Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

Review: A New Synthesis of NarratologyAuthor(s): Harold F. MosherSource: Poetics Today, Vol. 1, No. 3, Special Issue: Narratology I: Poetics of Fiction (Spring,1980), pp. 171-186Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1772418 .Accessed: 21/08/2011 22:47

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A NEW SYNTHESIS OF NARRATOLOGY

HAROLD F. MOSHER English, N. Illinois

SEYMOUR CHATMAN, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978.

Within roughly the last dozen years a number of French theorists - notably, Roland Barthes, Gerard Genette, Tzvetan Todorov, and Claude Bremond - have focused on narrative in such new ways that the term "narratology" has been coined to describe their activity. Much of Barthes' work has been translated into English as have some titles by the others, including one of Genette's most important, Figures III. Many of these narratologists' ideas are synthesized in this important new book by Seymour Chatman. Story and Discourse. What makes this study especially appealing is that it is clearly written (the jargon is not overwhelming and is adequately explained), that it illustrates its theory with specific examples from literatures of many countries, and that it offers deductively a comprehensive theory of narrative. For these reasons Story and Discourse will prove useful both as an introduction to the structuralist study of narrative as well as an original development of that quickly evolving methodology.

The two terms in Chatman's title refer to the form of expression (discourse, or the how of narrative) and the form of content (story, or the what of narrative). This familiar dichotomy, derived from Aristotle, was emphasized by the Russian Formalists, has been continued by the French structuralists, and is used by Chatman, who, however, unlike Genette includes considerations of time - order, frequency, and duration - under story rather than in the domain of discourse. That these aspects of time could more appropriately be classified as matters of discourse (how the narrative is presented to the reader) instead of matters of story becomes clearer if one adds to this two-part scheme the dimension called by the Russian Formalists "plot" [sjuzhet], which Chatman defines as "story-as-discoursed" (p. 43); the term "story," or "fable" [fabula], may then be reserved for the action as it was supposed to have "really" happened in its order and speed - that is, chronologically as in life. "Plot" designates, then, the artistic ordering and pacing of the narrative we read and would seem to be a means (discourse), involving as much choice by the narrator as in his decisions about mode ("showing" and "telling," in Anglo-American terminology) and point of view ("perspective" and "voice"), two of Chatman's major divisions of discourse. In fact, Chatman seems to recognize that time elements are part of discourse when he writes: "Structuralist narrative theory argues that the arrangement is precisely the operation performed by discourse" (p. 43). After the analysis of story,

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HAROLD F. MOSHER

Chatman's organization of the treatment of discourse in the two final chapters develops from the two poles of mode - unmediated ("nonnarrated") stories and mediated ("narrated") stories, the last of which are transmitted by "covert" and "overt" narrators. Correspondingly, there are two earlier chapters on story devoted respectively to "events" and "existents."

The introductory chapter, accompanied by a chart at the end of the book, elaborates Chatman's design, first sketched in his NLH article of 1975, and defines many of the

important terms. Statements in narrative are divided into two functional types -

"process" statements of doing and "stasis" statements of being. Process statements may either "enact" (unmediated discourse) or "recount" (mediated discourse) "events," which are classed as "actions," where an agent performs an event, or "happenings," where an event acts upon an existent. Events may consist of physical acts, speeches, thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. Adapting some of Roland Barthes' terminology, as outlined in his Communications article of 1966, Chatman divides events into "kernels," causal events, and "satellites," inessential events. Stasis statements either "expose" (unmediated discourse) or "present" (mediated discourse) "existents," which are classed as characters or settings, and a stasis statement might "identify" (name) or "qualify" (describe) character traits. Furthermore, a process statement might "index" (imply) an existent as a stasis statement might "project" an event (pp. 32-33). Later in Chapter 4 Chatman points out that the reader must recognize the functions of narrative statements: what seems to be narrating (John Austin's locutionary aspect) might actually be describing (the illocutionary aspect). Probably, though, the reader must be sensitive to both primary and secondary functions of statements which, as wholes, can thus create

complex simultaneous effects. Thus, in a passage from The Secret Agent, which Chatman cites later for its irony, a statement about Verloc's way of selling pornography is both a narration (process statement) of an event (locutionary aspect) but more importantly is a characterization (stasis statement) of the trait (illocutionary aspect) of underhanded

secrecy. In his chapter on events, the first of the two on aspects of story, Chatman draws a

parallel between story-time and discourse-time, on one hand, and, on the other, any contemporary moment to the character in the story, "character-NOW," and any contemporary moment to the narrator in the discouse, "narrator-NOW" (p. 81). The discourse-time is usually in the present, and the story-time in the past, but as Barthes has

pointed out in Writing Degree Zero, despite the use of the preterite, the illusion for the reader of most narrative is that the action occurs in his present. Chatman may have this in mind when he maintains that only in overt narration is the distinction between

story-NOW and discourse-NOW clearly apparent, whereas it is not evident in unmediated or covertly narrated stories, the narrator being relatively absent. What Chatman does not consider here is the admittedly rare case (but his system as a deductive one seeks to be complete) of the story whose narrative-NOW has its own chronology which dramatically affects the narrator's understanding of his story and himself, as in the cases of The Good Soldier or Lord Jim, or the narrators' relations among themselves, as in The Canterbury Tales. Often the time separating the first-person narrator from his

experiencing self is a cause of the former's superior knowledge. This relation, called "dissonance" by Dorrit Cohn, is lucidly demonstrated in her Transparent Minds

published in the same year as Story and Discourse. Chatman's treatment of time, like Genette's, is divided into remarks on order,

duration, and frequency; unlike Genette's it omits such considerations as the "partial" and "complete anachrony" in order (time-shift) and those qualities of "iterative" (the

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single narration for a repeated event) frequency that Genette calls "determination" (the beginning and end of the series' amplitude or duration), "specification" (the number of repetitions of the occurrence in the story), and "extension" (the duration of each unit of the series). Sometimes these omissions can result in confusions, as when Chatman defines an "internal anachrony" (including both the analepsis or flashback and the prolepsis or flashforward) as one that "begins after NOW" (p. 65). Of course an analepsis cannot by definition begin after the story-NOW, though, if it is a complete analepsis, it could end at the moment of NOW; as a partial analepsis, it must end some time before the moment of NOW, depending on its "distance' [Genette's porteel from the primary narrative (Genette, 1972:101). However, Genette does not define internal or external anachronies in regard to story-NOW but rather in regard to the beginning and ending of the primary story. The "duration" [atmplitudel of the external anachrony is outside the limits of the main story while the amplitude of the internal anachrony is within those limits. The beginning of the "mixed analepsis" is outside the main story's amplitude while its ending is within; the beginning of the "mixed prolepsis" is within the main plot's amplitude while its ending is without (Genette, 1972: 90-91, 106-109).

