Other titles in this series: Deconstruction
Edited with a new introduction by Jonathan Culler 4 volume set
Modernism
Edited with a new introduction by Tim Middleton 5 volume set
Feminism
Edited with a new introduction by Mary Evans 4 volume set
Post colonialism
Edited with a new introduction by Diana Brydon and John Scott 5 volume set
Performance
Edited with a new introduction by Philip Auslander 4 volume set
Gothic
Edited with a new introduction by Fred Botting and Dale Townshend 4 volume set
Urban Culture
Edited with a new introduction by Chris Jenks 4 volume set
Folklore
Edited with a new introduction by Alan Dundes 4 volume set
NARRATIVE THEORY
Critical Concepts in Literary
and Cultural Studies
Edited by
Mieke Bal
Volume I .
Major Issues in Narrative Theory
I
~ ~~~;!~n~~;up
LONDON AND NEW YORKby Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
no
Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Transferred to Digital Printing 2006Reprinted 2007
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Editorial matter and selection © 2004 Mieke Bal; individual owners retain copyright in their own material
Typeset in Times by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Digital Solutions,
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publi~ht(rs.
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-415-31657-X (Set)
ISBN 0-415-31658-8 (Volume I) Publisher's Note
References within each chapter are as they appear in the original complete work.
VOLUME I MAJOR ISSUES IN NARRATIVE THEORY
Acknowledgements
Chronological table o/reprinted articles and chapters
Introduction to Volume I PART!
Preposterous beginnings 1 Revisiting narrativity
GERALD PRINCE
2 The structure of the narrative text
J. M. LOTMAN
3 Literary narratives
THOMAS G. PAVEL
4 Towards ... afterthoughts, almost twenty years later
SHLOMITH RIMMON-KENAN
PART 2 Plot
5 Extracts from Poetics 6-11
ARISTOTLE
6 Introduction to the structural analysis of narratives
ROLAND BARTHES Xlll xv 1 9 11 20 25 42 57 59 65
7 Narrative versions, narrative theories BARBARA HERRNSTEIN SMITH
8 Story and discourse in the analysis of narrative JONATHAN CULLER
PART 3
Representing speech
9 Extracts from The Republic PLATO 10 Types of narration WAYNE c. BOOTH 95 117
133
135 13811 Narrative style and the grammar of direct and indirect speech 147 ANN BANFIELD
12 Free indirect discourse: a survey of recent accounts BRIAN McHALE
PART 4
Believe it or not
13 Mood
GERARD GENETTE 14 Narration and focalization
MIEKE BAL 15 The disnarrated GERALD PRINCE PARTS World making 16 What is a description? PHILIPPE HAMON
17 Over-writing as un-writing: descriptions, world-making and novelistic time MIEKE BAL 187
223
225 263 297 307 309 341VOLUME 11 SPECIAL TOPICS
Acknowledgements
Introduction to Volume II
PART!
Special topics: deixis, time, ch~lfacter/plot knot
18 (Im)plying the author SUSAN s. LANSER
19 Second-person narrative as a test case for narratology: the limits of realism
MONIKA FLUDERNIK
20 Extract from 'Virgin Territories: The strategic expansion of deictic options'
MONIKA FLUDERNIK
21 Telling in time (I): chronology and narrative theory MEIR STERNBERG
22 Mrs. Dalloway: repetition as the raising of the dead J. HILLIS MILLER
PART 2
Paradigmatic case studies
23 Description and narrativity: 'The Piece of String' ALGIRDAS JULIEN GREIMAS
24 Textual analysis of a tale of Poe ROLAND BARTHES vu 1 9 11 19 56 93 138
159
161 17225 The critical difference: Balzac's 'Sarrasine' and Barthes's 'S/Z' 187
BARBARA JOHNSON
26 William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! 'Something is always missing'
SHLOMITH RIMMON-KENAN
27 Salammbo bound NAOMI SCHOR
PART 3
The ethics of narrative truth
28 The elusive narrator JONATHAN CULLER
29 Reading (Proust) PAUL DE MAN
30 Freud and Dora: story, history, case history STEVEN MARCUS
31 Freud's case histories and the question of fictionality DORRIT COHN
32 The betrayal of the witness: Camus' The Fall SHOSHANA FELMAN
PART 4
Against wholeness
33 Models of narrative: mechanical doll, exploding machine CYNTHIA CHASE
34 Paris/childhood: the fragmented body in Rilke's Notebooks of
216 233 235 248 266 294 314 349 351
Malte Laurids Brigge 364
ANDREAS HUYSSEN 35 Archival poetics
NANNA VERHOEFF
VOLUME III POLITICAL NARRATOLOGY
Acknowledgements
Introduction to Volume III
388
IX
PARTl
Involvement/rhetoric
36 Emile Benveniste
KAlA SILVERMAN
37 The establishment of internal focalization in odd pronominal contexts
MONIKA FLUDERNIK
9
11
20
38 Narrative transmission, readers' scripts, and illocutionary acts 33 MICHAEL KEARNS
PART 2
Where is the political?
39 Consolidated vision: narrative and social space ALFRED A. KNOPF AND EDWARD SAID
40 The storyteller: reflections on the works of Nikolai Leskov WALTER BENlAMIN
41 Symptoms of discursivity: experience, memory and trauma ERNST VAN ALPHEN
67 69
88
107
42 Sexing narratology: toward a gendered poetics of narrative voice 123 SUSAN S. LANSER
43 The politics of translation GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK
44 Realism and desire: Balzac and the problem of the subject FREDERIC lAMESON
PART 3
Understanding ideology
45 Text and ideology: for a poetics of the norm PHILIPPE HAMON
46 Writing history with the Sun King: the traps of narrative LOUIS MARIN 140 162 189 191 219
47 I etcetera: on the poetics and ideology of multipersoned narratives 242 BRIAN RICHARDSON
PART 4
The politics of desire
48 Freud's masterplot PETER BROOKS
259
261
49 Coming unstrung: women, men, narrative, and principles of pleasure 276 SUSAN WINNETT
50 'Significant discharge': the cum shot and narrativity MURAT AYDEMIR
51 Ideology, form, and 'Allerleirauh': reflections on Reading for
297 the Plot 319 MARIANNE HIRSCH PARTS Time 52 Narrative time PAUL RICOEUR
53 Time, narration, and the exploration of central Africa JOHANNES FABIAN
54 The staging of time in Heremakhonon GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK
VOLUME IV INTERDISCIPLINARITY
Acknowledgements
Introduction to Volume IV
PART!
