Narrative Fiction

Contemporary Poetics

Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134464975
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

What is a narrative? What is narrative fiction? How does it differ from other kinds of narrative? What featuers turn a discourse into a narrative text? Now widely acknowledged as one of the most significant volumes in its field, Narrative Fiction turns its attention to these and other questions.

In contrast to many other studies, Narrative Fiction is organized arround issues - such as events, time, focalization, characterization, narration, the text and its reading - rather than individual theorists or approaches. Within this structure, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan addresses key approaches to narrative fiction, including New Criticism, formalism, structuralism and phenomenology, but also offers views of the modifications to these theroies. While presenting an analysis of the system governing all fictional narratives, whether in the form of novel, short story or narrative poem, she also suggests how individual narratives can be studied against the background of this general system. A broad range of literary examples illustrate key aspects of the study.

This edition is brought fully up-to-date with an invaluable new chapter, reflecting on recent developments in narratology. Readers are also directed to key recent works in the field. These additions to a classic text ensure that Narrative Fiction will remain the ideal starting point for anyone new to narrative theory.

1
INTRODUCTION

Newspaper reports, history books, novels, films, comic strips, pantomime, dance, gossip, psychoanalytic sessions are only some of the narratives which permeate our lives. One species of narrative will be the subject of this book: the species called ‘narrative fiction’, whether in the form of novel, short story or narrative poem.

But what is a narrative? What makes the following limerick a narrative?

There was a young lady of Niger

Who smiled as she rode on a tiger.

They returned from the ride

 With the lady inside

And the smile on the face of the tiger.

How can we differentiate between this limerick and the following discourse?

Roses are red

Violets are blue

Sugar is sweet

And so are you.

Why isn’t the latter a narrative?

And what is narrative fiction? How does it differ from other kinds of narrative? In what sense is a newspaper report, like ‘yesterday a store in Oxford Street was burned out’ a narrative but not narrative fiction? What are the features that turn a given discourse into a narrative text? What are the basic aspects of narrative fiction and how do they interact with each other? How does one make sense of a specific narrative text, and how can it be described to others?

These and other questions will be considered in some detail throughout this book. However, it is helpful to begin with working definitions of the key terms of the title, thus providing a framework for further deliberations.

Poetics is

the systematic study of literature as literature. It deals with the question ‘What is literature?’ and with all possible questions developed from it, such as: What is art in language? What arc the forms and kinds of literature? What is the nature of one literary genre or trend? What is the system of a particular poet’s ‘art’ or ‘language’? How is a story made? What are the specific aspects of works of literature? How are they constituted? How do literary texts embody ‘non-literary’ phenomena? etc.

(Hrushovski 1976b, p. xv)

By ‘narrative fiction’ I mean the narration of a succession of fictional events. Self-evident as this definition may seem, it nevertheless implies certain positions with regard to some basic issues in poetics. To begin with, the term narration suggests (1) a communication process in which the narrative as message is transmitted by addresser to addressee and (2) the verbal nature of the medium used to transmit the message. It is this that distinguishes narrative fiction from narratives in other media, such as film, dance, or pantomime.¹

The definition further suggests how narrative fiction differs from other literary texts, such as lyrical poetry or expository prose. Unlike the latter, narrative fiction represents a succession of events (Tomashevsky 1965, p. 66. Orig. publ. in Russian 1925). At this early stage of our discussion, an event may be defined without great rigour as something that happens, something that can be summed up by a verb or a name of action (e.g. a ride—perhaps on a tiger). Although single-event narratives are theoretically (and perhaps also empirically) possible (see chapter 2), I speak of a succession of events in order to suggest that narratives usually consist of more than one. Thus the lady in the limerick first rides on a tiger, then returns in it.

Finally, the main interest of this book is in narratives of fictional events. This is why I shall not consider here nonfictional verbal narratives, like gossip, legal testimony, news reports, history books, autobiography, personal letters, etc. The fictional status of events is, I believe, a pragmatic issue. It is arguable that history books, news reports, autobiography are in some sense no less fictional than what is conventionally classified as such. In fact, some of the procedures used in the analysis of fiction may be applied to texts conventionally defined as ‘non-fiction’. Nevertheless, since such texts will also have characteristics specific to them, they are beyond the scope of this book.