One of the problems here is the identification of the main story and, as Genette recognizes, of where the main story-strand begins and ends, particularly in extremely unchronological plots like Proust's. Meir Sternberg (1974: 54-57) has provided one solution by calling the first dynamic action in the story that is presented by scenic pace and singulative frequency in the plot the beginning of the "story proper." What precedes this first scene in the story (though it may not precede the first scene in the plot) Sternberg calls "exposition." Genette and Chatman would call this early material an analepsis; Chatman elsewhere reserves the term "exposition" for an explaining function of analepsis (see Chatman, 1974: 358). Indeed, it would seem that internal analepses, as well as external ones, could provide exposition, whether they are "completive" (filling in "ellipses" or omissions in the plot) or "repetitive." These terms are most useful in the analysis of "homodiegetic anachronies" (involving the same story-strand), and many of them can also be applied to "heterodiegetic anachronies" (involving a different story-strand) but not to Genette's "achrony," a plot which establishes no chronological progression.

Genette distinguishes two special kinds of prolepses, the explicit, brief repetitive prolepsis fannoncel and the implicit, brief prolepsis (amorcel, whose significance is not recognized until the reader arrives at its allusion (Genette, 1972: 111-112). This latter we might interpret as a "clue"; the former may be the equivalent of Chatman's term "foreshadowing" except that in differentiating it from the prolepsis Chatman defines foreshadowing as an anticipation drawn from satellites or existents, not kernels. Genette's examples of annonce contain kernels, and Chatman would probably, therefore, call them prolepses, and reserve Genette's amorce for foreshadowing. Just as Chatman considers exposition to be a function of analepsis so he would no doubt consider foreshadowing as a function of prolepsis. Foreshadowing, in turn, can generate suspense (Chatman, 1978: 60), and Chatman makes an interesting distinction, drawing on examples from Great Expectations, between a degree of suspense in the story for the character Pip and the narrator or limited reader (resolved, for instance, when the convict accepts the stolen pies) and further suspense in the discourse for the implied reader, not shared by Pip who is consequently surprised, as the reader is not, when Pip's theft of the pies is discovered. By the same token, the "mystery," which depends on an analeptic partial knowledge, about the identity of Pip's real benefactor exists in the discourse for the implied reader but not in the story for the narrator and the character Pip, who is convinced that Miss Havisham supplies his fortune (pp. 59-62).

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In regard to duration ("pace" in Anglo-American terminology), Chatman accepts the four traditional speeds of Genette - ellipsis, summary, scene, and pause, listed in order of decreasing speed which result from the relationship between the extent of the discourse and that of the story - and Chatman adds what he calls "stretch," a pace slower than scene in which the discourse takes more time to read than the time represented in the story (pp. 72-73). Although Genette only mentions this possibility, Chatman has established it as both a theoretical and actual category, useful for such novels as Ulysses. Of course, as Percy Lubbock has pointed out, paces in most novels vary, and Chatman demonstrates this alternating rhythm with an interesting example from Pride and Pre- judice on a much smaller scale than most of Lubbock's examples. Chatman correctly ob- serves that the scenic pace does not alone guarantee scenic presentation, which may also

require unity of place as well as time and, one might add, of character. In other words, though at times pace might be faster than the one we expect in scene (discourse time

Jquals story time), the action will seem to be presented in a scenic pace if the setting remains constant and fairly circumscribed and if roughly the same characters are present. It is useful also to distinguish between scene and episode, macro-sequence or macro-narreme in structuralist terminology, which is a group of events containing one or more kernels and is unified by character and an Action (Barthes' word) or motif that can be named. Thus in some of the action of Chatman's example, the sequential material

involving Darcy and Elizabeth, though some of it is summarized, would comprise one

episode. In this example summary serves the minor function of binding together separated scenes. The reverse may be true, as Chatman shows in another example from Pride and Prejudice, where the scene plays the secondary role of illustrating the summarized action (pp. 75-76). Such alternation of paces or modes of presentation is an effective and economical way of advancing the story quickly while at the same time maintaining intensity.

One way that narrative can unobtrusively assimilate anachronies into the main plot is to

present their action in the form of a character's "retrospection" or "anticipation" (Genette's terms; 1972: 81-82). Chatman points out that often the action of these anachronies is fast-paced but that the act of remembering or anticipating is slow-paced or scenic: that is, the thoughts take as long to think as to read (1978: 76). Thus particularly if the character's thoughts occur in the context of a scene, his extensive, fast-paced narrative, thought at a slower pace, may not seem to differ so greatly from the framing situation.

In addition to these matters of pace, Chatman also considers such problems of pure duration as occur in narrative with multiple story-strands. When more than one

story-strand is being narrated by the discourse, two possible durative relations may exist

among them: while one strand progresses in the discourse, the others may be stopped for that time and then return to their progressions whenever the discourse narrates them; or the ignored story-strands may continue to progress outside the discourse and be continued from the point that the discourse returns to them. This latter is called "unchronicled growth" by Carl Grabo, as Chatman reminds us.