Law, justice, history, truth
325
327 348 367 viii 1 955 The storyteller's silence: Waiter Benjamin's dilemma of justice 11 SHOSHANA FELMAN
56 The value of narrativity in the representation of reality HAYDEN WHITE
58
57 'The Otherwise Unnoteworthy Year 711': a reply to Hayden White 81 MARILYN ROBINSON WALDMAN
58 The narrativization of real events HAYDEN WHITE
59 Narrativity in history: post-structuralism and since HANS KELLNER
PART 2
Social narrative
60 Ethnography as narrative EDWARD M. BRUNER
61 Of dogs alive, birds dead, and time to tell a story JOHANNES FABIAN
62 Dinner narratives as detective stories: problem solving through
90 96
129
131 145 co-narration 165ELINOR OCHS, RUTH C. SMITH AND CAROLYN E. TAYLOR 63 Prison, drug abuse and personal identity
PATRICIA E. O'CONNOR
PART 3 Subjectivity
64 The narrative construction of reality JEROME BRUNER
65 Beyond Oedipus: the specimen story of psychoanalysis SHOSHANA FELMAN
PART 4
Music and film - the arts of time
184
211
213
233
66 The impromptu that trod on a loaf: or how music tells stories 269 SUSAN McCLARY
67 A telling view on musical sounds: a musical translation of the
theory of narrative 287
VINCENT MEELBERG
68 Screening the past in Mani Ratnam's Nayakan LALITHA GOPALAN
317
69 Film, narrative, narration: the cinema of the Lumiere brothers 350 ANDRE GAUDREAULT
70 Showing and telling: image and word in early cinema ANDRE GAUDREAULT
PARTS
Science and/as narrative?
71 Frames of reference: contextual monitoring and the interpretation of narrative discourse
CATHERINE EMMOTT
72 Narrative, science, and narrative science DAVID HERMAN
359
369
371
The publishers would like to thank the following for permission to reprint their material:
Gerald Prince for permission to reprint Gerald Prince, 'Revisiting Narrativity', in Watter Griinzweig and Andreas Solbach (eds), Transcending
Boundaries: Narratology in Context, Tiibingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1999, pp. 43-51.
lohns Hopkins University Press for permission to reprint 1. M. Lotman, 'The Structure of the Narrative Text', in Daniel P. Lucid (ed.), Soviet
Semiotics-An Semiotics-Anthology, Baltimore and London: lohns Hopkins University Press, 1977, pp. 195-197. Copyright © 1977 lohns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of The lohns Hopkins University Press.
John Benjamins Publishing for permission to reprint Thomas G. Pavel, 'Literary narratives', in Tuen A. van Dijk (ed.), Discourse and Literature, Amsterdam, Philadelphia: lohn Benjamins Publishing, 1985, pp. 85-103. Taylor & Francis for permission to reprint Shlomith Rimmon-Kennan, 'Towards ... Afterthoughts, almost twenty years later', in Narrative Fiction
-Contemporary Poetics, London and New York: Routledge, 2nd edn, 2002, pp. 134-149.
Harvard University Press for permission to reprint extracts from Aristotle,
Poetics 6-11, edited and translated by Stephen Halliwell. London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, pp. 49-67.
Hill and Wang for permission to reprint Roland Barthes, 'Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives', in Stephen Heath (ed. and trans.), Image
-Music - Text, New York: Hill and Wang, 1977, pp. 79-124. English trans-lation copyright © 1977 by Stephen Heath. Reprinted by permission of Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
University of Chicago Press for permission to reprint Barbara Herrnstein Smith, 'Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories', in W 1. T. Mitchell (ed.), On
Narrative, Chicago and London: University Chicago Press, 1980, pp. 209-232. Copyright © 1980 the University of Chicago Press.
Cornell University Press for permission to reprint Jonathan Culler, 'Story and Discourse in the Analysis of Narrative', in The Pursuit of Signs:
Semiot-ics, Literature, Deconstruction, Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 2002, pp. 169-187.
Harvard University Press for permission to reprint Plato, 'Book Ill, VI', in
The Republic, edited and translated by Paul Shorey, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930, pp. 225-231.
University of Chicago Press for permission to reprint Wayne C. Booth, 'Types of Narration', in The Rhetoric of Fiction, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2nd edn, 1974, pp. 149-159. Copyright © 1974 the University of Chicago Press.
Ann Banfield for permission to reprint Ann Banfield, 'Narrative Style and the Grammar of Direct and Indirect Speech', Foundations of Language 10 (1973): 1-39.
Brian McHale for permission to reprint Brian McHale, 'Free Indirect Discourse: A Survey of Recent Accounts', PTL: A Journal for Descriptive
Poetics and Theory of Literature 3 (1978): 249-287.
Blackwell Publishing for permission to reprint Gerald Genette, 'Mood', in Jane E. Lerrin (ed. and trans.), Narrative Discourse, London: Basil Blackwell, 1972, pp. 161-211.
Polebridge Press for permission to reprint Mieke Bal, 'Narration and Focal-ization', in David Jopling (ed.), On Story-Telling, Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press, 1991, pp. 75-108.
Style for permission to reprint Gerald Prince, 'The Disnarrated', Style 22(1) (Spring 1988): 1-8.
Philippe Hamon for permission to reprint Philippe Hamon, 'What is a description?' in Tzvetan Todorov (ed.), French Literary Theory Today, Cambidge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, pp. 147-178.
Mieke Bal for permission to publish Mieke Bal, 'Over-Writing as Un-Writing: Descriptions, World-Making and Novelistic Time', unpublished manuscript, 2003, pp. 1-33.
Disclaimer
The publishers have made every effort to contact authors/copyright holders of works reprinted in Narrative Theory: Critical Concepts in Literary and
Cultural Studies. This has not been possible in every case, however, and we would welcome correspondence from those individuals/companies whom we have been unable to trace.
Date Author Article/ Chapter References Vol. Chap.
c. 360 B.C. Plato Extracts from The Republic This version edited and translated by Paul I 9
Shorey, London: WiIliam Heinemann Ltd; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
(1
1930, pp. 225-231.
:c
c. 350 B.C. Aristotle Extracts from Poetics 6-11 This version edited and translated by Stephen I 5 ;;tl
HaIliwell, London and Cambridge, Mass.: 0
Harvard University Press, 1995, pp. 49-67. Z 0
1936 WaIter Benjamin The Storyteller: Reflections As 'Reflexions
a
propos de l'oeuvre de III 40 ron the Works of Nikolai Nicolas Leskov', in Oriet und Okzident and 0
><
Leskov also in Theodor Adorno (ed.), Schriften, Cl
<:
Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp-Verlag, 1955. (1
:>
This version translated by Harry Zorn, in r
Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, New ~
York: Harvard University Press and ~
Harcourt, 1968, pp. 83-107. t:I:I r
1966 Roland Barthes Introduction to the As 'Introduction
a
l'analyse structurale du I 6 t'rIStructural Analysis of recit', Communications 8. This version Narratives published in Stephen Heath (ed. and trans.),
Image, Music, Text, New York: Hill and
Wang, 1977, pp. 79-124.
1972 Gerard Genette Mood As 'Discours du recit', in Figures Ill, Paris: I 13
Editions due Seuil. This version published in Jane E. Lewin (ed. and trans.), Narrative
Discourse, London: Basil Blackwell, 1972,
Date Author Article/Chapter References Vo!. Chap.
