telling in time 2 sternberg

Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

Telling in Time (II): Chronology, Teleology, NarrativityAuthor(s): Meir SternbergSource: Poetics Today, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Autumn, 1992), pp. 463-541Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1772872 .Accessed: 06/10/2011 05:02

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Telling in Time (II): Chronology, Teleology, Narrativity

Meir Sternberg Poetics and Comparative Literature, Tel Aviv

Yes-oh dear yes-the novel tells a story. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

Before I set out to examine the structure of fiction, I feel duty-bound to confess to the reader that I do not have a definition for "story" as such. Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose

1. What's Become of Narrativity? Reasons and Reasonings about Temporal Order

A poem, according to Coleridge, reconciles the delights of the whole with those located in each component part. Delights apart, the present series aims at a comparable balance in developing its argument, especially as we now turn from empirical coverage to logical and teleological cogency in accounts of narrative time. This turn-whereby we approach the heart of the matter: narrativity in narrative, narrative in its narrativity-involves a shift of focus amidst continuity. For we have been puzzling over the logic (as well as the accidentals) behind the exclusion of chronological practice by theorists from the map of narrative, and our findings largely carry over to its dismissive mention. It is a fine line that separates denials of chronology's existence in narrative from denials of its value or efficacy as narrative: the latter, normative belittling even sanctions and radicalizes the former, quantitative belittling. (Who, as it were, except possibly one who doesn't know any better or cannot practice what he does know, would burden himself with such a poor thing as an icon of clock-time?) But that line, hence our crossing it, still makes a difference, if only because claims about efficacy bring to the fore reasons and reasonings: arguments for disorder and/or against order, which supposedly explain the facts

Poetics Today 13:3 (Fall 1992). Copyright ? 1992 by The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. CCC 0333-5372/92/$2.50.

464 Poetics Today 13:3

of composition-relative frequencies included-or what are taken to be such. Where an approach acknowledges the diversity of the field, no matter how partially, we at least gain some idea why chronological narrative does or must suffer invidious distinction.

Why, indeed? Of course, the strongest possible reason would be generic, and so absolute: namely, that chronological telling (like a character sketch or a syllogism) does not qualify as narrative by definition. The next strongest ground, less categorical but more conceivable and

nearly equivalent, would be that such telling ranks lowest on the scale of narrativity: that it makes poor narrative by the very form of its time

sequence (rather than by some norm of art or ideology, which would at once mar the purely descriptive force of the judgment as universal

statement). But neither line of argument, so far from being demon-

strated, has ever been officially advanced. Quite the contrary, in fact, as shown by the accord among otherwise divergent views of "minimal narrative":

We define narrative as one method of recapitulating past experience by matching a verbal sequence of clauses to the sequence of events which (it is inferred) actually occurred .... With this conception of narrative, we can define a minimal narrative as a sequence of two clauses which are tempo- rally ordered: that is, a change in their order will result in a change in the

temporal sequence of the original semantic interpretation. (Labov 1972: 359-60) Since any narrative, even one as extensive and complex as the Recherche du

temps perdu, is a linguistic production undertaking to tell of one or several events, it is perhaps legitimate to treat it as the development-monstrous, if you will-given to a verbal form, in the grammatical sense of the term. I walk, Pierre has come are for me minimal forms of narrative, and inversely the Odyssey or the Recherche is only, in a certain way, an amplification (in the rhetorical sense) of statements such as Ulysses comes home to Ithaca or Marcel becomes a writer. This perhaps authorizes us to organize, or at any rate to formulate, the problems of analyzing narrative discourse according to

categories [i.e., tense, mood, voice] borrowed from the grammar of verbs.

(Genette 1980: 30; see also 1983: 14-15) A minimal story consists of three conjoined events [e.g., "He was unhappy, then he met a woman, then, as a result, he was happy"]. The first and third events are stative, the second is active. Furthermore, the third event is the inverse of the first. Finally, the three events are conjoined by the three con-

junctive features in such a way that (a) the first event precedes the second in time and the second precedes the third, and (b) the second event causes the third. (Prince 1973: 31; repeated in 1987: 53)

The first remarkable thing, too often played down and hardly ever correlated with the time issue, is the absence of anything like an ac-

cepted definition of narrative. Our three accounts differ widely in both the reference and the sense assigned to the common term. In

Sternberg * Telling in Time (11) 465

reference, they mark an ascending scale of coverage (and I have sim- plified the picture by leaving out for the moment further variants). For William Labov, "narrative" refers to a subclass of autobiography, just "one method of recapitulating past experience" (1972: 359) in the ex- periencer's oral retrospect. For Gerard Genette, the same term refers to all telling of events in language. For Gerald Prince, as for Aristotle or Seymour Chatman (1978) or myself, the reference extends to all media, "language, film, pantomime, and so on" (Prince 1973: 12). So the official scope of the term, and with it the discipline, ranges all the way from the narrowly and idiosyncratically sociolinguistic, through the traditionally verbal/literary, to the intersemiotic.

Likewise, although not always correspondingly, with the term's sense, that is, the definitional features of the object that comes under the narrative rubric. For the "recapitulation of past experience" to qualify as narrative a la Labov, it must fulfill a variety of requirements: "matching a verbal sequence of clauses"-two, at least-"to the sequence of events which (it is inferred) actually occurred" within the personal experience of their oral recapitulator. Once properly broken down into features of narrativity, this amounts to a sizable miscellany of necessary or minimum conditions: on medium (language), channel (speech, uttered within a social encounter), truth-value (factuality), extent (from two-part clause/event sequence upward), mode of narration (autobiographical, or "first person"), center of interest (the narrating-I doubles as experiencing-I, or hero), and temporal order ("matching"). With his far wider range, Genette lowers the threshold for inclusion, a predictable gesture except for the bareness of the minimum: "a linguistic production undertaking to tell of one or several events," down to a single sentence ("I walk. Pierre has come").

In turn, Prince oddly breaks the norm of inverse proportion between the reference and the sense. The most wide-ranging and inclusive in media, his "minimal story" requires no fewer than "three conjoined events," with their threefold conjunction, moreover, revert- ing in effect to the Aristotelian standard of wholeness at its highest: a chrono-logical change of fortune from one extreme (e.g., "unhappy") to another (e.g., "happy"). Still odder is his attempt to distinguish between "story" and "narrative" minimum, since both the point and the basis of the distinction remain elusive throughout his various struggles with the topic. In Narratology, for example, we first encounter "narrative . . . defined as the representation of real or fictive events and situations in a time sequence" (Prince 1982: 1), which would accommodate Genette's "one or several events" minimum. A few pages later comes "a redefinition of narrative" as "the representation of at least two real or fictive events or situations in a time sequence, neither of which presupposes or entails the other" (ibid.: 4): an ascent toward


Labov. But then the subsequent narrative grammar defines the "kernel narrative" in terms that raise the threshold yet higher-up toward "story" minimum, in effect (ibid.: 83ff.). The very sliding shows a

healthy awareness of difficulties but hardly a way to resolve them. One wonders why the distinction between "story" and "narrative" needs to be made in the first place, then remade or unmade, only to leave a blur. Nor is it easy to see how the two patterns compare with the rest of the definitions, any more than with each other, because the common term "event" includes or equals here what most theorists would rule out or oppose, namely, "situations" (cf. Beaugrande 1982: 407). A contradiction in terms, the very phrase "stative event" does not just problematize any comparison of the event-units required. Its deviance from usage (beside which Labov's "narrative" pales) is also a measure of the extent to which it runs against our intuitive sense of storytelling or narrating versus describing: the noun belongs on this, the adjective on that, side of the representational fence. All very confusing, and

making the general confusion worse confounded. Taken together, and even without adding either further inconsis-

tencies or other voices, these lines of divergence amount to a Babel, with the most far-reaching implications. What are the limits of the field as regards subject matter, and why draw them here rather than there? The Labovian position even disallows the comfort that large bodies of texts (e.g., canonical epic, novel, historiography) fall within the narrative limits on all definitions, so as to enable theorizing from the repository of best generic exemplars. But supposing that they did so fall, their valorization would not yet settle the claim (or indeed, meet the principled challenges) presented by the rest, especially the extra-

literary corpora and media. Still less would such an assumption make it possible to dismiss the rival minimum narratives as an assortment of limit-cases, too rudimentary to be typical of the genre at its best and hardly worth quarreling about. For where does the narrativity of narrative (hence also the key to its scope) lie, if not in the disputed generic features of the minimum, and how does one decide among the

conflicting versions? After all, leaving them undecided sounds very pluralistic, but doesn't it incur the risk of (dis)missing the generic point-so that narratologists are then liable at best to do everything indiscriminately together with, at worst to do anything except, narra-

tology? What, in short, are we supposed to study? For practitioners of a discipline that claims to have come of age (and that adversaries re-

gard as having passed its prime), we seem neither very knowledgeable nor very concerned about the foundations. Since everyone presumably has an intuitive knowledge of what narrative is and is not, a sense of what is and is not narrative, the discipline at large must have failed to capture ("formalize"), or perhaps even to act upon, that universal


human competence. The results, as will emerge, do show, from Aris- totle to the present, and not only in the delimitations of the genre, often sharply if silently variant, almost at will. The results also show in the extent to which views, agreements, or disagreements on component features remain out of touch with overall generic workings and

priorities: with, ultimately, the temporalities of narrative as a whole. Yet how time, or even telling in time, comes into the matter is not

always obvious, relative to other points at issue. On the face of it, for

example, the sharper the diversity, the rarer and more reassuring the

harmony about chronological ordering. Labov and Prince build their definitions around it; Genette allows it by transparent implication (if only because the more minimal the number of events told, "one or several," the less room for disorder in the telling); and, even beyond the minimum, most theorists would take it as working for, rather than

against, strong narrativity-certainly in chrono-logical form. So, on all accounts, orderly telling in time counts as narrative.