As for duration so for frequency Chatman basically accepts Genette's classification of

the four relations between discourse and story - singulative (happening once in the story, narrated once in the discourse); multiple singulative (happening n times in the story, narrated n times in the discourse); repetitive (happening once in the story, narrated n times in the discourse); iterative (happening n times in the story, narrated once in the

discourse). In regard to this last frequency Chatman contributes an important observation

concerning the manifestation of iterative narration and related forms. Some verbs, he

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says, are innately "punctual," denoting actions that occur once in a brief span of time. Others are durative, indicating a continuous action composed of repeated but

uninterrupted units ("he was jumping") or a continuous action ("he was thinking") (p. 68). Such durative narrations should probably be distinguished from iterative ones which

depict repeated but interrupted actions ("on Sundays he would visit his aunt"), and both durative and iterative narration should be distinguished from descriptions of states which involve no movement in the story. Often narratives will play one frequency off against another for dramatic effect. Thus in Hemingway's "Indian Camp," the screams of the squaw in labor are juxtaposed with the silently smoking braves by the iterative or perhaps, rather, durative narration and these acts are in turn juxtaposed with the Indian father's suicide, narrated singulatively.

Turning to the other half of story, existents, Chatman takes up character and setting. He rejects the structuralist closed concept of character that restricts it to filling roles and acting out functions, as in the systems of Propp and his followers, including Bremond, Todorov, and Greimas. Chatman makes a valuable distinction between character traits and moods. Basing his analysis on J. P. Guilford (1959) and Gordon W. Allport and Henry S. Odbert (1936), Chatman defines a trait as an enduring characteristic that distinguishes one individual from another, and though traits are different from habits, traits and habits are interconnected despite the possibility of their sometimes being contradictory, particularly in modern fiction.

A trait, then, is a "narrative adjective out of the vernacular labeling a personal quality of a character, as it persists over part or whole of the story (its 'domain')" (p. 125). In contrast to events which have a set position and limited domain in the story, traits are said to be both "parametric" (constant over their domains) and "paradigmatic" (available to be evoked at any time) (pp. 129-130). Although traits may not be evoked until late in a narrative and although they may disappear to be replaced by other traits, they must be differentiated from moods, feelings, thoughts, temporary motives, and attitudes which are more fleeting. Furthermore, true characters, even though they may be "flat" in Forster's term, must be distinguished from people who function rather as setting. It is more likely, for example, that a human who is named, present, and important to the action will be a character than a human who is unnamed, unimportant, and who never reappears in the story (p. 141).

Some of Chatman's treatment of character and setting impinges on what is more relevant to point of view, discussed later. At present it will suffice to call attention to his distinction between the total "story-space" of a narrative and that part that is isolated at any one point for the reader, the "discours.-space." A character's angle and distance in relation to objects frame his "perceived story-space," viewed from his "occupied story-space" (pp. 102-103). Settings provide various functions: to provide a background for characters, to create atmospheres that may act as support to characters' moods or else act in ironic contrast to moods, to serve as symbols, or to act as mental pictures (pp. 141-143). Many of these ideas on the function of setting come from Robert Liddell (1947), and Chatman admits that setting has been relatively neglected by structuralists.

The second part of Story and Discourse, perhaps the more original and more difficult at once, is devoted to a consideration of discourse, divided into a chapter on unmediated or "nonnarrated" stories (perhaps better termed "minimally narrated") - that is, Plato's "mimesis" - and a chapter on narrated or mediated stories - Plato's "diegesis" - by either "covert" or "overt" narrators, depending on how evident they are (p. 146).

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One big difference between Chatman's system of mediation and most previous ones is that for him a narrator, whether inside or outside the narration, is still a mediator. Thus the narrator of Tom Jones is put into the same category as Marlow, for instance. It is true that Chatman refers to internal and external narrators (apparently equivalent to Booth's dramatized and undramatized narrators), but sometimes these distinctions are not

applied where they would be useful, as we shall see. Chatman first identifies the purest type of nonnarrated (objective) representation as the text that imitates written materials (the epistolary, diary, memoir novels) followed by the text that pretends to be an oral narration or a transcript of dialogue (p. 167). Epistolary and diary novels are alike in that

they have narratees, unlike an interior monologue (another nonnarrated type), but these narratees are different: letters are addressed to a correspondent while a diary (and probably the autobiographical novel) is addressed to oneself. Epistolary, diary, and

autobiographical novels are different from the interior monologue novel also because in the latter no gap exists, as it does in the former, between story-time and discourse-time, but that gap is much smaller in the epistolary and diary novel than it is in the

autobiographical novel (entirely retrospective) and separates the autobiographical novel from the other two. Furthermore, the diary and epistolary novel differ from other forms because they are often not narrations: their writers are concerned with their own here-and-now rather than with the there-and-then of others or of themselves at another time and place. Thus the strange conclusion that narratees can be present without narrators, who are instead writers of letters, diaries, or autobiographies, or speakers of

soliloquies, dramatic monologues, or interior monologues, depends on the distinction between narration and diegesis. Actually, though, usually much more of the content of

epistolary and diary novels consists of true narration than Chatman seems to admit, and so these forms are probably more narrated than not, though by an internal or dramatized narrator rather than an external or undramatized narrator (see Wayne Booth, 1961: 151-153). By preserving such distinctions, one can accept Chatman's classification of the so-called "first-person" narrations as unmediated along with the "third-person" narrations like interior monologue novels, but also recognize a difference between them beyond Chatman's degree of mediation. As Chatman's example from Ulysses shows (pp. 183-184), an external ("extradiegetic," in Genette's terminology) narrator can be more evident in indirect (third-person) interior monologue novels (Dorrit Cohn's "narrated monologue"), although not in the direct (first-person) types or in stream of consciousness, than in epistolary novels, which are less dependent on the extradiegetic "heterodiegetic"

(writing or talking about someone else) editor or presence. The complexity of this

problem leads Chatman to make self-contradictory or confusing statements, as when he labels as "external narrators" those he had previously called "agents," or redacteurs, or "editors" of epistolary or memoir novels like Laclos' Les Liaisons dangereuses and Sartre's La Nausee (pp. 169-170). Certainly these presences are not narrators in Chatman's sense of the term. Similarly he implies that only "genuine narrators" know the outcome of the action unlike the writers of epistolary or diary novels (pp. 170-171 ). Are we then to consider the Marlow of Lord Jim not a genuine narrator during his oral relation of Jim's story? Or would Chatman consider Marlow a "secondary narrator," framed by the external narrator?