The foregoing definition of narrative fiction also gives rise to a classification of its basic aspects: the events, their verbal representation, and the act of telling or writing. In the spirit of Genette’s distinction between ‘histoire’, ‘récit’ and ‘narration’ (1972, pp. 71–6), I shall label these aspects ‘story’, ‘text’ and ‘narration’ respectively.²

‘Story’ designates the narrated events, abstracted from their disposition in the text and reconstructed in their chronological order, together with the participants in these events.

Whereas ‘story’ is a succession of events, ‘text’ is a spoken or written discourse which undertakes their telling. Put more simply, the text is what we read. In it, the events do not necessarily appear in chronological order, the characteristics of the participants are dispersed throughout, and all the items of the narrative content are filtered through some prism or perspective (‘focalizer’).

Since the text is a spoken or written discourse, it implies someone who speaks or writes it. The act or process of production is the third aspect—‘narration’. Narration can be considered as both real and fictional. In the empirical world, the author is the agent responsible for the production of the narrative and for its communication. The empirical process of communication, however, is less relevant to the poetics of narrative fiction than its counterpart within the text. Within the text, communication involves a fictional narrator transmitting a narrative to a fictional narratee.

Of the three aspects of narrative fiction, the text is the only one directly available to the reader. It is through the text that he or she acquires knowledge of the story (its object) and of the narration (the process of its production). On the other hand, however, the narrative text is itself defined by these two other aspects: unless it told a story it would not be a narrative, and without being narrated or written it would not be a text. Indeed, story and narration may be seen as two metonymies of the text, the first evoking it through its narrative content, the second through its production.³ The relations among the aspects will be emphasized throughout this study, and the aspects themselves will inform the division into chapters.

Thus far I have suggested preliminary answers to all but the last two questions set forth in the beginning of this introduction. These two questions differ from the others in that they concern the specificity of individual texts rather than characteristics common to all works of narrative fiction. Indeed, the copresence of these two types of question is indicative of the double purpose of this book. On the one hand, I wish to present a description of the system governing all fictional narratives. On the other hand, I hope to indicate a way in which individual narratives can be studied as unique realizations of the general system.

This double orientation calls for a mixture of theoretical considerations and illustrations from works of narrative fiction. Of course, some issues are more amenable to illustration while others necessitate a more abstract discussion. The distribution of examples will vary accordingly. For reasons of space and variety, I do not analyse any text in full but prefer a discussion of extracts from many texts, deriving from various periods and various national literatures. Some examples are repeated in different contexts. This is done not only for the sake of reinforcement but also in order to emphasize that textual segments are junctions of various compositional principles, not readymade examples of any one principle to the exclusion of others (although a predominance of one is obviously possible). Analysis requires emphasis on the issue under consideration, but texts are richer than anything such an isolation of aspects can yield.

My presentation draws upon Anglo-American New Criticism, Russian Formalism, French Structuralism, the Tel-Aviv School of Poetics and the Phenomenology of Reading. However, the book is not structured according to ‘schools’ or individual theoreticians (as, for example, Hawkes 1977). Rather, it is organized around the differentia specifica of narrative fiction (e.g. events, time, narration). The predilection revealed here for certain approaches as well as the selection of specific aspects from each approach imply a personal stand on the various issues. Nor is this stand confined to tacit implication: on the contrary, it often manifests itself in explicit comments on and modifications of the theories which are brought together. Yet this book does not offer an original theory. Indeed the tension between an integration of existing theories and a presentation of a personal view is one of the inevitable frustrations of any attempt at a synthesis. Similarly, it was necessary to extract the relevant points from each theory without presenting the theory as a whole or following all of its implications. It is hoped that the reader will be encouraged to continue to explore this field, and by so doing to fill in some of these lacunae.

2
STORY: EVENTS¹

THE QUESTION OF THE STORY’S AUTONOMY

Story was defined above as the narrated events and participants in abstraction from the text. As such, it is a part of a larger construct, referred to by some as the ‘reconstructed’ (or ‘represented’) world (or ‘level’) (e.g. Hrushovski 1976a, p. 7), i.e. the fictional ‘reality’ in which the characters of the story are supposed to be living and in which its events are supposed to take place. In fact, story is one axis within the larger construct: the axis of temporal organization. Since this is the axis whose predominance turns a world-representing text into a narrative text, I shall confine my discussion to it, leaving out the broader construct which is not specifically narrative.

