide variety of phenomena which are often misapprehended by literary theoreticians. Misunderstanding occurs when, for example, causation is equated with expressions such as “chronological-logical structure” to describe one of the fundamental differentiating features of narrative. Among the problems encountered with such a conception is that causation includes microphysical chains of events from whose perspective the macroscopic, mental and social events forming the stuff of narrative are regarded as “mere illusions of causal connectedness.” [28] In practice, no precise philosophical theory of cause can satisfactorily account for what occurs in a story. This is the case of a story (related by Aristotle) in which Mitys was murdered and the murderer of Mitys was then killed by a falling statue of Mitys. A sense either of justice or of pure coincidence might be perceived here, but strictly causal elements (e.g., that an individual was killed by a falling object) are not core issues in such a series of incidents. What matters in narrative content, says Currie, is relations of dependency. Although dependency frequently integrates or presupposes elements of causation, “causal relatedness [is not] the heart and soul of narrative.” [38], for indeed there are cases in which the absence of causal relations between events is the very point of the story.

Narratology has provided a concept which is quite specific to the question of dependency in narrative, known as narrativity. Now, narrativity involves a number of features, but the one Currie is most interested in, and which forms one of the leitmotifs of the book, is what Gerald Prince called “narrativeness,” a gradational principle by which a parable will be perceived as more narrative than historical annals but less narrative than an adventure story. Much less narrative (at least in any conventional sense) is the following example in which causal information and indeed any form of dependency between events is fully evacuated: “Mitys was murdered; later a statue of someone fell on someone else; neither of them had anything at all to do with Mitys.” [38] As these considerations show, one of the points of interest of Narratives & Narrators is to bring logic and a variety of other philosophical and disciplinary concepts to bear on questions that are central to narrative theory and to draw the consequent conclusions, even where this may run counter to positions held by the community of narrative theoreticians.