Moving slightly away from the pole of "pure" stories, Chatman next takes up what he calls "pure speech records" - dialogue, dramatic monologue, and soliloquy. These are somewhat less unmediated than the written records because they assume that another

presence other than the speaker, a sort of anonymous stenographer, records the words. Since Chatman accepts the conventional definitions of the dramatic monologue and

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soliloquy, whose main purposes respectively are to characterize the speaker or comment on the speaker's situation, he labels these speakers' activities as basically nonnarrative. In other words, just as with the epistolary novel, the diegetic quality of the speech, dealing with the here-and-now of the speaker, provides the distinguishing criterion. Chatman does seem to recognize the possibility that some, at least, of the speaker's activities could be narrative, which in that case becomes "secondary narrative" (p. 174), and, I would assume, the speaker then becomes an internal or dramatized narrator, intradiegetic, in Genette's terminology. These distinctions allow one to place at a narrative level in Genette's system a character who, though speaking, is often not a narrator. Th.e application of Genette's narrative levels makes us more easily aware of the intradiegetic (internal) position and the slightly less unmediated stance of the speaker of the soliloquy, whose speech, according to Chatman, must be tagged ("he said") by a presence outside the narrative, an external or extradiegetic narrator.

Such a tag, of course, distinguishes records of speech from records of thought, for which mediation increases slightly, demanding more than just a stenographer. Nevertheless, three forms of recording thought -direct tagged thought, direct interior monologue, and stream of consciousness - are relatively unmediated. The term generally used in Anglo-American criticism for the narrator's ability to reveal the workings of a character's mind is omniscience, but critics like Norman Friedman often use it to qualify an omnipresent or omnitemporal narrator as well. Chatman makes distinctions among these terms, as well as the one between a narrator who knows all and one who tells all, the latter being a virtually impossible narrative act (p. 212). This latter distinction, which seems to relate to what Genette calls "paralipsis," is an important and complex one which we shall take up later. Another distinction, that between classical ominiscience and what Chatman calls "shifting limited" access to characters' minds, is covered in the section on covert narration. Omniscience allows the narrator to shift from one mind to another in order to carry out some teleological purpose, but shifting-limited access follows no pattern or purpose in moving from one character to another as in Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Although in practice it might be difficult to distinguish between these two types of omniscience because "teleological purpose" might be hard to disprove in any fiction, different types of point of view are apparent in Chatman's examples from Mrs. Dalloway and from Vanity Fair. However, Chatman's term "shifting limited" does suggest Friedman's "multiple selective omniscience" (probably equivalent to Genette's "multiple focalization"; 1972: 207), but Chatman's system does not seem to provide for this variation where access to characters' minds follows a set pattern governed by chapter or part divisions in the narrative, as in Henry James's The Golden Bowl or The Wings of the Dove or in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. Nor does Chatman seem to recognize as a distinct mode what Friedman calls "selective omniscience" which limits access to one mind as in James's The Ambassadors. Such terms seem useful in identifying these modes midway between the patternless but purposive (to use Chatman's criteria) type of point of view in Madame Bovary or Vanity Fair and the patternless and purposeless type in Mrs. Dalloway, if, indeed, purpose or lack of it can be detected, and if, indeed, the point of view in this novel is patternless.

In classifying ways of representing thought, Chatman includes in his definition of thought not only verbalized concepts but also perceptions conveyed "by conventional verbal transformation" (p. 188). Direct tagged thought is expressed as in direct tagged speech with the introductory clause and quotation marks. When the tag and quotation marks are dropped, the result is "direct free thought" which is called "direct interior monologue" when found in extended form (p. 182). Requirements are that the character

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speaks in the first person, that discourse-time and story-time are synonymous and are expressed by the present tense, that the language is the character's, that allusions to the speaker's knowledge are left unexplained, and that no audience is assumed. Stream of consciousness adds to these qualities the feature of random progress based on free association of the speaker's mind (p. 189). Thus Chatman does not make his distinction between interior monologue and stream of consciousness on the basis of cognitions and

perceptions, as does Lawrence Bowling, or on the basis of technique and genre, as do Melvin Friedman and, despite some disclaimers, Dorrit Cohn, whose "autonomous monologue" is throughout an a-chronological self-communion in the first person and narrative-NOW (Cohn, 1978: 219).

A distinguishing element between these unmediated stories and mediated ones is that in the latter the narrator's voice becomes more apparent. Basically in the unmediated stories, as we have seen, the reader must detect the illocutionary meaning of a statement and supply a metatextual word to describe that meaning. Recuperation, in Jonathan Culler's terminology, might have to be practiced by the reader in regard to events, existents, or theme. Though the vision (perceptual point of view), thoughts (conceptual point of view), or concerns (interest point of view) might be the character's, the voice

might be the narrator's. Chatman is indebted to Boris Uspensky for these distinctions (see Uspensky, 1974). In fact, Chatman asserts that voice is always in the discourse, outside the story (pp. 153-154), which seems to be a gratuitously perverse statement when one considers that characters, as well as extradiegetic narrators, have voices. Again, it seems to me helpful to make a distinction between the mediation of a narrator outside the narrative (extradiegetic) and the "mediation" of a narrator who is a character