1973 J. M. Lotman The Structure of the As 'Zameeanija 0 strukture I 2
Narrative Text povestvovatel'nogo teksta', in Trudy po
znakovym sistemam, VI, Tartu: Tartu University, pp. 382-386. This version published in Daniel P. Lucid (ed.), Soviet
Semiotics - An Anthology, Baltimore and n
London: Johns Hopkins University Press, ::c:
;:0
1977, pp. 193-197. 0
1973 Ann Banfield Narrative Style and the Foundations of Language 10: 1-39. I 11 Z
Grammar of Direct and 0
Indirect Speech t"" 0
>< 1973 Algirdas Julien Greimas Description and Narrativity: As 'Description et narrativite
a
propos de "La II 23 Cl$.
"The Piece of String" Ficelle" de Maupassant', Revue Canadienne (l
de Linguistique Romane I: 13-24. This version
>-translated by Paul Perron and Frank Collins, t""New Literary History 20(3) (Spring 1989): ....,
>-615-626. t:tI
1973 Roland Barthes Textual Analysis of a Tale of Originally published as 'Analyse Textuelle II 24 t"" tr:I
Poe d'un Conte d'Edgar Alan Poe', in Claude
Chabrol (ed.), Semiotique Narrative et
Textuelle, Paris: Librairie Larousse, pp. 29-53. This version published in Marshall Blonsky (ed.), On Signs, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985, pp. 84-97.
1974 Wayne C. Booth Types of Narration The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd edn, Chicago and I 10
London: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 149-159.
and New York: Cornell University Press, pp. 109-122.
1978 Brian McHale Free Indirect Discourse: A PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and I 12
Survey of Recent Accounts Theory of Literature 3: 249-287.
1978 Barbara 10hnson The Critical Difference: Diacritics, 8(2): 162-174. Il 25
Balzac's 'Sarrasine' and Barthes's 'S/Z'
1978 Michael Kearns Narrative Transmission, Rhetorical Narratology, Lincoln and London: III 38
Readers' Scripts, and University of Nebraska Press, pp. 162-199. (J
Illocutionary Acts ::r:
1979 Paul de Man Reading (Proust) Allegories of Reading - Figural Language in Il 29 0 ~
Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust, New Z
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 0
pp. 57-78. 0 r
:>< 1980 Barbara Herrnstein Smith Narrative Versions, Narrative W. 1. T. Mitchell (ed.), On Narrative, Chicago I 7
a
<
-
...
. Theories and London: University of Chicago Press,(J
pp. 209-232. :>
1980 Paul Ricoeur Narrative Time W. 1. T. Mitchell (ed.), On Narrative, Chicago III 52 r
and London: The University of Chicago ....,
:>
Press, pp. 165-186. t:l:l
1981 Frederic lameson Realism and Desire: Balzac The Political Unconscious - Narrative as a III 44 r
and the Problem of the Socially Symbolic Act, Ithaca, NY: Cornell tI1
Subject University Press; London: Methuen,
pp. 151-184.
1981 Hayden White The Value of Narrativity in W. 1. T. Mitchell (ed.), On Narrative, Chicago IV 56 the Representation of Reality and London: The University of Chicago
Press, pp. 1-23.
1981 Marilyn Ro bins on 'The Otherwise W. 1. T. Mitchell (ed.), On Narrative, Chicago IV 57
Waldman Unnoteworthy Year 711': A and London: The University of Chicago
Date Author Article/Chapter References Vol. Chap.
1981 Hayden White The N arrativization of Real W J. T. Mitchell (ed.), On Narrative, Chicago IV 58
Events and London: The University of Chicago
Press, pp. 249-254.
1982 Philippe Hamon What is a description? Tzvetan Todorov (ed.), French Literary I 16
Theory Today, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 147-178. (")
1982 J. Hillis Miller Mrs. Dalloway: Repetition as Fiction and Repetition - Seven English Novels, Il 22 ::r:
the Raising of the Dead Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ~ 0
pp. 176-202. Z
1983 Kaja Silverman Emile Benveniste The Subject of Semiotics, New York: Oxford III 36 0
l '
>< University Press, pp. 43-53. 0
S:
1983 Philippe Hamon Text and Ideology: For a Poetics of the Norm Translated by Susan H. Leger, Style 17(2) (Spring): 95-118. III 45a
(")1983 Shoshana Felman Beyond Oedipus: The Robert Con Davis, ed., Lacan and Narration- IV 65
>
Specimen Story of The Psychoanalytic Difference in Narrative l '
o-:l
Psychoanalysis Theory, Baltimore and London: Johns
>
Hopkins University Press, pp. 1021-1053. ~
1984 Cynthia Chase Models of Narrative: Oxford Literary Review 6(2): 57-69. Il 33 l '
t'I1 Mechanical Doll, Exploding
Machine
1984 Andre Gaudreault Film, Narrative, Narration: Iris 2(4) this version translated by Rosamund IV 69 The Cinema of The Lumiere Howe, in Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker
Brothers (eds), Early Cinema - Space, Frame,
Narrative, London: BFI Publishing, 1990, pp. 68-75.
1985 Thomas G. Pavel Literary narratives Tuen A. van Dijk (ed.), Discourse and I 3
Literature, Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, pp. 85-103.
French Realist Fiction, New York: Columbia
University Press, pp. 111-126.
1985 Steven Marcus Freud and Dora: Story, Representations: 56-91. Il 30
History, Case History
1985 Louis Marin Writing History with the Sun Marshall Blonsky (ed.), On Signs, London: III 46 King: The Traps of Narrative Basil Blackwell, pp. 267-288.
1986 Marianne Hirsch Ideology, Form, and Children's Literature 14: 163-168. III 51
'Allerleirauh': Reflections on Reading for the Plot
( j
1986 Edward M. Bruner Ethnography as Narrative Victor W. Turner and Edward M. Bruner IV 60
::r::
(eds), The Anthropology of Experience, ;;0
Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois 0
Press, pp. 139-155. Z
0
1987 Hans Kellner Narrativity in History: Post- History and Theory 26(4) (December): 1-29. IV 59 r
Structuralism and Since 0
><
1988 Gerald Prince The Disnarrated Style 22(1) (Spring): 1-8. I 15
a
:;<.
1990 Meir Sternberg Telling in Time (I): Poetics Today 11(4) (Winter): 901-948. Il 21 ( j
Chronology and Narrative > r
Theory
...,
1990 Peter Brooks Freud's Masterplot Yale French Studies (55/56): 280-300. III 48 ,>
1990 Andre Gaudreault Showing and Telling: Image Translated by John Howe, in Thomas IV 70 t:I:I
r
and Word in Early Cinema Elsaesser and Adam Barker (eds), Early tTl
Cinema - Space, Frame, Narrative, London:
BFI Publishing, pp. 274--281.
1991 Mieke Bal Narration and Focalization David Jopling (ed.), On Story-Telling: Essays I 14
in Narratology, Sonoma, Calif.: Polebridge
Press, pp. 75-108.
1991 Johannes Fabian Of Dogs Alive, Birds Dead, John Bender and David E. Wellbery (eds), IV 61 and Time to Tell a Story Chronotypes - The Construction of Time,
Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 185-204.
Date Author Article/ Chapter References Vol. Chap.
1991 Jerome Bruner The Narrative Construction Critical Inquiry 18 (Autumn): 3-21, Chicago IV 64
of Reality University Press.