'How could it possibly be otherwise?' you might wonder. A good question, except that the impossibility it rightly presumes is not quite self-evident, nor indeed always operative, in the arena of theory old and new, literary and extraliterary. To take first our three cases in

point, again, they lay down and betray an assortment of dubious exclu- sions from narrative. Not exactly the same ones, of course, yet always involving some unreasonableness, often with a time-nexus. Whether imposed by or counter to definition, the sociolinguist's limits push to the verge of idiosyncrasy their equally arbitrary but less glaring equivalents among the narratologists.

Why, for instance, confine "narrative" to language when the criterial feature evidently bears less on the rendering medium than on its accord with the events rendered? Does the confinement forced upon the object of inquiry reflect anything except the inquirer's own horizons, priorities, ready-made tools, all due to his medium-specific training in linguistics or literary study? Far from innocent, moreover, the monopoly given to the special case is always prone to blur the line between verbal narrative's specifics and narrative's universals: to project the features distinctive of one generic sign system into the conception of the genre at large, as when Labov insists on "a sequence of two clauses" in addition and conformity to "the sequence of events." (Such insistence also exemplifies how time rules may prejudice even ostensibly independent questions: the heavier the constraints on narrative temporality, as here, the less room is left for media other than language.) Obvious in Labov, the pressure exerted by (sub)disciplinary on substantive limits-by accidentals or variables on essentials-resur- faces in Genette's appeal to the linguistic paradigm: "analyzing narrative discourse according to categories borrowed from the grammar


of verbs." (That the verbal analogy proves even falser than usual in

Structuralism-e.g., "tense" having little to do with "order/duration/ frequency" and much to do with point of view-hardly improves matters.) Beyond medium, again, Labov attaches too many unnecessary strings to narrative-such as orality, personality, factuality-where he might detach them to the gain of inclusiveness and without detriment to his basic requirements. But then why should Genette exclude drama, say, as if it were not "a linguistic production undertaking to tell of one or several events"? Or what would become of a stretch of

language, a fortiori of a painting, that "undertakes" to describe but in effect "tells" of events between the lines? In turn, even Prince blocks, in terms of required features, part of what his intersemiotic scope ad- mits, such as episodic or otherwise less than "kernel" event-sequences; nor is it clear, again, whether and how he could find room for visual

narrativity, in (say) the well-known form of Lessing's (1963 [1766]) "pregnant moment." So, for the third time running, a definition would close even such spatial loopholes for narrative as are kept open amidst the sharpest Neoclassical insistence on fencing off the arts by their media. Why must signified and signifying temporality go together?

Considering the variety of exclusionary acts performed by theorists, chronological ordering in language itself might well figure among the excluded; and, despite the strong grounds along with the ostensible consensus to the contrary, it actually does. In fact, by one move or another beyond the official definitions of narrative given here, the apparently free variable of telling in or out of time comes to suffer fixity both ways.

On the one hand, although repeatedly introduced by Labov as "only one way of recapitulating past experience" (1972: 359-60), the narrative clause/event "matching" soon hardens into the only viable way. For stories that "begin in the middle of things" are liable to remain

"ambiguous and obscure throughout," to produce "meaningless and disoriented effect" (ibid.: 367). On the other hand, the early license to chronologize issued by Genette's minimal narrative ("a linguistic production undertaking to tell of one or several events") is likewise

quietly taken away soon thereafter: once "perfect temporal correspondence between narrative and story" becomes a "zero-point" of "more

1. For the contradiction at its sharpest, see Genette (1983: 12-14). On the one

hand, he makes a point of defining narrative by the represented object ("acte ou

evenement"), against narrower definitions. On the other hand, he attacks the extension of the term "narrative," and the field of narratology, to all rendering of such an object, the dramatic or the graphic included, pleading instead for the ex- clusiveness of a certain representational manner ("puisque la seule specificite du narratif reside dans son mode, et non dans son contenue"). That plea is theoreti-

cally indefensible as well as inconsistent.


hypothetical than real" existence vis-a-vis the noncorrespondences in anachrony (Genette 1980: 35-36).

Polar extremes, the two approaches form mirror-images. Since each excludes what the other privileges, not to say monopolizes, they would between them virtually depopulate the land of "narrative." Nor is the privileging on either side a matter of imbalanced descriptive picture or disciplinary preference alone. By the same force of contrast, although less obviously, each brings out the other's real grounds for inclusion versus exclusion, centering versus marginalizing. Labov's slip- page from "only one" to the only viable "way" reveals a bias toward what I call the poetics of lucidity. Hence his (Trollope-like) attack on beginning "in the middle of things," as if the plunge into the middle were not an immemorial strategy designedfor "ambiguous and obscure" narration. Conversely, hence also his approval of temporal matching throughout. For instance, the opening "abstract covers the same ground as the story" in advance (Labov 1972: 364); the "orientation" follows at once to do whatever "is necessary to identify in some way the time, place, persons" (ibid.); "a good coda," far from being a "mechanical" signal for the end, "leaves the listener with a feeling of satisfaction and completeness that matters have been rounded off and accounted for" (ibid.: 365-66); clear "evaluation" is at a premium, and its skills even provide the measure of human development (ibid.: 366-75, 393-96).

All this helps to throw light on the opposite theoretical extreme, Genette's, where "beginning in medias res" duly comes to the fore as the inaugural and paradigmatic anachrony of "our (Western) literary tradition" (Genette 1980: 36). On the face of it, "perfect correspondence" in ordering now gets ruled out of court simply due to its nonexistence outside the folktale-a ruling oblivious to the entire tradition of historical, along with literature's history-like, telling and clean opposed to the definition's own insistence on the petite histoire of one-sentence minimum.2 Genette's true grounds prove to be the mirror-image of

2. Most recently, Genette (1990: 756) has "confessed [his] own guilt" as an expo- nent of a "fictional narratology" that "never properly explored but only silently annexed" the factual domain. A handsome and promising confession, except that it leads at once to a regression: the views on "factual" (or historical) ordering grow only more extreme, more annexational than before. In retreat, Genette silently abandons the criterion of "main articulations," still upheld in an earlier retreat (1983: 21), as the key to the difference between genuine and incidental disorder. We now find him, instead, embracing the wholesale denial of chronology by his former antagonists. "I do accept the point that no narrative, including extrafic- tional and extraliterary narrative, oral or written, can restrict itself naturally and without special effort to a rigorously chronological order" (1990: 758; cf. Stern- berg 1990a: 908ff.): so far from being explored at long last, the time-logic and empirics of the factual get officially incorporated into the presumed rule of the fic-


Labov's: his deviation-based apparatus cannot handle chronological narrative-not even the ordering measures and processes shared with its opposite-as his deviation-based aesthetics cannot stomach it. Ac- cordingly, within the Recherche itself, "one might prefer the subtle temporal 'confusion' of Swann to the sobered arrangement of the Balbec- Guermantes-Sodome series" (ibid.: 156): a nice, typical counterpoint to the Labovian scaling of the obscure versus the lucid; much the same pressure, only working in reverse below the surface and demanding an impossible either/or choice. Taken seriously, they would between them make the world of narrative not just uninhabited but uninhabitable and hardly worth visiting. With their opposed exigencies, premises, values impossible to take together, any more than to adjudicate within reason, they must be left together.