(intradiegetic). Certainly the "truth" for a fiction is more likely to come from the former than the latter, although exceptions like Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" do exist, and, as Wayne Booth, among others, has emphasized, the reliability of speakers, narrators, and characters is an important element for the reader to determine if he is to read the storv correctly. Certainlyv Chatman's distinctions between the different types of

point of view - perceptual, ideological, interest - are useful (pp. 151-158), but the

apparent equivocations (Chatman would probably say "plurisignifications"), resulting especially from his applications of interest point of view, lead to difficulties. Evidently we are to understand interest point of view as meaning the sympathy the reader feels for a character or simply the interest he takes in a character or the interest a character takes in someone else (pp. 157-158). In The Ambassadors, a fiction which, for all its famed covert narration (relative objectivity in Anglo-American terms), does shift frequently to overt narration (nonobjectivity), Chatman correctly identifies the voice as the narrator's

speaking in the first chapter about Maria Gostrey's ability to classify her "fellow mortals." The characterization of Gostrey ends with the narrator's remark that Strether was not yet entirely aware of these traits. Thus, Chatman assigns to Strether the point of view of the

preceding characterization of Maria Gostrey (though he is not aware of her traits) on the basis that the "focus of attention remains on him" and that her "traits are significant only in their implications for him" (p. 157). Even if we accept Chatman's reasoning, we

certainly must add that the ideological and perceptual points of view are the narrator's and that they are more important here in establishing the "truth" of Maria Gostrey's character as a reliable observer. When Chatman says that unlike the narrator, the character's "thoughts are truthful, except in cases of willful self-deception," he seems to

forget the frequent possibility of a character's misjudgments, not a case of willful

self-deception, and the very frequent cases of narrators' (especially extradiegetic ones) reliability. In emphasizing Strether's interest point of view, Chatman suppresses the

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narrator's ideological point of view, which by Chatman's own system, would appear in this passage as overt narration - that is, reporting what characters do not think (pp. 225-226). One might note here that this passage from IThe Ambassadorsis a good illustration of only one of the causes for difficulties in assigning point of view. One might argue that Maria's ability to "pigeon-hole" people is something that she is and has been conscious of and therefore this trait is represented from her point of view.

When, as in Chatman's example, a character's consciousness is reported in retrospect by the narrator or when a character's unvoiced feelings are expressed (as in C(hatman's example on p. 238 from Pere Goriot of Eugene's bafflement about women) or when a character's very deep thoughts are suggested (as in Chatman's example on p. 226 from Women in Love of Gerald's feelings) or when absence of thought is indicated (as in Chatman's example on p. 238 from Pere Goriot of Eugene's being unaware), or when unknown results of feelings or hidden motives are given (as in Chatman's examples on p. 240 from Jude the Obscure and The Ambassadors), the dividing line between the narrator's point of view and the character's is indeed very fine. Sometimes, as Chatman suggests, we can settle for a "merger of narrator and character sympathies" (p. 240), but in Chatman's example, just mentioned, from The Ambassadors concerning Strether's "wholly instinctive" "secret principle" for not desiring Waymarsh's presence right away, we might simply recognize a somewhat lesser degree of overtness on the narrator's part than when he speaks of thoughts or feelings that do not occur at all to the character, rather than try to separate Strether's interest point of view from the narrator's analysis. It seems sufficient to say that the narrator has chosen certain words like "secret principle" or "wholly instinctive" to voice Strether's feelings, of which he is not conscious. Though the issue might seem to be a futile exercise, the reader's understanding and enjoyment. as in his awareness of the irony shared between narrator and Strether that lan Watt and Chatman refer to, often depend on the reader's identification of point of view.

Such difficulties arise especially in covert narration, as opposed to overt narration, the subject of Chatman's last chapter. In contrast to nonnarrated stories, where characters write, speak, and think in their own words, characters' expression in covert narration is presented by indirect discourse, indirect free style, or summarized discourse. According to Chatman, whose analysis depends on such studies as those by Dorrit Cohn, Ann Banfield, Roy Pascal, Stephen Ullmann, and Derek Bickerton, indirect free style is marked by the absence of the tag, by the tense shifted to one tense earlier than it would be in direct discourse, by the change of pronoun from first in direct discourse to third in the indirect, and by the absence of the quotation marks. The language may or not be that of the character although expressive words will usually be understood to be the character's (pp. 199-202). Indirect discourse, of course, conforms to this description of indirect free style except that indirect discourse includes the tag and possibly also the relative conjunction that. Chatman accepts the term "narrated monologue" to describe the class of indirect free style where the words are the character's and proposes "narrative report" for the class where the words are the narrator's. Still another subclass of indirect discourse and indirect free style is the expression in the narrator's words of what the character perceives, not thinks or says; Chatman calls this "indirect free perception." In practice, a narrative or even a sentence in a narrative might mix these modes and, especially when a character is as articulate as the narrator, the reader may not be able to distinguish one voice from another (pp. 203-205). Still another covert form, which, nevertheless, is slightly more mediated, of reporting thoughts and speech is the narrator's summary in a phrase without the "that" clause, a device which Chatman calls "internal analysis" (p. 209), a somewhat misleading label since little analysis of character by the narrator is

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involved. In fact, Genette calls this form "narrated" or "narrativized discourse" and distinguishes it from analysis (1972: 191). Related to this is the device by which the narrator cites the exact words of the character but leaves out much of what he said or thought, to which Chatman attaches the term "summarized dialogue" (discourse) (pp. 68-69), but which one might call "elliptical discourse." Such a report, being direct discourse, would probably be classified as unmediated narration.

The second part of Chatman's chapter on narrated stories treats overt narration, which is still more obviously mediated than covert narration because the narrator's voice is the sole means of effecting descriptions, summaries, reports of what characters do not think, characterization, and various other types of commentary. Closest to covert narration - that is, the least mediated of overt narration - is description. Within this function Chatman distinguishes two poles, one which is "purposive," description essential to the plot, and one which is "set," nonessential to the plot. Hemingway's bare back-drops are examples of the purposive, less mediated type, and Flaubert's or Balzac's extensive descriptions are examples of the set, more mediated kind (p. 168). Probably the operative phrase here is "essential to the plot," rather than essential to theme, because obviously in Flaubert's or Balzac's descriptions details are used symbolically or for atmosphere (these and other purposes of setting are set forth in Chatman's chapter on existents) and would therefore be essential to theme, although the excessive detail would not necessarily be essential for the simple action, or plot. Admittedly description, as well as narration, can be performed by characters, who as secondary narrators or describers relieve the primary narrator of that burden and consequently avoid his mediation. Since Chatman himself acknowledges this alternative (p. 220) in his analysis of Zola's use of it (p. 74), it is difficult to understand why he classifies description as less overt than narration on the basis that description can only be performed by the narrator. Narration, on the other hand, according to Chatman, may be accomplished by other means than by summary, such as by ellipsis, and therefore the reader is less indulgent - that is, he recognizes the act of summary as an unnecessary mediation - with the summarizing narrator than with the describing narrator who has no other means to achieve his ends (p. 223). One might ask how the narrator can accomplish the same ends by omitting action (ellipsis) as by summarizing it. Furthermore an apparent contradiction arises when Chatman writes in the chapter on nonnarrated stories: "The bare description [narration] of physical action is felt to be essentially unmediated" (p. 168). If by overt narration Chatman means summary as opposed to scene and if the choice is not between leaving out action (ellipsis) entirely and summarizing it but between summarizing it and narrating it in detail (essential narration), the narrator and the describer are confronted with the same options and may decide on the same aesthetic basis how overt their narrations or descriptions will be. Although it may be true, as Genette points out (1969: 57), that description can exist without narration but not vice versa, the question that Chatman discusses is not the requirement that discourse must name (describe) an object before and as a condition for narrating an action but rather the question of how much discourse-space will be devoted to a description and to a summary. In both cases the narrator and the describer may be equally overt, but perhaps for different reasons. One might argue that the describer might actually become more overt as he devotes more discourse-space to his description of story-space in the case of what Chatman calls "block descriptions" (p. 223) - that is, he provides more detail to fill in relatively circumscribed story-space - whereas the narrator becomes more overt as he devotes less discourse to his narration of a long story-time -

