2. narratology. genette

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Genette’s three-layered model: Story (French. Histoire) for the signified or narrative content; Narrative (French. Récit) for the signifier/ statement/ discourse/ narrative text itself; Narrating (French. Narration) for the producing narrative action and, by extension, the whole of the real or fictional situation in which that action takes place. The analysis of narrative discourse presupposes the study of the relationships between: narrative and story; narrative and narrating; story and narrating (to the extent to which this relationship is inscribed in the narrative discourse).

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Page 1: 2. Narratology. Genette

Genette’s three-layered model:◦ Story (French. Histoire) for the signified or narrative

content; ◦ Narrative (French. Récit) for the signifier/ statement/

discourse/ narrative text itself; ◦ Narrating (French. Narration) for the producing

narrative action and, by extension, the whole of the real or fictional situation in which that action takes place.

↓The analysis of narrative discourse presupposes

the study of the relationships between: narrative and story;

narrative and narrating; story and narrating (to the extent to which this relationship is inscribed in the narrative discourse).

Page 2: 2. Narratology. Genette

Tense – temporal relations between narrative and story; Mood – modalities (forms and degrees) of narrative

representation; Voice – the way in which the narrating itself (i.e., the

narrative situation or its instance and its two protagonists, the narrator and the audience, real or implied) is implicated in the narrative.

StoryNarrative

Narrating

Tense and Mood Voice

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“connections between the temporal order of succession of the events in the story and the pseudo-temporal order of their arrangement in the narrative” → deviations from chronology = ANACHRONIES:◦prolepsis = “any narrative manoeuvre that

consists of narrating or evoking in advance an event that will take place later” (1980: 40);

◦analepsis = “any evocation after the fact of an event that took place earlier than the point in the story where we are at any given moment” (1980: 40).

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external analepsis (“analepsis whose extent remains external to the extent of the first narrative”) (1980: 49);

internal analepsis; mixed analepsis (“whose reach goes back to a

point earlier and whose extent arrives at a point later than the beginning of the first narrative”) (1980: 49).

heterodiegetic analepsis (“analepsis dealing with a story line (and thus with a diegetic content) different from the content (or contents) of the first narrative” (1980: 50);

homodiegetic analepsis that deals with the same line of action as the first narrative.

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Speed: “the relationship between a temporal dimension and a spatial dimension (…): the speed of a narrative will be defined by the relationship between a duration (that of the story, measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years) and a length (that of the text, measured in lines and in pages).” (1980: 87-8)

variations in tempo/ narrative speed:◦ (descriptive) pause (NT = n, ST = 0, thus NT ∞ > ST, i.e.

NT is infinitely greater than ST);◦ scene, “most often in dialogue, which (…) realizes

conventionally the equality of time between narrative and story” (1980: 94) (NT = ST);

◦ summary, “a form with a variable tempo (whereas the tempo of the other three is fixed, at least in principle) which with great flexibility of pace covers the entire range included between scene and ellipsis)” (1980: 94) (NT < ST);

◦ ellipsis ( NT = 0, ST = n, thus NT < ∞ ST, i.e. NT is infinitely less than ST).

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Singulative narrative or, otherwise, narrating once what happened once. (e.g. Yesterday I went to bed early);

Repeating narrative or narrating n times what happened once (e.g. Yesterday I went to bed early, yesterday I went to bed early, yesterday I went to bed early, etc.) Although apparently rather hypothetical and irrelevant to literature, this kind of repetition has been successfully exploited at different stages in the evolution of the novel, here including the eighteenth-century epistolary novel, or novels in which stress is laid on the repetition doubled by stylistic or viewpoint variations or that display repeating anachronies such as the advance notices and the recalls. (1980: 115)

Iterative narrative or narrating once what happened n times. This type of narrative can be easily identified because of its association with grammatical markers of frequency.

Page 7: 2. Narratology. Genette

mimesis/ diegesis (Plato) ↔ showing/telling (Henry James) ↔ narrative of events/ narrative of words → Information + informer = C - “which implies that the quantity of information and the presence of the informer are in inverse ratio” (1980: 166):◦MIMESIS = A MAXIMUM OF INFORMATION

AND A MINIMUM OF THE INFORMER ↔ SCENE;

◦DIEGESIS = A MAXIMUM OF THE INFORMER AND A MINIMUM OF INFORMATION ↔ SUMMARY.