As demonstrated throughout the first stage of my analysis (Stern- berg 1990a), these poles are anything but uncommon. Rather, their numerous equivalents or variants or derivatives belong to different

disciplines: Labov's to (socio)linguistic, as well as historiographic, approaches to narrative; Genette's to (literary) narratology, with its ancient roots and modern semiotization. (Roland Barthes [1977: 99] even puts the cards on the table: "Analysis today tends to 'dechronolo- gize' the narrative continuum"; and we have already seen him maneuvering to enlist Aristotle's authority and to impose the tendencies of the Structuralist project on the time structure of the object.) On the narratological side of the fence, however, the value-laden, polarized dealings with order make even less sense or call for more acrobatics where theory aspires to scientific descriptiveness and all-inclusiveness. Nor is temporality the only, but rather the most basic, axis in need of some appropriate polarization. Much the same double bind con- torts the treatment of other strategies taken to image rather than to manipulate, preferably subvert, the narrated reality: thus, omniscient narration (its God-like posture disfavored since modernism for its supposed offenses against freedom, epistemology, opaqueness, in-

determinacy), or direct quoting (a "copy" of the original, hence pure mimesis, world- rather than discourse-oriented). How to deal with narrative modes so capable of encompassing the narrated reality- turning the signifier into an icon of the signified-as to leave the ana-

lyst no (or no manifest) friction, disharmony, or arbitrariness on which to operate? Predictably, both strategies get reduced to negativity, aes-

tional, with a view to salvaging the apparatus made for anachrony. In the process, the fictional rule itself hardens, now wresting from the house of chronology even the folktale corpus (earlier, the Poor Man's Ewe-Lamb) as well as absorbing all "minor" nonchronological touches anywhere. Multiply regressive, therefore, the account goes from bad to worse.


thetic or (if only by analytical fiat covering the samejudgment) generic. For instance, omniscience counts as "nonfocalized narrative, or narrative with zero focalization"; wherever directness appears, again, "one cannot speak of narrative" (Genette 1980: 189, 169). Demonstrably false, in its own terms as otherwise,3 such reduction is yet inevitable, given the common Structuralist premise that formal deviance alone enables and merits registering: you must then either push the non- deviant out of narrative discourse-except as a zero-sign at most- or go out of narratological business. But, compounding the grounds for offense as nowhere else, chronology presents the rudest challenge of all to method and value scheme rolled into one. How to reconcile in its treatment the extremes of scholarship and partisanship-narratology with ideology, formalism with normativism, semiosis unlimited with limitation to the congenial, the facts and forces of harmony with the commitment to disharmony, if only for survival as distortion-based

approach? To escape the dilemma, therefore, such theories would like nothing

better than to pile denial on denial against telling in time, categorical principle on contingent practice: to validate and explain the desired

empirical picture of temporality by appeal to absolute generic law, from which the data supposedly follow by necessity. The argument from narrativity would be ideal, putting chronology in its place once and for all: either anachrony or no (good) narrative. Indeed, it is because this highroad cannot be taken, or not openly, that we have found (and will continue to find) antichronologists driven willy-nilly into the desperate paths of amnesia, non sequitur, shift of ground and/ or usage, equivocation between statement and judgment, or Barthes- like mixtures of semiotic rigor with special pleading and outspoken iconoclasm, in defiance of bourgeois values, scholarly as otherwise.

In what follows, we will observe how narrative logic as well as empirics suffer, often together, under methodological, axiological, and ideological preconceptions-always involving some temporal form (disorder, above all) elevated and reified into artistic norm. Nor, I will

3. Arguments to this effect have already been developed in Sternberg (1978: 254ff.; 1983b: 172-86; 1985: esp. 58-128); see also Yacobi (1981, 1987) and Stern-

berg (1982a, 1982b, 1985: 365-440; 1991). The two arguments converge on the

liberty of discourse to shuffle and reshuffle all clusters of features, a principle that

generates such mixtures as the nonauthoritative or nonfictionalizing (and so, if you will, "focalized") omniscient narrator, or the indirections (hence the "narra-

tivizing") of direct quotation; and it is the same Proteus Principle that enables the sense of disorder in apparent temporal order, and vice versa, our immediate business. This convergence from all sides bespeaks a whole dynamic system at work (no more like the "ad hoc" postulation in Dorrit Cohn [1990: 792-93] than like older fixities).


argue, does the exposure of the old-new package deal merely lead to its collapse (let alone, heaven forbid, to its replacement by another, opposed or mixed). On the positive side, rather, disposing of it clears the way for redefining narrative and narrativity, along with the appropriate theoretical reorientation to their generic workings: to narrative rules as distinctive, universal roles of sequence which govern (at will assimilate, "narrativize") all other elements and patterns found in discourse at large. These generic master roles (to be called, in shorthand, "suspense," "surprise," "curiosity," each with its proper dynamics between the telling and the told) are alone constant as a threefold set; everything else (including established favorites apart from time, such as perspective, space, character, verbal medium, or linear form) turns out to be variable, because nondistinctive by itself, if not dispensable, yet always narrativizable in the generic process.

Either way, the negative or the positive, the claims here are accordingly stronger than those made earlier (Sternberg 1990a). They are also, I hope, sharper and more conducive to genuine debate than a medley of recent complaints about "formalism" (or its supposed equivalents) in the name of rival gods, all too often beyond or above narrative (thus, the appeal to meaning, reading, deconstruction, history, sociocultural study). With few exceptions (e.g., Pavel [1988] on Greimassian semiotics), such responses are apt to leave the tag itself undefined; the method or bundle of methods in question, unexplored (therefore unfalsified) from within; its gains and losses, unweighed- if at all specified-against the allegedly better countermethod; and so the issues, left undecidable by any rational standards, generate more heat than light. It is worth trying to reverse that proportion by revers-

ing the procedure. Accordingly, "formalism" will continue to bear throughout the sense

that I have already assigned to it, namely: anti-functionalism, whether overt, hidden, or even disclaimed, rather than anti-contentualism and the like, which may, but need not, be involved. And it is on this (to my mind, the) question that the two prongs of the argument will con-

verge. On the one hand, illustrating from some classic, old-new models of action and/or discourse in narrative, I intend to show how such formalisms collapse under the weight of their own inconsistencies-

notably, the value judgments smuggled or built a priori into neutral-

looking classifications-on top of assorted shortcomings in a wider

perspective. If so, the divorce of the formal from the functional, of rules from roles, of patterns at whatever level from purposes would seem essentially untenable, as would their automatic coupling. Nor have the boundaries drawn within, as well as around, the object of in-

quiry promoted interdisciplinary traffic, for example, between poetics and inter-art, historical, cultural, or cognitive studies. On the other


hand, I will suggest how a proper functionalist alternative meets the case, to the extent of dovetailing the generic with the general: the constants of narrative in its narrativity, a law unto itself, with the variables of narrative in its textuality, where it must or may integrate a range of extranarrative components, dimensions, parameters. The latter, moreover, include both surface forms of representation, always central to mainstream narratology, and large communicative/historical/ideological forces, which it would keep out of bounds-in nice symmetry to its antagonists, who would centralize, but often denarra- tivize, those forces. Hence, referring the two sets of variables to the law of narrativity, within a single theoretical framework, presents the supreme test.

When it comes to such matters, the empirics of the case no longer suffice to distinguish, much less to decide, the points at issue. We need to go further and deeper. Both the critical and the constructive thrusts of my analysis must evidently take their reference from goals, values, operations, pros and cons, whereby the narrative genre has been or may be characterized: from teleologies, in short, which inform and slant even our current formalist typologies, regarding (dis)order as elsewhere.

This is what I meant by proposing to advance from the quantitative to the normative, apparently reasoned, belittling of the undesirable. On such ground, our paradigm case again widely suffers demotion, but again not without resistance or reprisals. Where the judgment goes against chronology, the closer one looks at the reasons and reasonings on record, the less logical they prove to be. Nor does their inner coherence, let alone their explanatory force, improve over the ages. On the contrary, it is the modern attempts in this line that least satisfy the minimal requirements for any theory: being true to itself, if not to the facts, making sense in its own terms, with premises kept stable and conclusions following from them. (To keep the issues distinct, the premises themselves-regarding effects, goals, motivations behind narrative-will be granted as far as possible, if necessary even articulated and interconnected for maximum value: it is not in them but in the jump from them to imaginary formal rules about sequence, or whatever, that the trouble lies.) The very program implicit in the rise of "narratology," combined with the increasing sophistication about ways and means-and I would be the last to underrate either-only highlights the discontinuity of local expertise with reasonable, let alone progressive, theorizing.