1992 Shoshana Felman The Betrayal of the Witness: Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (eds), 11 32
Camus' The Fall' Testimony - Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, New York and
London: Routledge, pp. 165-203. n
1993 Edward Said Consolidated Vision: Culture and Imperialism, New York: Alfred A. 111 39 ::r:
Narrative and Social Space Knopf and Vintage, pp. 62-80. ~ 0
1993 Gayatri Chakravorty The Politics of Translation Outside in the Teaching Machine, New York 111 43 Z
Spivak and London: Routledge, pp. 179-200. 0
l '
1994 Monika Fludernik Second-Person Narrative As Style 28(3) (Fall): 445-479. 11 19 0
:>< a Test Case for Narratology: Cl
:><
The Limits of Realism n
1994 Brian Richardson I etcetera: On the Poetics and Style 28(3) (Fall): 312-328. 111 47 :>
Ideology of Multipersoned l '
...-3
Narratives :>
1994 Catherine Emmott Frames of reference: Malcolm Coulthard (ed.), Advances in IV 71 tl:'
contextual monitoring and Written Text Analysis, London and New l ' tr1 the interpretation of York: Routledge, pp. 157-166.
narrative discourse
1995 Andreas Huyssen Paris/Childhood: The A. Huyssen (ed.), Twilight Memories- 11 34
Fragmented Body in Rilke's Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia, Notebooks of Malte Laurids New York and London: Routledge,
Brigge pp. 105-126.
1995 Monika Fludernik The establishment of internal W van Peer and S. Chatman (eds), New 111 37 focalization in odd Perspectives on Narrative Perspectives,
Territories: The strategic New York: Routledge, pp. 222-249. expansion of deictic options'
1996 Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan William Faulkner, Absalom, A Glance Beyond Doubt - Narration, Il 26
Absalom! "Something is Representation, Subjectivity, Columbus: Ohio always missing" University Press, pp. 30-54.
1996 Elinor Ochs, Ruth C. Dinner narratives as detective Charles L. Briggs (ed.), Disorderly Discourse, IV 62 Smith and Carolyn E. stories: Problem Solving New York: Oxford University Press,
Taylor Through Co-Narration pp. 95-113.
1997 Susan McClary The Impromptu That Trod Narrative 5(1) (January): 20-35. IV 66
on a Loaf: or How Music ()
Tells Stories ::r: ~
1998 David Herman Narrative, science, and Narrative Inquiry 8(2): 379-390. IV 72 0
narrative science Z
1999 Gerald Prince Revisiting Narrativity Walter Griinzweig and Andreas Solbach I 0 r
(eds), Transcending Boundaries: Narratology 0
:>< Cl
~. in Context, Tiibingen: Gunter Narr Verlag,
pp. 43-51. ()
1999 Dorrit Cohn Freud's Case Histories and The Distinction of Fiction, Baltimore and Il 31 ;:I> r
the Question of Fictionality London: Johns Hopkins University Press,
...,
pp. 38-57. ';:I>
1999 Ernst van Alphen Symptoms of Discursivity: Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer III 41 ~
r
Experience, Memory and (eds), Acts of Memory - Cultural Recall in the tr1
Trauma Present, Hanover and London: University
Press of New England, pp. 24-38.
1999 Susan S. Lanser Sexing Narratology: Toward Walter Griinzweig and Andreas Solbach III 42
a Gendered Poetics of (eds), Transcending Boundaries: Narratology Narrative Voice in Context, Tiibingen: Gunter Narr Verlag,
pp. 167-183.
2001 Susan S. Lanser (Im)plying the Author Narrative 9(2) (May): 153-160. Il 18
2001 Johannes Fabian Time, Narration, and the Narrative 9(1) (January): 3-20. III 53
Date Author Article/Chapter References Vo!. Chap.
2002 Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan Towards ... Afterthoughts, Narrative Fiction - Contemporary Poetics, I 4 almost twenty years later London and New York: Routledge, 2nd edn,
pp. 134-149.
2002 Jonathan Culler Story and Discourse in the The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, I 8 Analysis of Narrative Deconstruction, Ithaca and New York:
Cornell University Press, pp. 169-187.
2002 Patricia E. O'Connor Prison, Drug Abuse and Revista Anglo-Sax6nica 2 (16-17): 147-182. IV 63 Personal Identity
2002 Nanna Verhoeff Archival Poetics Screening the Past 14 (December): 19pp, Il 35
Cl
www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast. ::c:
2002 Shoshana Felman The Storyteller's Silence: The Juridical Unconscious - Trials and IV 55 ~
WaIter Benjamin's Dilemma Traumas in the Twentieth Century, 0
Z
of Justice Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard 0
University Press; The University of Chicago l '
>< Press, pp. 10-53. 0
~: 2002 Lalitha Gopalan Screening the Past in Mani Cinema of Interruptions - Action Genres in IV 68 Cl
Ratnam's Nayakan Contemporary Indian Cinema, London: BFI Cl ~
Publishing, pp. 106-140. l '
2003 Mieke Bal Over-Writing as Un-Writing: Unpublished manuscript, pp. 1-33. I 17 ....,
Descriptions, World-Making ~ ~
and Novelistic Time l '
2003 Susan Winnett Coming Unstrung: Women, PMLA 105(3) (May): 505-518. III 49 tT1
Men, Narrative, and Principles of Pleasure
2003 Murat Aydemir "Significant Discharge": the Unpublished manuscript, pp. 1-22. III 50 Cum Shot and Narrativity
2003 Gayatri Chakravorty The Staging of Time in Cultural Studies 17(1): 85-97. . III 54
Spivak H eremakhonon
2003 Vincent Meelberg A Telling View on Musical Unpublished manuscript, pp. 1-20. IV 67
Sounds: A Musical
Narrative theory is primarily a set of approaches to texts that can be con-sidered to be, partially or wholly, narrative. By contrast to this theoretical context in which particular issues have been hotly debated for their own sake, this set of volumes will sketch narrative theory's history, breadth and applic-ability in relation to cultural artifacts of all kinds and all media. It will do this through an ongoing demonstration of narrative theory's value as an analytical instrument: for close reading or micro-stylistic analysis (Volume I); for special topics of narratological interest but also for concrete demonstra-tions of abstract theories (Volume II); for politically- and socially-oriented critiques of culture (Volume Ill); and for interdisciplinary method (Volume IV). While the four volumes will roughly follow an intellectual chronology, the overlappings and contemporaneity among different conceptions are equally important. Finally, debate and demonstration are equally relevant and have been included with more or less equal frequency.
Since the first 'wave' in the first half of the twentieth-century, when novelists published their collected prefaces (as did Henry James) or separate studies (as did E.M. Forster), literary studies has generated a subdiscipline that pres-ently functions in a much wider context under the names of narrative theory, theory of narrative and narratology. For the sake of convenience, I will use the latter term. As a modern theory, literary studies, or narratology, has developed in often overlapping stages, each with specific centres of interest, of which I will, somewhat arbitrarily, highlight four.
