Reid is also concerned to argue against a particular school of linguistics, the Hallidayan social semiotics group, influential in cultural studies and educational theory. Michael Halliday and his followers have valuably approached texts not as isolated objects but as part of interactive processes, situations of exchange. But they have been unable to develop adequate let alone subtle analyses of highly crafted textual artefacts such as written fiction. Dubiously, Hallidayans will treat an excerpted passage as a coherent whole. When they do turn their attention to a literary text, which is seldom, they tend to treat the text as no more than an illustration of a taxonomic system previously developed to analyse spoken language. They also attempt to ‘infer evaluative meanings from formal structures alone’, to read off ideology from form. And when they turn their attention to narratives produced by children, they assume a ‘norm of creative development’ and a pedagogy where the ‘pleasures of experimenting with generic innovation’ should be suppressed in the young so they can eventually flourish in the mature. In Reid’s critique, the Hallidayans emerge as not only, for all the universal ambition of their theory, very limited but also disturbingly authoritarian.

Reid turns to general poststructuralist and postmodernist theory, from a reprised Bakhtin to Derrida and Lyotard, and to major figures in recent narrative study such as Ross Chambers, to produce a sketch of a new, post-narratological critical method. In Reid’s view, narratives are always ‘framed’ as particular kinds of material objects associated with particular expectations. But these framing expectations can be subverted by two important further features of narrative, ‘substitution’ and ‘dispossession’. Substitution ‘is the process whereby narrative momentum occurs through a ‘shuffling of scenes or takes or rhetorical figures’ so that narrative consistency is always under threat of disruption or reversal, of ‘severance or cleavage’. Dispossession refers to the process whereby the narrator’s power as narrator, a textual authority, as unitary and unifying voice, is always under dispute and threat of loss in a contest with other narrative voices, an agon of moves and counter-moves. (An example I thought of was the relationship of text to reviewer.)

In this account, narrative becomes splintered and fissured. The forces surrounding a text, its relations with other texts, and its internal relationships, are revealed to be turbulent, contingent and unpredictable. The relation of reader and text is one of active exchange, for we now realise that literary fictions permit and often encourage a plurality of reading positions, mediated by institutional settings and pressures. The ‘origins’ of a text, either in previous textuality or in supposed authorial intentions and presence, are ‘elusively deferred’. Meanings are provisional, dispersed, frequently paradoxical.

I found the journey of Narrative Exchanges into poststructuralism congenial. I also enjoyed the critique of the Hallidayans. It explained to me why certain kinds of social semiotics seem so inadequate to the challenge of cultural studies and textual analysis. And yet as Reid’s narrative went on I became a little uneasy. Was Narrative Exchanges winding back towards those features of formalism and structuralism, in particular a narrowing, essentialising and universalising, that it felt it had left far behind? Warning bells sounded on the first page of the introduction, when Reid writes that ‘we’, that universal collectivity, crave narrative exchanges, as ‘compulsions’ that seem ‘inherent in human culture’. Reid tells us that his argument will work through an assortment of ‘exemplary texts’. The examples of narrative he chooses to discuss, however, while sometimes non-canonical, are almost all Western (though he also piously acknowledges Spivak’s concern at the dominance of Western discourse).

A little later, we learn Narrative Exchanges is interested in the ‘general structural features that govern the tenor of a text’s figurative economy’. By mid-book we find that ‘substitution’ and ‘dispossession’ are not merely occasional devices but ‘constitute’ the narrativity of a text. It becomes clear that in discussion of each new example of narrative the narrator of Narrative Exchanges will discover, hail, and home in on the same recurrent features. By near his journey’s end Reid is confidently talking of an avant-garde American text, ‘The Hind of the Further’, as ‘laying bare the basic constituents of any textual exchange, showing it to be fundamentally substitutive and dispossessive’.

In its final chapter Narrative Exchanges discusses an example of children’s writing. It concludes that our earliest encounters with· written stories focus on substitution-and-dispossession as the ‘primary constituent element’ of narrative: in our beginning is our end, arche is telos, the circle is complete, all is explained, look no further. We are firmly, cosily, safely, back in the structuralist heartland and language of essences, and more, that which poststructuralists excoriate, origins. At one stage Reid admonishes, in curiously atavistic positivist terms, a theory he disagrees with because it ‘does not fit the facts’.

Also all too familiar is a gendered conception of the relation of critic and text. Narrative is associated in Narrative Exchanges with markers such as ‘shifty’ (this odd term insistently recurs), ‘agility’, ‘cunning’, ‘complicated’, ‘elusiveness’, ‘teasingly’, ‘unstable’, ‘enigmas’, ‘guile’, ‘tease along the desire’, ‘puzzling’, ‘provokingly’, ‘riddling’, ‘lures’, ‘eludes’. These terms climax in announcements that the ‘body of a text always comprises scatterings, bits and pieces of desire’, that the ‘way texts are dealt with in being read and rewritten may sometimes be more like theft, abduction or carnal intercourse’, and that reading is an ‘attempt to seize and plunder what the text signifies’, while knowing that behind any text are further texts.

The ideal post-narratological critic, then, looks forward to hunting down the body of the text as his quarry, elusive, luring and alluring, teasing and provoking, agile, guileful and cunning, but not so complicated and enigmatic that it can’t be seized, pinned down, and plundered. The critic captures his prey, enjoys pulling apart the text’s ‘scatterings, bits and pieces of desire’, but doesn’t terminally fix the meanings discovered. The prey is to be released for further stalkings. Is post-narratology the parade and preening of male sexual fantasy and tropes of violence? What’s new?

Finally, let’s approach Narrative Exchanges as its narrator would wish a text to be approached. In terms of framing and its horizons of expectation (the ‘most tangible basis for framing consists of a text’s immediate, material environment’), I pick up a book sent for me to review, Narrative Exchanges, and see that it’s a Routledge production. I then think of my growing suspicion that in Routledge cultural theory texts reflections in a field are presented not for exploration but as correct, as defining theoretical truth. I start reading. I see that the narrator, ‘I. Reid’, is addressing a particular area, the study of written narrative, and that he immediately moves to establish his narrative voice as knowledgeable, assured, authoritative, in a language and terminology that is congested, clogged, heavy, pompous and unrhythmical, as when we’re told that narrative may be ‘comprehensively defined as the discursive mode that imparts an illusion of eventful serial movement to its constituent figures’. (I write ‘fuck’ beside this in the margin.) I note too that there is an evident compulsion to litter the page with numbered points, making it a typical Routledge book inside, visually unpleasant.

I also see that the narrator quickly issues signals of membership for the poststructuralist world of debate he is entering. There is a judicious deference to an ultimate authority, Derrida, accompanied by an evident reluctance to criticise this resident giant of the field. (At one point the narrator notes that Edward Said has argued that poststructuralism has been surprisingly neglectful of narrative texts, but doesn’t tell us that Said is saying this specifically as part of a harsh appraisal of Derrida’s critical procedures.) With somewhat lesser figures such as Ross Chambers, there is respectful acknowledgment of importance, with Chambers being associated with terms such as ‘original’, ‘argues convincingly’, ‘discerns’, ‘gives nuance to’, ‘finesse’, ‘fitting sense of irony’, ‘shrewdly’, ‘gently’, ‘puts us well on the road towards’. But some criticism of Chambers is also permitted, one equal in the field to another.

By the end, having scribbled all over it, I get around to thinking that Narrative Exchanges is little more than a reproduction of poststructuralist pieties, laborious, dutiful, useful, worthy. Then I go to my ageing Olivetti to begin the review. Tap tap tap tap.