In the name of what, then, has anachrony been favored at the expense of chronology? Does the contrast or the scaling follow from the effect named? Where does the alleged polarity touch or mirror axes other than time? Above all, how does the logic of argument stand to


that of narrative itself? Such questions uncover an instructive story, although not exactly a happy one, whose patterns have both recurred and diverged over the last two thousand years, often in unexpected places. Let us examine a few landmarks, each associated with some influential concept, going from the ancient to the contemporary: the

logic of plot in Aristotle, of the Renaissance in medias res, of Victor

Shklovsky's defamiliarization, and of Joseph Frank's spatial form and related modernisms. Apart from suggesting themselves by their appeal and typicality, all of these concepts are also notable for the challenge they pose to any alternative, since they bear on central narrative realities. No matter how faulty their traditional conceptualizing may prove to be, they still demand reconceptualizing, if possible in coordination.

2. The Sense of Purpose: Aristotle in/and Narrative Poetics Today

2.1. Aristotle's Chrono-Logical Whole in Complex versus Simple Plotting: The Birth of Functional Analysis A founding text and enduring inspiration, Aristotle's Poetics offers in some ways a lure, in others a mirror, in yet others a contrast to

present-day theorizing about narrative. In all of these capacities, if

duly recognized, the Poetics helps to propound, but also to resolve, a

puzzle of high importance, one charged with lessons for the future as well as with historical and metacritical interest. How come a discipline that got off to such an extraordinary start in antiquity and has made such advances since its revival over the last few decades-often under the banner of narrative poetics-is still in its infancy and already in trouble? That many would deny one or several of the question's four

premises is actually a measure of the predicament. Here, as usual,

telling in time makes the best test case and the best ground for wider

appraisals, except that nowhere as in Aristotle does its treatment so

luminously, if unwittingly, mix the corrective with the pull to formalism.

Of the various antichronological positions taken to date, Aristotle's is the earliest (and least explicit) but still the least unreasonable, if only by comparison. What makes it so is the reference of facts to effects: the Poetics views the arrangement of events, like everything else, in functional ("teleological") terms, as a means to an end. How ends determine or explain means, so as to inform their form, can be traced at different stages along the way from Aristotle's universals of art to his plot rules and variables, silently including temporal (dis)order.

On the most general level of teleology, the very definition of art as mimesis finds its rationale in the universal "pleasure felt in things imitated," due to their unique significance and signification as well as their craftsmanship. "To learn gives the liveliest pleasure, not only to


philosophers but to men in general .... Thus the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is, that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring, and saying perhaps, 'Ah, that is he'" (Poetics [Aristotle 1951 {1907}: chap. 4]). And as the ensuing argument descends in generality-from art through literary narrative or fiction to tragedy-it progressively refers specific forms and options of mimesis to their specific informing pleasurable effects, kinds of structure to kinds of pleasure, such as unity, surprise, catharsis. At least two of those steps, as I understand them, are of immediate concern to us: the relation between chronology and teleology, first within the arrangement of the "whole" (holos) and, second, within the disarrangements open to "plot" (mythos).4

The classic analysis of action patterns in chapters 7 through 14 thus starts by deriving the need for events to form a "whole"-marked by its "beginning"-to-"middle"-to-"end" (chrono)logical concatenation- from the law of poetic unity. Whether comic or tragic, whether moving the process of change (metabasis) within the represented world "from happiness to unhappiness" or the reverse, the whole will then cohere as a "necessary or probable" sequence between well-defined poles of human fortune. The strongest possible chrono-logical enchainment results; and you just cannot say of weakly forwarded narratives, as Labov does, that "they are complete in the sense that they have a beginning, a middle, and an end" (1972: 362). Aristotle would deny that they bear this sense, or indeed that they make sense: the difference in linkage assumes an evaluative edge. His "wholeness" favorably opposes poetic structure to the mere alignment of events in history writing (chronicle, biography), with its allegedly misguided equivalents in history-like epic: they abandon the chrono-logic of action for the chronology of an era, a life, or some other time-span covered in serial fashion to yield a "sum" (or "total") of episodes. "They imagine that as Heracles was one man, the story of Heracles must also be a unity"; but "infinitely various are the incidents in one man's life, which cannot be reduced to unity," except of the loosest, biographi- cal kind (Poetics: chap. 8). Later versions and echoes of Aristotle, whether they adopt this typology of sequence with, without, or despite the value judgment involved, often omit the purposive reasoning behind it. So one may easily forget that the law-giver doubles as a reason-

4. For complementary analyses, see Sternberg (1973a, 1990b), which also go into the question of Aristotle's curious silences regarding the temporalities implicit in his approach: especially his promotion of world-time at the expense of discourse- time and their interplay. Here, my business is less to account for such imbalances than to redress them, where possible, in the light of the overall theory, and to explore consequences and alternatives, where not.


giver, never more intent on motivation than when he grounds causality in the beauty and distinctiveness and memorability of the artifact. Nor does his plea for this overall means stop here, with ends other than

meaning. Unlike the historical or history-like record of "particulari- ties," the artistic chain of probabilities also makes for "universality," that is, for built-in consequentiality and, with it, the pleasure of infer-

ring ("learning," generalizing) cause from effect, effect from cause, as between action and character. Instead of merely noting the given deed as an item in a series, for example, we readers explain and integrate it by appeal to the doer's personality type or to his customary doing or even to some wider rule of human behavior. For Aristotle, then, the opposition of "whole" to "sum" in event linkage is all the more

principled and value-laden because it ranges from the (tight vs. loose) shape of chronology to its (universal vs. particular) intelligibility, from formal and perceptual aesthetics to ontological sense and coherence.

Whatever the cogency of this law, or its specificity to event formation, it does have its reason-multiple at that, and, just like the well- ordered whole itself, continuous with both earlier and ensuing links. The very next step advances from "whole" toward "plot," no longer uniform but multiform in sequence and, ideally, even disordered for a time out of wholeness, yet again on poetic grounds. Here, the general directive of connectivity must come to terms with specific affective needs and choices that inform (and, at their best, reform) the finished

product, the plotted artifact.

Chrono-logic itself bends, temporarily at least, in response to a

stronger, more determinate teleo-logic. Given that tragedy and high epic aim for pity and fear, then "such an effect is best produced when the events come on us by surprise" (ibid.: chap. 9). And given the demand for surprise, the "whole" action needs to be "complicated" (in effect, as will appear, dechronologized) into "plot" by way of discovery and/or reversal (ibid.: chaps. 10-11). For example, instead of mov-

ing directly from happiness to unhappiness, the "simple" and minimal

tragic way, the sequence will promise a happy outcome, only to turn round with a vengeance: the mandatory change of fortune then com-

plicates its route, and compounds its impact, by a sudden change of direction, unpredictable (for surprise) yet in retrospect probable (for wholeness, if only after the event).5 Accordingly, plot sequences fall into a hierarchy that assigns each its place in terms of a single regulating generic function, rather than into a dichotomy where artistic

5. "Complex" versus "simple" are precise terms in Aristotle, distinct both from their loose ordinary reference to plot types of varying intricacy and from their otherwise technical usage in story grammars, where they indicate the (de)compos- ability of an action sequence. That is, a tale with a complicated plot can be "de-

composed" into a number of tales with simple plots.


status is either granted or denied altogether by reference to some formal marker of disarrangement. The "complex" plot (e.g., Oedipus Rex or, for that matter, Absalom, Absalom!) outranks the "simple" (e.g., Euripides' Medea) not because it breaks or deforms the natural temporality that the other preserves, but because its broken temporality best serves, indeed maximizes, the effect common to both types as tragic plots, namely, catharsis. Like the fiat of chrono-logizing the action, the recommended dechrono-logizing of the actual (dramatic, epic) presentation serves a purpose beyond itself: the teleology remains in control across forms and levels of sequence.

Poles apart, this, from most contemporary approaches to narrative

poetics. How far Aristotle is from offering a valuation of dechronolo-

gizing per se, much less at the expense of (chrono)logical continuity and integrity, arises from a set of pregnant silences and statements.

Considering the role played here by the surprise twist, for example, why is it so firmly attached to the overall tragic effect that it never receives independent mention, as though it had no worthwhile impact on its own? Where such turns do not intensify catharsis, it would appear, the plot may execute them en route to the end (discovery scenes included) without modulating from simplicity into complexity proper, hence without deserving theoretical notice. Nor does the Poetics even touch on basic linear effects and devices other than surprise-whether glancing backward in order to arouse curiosity or forward, for suspense-apparently because these are likewise deemed irrelevant to the thrust of tragedy. As with judgment by omission, moreover, so with recurrent vocal commission. Observe especially the fact that Aristotle ranks epic below drama-and not despite, but due to, epic's greater temporal license. The comparison boils down to three variable points.