Page 8: 2. Narratology. Genette

“narrative of words”:◦ Narratized or narrated speech, obviously the most ‘distant’

and, generally, the most reduced. Genette identifies as a peculiar species of narratized discourse the narrative of an inner debate, or, as he puts it, the analysis or the narrative of thoughts or narratized inner speech. E.g. uttered speech: “I informed my mother of my decision to marry Albertine.”; inner speech: “I decided to marry Albertine.” (1980: 171)

◦ Transposed speech, in indirect style: “Although a little more mimetic than narrated speech, […] this form never gives the reader any guarantee – or above all any feeling – of literal fidelity to the words ‘really’ uttered: the narrator’s presence is still too perceptible in the very syntax of the sentence for the speech to impose itself with the documentary autonomy of a quotation.” (1980: 171) E.g. uttered speech: “I told my mother that I absolutely had to marry Albertine.”; inner speech: “I thought that I absolutely had to marry Albertine.” Words are not simply reported in subordinate clauses, but condensed, integrated into the narrator’s own speech.

◦ Reported speech, the most ‘mimetic’ form (that Plato rejected) in which the narrator pretends literally to give the floor to the characters. E.g. “I said to my mother/ I thought: It is absolutely necessary to marry Albertine.”

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Genette chooses to challenge most of the theories on the “point of view”, on the ground of their promoting a “regrettable confusion” between two different questions which he proposes to answer separately in the discussion of the categories of mood and voice. These questions are: ◦ (1) Who is the character whose point of view

orients the narrative perspective? ◦ (2) Who is the narrator? (1980: 186)

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Genette introduces his own term, i.e. focalization and re-discusses the classification of narratives according to the perspective they are representative for as follows:◦ Nonfocalized narrative or narrative with zero

focalization. This type of focalisation was questioned and eventually rejected in later theories of the narrative discourse.

◦ Narrative with internal focalization: Fixed (e.g. The Ambassadors, where everything passes

through Strether, or What Maisie Knew, where we almost never leave the point of view of the little girl);

Variable (e.g. Madame Bovary, where the focal character is first Charles, then Emma, then again Charles);

Multiple (e.g. epistolary novels).◦ Narrative with external focalization (e.g. Hemingway’s

novellas “The Killers” or “Hills Like White Elephants;” Walter Scott, Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas, Balzac, etc.)

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“The temporal determinations of the narrating instance are manifestly more important than its spatial determinations.” (1980: 215) The chief temporal determination of the narrating instance is its position relative to the story. ◦ subsequent – the classical position of the past tense narrative, by

far the most frequent;◦ prior – predictive narrative, generally in the future tense, but not

prohibited from being conjugated in the present, which has been less used than the other type of narrating, even in the novels of anticipation. (1980: 219-20)

◦ simultaneous – narrative in the present contemporaneous with the action, which, in principle, should eliminate any sort of interference or temporal game. However, the blending of the instances can function in two opposite directions, according to whether the emphasis is put on the story or on the narrative discourse.

◦ interpolated – between the moments of the action. It is the most complex type as it involves narrating with several instances and the very close entanglement of the story and the narrating. One of the best cases in point is the epistolary novel with several correspondents in which the letter is at the same time a medium of the narrative and an element of the plot. Furthermore, “the extreme closeness of story to narrating produces […] a very subtle effect of friction […] between the slight temporal displacement of the narrative of events (‘Here is what happened to me today’) and the complete simultaneousness in the report of thoughts and feelings (‘Here is what I think about it this evening’).” (1980: 217-8)

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“Any event a narrative recounts is at a diegetic level immediately higher than the level at which the narrating act producing this narrative is placed.” (1980: 228) – Transitions from one level to another: metalepses (e.g. Tristram Shandy).

The first-degree narrator

The characters of the first-degree narrative+

The narrator of the second-degree narrative

The characters of the second-degree narrative

+The narrator of the third-degree narrative

etc.

METADIEGETIC INTRADIEGETIC METADIEGETIC INTRADIEGETIC EXTRADIEGETICEXTRADIEGETIC

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Genette does not entirely agree with the use of the “first-person” and “third-person” labels, hence he uses them in between inverted commas. The presence of the narrator is invariantly in “the first person.” Genette explains that the presence of first-person verbs in a narrative text can refer to two different situations that the narrative analysis must distinguish (although grammar renders them identical): ◦ the narrator’s designation of himself as such (I) and ◦ the identity of person between the narrator and one of

the characters in the story. The term “first-person narrative” refers only to

the second situation, but the narrator can interfere as such, in the first person, virtually in any narrative.

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Genette distinguishes between two types of narrative:◦ with the narrator absent from the story

(s)he tells – heterodiegetic;◦ with the narrator present as a character in

the story (s)he tells – homodiegetic: the narrator is the hero of his narrative

(autodiegetic). the narrator plays only a secondary role, which

turns out to be a role of observer and witness.