The first section of Volume I sketches the field of narrative theory in gen-eral, through three texts written during the heyday of that theory, the 1970s and 1980s, and one at the end of the twentieth century, written with hind-sight on the occasion of the republication of a successful textbook. I have called this prefatory section 'Preposterous beginnings', in keeping with the theory of history I developed in my retrospective analysis of visual art (Bal, 1999).
All
of these overview articles are anchored in the ancient roots of narrative theory - Plato on representation and Aristotle on plot, fragments of both of which are also included here.Developed first as a way of accounting for the wide appeal of the novel as the predominant literary genre, narratology has long been a central theory in 'literary study', itself a growing and specialising area of the humanities. At first, narratology was an attempt to turn critical conceptions into tools for literary analysis. As such, it enjoyed great popularity in the German-speaking world (see, for example, Stanzel, Lammert or Hamburger), as well as in the Anglo-Saxon world (see, for example, Friedman or Booth) and, although less commonly known at the time, in Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, Israel and France. The inevitable bias towards Anglo-Saxon publications in the four volumes of this collection, due to financial constraints regarding translation, must not allow us to forget these other schools of thought. In particular, the many representatives of German theorising would have taken a much more prominent place if such limitations did not exist.
A clear bias towards accounting for literary quality determined the foci of attention: plot, style, mood and description. Plot analysis was a structuralist specialty. Under the influence of the Russian folklorist, Vladimir Propp, who first developed a structuralist model for the analysis of folk tales, French structuralism became the privileged centre of attempts to make the analysis of plot less impressionistic and more reliable, according to ideals derived from science, linguistics and even mathematics. Of this enthusiastic move-ment, to which the names of Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, Claude Bremond and Algirdas Julien Greimas are attached, only Barthes' classic article 'Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative', originally pub-lished in the group's interdisciplinary journal, Communications, is included here (see Volume I, Chapter 6), immediately after a fragment from Aristotle's Poetics, in which the Greek philosopher makes the first generalisations about plot structure. 1
The availability of many readers in structuralist theory hopefully makes this limitation to a single representative acceptable.
Because the structuralist method for plot analysis proposed by- Barthes and others provoked a lot of controversy, the second section of Volume I also includes two critical responses to such models, which put forward the fundamental problem of the tension between discourse and the events it represents. These sceptical accounts come from the US, although they differ in their background: one is influenced by analytical philosophy, the other by deconstruction. This difference indicates how different schools of thought related to the models of French structuralism.
Under the influence of the belated discovery in the West, of Russian Formalism, folklorist studies (by, for example, Pro pp ) and the circle of Mikhail Bakhtin, narrative theory gradually detached itself from the aes-thetically- and medium-specific field of literature. Rooted in criticism, it became 'structuralist', in the second key movement or 'wave' of the 1960s and 1970s. At this time, the elitist nature of literary study and the implicit privil-eging of a narrow kind of literature - from James to Joyce, Musil to Mann, and Flaubert to Proust - collided with the discoveries of folklorists, such as,
most famously, Vladimir Propp, who found commonalities among tales from around the world.
In the West, structuralist narratology developed primarily in France, where Roland Barthes became the leading voice, while Tzvetan Todorov developed a 'grammar' of Bocaccio's Decamerone. Todorov was also instru-mental in bringing Russian Formalism to the attention to the French literary establishment, while Etienne Souriau recycled Propp's model, which was fur-ther systematised later by Algirdas Julien Greimas. Paradoxically, this was the context within which 'literariness' became the subject of explicit theoris-ing (under the influence of Russian Formalism) while, at the same time, the limitation of the narrative theory of literature was polemically rejected. Barthes' Mythologies and Systeme de la mode, as well as Greimas's analyses of newspaper clippings and the master-narratives (see, for example, Lyotard) of contemporary ideologies, found their way to a public interested in larger cultural issues and fields.
Structuralist narratology became obsessed with plot structure and seman-tic analysis. This tendency attracted linguists as well as scholars of religion and anthropologists. The anthropological turn put the concept of 'ritual' at the forefront, a concept that lent itself to narrative analysis as easily - or, unsettlingly, more easily - as, say, Virginia Woolfs To the Lighthouse. Inter-est in plot and actantial structure (the alternative to the humanistic concept of character) generated a plethora of theoretical propositions and sometimes exceedingly detailed sample analyses, such as Greimas on a short story by Maupassant and Barthes on short stories by Poe or Balzac. Since structural-ist narratology, as dstructural-istinct from style analyses, remains highly abstract, Vol-ume 11 contains not only key theoretical articles but also sample analyses marking moments in the development of narrative theory, with some emphasis on plot and actantial structure.
In the same decade, the 1970s, special attention was devoted elsewhere to those literary devices that characterised 'modern' fiction specifically, such as, most notoriously, Free Indirect Discourse (FID). Because FID is considered
a modern phenomenon, little attention has been paid to its roots in antique philosophy. The fragment of Plato's Republic (see Volume I, Chapter 9) included here broaches the question of a necessary distinction between the representation of actions and events, on the one hand, and the representa-tion of speech, on the other. Once we think about what it means to represent speech, the question of fiction is not far away. Among the various possible ways of representing speech are: direct discourse, where the allegedly original speech is quoted; indirect speech, where it is represented as an event, and hence, totally unverifiable; and, in-between, that subjective style that represents the speech of characters in a voice in which the narrator and the character can no longer be distinguished.
Within the rich bibliography devoted solely to this phenomenon, a great number of schools developed and came to rival each other: the typological
approach (by, for example, Stanzel); the theory of text interference (by, for example Schmid or Dolezel); the poetics of the Israel-based group, around Benjamin Hrushovski, Moshe Ron, N omi Tamir-Ghez, Menakhem Perry and Meir Sternberg in Tel-Aviv, and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan in Jerusalem and, in the US, the powerful linguistics-based theory of Ann Banfield. The path-breaking article of the latter is included here (see Volume. I, Chapter 11), along with an overview by Brian McHale (see Volume I, Chapter 12), who worked in Tel-Aviv at the time and is a long-standing executive editor of the Tel Aviv group's international journal, Poetics Today. In that journal, many of the important pieces of FID literature appeared. Because of its implicit critical thrust - FID as a style allegedly characterised 'modern' nar-rative, and specifically, 'fiction' - the key publications around this admittedly narrow topic constitute a rich resource for the large majority of literary students who have, with the shifts of interest in literary studies of the past decades, de facto lost an important tool, hence, skill, for analysis.