(1) Concerning duration: "Epic action has no limits of time," while "Tragedy endeavours ... to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun" (ibid.: chap. 5). (The difference, one might add, likewise applies to the respective parts, and with even more force, because it shows in them not as a matter of Greek convention but of generic principle: drama's scenic uniformity, with its pressure for one-to-one correspondence between represented and representational time, versus epic's free alternation of scene and summary. The Aristotelian corpus, then, actually doubles the constraint on drama relative to epic latitude.)

(2) Concerning extension beyond or even against the line of the whole, the epic alone permits diversity by way of more or less independent "episodes." While lesser poets abuse this scope for multiplicity, in the form of overall episodic plot, Homer strikes a nice balance between keeping the major line in focus and digressing into sidelines en route: "He detaches a single portion [from the traditional material] and ad- mits as episodes many events from the general story of the war-such


as the Catalogue of the ships and others" (ibid.: chap. 23). Note that we modulate here from plot duration to direction because the "episodes" may involve retrospectiveness on top of digressiveness, as indeed does the Iliad's belated Catalogue of Ships (or the tale of Odysseus's scar, introduced toward the end, but antedating everything else because it looks back to the hero's youth). On the other hand, drama requires such unilinear tightness that, if any part "is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed" (ibid.: chap. 8).

(3) Concerning maneuverability: "In Tragedy ... we must confine ourselves to the action on the stage and the part taken by the players. But in Epic poetry, owing to the narrative form, many events simul-

taneously transacted can be presented; and these, if relevant to the

subject, add mass and dignity to the poem" (ibid.: chap. 24).6 This

rendering of simultaneous occurrences-or this simultaneous render-

ing of occurrences (Else 1957: 601-14)-further widens the disparity in temporal repertoire. No longer confined to episodic extras and

departures, it affects the (dis)ordering of the action proper and, ac-

cordingly, marks the highest liberty from time. To Aristotle, however, liberty from time carries no automatic advan-

tage, no aesthetic plus sign, as it does to a Renaissance in-medias-res enthusiast and his modern formalist counterpart. (Thus the supreme value placed by Shklovsky [see, e.g., 1965] on deviation-as-emancipa- tion from the fabula, a measure later echoed throughout Barthes

[1974] or Genette [1980], and even directly applied to the classical kinds: "Drama is usually tied to the lockstep progression of clock and calendar, while narrative can treat the human reality in time, dipping into memory for the past... and imagining the future" [Martin 1986:

110].) In Aristotle's eyes, however, such extra latitude may constitute a

plus or a minus or a mixed blessing, depending on its results, especially the balance of essential and additional effect. By this standard, epic's impressive-looking capacity and bent for variation is found wanting- if not just counterproductive, then at best liable to do more harm than good, but never an asset. Epic, to his mind, simply got its artistic

priorities wrong, which is why, over-permissive temporality and all, it had to be outgrown in the Aristotelian evolution of forms. Just as it ranks below drama, so it arose before, and by the same measure of generic perfection: synchrony and diachrony join forces in judgment. Throughout, the increased (sub)generic license in arrangement

6. Developments since then (ranging from the balcony above the platform in the

Shakespearean theater to the split cinematic screen, as against the abortive ex-

periments in double-column writing, typically shortlived in John Barth's Floating Opera) have modified or reversed the distinction. But the issue remains unaffected either way: Does variability confer value?


supposedly comes at the price of diminished coherence; variety gains to the detriment of unity and all that it entails. Such a loss to artistic wholeness cannot therefore be fully made good even by Homeric

epic, which Aristotle so admires, and would be even less acceptable in drama. For disordering in these mimetic genres to become viable, indeed a virtue or a clear gain, it must involve the writer's twisting the "whole" into complex "plot" movement (rather than branching into di-

gression and so forth) in the service of determinate and determinative

tragic ends (catharsis, above all, rather than general literary values, such as length or multiplicity).

To be sure, this cathartic effect is itself vulnerable to challenge, cer-

tainly in the light of a corpus later and larger than Aristotle's. One may question its range and centrality, to say nothing of its monopoly, vis-a- vis other effects. One may ask whether it dominates and explains the

composition, temporal or otherwise, of tragedy and epic from their

origins in Greek literature onward-let alone, of narrative at large. Such a challenge will therefore go much further than the kinds of discourse that Aristotle himself openly excludes; namely, comedy on the one hand (no catharsis, hence no ground for comparison), and history- telling (or rather chronicling, with no eye to causation, hence no poetic value) on the other. Put to an empirical test, in short, this Aristo- telian argument for the complex plot may well be found wanting- but not its logic: certainly not the positive thrust of this (teleo)logic, culminating in the recommendation of deformed-and-reformed sequence for intensity. Given the first premise, all the rest follows by a long chain of reasoning from desired poetic end to necessary or contributory means: from pity and fear to surprise effect, therefrom to discovery (anagnorisis) and reversal (peripeteia), therefrom to the twisting or "complication" of the chrono-logical "whole" (holos) into optimal "plot" (mythos).

2.2. Teleology Arrested, Chronology Demoted, Narrativity Vanished: Lures and Penalties of Formalism More is the pity, therefore, that the final, and for our concerns vital, link in this chain of deduction-the time-nexus-remains implicit throughout the Poetics. So much so that it has generally escaped notice ever since, as has the affinity of the Aristotelian "whole"-versus- "plot" dichotomy to later pairings: the Renaissance opposition of the "natural" to the "artificial" or "poetic" order; the Russian Formalist fabulalsujet opposition, with its assorted Structuralist offspring, such as Tzvetan Todorov's histoire/discours and Genette's histoire/recit. Contem- porary narratology since Shklovsky, despite its revival of Aristotle as the founder of the discipline, has somehow missed (or misread) this anticipation of its key antithesis and, still more unfortunately, as will


appear, the underlying Aristotelian rationale.7 Taken together, the two oversights have left their mark on the approach to narrative, including concepts (of event linkage, action sequence, well-formedness, taxonomy) extrapolated from Aristotle and modernized in his name. Nor do most scholarly commentaries on the Poetics have anything much to say about the whole/plot issue. One of the best, by Leon Golden and O. B. Hardison (1968: esp. 140-41, 145-50), goes so far as to neutralize the distinction between the two sequences by associating the "whole" itself with disorder in the finished work and thus also dissociating the logical from the chronological beginning-middle-end movement to the point of contrast. The logic of events must always go straight, as it were, across or even against all variations on the events' temporal axis. This not only impoverishes, but flatly contradicts, Aristotle's definition of the whole, along with his insistence on reserving surprise twists for the

complex plot. For example, if "'beginning' . . means the first incident of the

play" as actually unfolded (ibid.: 141), then the beginning of Oedi-

pus Rex consists in the outbreak of the plague. But this would make nonsense of the theory in relation to the drama invoked by it as a

paradigm. Given that the Aristotelian "beginning ... does not itself follow anything by causal necessity" along the whole (Poetics: chap. 7), the plague hardly meets the definition since it does follow from earlier causes-and in the most perceptible as well as chrono-logical manner at that. Their absence at the actual beginning, so far from being discernible in retrospect alone, as they emerge with such surprising im-

pact on enchainment and development-the hallmark of complexity vis-a-vis simple wholeness-must be feltfrom the actual beginning, the

7. Here even Chatman, who usually turns the Poetics to good Structuralist account, matches the wrong pair of sequences. "For Aristotle, the imitation of actions in the real world, praxis, was seen as forming an argument, logos, from which were selected (and possibly rearranged) the units that formed the plot, mythos" (1978: 19, 28). In fact, "argument, logos" is a highly abstract event pattern, introduced by Aristotle as late as chapter 17, under the heading of "general outline" or "plan": a drastic summary, whereby the Iphigenia or the Odyssey get reduced to a few lines each. Rather than providing the units "selected" from by "the plot, mythos," there-

fore, the "argument" itself needs to be provided with links and episodes in order to form a coherent "whole"-which, in turn, is indeed "possibly rearranged" into a "plot." The compositional scale thus goes from logos to holos to mythos, but the last two alone concern us now. (These and related time-patterns receive a fuller discussion in Sternberg [1973a].) That Aristotle and his followers have neglected to bring out the temporalities involved may also account for the little attention

paid in narratology to the work done by the Chicago Neo-Aristotelians. Within that school, for example, Elder Olson even associates "plot" with chronological sequence (Olson 1966: 35-36; 1977: 383-86); while R. S. Crane, who applies the

whole/plot distinction to Tom Jones with notable success, regrets the lack of proper terms (Crane 1952: 631-32 n.13). For downright misunderstandings, see below.


plague's outbreak, due to the opacity of the chrono-logical beginning. And that absence is felt all the more because the riddle of chrono-logic cries out for solution in so many voices: political (the duty of leader- ship), ideological (retribution presupposing crime), psychological (the king's character), on top of the cognitive challenge itself. Where does the plague spring from? It is the imperative need to discover those mysterious causes that launches and sustains Oedipus's inquiry into the past, his detective-like obsession with pursuing antecedents all the way back to the appropriate "beginning." Throughout the plot, he is literally a tragic hero in search of a whole.