that is, he provides less detail to fill in more story-time. An even further step toward overtness is what Chatman calls "space summarizing" (pp. 224-225). It depicts large areas

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of setting and, Chatman claims, in what would seem to be a reversal of his former position on the overtness of temporal summary, this space summarizing is even more overt than time-summarizing.

A third kind of summary for Chatman is the description of qualities attached to events, characters, and settings. Exactly how one separates these qualities from the things they modify - that is, how one may distinguish between a setting, character, or event and the qualities that adhere to them and still talk about a setting, character, or event without those qualities - is difficult to understand. Although adjectives may be distinguished from nouns, if we separate the qualities from the setting, character, or event, how can we talk, as Chatman does, of block descriptions (and presumably of block characterizations) as whole entities when by definition they contain the qualifiers that make them extended in the discourse'? Either we have to define the events or existents as including their qualifiers and describe their narrations or descriptions as being long or short (summarized or detailed, fast or slow-paced), or we must define events and existents as being named only by a noun, as being separate from the description of their qualities, and accept that they will all be more or less equally paced. Probably what Chatman has in mind is a continuous, uninterrupted narration or description as opposed to those "dispersed by hints throughout the text" (p. 225). In other words, the covert description or narration would not be unified in the discourse but would be interrupted by other material and remain incomplete up to a point at least. The narrator who concentrates his summaries or descriptions in one paragraph or on several consecutive pages becomes more overt than the narrator who disperses the same narration or description piecemeal throughout his discourse. These would paradigmatically add up to wholes in either case, and it seems illogical to separate summaries and descriptions from the itemizing of the qualities that belong to them as a "third kind of summary." Rather, it seems to me that the third kind of mediation of this type in addition to temporal summary and spatial description is the overt characterizing of fictonal people. Chatman certainly recognizes this mode', calling it a formal introduction with qualifiers, but adds, unfortunately, that covert characterization is marked by specific naming and deixis, as if these qualities were not also present in overt characterization as well, as his examples from Emma and Jude show (pp. 221 and 225).

For Chatman overt characterization would be classified as the type of "commentary" called "interpretation." Interpretation is the most pervasive type of commentary and may he found mixed in the other types which are "judgment " "generalization," and "comments on the discourse" (p. 228). Although commentary might come from characters (nonnarrated) or from an ironic narrator (implicitly or "indirectly" narrated), it is overt (explicit or "direct") commentary (p. 225) that Chatman treats in this penultimate part of his argument. Theoretically, interpretation might explain events and setting as well as character although all Chatman's examples are concerned with character. Of course, as we have seen, any narrative statement might perform more than one function, and interpretation might be joined with judgment and generalization, as in many of Chatman's examples of interpretation (p. 238). The basis for Chatman's distinctions might be the categories of terms established by Allport and Odbert, cited earlier by Chatman: "Neutral Terms Designating Possible Pertinent Traits," "Terms Primarily Descriptive of Temporary Moods or Activities," "Weighted Terms Conveying Social or Characterial Judgements of Personal Conduct, or Designating Influence on Others," and "Miscellaneous: Designations of Physique, Capacities, and Developmental Conditions: Metaphorical and Doubtful Terms" (p. 125, note 38). Adapting these classes, we might recognize this last as simply the identifying or naming of characters, the first (neutral terms) as interpretations, and the third as judgment. The second category, terms

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interpreting temporary moods, would include words chosen to describe what Chatman also calls moods, those characteristics of limited domain, as distinguished from the

pervasive traits. Thus to Chatman's interpretation, which when revealing traits we might call "characterization," could be added another term, perhaps "analysis," which would describe the narrator's (or a character's or even an action's) activity of revealing a character's moods. Furthermore, if we add to each of Chatman's two basic distinctions of discourse - narrated and nonnarrated - his other two distinctions of commentary implicit or explicit, two double categories result: unmediated implicit and explicit interpretation (implicit: a character's actions reveal, "expose" in Chatman's terms, indirectly his traits or moods as in "Red-faced, John stamped on the floor"; explicit: a character's words name reliably, directly, his or another's traits or moods as in "Mary observed John's anger") and mediated implicit and explicit interpretation (implicit: an

extradiegetic narrator "presents" in Chatman's terms - characterizes or analyzes -

ironically, indirectly, the traits or moods of an existent as in "John reacted so calmly"; explicit: an extradiegetic narrator characterizes or analyzes directly the traits or moods of an existent as in "John reacted angrily"). Such a system, it will be noted, requires a different definition of mediation from Chatman's; the term is applied only to the

extradiegetic narrator, and while characters may narrate, interpret, and judge, their accounts are not said to be mediated but are rather assigned one of Genette's levels

intradiegetic, metadiegetic, or "below." Related to interpretation is the category of overt narration that Chatman calls