In the late 1960s, the French literary scholar, Gerard Genette, spent a semester away from his home institution, carrying Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu in his suitcase. He returned home later with a manuscript for a fully-fledged narrative theory, in which plot played no part and Proust was almost the only example. His book incorporated German and Anglo-Saxon theories of temporality, voice and what Genette called 'mood'. Following Henry James's ideas on focus as distinct from voice (James's What Maisie Knew was the novelist's laboratory experiment on that distinction), Genette proposed a theory for the analysis of what can properly be called 'narrative style', which eventually made its way back to its point of origin when it was translated into English in 1980. I will never forget the empowering impact it had on me, then a fledgling PhD student, when, by chance, it was given to me as a Christmas present immediately after it first appeared. My subsequent critique and emendation of Genette's theory marked the beginning of my life as a narratologist. No other publication has had such an influence on my narratological work and it is a pleasure to acknowledge my debt to Genette here. To mark that moment - also the moment that a second generation of narratologists emerged - I include Genette's chapter, 'Mood' (see Volume I, Chapter 13), along with my proposal for a revision of that topic (see Volume I, Chapter 14). For me, the sUbjectivisation that 'mood' entails raises issues of belief and truth, but also of ideology and bias. I was already thinking more and more of feminist and other political issues, whereas Genette was more interested in narrative aesthetics. With hindsight, I see that some of the irresolvable disagreement between us can be understood through that difference.
The final section of Volume I is devoted to what can be called 'world making': descriptions that represent, not events and characters, but the spatial world in which they evolve. It was again Genette, in his article 'Boundaries of Narrative' (1969), who aroused interest in the seemingly
marginal place of description in narrative. Ris groundbreaking paper that questioned that marginality was soon followed by Philippe Ramon's decisive semiotic model for the actual analysis of descriptive fragments. I include a later English version of that article (see Volume I, Chapter 16), along with a complementary paper. My own overview sketches the development of description theory through descriptions of characters (see Volume I, Chapter 17). I hope this article also implicitly suggests links to the issues discussed in the later volumes of this set. For, on the one hand, the article attempts to speak primarily to the profound connections - indeed, inextricable inter-twinements - between those aspects of narrative that propel the reader from event to event in a desire to read, as Peter Brooks would put it, 'for the plot', and those that put before the reader a world that resembles more or less closely (but without ever being) the actual world as we know it. In this sense, it sides firmly with Genette and Ramon who, each in his own way, have, from the beginning of structuralism, cautioned against an over-emphasis on, or indeed isolation of, plot. On the other hand, my article, written much later than the other two, also attempts to revisit narratological thought from 'beyond' or 'after' the dual turn to politics and interdisciplinarity, represented in Volumes III and IV respectively. These two prepositions must be taken to mean, not a, leaving behind of narrative theory, nor a regression to earlier positions, but, on the contrary, a necessarily belated position in time. Such a position requires a rethinking of the premises and results of structuralism, separating out what has proven to be problematic - the universalism and the unworldliness - but without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Vol-umes Il, III and IV offer reflections on narratology beyond its structuralist rigidity in this sense.
Such a belated revisiting, however, is only apparently 'new'. As early as 1970, Barthes's S/Z marked an important transition in this regard. The joint influence of semiotic approaches to narrative objects of all cultural kinds (in, for example, Umberto Eco) and the profound questioning of structuralism's timeless universalism by deconstruction caused great doubts in the leading narratologists themselves, Barthes being only the most spectacular case. My reluctance to include just fragments in the present volumes - a reluctance that marks a stance against the current academic culture of 'readers', consisting of short bytes of longer texts, which I find ultimately antiintellectual -precluded the inclusion of a fragment from the book-length analysis of S/Z; a key text, the absence of which I regret.
In this sense, Volume Il opens with a gap: the absence of what was both the apogee and the surpassing of structuralist narratology. Not long after this 1970 article, however, Barthes published an article-length analysis of a story by Edgar Allan Poe that can stand here for the similar transitional mode of narratological theorising (see Volume Il, Chapter 24). It is not exactly similar to S/Z in its theoretical position - Barthes' thinking was notoriously volatile - but it is comparable in its painstaking effort to
demonstrate 'narratology at work'. As such, it is an answer to many critical voices who, at the time, blamed narrative theory for abstraction and general-isation. In compensation for the loss of SIZ, I have included Barbara 10hnson's deconstructionist critique of it (see Volume 11, Chapter 25). Like the book her piece engages, this article embodies the fine and ambiguous line between structuralist narratology and its productive critique.
Traditionally-inclined literary criticism regained some of its lost liveliness and sometimes it is hard to distinguish pre- from post-structuralist com-plaints about narratology's alleged loss of relevance. The cultural turn already inaugurated by the participation of anthropology became enriched with the politically-oriented movements of the 1980s, such as feminism and, in its wake, anti-racist critiques of culture. Bakhtinian thought was widely adopted in this context. Similarly, rhetorical analysis was revitalised by deconstruction. The development of cultural studies made the distinct visibility of narratology somewhat inconspicuous. Volume Ill, including primarily sample analyses, demonstrates the ongoing and, in fact, increasing relevance of narratological tools and concepts to provide an analysis that is both politically aware and integrates aesthetic considerations with attention to power structures both within and outside literature per se.
In the wake of this development, and owing to its long history of engaging non-literary objects, narratology is currently enjoying a kind of comeback. In the 1990s, and continuing up to the present, the increasing attention to visual culture opened up a dialogue, hitherto impossible, between narratol-ogy and visual art. Of course, this dialogue had already been made indispensable by the flourishing development of film studies, a field that could neither dispense with narratology nor accept that discipline's textual bias. Given the current state of universities, with their increasing interest in and need for re groupings and interdisciplinary exchanges, narratology con-tributes widely to resolving the methodological problems generated by the abandonment of the unquestioned certainties of traditional disciplinary paradigms.
Several disciplines have had their own narratological traditions. Two prob-lems accompany that development. One is the lack of specific narratological knowledge in fields where the primary focus lies elsewhere. Conversely, nar-ratological approaches can become somewhat idiosyncratic within disciplines where the mainstream is otherwise inclined. Thus, in the wake of Hayden White's groundbreaking Meta-History, historiography has had its narrative turn. Specifically narratological analyses remain rare but making these available may be tremendously useful. Film studies has its own narratological tradition attached to cognitive approaches (as in the work of Bordwell and Branigan). A painfully limited choice of articles nevertheless draws this approach within the larger field. Art history has been far from keen to adopt narratology, yet narrativity in images is continually taken for granted. The study of religions and their respective canons needs and has used
-narratological tools but it could still integrate structuralist tools with post-structuralist ones more effectively.
The turn to interdisciplinarity then can provide a context for an enhanced presence of narratology. With this in mind, I composed Volume IV out of texts that explicitly broach the question of interdisciplinary methodology: how can narrative theory be brought to bear on issues and artifacts not traditionally considered to be primarily narrative?
I began this introduction by defining narrative theory as a range of approaches to texts that can be considered, partially or wholly, as narrative. None of the texts included in these volumes is primarily preoccupied with defining narrative or the aspect that makes texts narrative (also called their 'narrativity'). Although elementary definitions can and have been put for-ward, they offer little help in the actual work of narrative analysis. Narrative theory then is primarily a toolbox, not a philosophy of a discursive genre, mode or attitude. Yet, if anything defines narrativity, it is precisely such an attitude: the one adopted when one puts forward information on events that have happened, could happen or should be prevented from happening.