Nor will the epic, for all its greater looseness and license regarding time, accord with an idea of the whole as a logical order amidst chronological disorder. Take the claim that, in the Odyssey, "the initiating incident begins the processes that will eventually result in [Odys- seus's] restoration to wife and kingdom" (Golden and Hardison 1968: 141); in other words, that the "beginning" lies in the first scene of the first book, where the divine assembly orders the hero's return despite Poseidon's enmity. In fact, this opening scene not only happens at a later point in Odysseus's history than a good many events that unfold after it, notably the early adventures told to the Phaeacians throughout books 9 to 12; the assembly on Olympus-like the plague vis-a-vis Oedipus's past-also "follows" some of those Odyssean events in the fullest chrono-logical sense, that is, by causal as well as temporal sequence. Thus the origin of the Poseidon trouble and even the hero's own share of responsibility for his delayed homecoming are both un- veiled as late as the retrospect in Phaeacia (for details, see Sternberg 1978: 35-40, 56-128). In either generic exemplar, then, we find the whole thrown out of order in the plotting-to meet Aristotle's highest standard-not itself dechronologized in the first place.

Elsewhere, the difference implicit in Aristotle gets neutralized the opposite way, through the reduction of the plot to the whole's chrono- logic. One recent example from a survey of narrative theory:

To counterbalance Aristotle's assertion that plots begin at the beginning, one can cite another classic authority, Horace, who says that epics should begin in medias res, in the middle of things. Many narratives follow this advice, supplying details about characters and anterior situation after starting a story. (Martin 1986: 84; cf. Olson in n.7, above)

It is, rather, Aristotelian wholes that "begin at the beginning," not plots, which may begin anywhere and, ideally, at a point later than the chronological beginning, in the interests of complexity with com- pactness. Further, although Wallace Martin goes on to impose on all plots the option that Aristotle reserves for the complex variety, he still misses its entailment of disordering: "For Aristotle, the crucial


elements of plot structure are recognition (involving ignorance and knowledge) and reversal (of intention, or of situation)" (Martin 1986: 117), as if there could be recognition without earlier mis-cognition, hence distortion. On top of it all, Horace's in medias res itself origi- nally urges the epic poet to select a coherent action (e.g., the Iliad's) from a loose extraliterary chronicle (e.g., the Trojan War): so the Horatian advice bears on the ordering of the whole into unity, not on its disordering into late-before-early plot, and actually derives, rather than diverges, from Aristotle (for details, see Sternberg 1978: 35-41; Genette 1983: 21).

All this is due in part to the Poetics' own neglect to spell things out at the juncture most charged with modern themes, so that the chain of deduction from catharsis to plot design apparently stops just before

reaching the variable of time (dis)arrangement. Still, once this tem-

poral nexus has been articulated, narrative theory might profitably gather from the cryptic lines of Aristotle one or two hints about it, sometimes even despite him. For his very lapses (as well as his limitations and blind spots) might then serve to compound a negative with a positive lesson.

Above all, that lesson concerns the need for a functional, means/ end approach to the forms of time: as options chosen or avoided or

brought together for a purpose, rather than as having any intrinsic

(de)merit or being otherwise amenable to ready-made classification. Unless one denies narrative all sense of purpose8-and with it all

change, as well as all regularity and continuity of purpose-the forms of sequence must derive from functions: the given surface from the

underlying goals and directives, mimetics from poetics, how's from

why's, whatever they may be. Where there's a way taken in discourse, there's always presumably a will behind it-the writer's, the genre's, the culture's, variously interacting-so that in coming together the one fulfills and reflects the other (or, from the interpreter's side, the one finds its unity and intelligibility in the other). If every narrative

multiplies this bond a hundredfold, according to its range and exercise of choice, then narrative as a genre sets no limit in principle to the multiplicity, except for those limits inherent in narrativity itself.

Having so many wills to accommodate, and even more ways in which

8. -Which nobody really does, for all the talk about failures of intentionality or the liberation from goal-directedness in (modern) art and the like: I challenge anybody to show the contrary. (On the subject of how nonpurposive, e.g., genetic, sense-making itself interrelates with purposive operations, see Sternberg [1983b, 1985: esp. 7-23]; see also Yacobi [1981].) But acknowledging the principle, under whatever name, is one thing; consistently practicing, a fortiori theorizing, its im-

plications is another and much rarer thing, in narrative as in all discourse study.


to express them, the system of narrative consists in a vast network of

many-to-many relations.

Theory, temporal or otherwise, can gain explanatory power only by inferring and systematizing these protean teleological relations, although not necessarily or even mainly along the lines favored and codified in the Poetics. We may, that is, benefit from Aristotle's logic of

reasoning without endorsing the specific reasons (ends, values, functions, teleologies) that he lays down as premises, still less his formal

repertoire. To a decisive extent, we must do so because his spectrum of effects remains all too narrow (geared to the affective more than the

cognitive, to mimesis at the expense of language, to causal sequence as against the episodic or the suprasequential); and, concerning time, it even remains one-sided, so focused on complexity in plotting as to forfeit narrative universality across plot types.

Here, in encoding this imbalance that will recur and worsen

throughout history, Aristotle fails to pursue his own teleo-logic to its

logical conclusion. Once invoked, the method should likewise apply to the form of chronological ("simple") narrative, fictionalized or histo-

riographic, which is surely not without its reasons. Nor, again, does it make sense for him to consign such reasons, least of all a priori, to a minus or zero-degree: to an absence or loss of optimum effect, a missed opportunity on the artist's part, through lack of insight or skill, to exploit the operations of time by deforming the "whole" into a "complex" plot. (Observe his negative definition of the simple plot as one where "the change of fortune takes place without reversal and without recognition" [Poetics: chap. 10]. An Aristotelian in the comic mode, Fielding spells out the judgment in Joseph Andrews [1: 11]: "To indicate our idea of a simple fellow, we say, he is easily to be seen through: nor do I believe it a more improper denotation of a simple book," i.e., one with a foreseeable, unidirectional plot.) At this juncture, the rule generalized during the first stage of our inquiry (Sternberg 1990a) in opposition to modern Formalists and Structuralists-then equally drawn, the other way around, from the excess zeal of some prochro- nologists-does now extend to the Poetics' model of tragedy, catharsis and all. What recommends deformation of time in the telling need not disqualify or belittle straight ("simple") formation; an argument for one (e.g., that leading from catharsis, through surprise and discovery/ peripety, to "complex" plot) does not automatically count as an argument against the other, on pain of dogmatizing the formal means and/ or reducing the calculus of narrative (generic, aesthetic, other, mixed) functions to a single value or end. In turn, the penalty for such dog- matism and reductionism includes a built-in obstacle to the definition of narrative. Theory cannot dictate or freeze, much less ignore, the


play of teleology-to the loss or gain of chronology-without paying the price in narrativity.

To see how and how far this principle comes to tell against Aris- totle himself, we need not go outside his limited concerns, regarding either means or ends. We need not rehearse, that is, the extra ordering forms, measures, parameters equally available to telling in and out of time, to "simple" and to "complex" plotting: shifts in duration, fresh cut-offs, multilinearity, nontemporal mechanisms of sequence, suprasequential play of equivalence, and the rest (ibid.: 928ff.). Nor do we need to appeal against complexity, any more than against catharsis, in the name of rival values attached to the chronological extreme, such as Gibbon's "higher delight," Trollope's "intelligibility," Graves's history- like "thoroughness" (ibid.: 934ff.), or their variant in Labov (1972). Leaving the empirics and alternatives aside for the moment, we need

only enter into Aristotle's logic to conclude that his means/end argument boomerangs here even on its own terms, on its own functional

specifics. For example, if the complex plot heightens pity and fear through

the shock of discovery/reversal, as in Oedipus Rex, then the simple, orderly plot may work to much the same heightening end through its inexorable movement toward the catastrophe that looms ahead- thus Medea's killing of her children. (A novelistic example would be The Idiot, according to Edwin Muir: "Dostoevsky shows in what ways the knowledge of something to come can change and at the same time

bring out the values of time. In the instance he describes [Nastasia's threatened murder by Rogojin] the knowledge is certainty, and the

thing to come is death. ... It is the expectation of this event dreaded and yet inconceivable that gives The Idiot its painful tension, and makes the conclusion so powerful, at once an exposure and a fulfillment of the whole action" [Muir 1960: 74-75].) The gain of either strategy, or plot type, is the other's loss. Inevitably so, because you cannot have at once the jolt of the unforeseen and the juggernaut of the ex-

pected, the abrupt ("complex") regression from effect to cause and the tense, oppressive ("simple") progression from cause to effect (not, at least, without mixing and modifying both forms in the process, which

only extends the range of choice). And although an artist or audience

might still favor one balance of gain and loss over another, the choice

always lies between alternative arrangements of action-with-impact, not between a positive and a negative, or null, value. The logic of

goal-directed ordering cuts both ways. It cuts both ways, moreover, regardless of whether the goals served

by the disordered versus the ordered form of time are variant or much the same. If the goals are variant, such as surprise in Oedipus Rex versus mounting dread in The Idiot, or Jamesian ambiguity ver-


sus Trollopian lucidity, then those polar forms cannot be referred to any single shared function and thus remain apart, incommensurable and ungradable. Each suits its own purpose, more or less, better or worse-depending on skill and context-rather than best or not at all.