"Reports of What Characters Did Not Think or Say." to which we have referred already in passing, especially in regard to the problem of separating the character's point of view from the narrator's. It seems useful to distinguish between more overt interpretation of what characters do not think, as in those examples Chatman takes from Pere Goriot in which Eugene is completely "unaware" of something (p. 238), and those reports of what characters are not conscious of but still feel, as in Chatman's example from Women in

Love (p. 226), where the narrator simply reports a character's mood at a deep level of

consciousness, an activity requiring less overt mediation than the former. If a separate term is needed for this deep-level report, one might call it "super-omniscience." Sometimes the narrator might choose, for the sake of suspense or ambiguity for example, to suppress in his discourse a narration of what happens or of what a character thinks in the

story "- paralipsis," in Genette's terms. Ultimately, at least, such omissions can call attention to the narrator as, for instance, at the end of Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," where the narrator refuses to tell the reader whether the witch's sabbath "reallv" occurred or was a dream.

Chatman provides good examples of mediated, explicit (direct) judgments of characters from Trollope's Barchester Towers and at least one example of mediated

implicit (indirect and here ironic) judgment of Mr. Slope. who "added an 'e' to his name, for the sake of euphony. as other great men have done before him" (p. 242). Such an

example, demonstrating the pleasure resulting from the narrator's overt partiality, illustrates the value of Booth's corrective to the exclusive praise of the nonnarrated story bv the so-called Jamesian school of critics. Booth bases much of his argument on those intrusions that Chatman calls generalizations, the equivalent of Booth's "norms," Friedman's "editorials," and Barthes' "cultural code": "philosophical observations that

reach beyond the world of the fictional work into the real universe" (Chatman, 1978: 243). They abound in such novelists as Fielding. Balzac, Trollope. and Tolstoy where they may range from one sentence in length to a whole chapter. They can also be found, more subtly expressed and less extensive, in Jane Austen and Henry James.

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For "commentary on the discourse," comments on the making of the fiction, divided into comments that undercut the fiction and those that do not, Chatman relies on Robert Alter's description in Partial Magic: "'a testing of the ontological status of the fiction' " in which we watch how the novelist "'makes his novel, what is involved technically and theoretically in the making'" (Chatman, 1978: 250).

A facet of narrative receiving much attention recently is the "narratee," the narrator's receiver, who is the subject of the last section of Chatman's book. To put the narratee into the context of Chatman's argument. we should also consider his treatment of the author, implied author, narrator, (narratee), reader, and implied reader, all of whom are grouped in this order on a horizontal line to convey the narration from left to right, so to speak, from the author to the reader through, at least, the implied author and the implied reader if not always also through the narrator and narratee (pp. 233-234). The real author, as Wayne Booth has pointed out, is quite different from his second self or the implied author, who, according to Chatman, "is reconstructed by the reader from the narrative" and is the inventor of the narrative and the narrator (p. 148). Unlike the narrator, who tries to convince us of the "truth" of his narrative, the implied author silently seeks to "make the whole package, story and discourse, including the narrator's performance, interesting, acceptable, self-consistent, and artful" (p. 227). In distinguishing between this implied author, who is "without personality or even presence" (p. 158) as well as without voice, Chatman's use of Booth's descriptions of certain implied authors results in confusion because Booth sometimes seems to have a narrator in mind while speaking of an implied author's "overt, speaking role" (Booth, 1961: 71). For example, Chatman, quoting Booth, identifies three different implied authors for three of Fielding's novels on such bases as their having "'an air of sententious solemnity'" or sounding "'facetious' and 'generally insouciant'." Likewise in differentiating between the real author and the implied author, Chatman seems to have the narrator in mind when speaking of the "reactionary attitudes of the implied author of The Secret Agent or Under Western Eyes" for which we cannot "hold the real Conrad responsible" (p. 149). If, indeed, we can say that the narrators of these two novels hold reactionary attitudes (the attitudes, expressed and implied, seem rather to condemn despotic government as severely as revolutionaries), this ultra-conservative political and social philosophy is expressed by the language teacher in Under Western Eyes and by the anonymous, though almost equally dramatized, narrator of The Secret Agent. The political attitudes or, in Booth's terms, the norms of the implied author of these two novels are probably closer to the center. In other respects Booth and Chatman seem to disagree. Although Booth's examples of his "undramatized narrator" are somewhat confusing (both the narrator of "The Killers" and Horatio speaking about the ghost in Hamlet are cited as examples), Booth seems to imply that, nevertheless, "The Killers" is a mediated story (1961: 152), while Chatman uses it frequently as an example of the nonnarrated story, one that is basically unmediated. Chatman often insists that the James' central consciousness character and even Joyce's Bloom are not narrators because while in the act of thinking they are not telling narratives to a narratee, not even to themselves (pp. 154-155). Occasionally Chatman will slip as when he labels Marcher, the central consciousness of "The Beast in the Jungle," a narrator (p. 233). Booth, on the other hand, does consider these centers of consciousness as narrators (1961: 153). The disagreements here may be partly semantic, but still there seems to be a real difference of opinion when Chatman defines narrator as one who tells a story and Booth defines narrator as one who speaks.

Perhaps some reconciliation of these differing views can be made if we realize that Booth would identify the narrator with the implied author in a story like "The Killers,"

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while Chatman would eliminate for the most part the narrator. Booth's narrator becomes dramatized when he is referred to as "I" while Chatman's narrator becomes overt when he does more than just report thoughts and words, and covert when he reports them indirectly instead of directly. Booth makes a distinction between narrators as observers or agents (1961: 153-154), similar to Friedman's witness and protagonist, depending on their involvment in the action, but does not make the valuable distinction that Chatman and other structuralists do between the narrating self and the experiencing self in a homodiegetic restrospective narration like Great Expectations. Booth's undramatized narrator would seem to compare to what Chatman calls a "completely external narrator," one who unlike Pip never was in the story, and Booth's "disguised narrators" would be intradiegetic narrators who are characters in the story (1961: 152). Two problems in Chatman's argument arise here. The first is that he tends to use Genette's term "heterodiegetic" (talking about another) for Genette's term "extradiegetic" (outside the

story). "Further, the narrator's is second-order or heterodiegetic conceptualizing about the story - as opposed to the first-order conceptualizing of a character within the story" (p. 155). The second problem is that Chatman seems to consider the narrator of A Portrait

of the Artist as a Young Man (an extradiegetic narrator) as much in the story as is Marlow

(an intradiegetic narrator) in Lord Jim, or possibly even Marlow's listener (pp. 154-55). Ironic and unreliable narration are also subjects that Wayne Booth has ably dealt with.