It is not the intention of this set to offer a comprehensive overview of the development of narrative theory. Instead, the choice of articles is meant to show how these debates have shifted in the Western academy over the past four decades. Thus, some reflect issues that have characterised discussions among narratologists. Others appeal to their work for other goals and are grouped according to the extent to which they are hotly debated. Together, they offer a sense of productive debate. The primary goal of these volumes is not to sketch a development, either internal or external, in narrative theory, however. Instead, their point is to offer thoughts, perspectives and tools.
Narrative, or narrativity, involves such widespread cultural phenomena and has such a great social impact that I can imagine no academic field where thinking about narrative can be avoided. For those inside the field where this body of theory is most obviously relevant (literary studies), as well as for those who practice in other disciplines (from music, film and visual art to ethnography and sociology, and from law or history to cognitive science), the question of what it means for the agency of an artifact to be infused with narrativity inevitably arises. For, in order to present ideas, opinions, artworks or political situations in terms of a logically related series of events deter-mines what others glean from that alleged information and how they act upon it.
Ultimately then, in terms of the critical tradition of literary study, narra-tive theory is more than an aesthetic theory. In terms of semiotics, it is also more than a semantic, syntactic and pragmatic theory, although these three junctures of semiotics do appear as the skeleton of many structuralist narrative theories. As long as it helps us to ask questions regarding the
distribution of power (who has the authority to narrate and be believed?); the way we represent ourselves to others and others represent themselves to us or pertaining to the juridical consequences of versions of events and the kind of justice they entail, narrative theory is also, at least, a social theory.
These volumes are neither comprehensive nor representative of the domains for which this body of theory has relevance but it is· hoped the grouping of articles around issues and sometimes particular discussions will at least suggest ways in which more avenues can be opened. It is also hoped that this will suggest the points at which narrative attitude joins the questions that all researchers constantly ask themselves, regardless of whether these questions concern the nature of attraction, imagination, truth, justice or meaning or the many ways we can approach those things.
Note
The editors of an excellent French edition of this text (and also of extensive com-mentary) were more-or-Iess related to this group. See La poetique: Aristotle, 1980.
References
Bal, Mieke (1999) Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dupont-Roc, Roselyn and Lallot, Jean (1980) La pohique: Aristotle, translated and annotated by Roselyn Dupont and Jean Lallot, with an introduction by Tzvetan Todorov, Paris: Editions du Seuil.
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REVISITING NARRATIVITY
Gerald Prince
Source: Waiter Grilnzweig and Andreas Solbach (eds), Transcending Boundaries: Narratology in Context, Tilbingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1999, pp. 43-51.
Narrative has been minimally defined as the representation of at least one event, one change in a state of affairs. In Narrative Discourse Revisited, for example, Gerard Genette wrote: »The idea of minimal narrative presents a problem of definition that is not slight. [ ... ] For me, as soon as there is an action or an event, even a single one, there is a story because there is a transformation, a transition from an earlier to a later and resultant state« (1983: 18f.). If, according to E. M. Forster, »The king died and then the queen died« constitutes a narrative, according to Genette »The king died« is quite enough. As he says, it could even be a news story. Indeed, for Genette, texts like» The boy came« or like» The girlleft« would also constitute narra-tives. Granted, they might not be very interesting; but, as he points out and as many of us unfortunately know from experience, not every narrative is very interesting.
The minimal definition is adequate in that it captures an important difference between what would generally be considered narrative and what would not: on the one hand, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
Middlemarch, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, but also texts like »Mary drank a glass of apple juice and then she drank a glass of beer« or like the news story »The king died«; on the other hand, Introduction to Kinetics, Anatomy
of Criticism, Language, Truth, and Logic, as well as texts like «All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; Socrates is mortal» or like »Elephants are large herbivorous animals.« What the minimal definition does not capture is that certain texts that satisfy it are not always taken to be narratives. I am think-ing not only of «The boy came» or «The girl left,» which are formally equiva-lent to «The king died,» but also of more complicated texts like «Mary ate a hamburger» or «Janet closed the window,» of countless lyric poems which depict actions and happenings, and of many a recipe: »First you wash and drain a cup of rice and place it in a heavy kettle with three cups of cold
water; then you boil for five minutes; then you reduce the heat and cook covered for eighteen minutes; then you remove from heat, let stand for a few more minutes, and enjoy!« More generally, what the minimal definition does not account for (nor does it attempt to) and what more constraining def-initions - which specify, for instance, that narrative represents at least one event and one resulting state of affairs not logically entailed by that event -likewise do not capture is that different narrative texts exhibit different kinds or different degrees of narrativity (with some being more narrative than others, as it were) and that, even among persons of widely different back-grounds, there is considerable agreement about their comparative narrativity. Few people, if any, would think that Nausea, for example, «tells a better story« than The Three Musketeers (though, given that there is much more than narrative in a narrative, many people may prefer Sartre's novel to Dumas's) and even fewer would consider that a text like »Mary drank a glass of apple juice and then she drank a glass of beer« has a particularly high degree of narrativity. In other words, the definition does not (try to) dis-tinguish between what could be called narrativeness - what makes a text narrative, what all and only narratives have in common - and what I have been calling narrativity: what in a text underlines its possibly narrative nature, what emphasizes the presence and semiotic role of narrative struc-tures in a textual economy, what makes a given narrative more or less narrative.
Now, narratologists have long made (implicit) distinctions between differ-ent narrativities. Aristotle, not surprisingly, provides a kind of early example. His consideration of mythos leads him to a number of judgments about various plot types and, by extension, different sorts of narrativity: the imi-tated action must be complete and whole just as it must be of a certain magnitude (neither too small nor too big!); dramatic rather than episodic plots ought to be devised; complex plots are preferable to simple ones; same-ness of incidents should be avoided; and so on. Similarly, in our own century, E. M. Forster contrasted what he called stories (»The king died and then the queen died«) with what he called plots (»The king died and then the queen died of grief«). Among the great French structuralists, Barthes broached the subject through his discussion of the post hoc ergo propter hoc confusion, Genette addressed it in his studies of the boundaries of narrative (1976) or the notion of mo1tivational cost (1968), and Greimas adumbrated it through his insistence on structural closure and internally governed predictability of denouement. William Labov, in his influential study of oral narratives of personal experience and tellability, compared not only pointed and pointless stories but, more specifically, narratives that »are complete in the sense that they have a beginning, a middle, and an end« and »more fully developed types« (1972: 362£) that include their own evaluation and indicate their point, their raison d' etre: why they are told and »what the narrator is getting at« (1972: 366). In his exploration of the difference between annals,
chronicles, and histories, Hayden White made a fundamental distinction between narrating (reporting a series of events in chronological order) and narrativizing (imposing »story form« on events or making the world speak itself as a story). And Paul Ricoeur was led, through his analysis of time and historical knowledge, to distinguish between the plots of (fictional) narra-tives and the quasi-plots of (modern) historiography as well as between the characters of the former (individual human agents, say) and the quasi-characters of the latter (entities like nations or cultures). Numerous other names could, of course, be mentioned: Peter Brooks (the prospective/ retrospective movement of narrative), Seymour Chatman (the nature of textual and, in particular, narrative service), Jonathan Culler (the conveying of a human project or a human engagement in the world), Monika Fludernik (anthropomorphic experientiality), Yeshayahu Shen (the kind of connections between events), Robert Wilensky (external and internal, static and dynamic points), and so forth.