Being an abstraction, a construct, the story is not directly available to the reader. Indeed, since the text is the only observable and object-like aspect of verbal narrative, it would seem to make sense to take it as the anchoring-point for any discussion of the other aspects—as I do in chapters 4, 5 and 6. What I believe is called for here is a defence of the decision to treat story in isolation in this and the next chapter.

Far from seeing story as raw, undifferentiated material, this study stresses its structured character, its being made of separable components, and hence having the potential of forming networks of internal relations. Such a view justifies attempts to disengage a form from the substance of the narrated content, a specific narrative form.² The theoretical possibility of abstracting story-form probably corresponds to the intuitive skill of users in processing stories: being able to re-tell them, to recognize variants of the same story, to identify the same story in another medium, and so on. It is this intuition that has led almost every narratologist following in Vladimir Propp’s footsteps to formulate a claim that an immanent story structure, sometimes called ‘narrativity’, may be isolated at least for the sake of description. What Propp studied in his Morphology of the Russian FoIk-tale, writes Bremond, was an ‘autonomous layer of meaning’. He goes on:

The subject of a tale may serve as an argument for a ballet, that of a novel may be carried over to the stage or to the screen, a movie may be told to those who have not seen it. It is words one reads, it is images one sees, it is gestures one deciphers, but through them it is a story one follows; and it may be the same story.

(Bremond 1964, p. 4. Ron’s translation)

A stronger stance is taken by Greimas, according to whom an acknowledgement of Bremond’s point

amounted to recognizing and accepting the necessity of a fundamental distinction between two levels of representation and analysis: an apparent level of narration, at which the manifestations of narration are subject to the specific exigencies of the linguistic substances through which they are expressed, and an immanent level, constituting a sort of common structural trunk, at which narrativity is situated and organized prior to its manifestations. A common semiotic level is thus distinct from the linguistic level and is logically prior to it, whatever the language chosen for manifestation.

(Greimas 1977, p. 23. Orig. publ. in French 1969)³

What emerges from these statements (and one could add Prince 1973, p. 13) is that story is an abstraction from: (1) the specific style of the text in question (e.g. Henry James’s late style, with its proliferation of subordinate clauses, or Faulkner’s imitation of Southern dialect and rhythm, (2) the language in which the text is written (English, French, Hebrew) and (3) the medium or sign-system (words, cinematic shots, gestures). Starting with story, rather than with the text from which it is abstracted, the former may be grasped as transferable from medium to medium, from language to language, and within the same language.

This view can be opposed by the equally intuitive counterconviction of many trained literary readers that literary works, not excluding their story aspect, ‘lose something’ in paraphrase or ‘translation’ (lose more than something, say, in their Hollywood version). In other words, stories—the claim is—are in some subtle ways style-, language- , and medium-dependent. This is forcefully stated by Todorov in an early work:

Meaning does not exist before being articulated and perceived…; there do not exist two utterances of identical meaning if their articulation has followed a different course.

(1967, p. 20. Ron’s translation)

If accepted, such a view suggests some limits on the notion of translatability in general.⁴ Indeed, readers with a fanatic attitude about the ‘heresy of paraphrase’ (an expression coined by Cleanth Brooks 1947) will have little use for the study of story as such.

Still, as with so-called natural language, users cannot produce or decipher stories without some (implicit) competence in respect of narrative structure, i.e. in something which survives paraphrase or ‘translation’. This competence is acquired by extensive practice in reading and telling stories. We are faced here with the same epistemological dialectic which binds together any opposition of the virtual and the actual (such as ‘langue’ v. ‘parole’ in Saussure, ‘competence’ v. ‘performance’ in Chomsky. See Culler 1975, pp. 8–10; Hawkes 1977, pp. 21–2). In this predicament, the preliminary assumption that story-structure or narrativity is isolatable must be made at least as a working hypothesis. This, however, does not amount to granting any undisputed priority, whether logical or ontological, to story over text (if forced to decide, I would rather opt for the latter).

THE NOTION OF NARRATIVE GRAMMAR

Although story is transverbal, it is often claimed to be homologous (i.e. parallel in structure) to natural language and hence amenable to the type of analysis practised in linguistics. Such analysis frequently takes the form of the...