Drawing on Booth, Chatman defines the unreliable narrator as one whose "values diverge strikingly from that of the implied author's"; the narrator's presentation conflicts with the norms of the work, and his sincerity or ability to tell the "true version" becomes suspect (p. 149). When the implied author communicates a covert set of values to the implied reader at the expense of the narrator, the implied author is ironic, but the narrator is unreliable (p. 229). On the other hand, when a communication occurs between the narrator and the narratee at the expense of a character, the narrator is ironic. The narrator of The Secret Agent is ironic because the narratee understands his superior attitude to all the characters, and the ironic narrator of the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice communicates to the narratee that every wealthy man is really not in search of a wife, contrary to what characters like Mrs. Bennett think. However, another example from The Secret Agent of the ironic narrator does not seem to follow Chatman's definition. When he claims that the narrator's irony condemning Michaelis, the court, do-gooders, and the great lady is derived from the narrator's shifting moral grounds, Chatman's claim seems rather to point to an unreliable, not ironic, narrator. It would seem more fitting to assign the shifting values to the characters -"excessive self-righteousness" to the court, "social

irresponsibility" to the do-gooders, and "great hereditary wealth" incorrectly used to the

great lady (pp. 232-233) and such acceptable values as justice, not meddling, and correctly used wealth to the narrator, all of which become part of a unified ethos. If "shifting values" is assigned to the narrator and not the characters, the example becomes one of the unreliable narrator, not the ironic one.

In regard to the narratee and his relation to the implied reader, Chatman relies on Gerald Prince's work. From Prince (1973) for example, Chatman describes the various roles of the narratee: the narratee may or may not be a character; as a character he may be a reader or a listener; he may be important or unimportant; he may be influenced or not; he may become a narrator in his turn (pp. 253-255). Another helpful qualification that Prince applies to the distances between narrator, narratee, and characters that Chatman does not consider is their types: moral, intellectual, emotional, and physical (Prince, 1973:

190). Chatman seems to emphasize the moral relation only in establishing his five possible relations: 1) the narrator and narratee are close to each other but far from the character,

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resulting in irony; 2) the narrator is far from the narratee and character who are close to each other, giving another type of irony; 3) the narrator and the character are close to each other but far from the narratee, producing unreliable narration; 4) all three are close to each other, creating a sympathetic atmosphere; 5) all three are far from each other, creating an unsympathetic atmosphere (pp. 259-260). An example of the second type might be one that Prince draws from Torn Jones where the narratee is as insensitive as a character: to both of them the delights of love are equivalent to those of eating a beefsteak (1973: 192). Another example of this irony might very well be Chatman's own description of the deliberate misleading by the narrator of the narratee into believing that Miss Havisham is Pip's real benefactor, but the distance here between the narrator and the narratee, who is as much in the dark as the character Pip, is an intellectual, not a moral distance. Chatman's failure to consider different types of distance also leads to the confusion resulting from his claim that the distance between the implied reader, "the counterpart of the implied author ... J the audience presupposed by the narrative itself," and the narratee is close in Torn Jones and far in Heart of Darkness. The reverse, at least for Tor Jones, would seem to be true if distance is defined as moral, but Chatman's statement would be acceptable if distance is defined as physical. Similarly when Prince mentions the great distance between narrator and narratee in Tom Jones, he means an intellectual one, but he could also speak of the closeness between the narrator and the implied reader, who understands the true nature of love better than the narratee and the characters. Better examples or more explanation would help in Chatman's book toclarifv the even more complex relations involving not only the narrator, narratee. and characters but also the implied author and the implied reader although his chart (p. 233), showing how messages between the implied author and reader can bypass narrator and narratee. is a clear theoretical statement. In this regard, Chatman seems to disagree with Prince who claims that every story has at least a narrator and a narratee (1973: 178). Again the disagreement would seem to stem from Chatman's conception of mediation in his nonnarrated, or as he admits, minimally narrated stories. For Prince a simple "he said" would be a sign of mediation; for Chatman it would not.

Despite my few objections and questions, I wish to end by emphasizing my admiration for Story and Discourse, and, aside from my disagreement with its definition of mediation, my sympathy with its description of narrative. It reviews much important theoretical material from French sources, organizes it in a coherent way, introduces a number of original ways of approaching narrative especially in it distinctions among nonnarrated, covertly, and overtly narrated stories, and, perhaps best of all, is not afraid of offering specific examples from a wide range of narrative to encourage what Chatman calls the reactions of "engaged readers." I should think that Story and Discourse will stimulate much discussion from such readers and will act as a basic guide to the study of narrative.

REFERENCES

ALLPORT, G. W., AND ODBERT, H. S., 1936. Trait Names: A Psychosexual Study (Princeton UP). BARTHES, R., 1966. "Introduction a l'analyse structurale des recits," Communications 8, 1-27. BOOTH, W., 1961. The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago UP). CHATMAN, S., 1974. "Genette's Analysis of Time Relations," L'Esprit Createur 14. COHN, D., 1978. Transparent Minds (Princeton UP). GENElTE. G. 1969. Figures II (Paris: Seuil).

1972 Figures III (Paris: Seuil). GUILFORD. J. P. 1959. Personality (New York).

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LIDDELL, R. 1947. A Treatise on the Novel(London). PRINCE, G., 1973. "Introduction a I'etude du narrataire," Poetique 14, 178-196. STERNBERG, M., 1974. "What is Exposition?" in: John Halperin, ed.. The Theory of the Novel: New

Essays (New York: Oxford UP). USPENSKY, B., 1974. Poetics of Composition (Berkeley: California UP).