Indeed, despite a general reluctance to engage universals (they smack of imperialism) and despite a strong tendency to shy away from possibly value-laden problems, the past dozen years have seen the interest in (factors uni-versally affecting) narrativity assert itself in increasingly explicit ways, partly - no doubt - because of the so-called narrativist turn (the reliance on the category »narrative« to describe, discuss, and account for indefinitely many activities, fields, and texts, from political speeches, legal briefs, or philo-sophical arguments to scientific proofs, psychoanalytic sessions, and L. L. Bean catalogues). By the end of the 1960s the very word »narrative« (or »story«) begins to invade a multitude of (discursive) terrains. One says >mar-rative« instead of »explanation« or »argumentation« (because it is more ten-tative); one prefers »narrative« to »theory,« »hypothesis,« or »evidence« (because it is less scientistic); one speaks of »narrative« rather than »ideology« (because it is less judgmental); one substitutes »narrative« for »message« (because it is more indeterminate). The notion of narrative is repeatedly called upon to characterize this or that domain, practice, or object and - with the spread of anti-foundationalism, structuralism, and post-modernism - narrative becomes one of the most common hermeneutic grids of our time. But even if it is true that »everything« is narrative (I prefer to think that »everything« may be part of a narrative, that there is a possible narrative behind »everything«), perhaps it is also true that »everything« is not equally narrative. More pointedly, if Nausea, The Three Musketeers, »Janet closed the window,« a supermarket ad, and even my wanting to have a drink all constitute narratives, don't they exemplify different kinds of narrativity? In fact, aren't some of them more narrative than others?
In order to start answering such questions and also in the hope of devising a more »realist« grammar of narrative that would adequately characterize not merely narratives like »Janet closed the window« or »The boy came« but also more »narrative« narratives, I attempted, in Narratology, to isolate some
of the factors affecting narrativity. I argued, for instance, that the narrativity of a text depends on the extent to which that text constitutes a doubly oriented autonomous whole (with a well-defined and interacting beginning, middle, and end) which involves some kind of conflict (consider» The cat sat on the mat« versus »The cat sat on the dog's mat«), which is made up of discrete, particular, positive, and temporally distinct actions having logically unpredictable antecedents or consequences, and which avoids inordinate amounts of commentary about them, their representation, or the latter's context (compare, on the one hand, »Jussac, anxious to put an end to this, sprang forward and aimed a terrible thrust at his adversary, but the latter parried it and, while Jussac was recovering himself, glided like a serpent beneath his blade, and passed his sword through his body« with, on the other hand, »N ow let such readers as are capable of generalizing an image and an idea, to adopt the phraseology of the present day, permit us to ask if they have formed a clear conception of the spectacle presented«). I also con-tended in »The Disnarrated« that, all other things being equal, the presence of disnarrated elements representing what did not happen but could have -affected narrativity in a positive manner.
In Narrative as Communication Didier Coste, too, presented what can be called a scalar view of narrativity. Besides maintaining that narrativity varies with the degree of narrative dominance in a semiotic act, and that this dom-inance can be quantitative (out of twenty predicates, say, fifteen are nar-ratemes, three are descriptemes, and two are ontemes), or that it can be hierarchic (the most important predicates are narratemes; the act makes the most sense if it is viewed as narrative; the text is interpretable (only) if a narrative grid is invoked), Coste specified several elements positively affect-ing narrativity: transactiveness rather than non-transactiveness (in other words, actions as opposed to mere happenings); transitiveness rather than intransitiveness (events involving an agent and a patient, as in »Peterinsulted Paul,« instead of an agent only, as in »Mary smiled«); deep or remote causal-ity as opposed to a lack of it (so that the first events, chronologically speak-ing, are linked to the last ones in significant ways); specificity instead of· generality (rather than sequences fitting any or indefinitely many sets of cir-cumstances like »Countless people were born and died,« the narrative act would figure sequences contingent on specific sets like »Wellington was born in 1769 and died in 1852«); singularity instead of banality (with the con-sequent avoidance of repetitiveness and the kind of superficial diversity whereby »the more things seem to happen, the less things actually change,« (Coste 1989: 62); and the presence as opposed to the absence of alternative courses of action for the narrative participants.
But it is perhaps Marie-Laure Ryan who has done the most systematic and promising work on narrativity. According to her, narrative texts create a world by depicting particular entities and events and they make that world coherent and intelligible by evoking a network of relations - causal links,
psychological motivations, goals, plans - among the entities and events. Their narrativity (and, in particular, what Ryan calls plot tell ability) varies with the way they realize these definitional traits. Specifically, in Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory, Ryan not only showed that an adequate model of plot must represent the relational changes obtain-ing between the constituents of the actual narrative world (what is true in the story) and the constituents of the characters' private worlds (the virtual embedded narratives fashioned in terms of their knowledge, wishes, obliga-tions, simulaobliga-tions, intenobliga-tions, or fantasies); she also insisted that >>oot all plots are created equal« (1991: .148) and that narrativity is rooted in the configuration of the relational changes as well as »in the richness and variety of the domain of the virtual« (1991: 156). If accounts of experiments in physics, for instance, are not particularly high in narrativity, it is partly due to the fact that neutrons, electrons, leptons, ions, quarks do not have intentions, wishes, or fantasies; of course, such accounts can be made more highly narrative if the experimenters' beliefs, expectations, disappointments, and triumphs are also represented. More recently, Ryan (1992) sketched an open-ended taxonomy of different modes of narrativity, including the simple narrativity of fairy tales or urban legends (where the semantic dimension of the text primarily springs from a linear plot revolving around a single prob-lem), the complex narrativity of Balzac, Dickens, or Dumas (where narrative structures appear on both the macro- and the micro textual level and where semantic integration obtains between the main plot lines and the subordinate ones), the figural narrativity of lyric, historiographic, or philosophic texts (in this case, the sender or the receiver constructs a story by reshaping universal claims, collective entities, and abstract concepts into particular characters and events), and the instrumental narrativity of sermons and debates (where narrative structures appearing on the micro textual level function merely as illustrations or clarifications of a nonnarrative macro textual level).
If, as my remarks more than suggested, narrativity is not to be confused with textual value (one can find in a narrative much more than narrative or than narrativity: wit, imagery, psychological insight, philosophical vision, documentary information), it is also not to be conflated with the category of narrative appeal or narrative interest and, in particular, with a notion which pertains to that category and which has evoked a good deal of discussion. I am speaking of the notion »point« (and the class of pointed - as opposed to pointless - narratives). William Labov is surely correct when he writes: »Pointless stories are met (in English) with the withering rejoinder, >So what?< Every good narrator is continually warding off this question: when his narrative is over, it should be unthinkable for a bystander to say >So what?< Instead, the appropriate remark would be >He did?< or similar means or registering the reportable character of the events of the narration« (1972: 366). But what Labov says of narratives and narrators can, mutatis mutandis, be said of any utterance and any speaker. Indeed, the
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