Again, if the goals are basically the same, as with Aristotelian catharsis throughout tragedy, then the respective forms of sequence may always deliver the goods by different, possibly opposed, routes, or what I called balances of profit and loss: for example, the heightening of pity and fear through the reversal or the relentlessness of expectation. The choice then becomes a question of economy, novelty value, generic norm, individual and collective preference, all relative. In short, where the ends are not comparable, neither are the means, regardless of surface likeness; where the ends are comparable, so in principle are the means, never mind how apparently unlike. In either case, therefore, to reify (freeze, privilege) any set of means, such as the form of complex plot and its assorted offspring to this day, is not just to impov- erish but to undermine the functional calculus of time, as of narrative structure in general.

Exactly here, at a crossroads in the analysis of plot-making, Aris- totle's functionalism lapses and hardens for once into sheer formalism. So much so that, if we read this decisive stage in the argument out of context, his approach could not easily be distinguished, except in specifics, from what has since become standard critical practice-not least among Formalists and Structuralists, who often bear the name of functionality in vain or in another sense. This lapse from the spirit of his own poetics (along with the rest of his scientific work) makes Aristotle doubly vulnerable to misunderstanding by narratologists in search of ancestry and foundations for very different projects. It is as if the Renaissance and Neoclassical history of pseudo-Aristotelianism (Weinberg 1961) were repeating itself in modern guise, whether action- or discourse-oriented.

You thus often find Aristotle yoked together with Vladimir Propp, as the fathers of modern narratology. Yet although (or because) Propp himself actually draws on Aristotle far more than has been recognized, theirs is a sorry mismatch. For Propp's (1968 [1928]) "morphology" of the folktale has no reference whatever to artistic, still less to affective or communicative, teleology. Instead, his model undertakes to reduce the diverse-looking material "to a sequence of thirty-one functions corresponding to the principal acts and events of the narrative: Villainy, Mediation, Beginning, Counteraction, Departure, etc." (Bremond 1970: 247). As a common denominator, this morphological structure also offers a typological principle, leading from the (Russian) folktale's classification within narrative to its own subclassification, because its instances all mark the same trajectory, but do not always go through all


or the same landmarks en route. For better or worse, then, the Prop- pian event-line amounts to a "whole" logic of action, only specified and de-poeticized, de-motivated, in effect de-"plotted." Here Aris- totle's well-formed beginning-middle-end action sequence descends in

generality (always going now the "happy" way, always with "peripety/ discovery" and many further intermediate links newly extrapolated from the folktale corpus) to match a particular subgenre.9 Defined as "the study of forms" (Propp 1968 [1928]: xxv), by contrast, this mor-

phology lacks all sense of purpose behind the formalized what's and how's: its very "functions" 0 exclusively adhere to the action unrolling within the narrated world, in principled (and illusory) disregard of the

activity contrived by the narrative for the reader, namely, to mimetic, as divorced from poetic, cause and effect. In a word, the tale's sense or (teleo)logic of order shrinks to a single level, that bearing on the framework of existence and occurrence inhabited by the dramatis personae: on Aristotle's holos, Shklovsky'sfabula, the Structuralists' histoire, the domain of the told.

As a result, the features and forces of telling in or out of time dis-

appear from view, along with other relations between the telling and the told. "The sequence of functions is always identical" (ibid.: 21- 23): this basic law does not apply to the actual narrative sequence, where (it transpires in passing) the "functions" may change places, for reasons left obscure (ibid.: 26, 97, 109, 145; see also Bremond 1970: 254-56). Far from describing such transpositions and explain- ing their reasons-if only as part of the interplay between constancy and variety, uniformity and multiformity, dramatic and artistic functions-the Morphology does not so much as consign them in passing to a different stage or even a tack of inquiry into the (folk)tale. The

complementary tacks mentioned include genesis, diachrony, religion,

9. By the rule we have already encountered apropos of "minimal narrative," formal

specificity (here imposed both on the direction of change and on its itinerary throughout, running to no fewer than thirty-one stages or "functions") is inversely proportional to empirical coverage. The more features required, the less the range of inclusion. Predictably enough, Claude Bremond and Jean Verrier (1984) have now established that Propp derived his model from a single type of fairy tale, the "Dragon Slayer," harmonizing the rest of his corpus with it by violence. The wonder is rather that Bremond himself still fails to draw the conclusion about the

hopelessness of the project as such, not least about his own ambitious efforts in the same line. There, he actually outreaches Propp, claiming that his own improved model "did not apply specifically to the French folktale, or to the folktale in general, but was to be considered as an outline applicable to all types of narrative"

(Bremond 1970: 247): as though entangling the logic of action widened its scope, to the point of universality. 10. "Function is understood as an act of character, defined from the point of view of its significance for the course of the action" (Propp 1968 [1928]: 21).


and anthropology, but never the plot behind the action, the poetics underlying and governing the mimetics.

Carried to such lengths, therefore, the one-level reductiveness be- trays nothing less than a confusion, or at best a drive toward fusion, of nature and culture. Aristotle was the first to draw the analogy between the natural and the man-made," the organic and the poetic, but only so as to establish the unique duplicity of art, which operates by and for its own logic (e.g., catharsis) under the action's lifelike guise. The goal-directed process of change built into nature must be supplied in and through the artful imitation of nature, the two-faced plot. In revisiting the analogy from the first page onward, however, Propp literalizes it (even more so later [Propp 1984: 68-69, 82-83]). He speaks as though an artifact were not just equally describable, decom- posable, classifiable, but also equally uni-functional with its analogue in nature, the plant and/or the animal: as though narratology could emulate biology in the object morphologized, on top of the morphological method itself. Whether or not the false analogy is dropped, its consequences for the model of analysis have affected much of the work done by Propp's successors, from professed morphologists to story grammarians. A category mistake remains one, under any name or variant.

The two approaches stand opposed even where their interests seem most convergent, indeed continuous-regarding the "whole"-since Propp feels no need to account, in aesthetic terms, for the whole's tight unilinear concatenation, any more than for its possible disarrangements or transpositions in the plot. As with his formal borrowings, so with his thematic ones: what's and how's encoded in apparent isolation from why's, actional from textual function, nature-like morphology from socio-artistic value and ideology, except that the show of positivism breaks down at second glance. Characteristically, Propp does not even see fit to explain why the fairy tale always moves in one of the two directions considered and complicated in the Poetics, namely, from unhappiness to happiness: that one-way movement toward happiness simply remains for him a given to be described, as though the morphological constant were not itself a product of teleological choice among the variables of narrative. How can it be anything other than a product, where the two directions are so thematically opposed all the way from one cut-off point to another (and so reversible 2) that their

11. For an excellent discussion of functionalism in Aristotelian biology, see Martha C. Nussbaum (1978). I owe the reference to Dr. Chava Yablonka, of Tel Aviv University. 12. -Actually reversed, moreover, even outside tragedy. Within myth alone, consider the "unhappy" ending of the master story traced by Lord Raglan (1956)


difference makes all the difference to the effect? And if the choice of direction makes such a difference, then any model unable (or unwill-

ing) to incorporate its poetic reasons and results in communication will get into trouble even in describing the action, to the ultimate breakdown of its own logic. So the entire Proppian approach, I would

argue, is caught between two evils. Without a higher functional reference point, the one-level analysis must remain not just partial but ill

equipped even for the limited (morphological, taxonomic) jobs that it does undertake; and with such a reference point built in, that analysis would forfeit much of its spirit and many of its claims, in effect

transforming into something other (and, although not in its own eyes, better) than a pure, objective morphology, comparable to the natural scientist's, or to the linguist's grammar. The catch is inescapable.

