|
Although most critics have located the story cycle genre within the
western tradition, identifying its characteristic fragmentation as a
postmodern feature, the genre has clear affinities to oral traditions
and to projects of retrieving communal memory and building community
so prominent in what are designated as `ethnic' literatures. While it is possible
to trace the story cycles to The Canterbury
Tales, sonnet cycles, and other linked narratives through the centuries, story cycles also appropriate an oral
tradition passed down through alternatives to the written word—mother's
lullabies, stories stitched onto quilts, fireside tales, folksongs, and other popular
mediums. In The Women of Brewster Place, Naylor melds postmodern strategies with
a longstanding female and oral heritage of inclusion and community.
The unusual structure of the story cycle, consisting of individual
text-pieces that exist discretely as stories while acting together to produce a broader
`novel-like' narrative, lends itself to experiments in form and content. An
important departure is in the text's chronological pattern. Whereas the
conventional narratives emulate `real time' experience in moving forward to a
conclusion, the fragmentary story cycle progresses erratically and non-directionally,
often omitting causal links between physical and psychological events. And it is
this irregular movement among episodes which mirrors the associative patterns
of human consciousness. Further, the story cycle tends to reflect many
individual consciousnesses simultaneously which adds to the irregular movement of
the story cycle. Such storytelling patterns underscore the selective process
of remembering and retelling where concrete events are sometimes occluded
by the less tangible visions of diverse memories and imaginations. When reading
a story cycle, then, we must learn to withhold expectations in order to
assimilate the jarring elements that we might be inclined to reject as inexplicable
plot shifts, character anomalies, or narrative lapses. Whereas the design of a
story cycle might point to a textual coherence comparable to that of a novel (insofar
as there are recurring characters and a common setting) the often enormous
gaps a reader must negotiate in moving between text-pieces replicate an
experience more akin to that encountered when reading a story collection. This
experience is felt most acutely when the story cycle is constantly shifting its narrative
to encompass a growing group of characters, experiences, and perspectives, so
that the end result is less a coherent novel than a communal utterance. |