For example, Propp typologizes the initial, preparatory situation as one where "calamity" or "misfortune already hovers invisibly above the happy family"-soon to be actualized through the villain's machi- nations-or as one of "insufficiency or lack, and it is this that leads to

quests analogous to those in the case of villainy," its "morphological equivalent" (Propp 1968 [1928]: 27, 34-35). Yet are they equivalent? On what grounds, other than analytic convenience? How to meet the

objection that the resulting sequences "tell not one story but two"? (Martin 1986: 94).

Certainly not by shifting, detailing, or otherwise revising the terms of the comparison within their original, action-bound framework, a la Bremond (1970). Having widened the range of "deficiency" to include "poverty, illness, foolishness, scourge, desire, etc.," Bremond would bring them all under one definition as a state "which could be

improved," and their "satisfactory" opposites, correspondingly, under that "which could deteriorate" (ibid.: 252). Yet his attempt to unify the variations at either pole in fact renders the poles themselves inter-

changeable rather than well defined for a change, if only because rela- tivized. Consider the fact that, short of absolutes (rare in human af-

fairs), every "deficiency" is liable to further "deterioration"-Edgar's hard-earned lesson in King Lear, when suddenly confronted with his blind father-as every "satisfactory state" is to "improvement." And if the definitional features may change places, and the states change poles, then the trouble already encountered by Propp only gets worse. For the model can no longer distinguish even the basic opposition

across cultures. And as with actual reversal, so with potential. Even in Bremond's

(1970) revised morphology, fairy-tale action normally goes from either unhappiness ("deficiency") or happiness ("satisfactory state") to happiness (achieved, re-

gained, improved), but not to unhappiness. Why not?


that every member of the fairy tale's audience will intuitively register: the diametric cut-off points, along with the to-and-fro movements between them.13 Bremond himself comes to admit as much in blandly observing that at times the initial "state of deficiency (= which could be improved) corresponds functionally to A still relatively satisfactory state (= which could deteriorate)" (ibid.). Where Propp equated "insufficiency" with "misfortune," by uneasy fiat, Bremond's supposed revisions end up by equating "deficiency" with comparatively good fortune. On top of the old question as to the constant behind such variant states as "illness" and "desire," then, you now wonder how to draw such fundamental (because allegedly deep rather than surface) contrasts as "improvement" versus "deterioration," or "ascen- dant" versus "descendant" movement, or even "hero" versus villain" or "enemy." Where, in short, can such narratology find the missing sense of equivalence and difference (actional or otherwise) that goes into telling/reading competence?

As it stands, I maintain, the answer is, nowhere-because that sense is just not to be found anywhere within the narrated world, but only in the coordinates of the narrative discourse. To capture it, therefore, the scheme must extend its grounds from the allegedly self-contained, nature-like (morpho)logical formation of the variants to their artistic, sociocultural, or otherwise norm-bound determination, possibly including polar transformation. As the functional frame of reference for comparison grows double, to be sure, it also grows double-edged: the equivalence/difference becomes proportionally less context-free and more contingent, less governed by nature than by art, history, ideology.

With respect to openings, for instance, can "the same be said about the abduction of a bride as about the simple lack of a bride"? (Propp 1968: 35). Not necessarily, I would emphasize, but possibly, on a double condition: provided that both openings have the same consequences for (1) the hero (launched into a quest for his/a bride), and (2) the reader (enlisted for the marriage). Failing (1), of course, the

13. CompareJonathan Culler (1975: 207) on the evaluation of approaches to plot: "Without this intuitive knowledge, which we display every time we recount or dis- cuss a plot, there is no way of evaluating a theory of plot structure because there is nothing for it to be right or wrong about." Well said. But apart from going on to credit Propp with an awareness of this standard, which the latter signally fails to exhibit, Culler's generalization rather understates the ills involved and our ability to evaluate them. Such "a theory of plot structure" not only remains arbitrary and empty, because lacking in explanatory power, but it may also turn counterproductive, because counterintuitive, and even self-defeating, because at odds with its own premises as well as with the facts.


variants would never amount even to "morphological" equivalents; but (2) is no less necessary and far more subject to divergence, reversal included. Thus, the "abduction of a bride" at least presupposes her de-

sirability, with the result that the bridegroom suffers misfortune and

understandably seeks, as "victimized hero," to retrieve his fortune. The "simple lack of a bride," however, may always (and at times does) count as a positive good, a fortunate state of affairs; in which case the brideless youth cannot set out on the quest without forfeiting his title to probability or sympathy or both: his very (psycho)logical incentive

along with his (typo)logical name and role of hero. Given the frame's

negative attitude toward marriage, the logic of events itself then loses its propulsive force on pain of multifold incoherence, actional (unintel- ligibility) as well as rhetorical (e.g., unattractiveness, undesired irony). So even the formal cause/effect equivalence of the two variants hinges on their pairability or interchangeability under some normative/affective common denominator (as Aristotle's range of "unhappiness" appeals to our "pity and fear"). And whether or not the fairy tale

empirically interchanges those variants is beside the theoretical point since, even if yes, this would only mean that the tale knows better than its analysts: that it does observe both aspects of the double condition on narrative sense, referring the event-line's canonical form to the

appropriate socio-artistic norm from the outset.

Similarly with the final liquidation of the misfortune or lack. Either

"happy end" owes its happiness, including its very description as such, not to any objective property or logical rule but again to the (sub)- genre's normative, ideological choice to involve the audience in the fortunes of the "hero" as against the "villain," whose (objectively) un-

happy end completes our sense of happiness for his adversary. From

opening to terminus, then, the norms are as canonical as the forms of "whole" action that they generate and govern, bring together or divide, move toward one state or its opposite through a variable number of

midpoints ("functions"), always for a double purpose. As it is, especially given its immense appeal, Propp's case serves as

an object lesson, disabling both the union of incompatibles and their

equally facile relegation to "different approaches" to narrative. Its straits expose the illusion behind the new positivism in the Formalist/ Structuralist camp, most immediately behind the one-level analyses oriented to the narrated world. For our case brings home the principle that there is no morphology, no taxonomy, no story grammar, no

logic of action, without a regulating discourse teleology: the more nar-

rativized, let alone reasoned and theorized, the better. Aristotle would

hardly associate himself with this pseudo-objectivity of facts without

effects, routes and routines without reasons; but he seems to invite such associations by his (typo)logical concerns, his neglecting to articu-


late the whole/plot relation, his privileging of complexity, all features that recur in Propp and his heirs.14

Likewise with the apparently opposite camp of theorists, oriented to discourse ("plot") rather than to "action" in narrative: here we find Aristotle's overhasty ranking of plot types by their effectiveness mistaken for an absolute artistic/inartistic dichotomy-if only through the omission or exclusion of the "simple" kind from the repertoire- and so brought into line with modern antichronologism. Typically, for instance, having ruled chronology out of (artistic) existence in his own name, Genette then does away with the simple plot in Aristotle's: he describes the features of complexity, "surprising enchainment . . . peripety . . . recognition," as "necessary" to the tragic effect (Genette 1979: 22-23 [my translation]). Otherwise hostile to the kind of narratology done by Genette-but, significantly, sharing its disbelief in orderly narration-Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1978: 194) even generalizes these features beyond tragedy into "the basic or minimal plot of every story (change, reversal of fortune, or peripeteia, as structuralists from Aristotle to Barthes have maintained)": it is, of course, change of fortune that really constitutes the minimal Aristotelian plot, while the reversal of fortune (i.e., of direction of change) aims for the maximum. She thus conflates straight with peripeteic metabasis, to much the same effect as Genette. Likewise Frank Kermode, who has tried to steer a middle course between Structuralism and humanism, not only locates "peripeteia . . . in every story of the least structural sophistication," but also collocates it with its Aristotelian mate via "our wish to reach the discovery or recognition by an unexpected and instructive route" (1967: 18; cf. Kermode 1987 [1983]: 199). No more true of the Poetics than of narrative practice, again, all these bids for universalizing the form of twisted sequence (in other words, for attaching it to narrativity) are typically modern, yet their convergence from such different quarters also reveals something about the ancient authority to which they appeal. "For our own reasons we habitually misread [Aristotle]," Kermode (1980: 75) disarmingly observes. Yet certain "misreadings," like this one in regard to sequence, are not quite so groundless as others, like the Propp connection. Rather, they mark a continuity of sorts in the bias toward complex form, pushed over the ages to the

14. I leave aside the crosscutting, but less clear-cut, question of the Morphology's "formalism," in the sense of anti-contentualism: a charge made by Levi-Strauss and denied by Propp. (Both sides of the exchange have now reappeared in Propp [1984].) My own discussion, rather, brings out a family resemblance between the two sides, notably in the common, even escalating, disregard for generic teleology: Levi-Strauss's focus on deep atemporal structure (itself part of modernism's convergence on "spatial" form) amounts to denarrativizing myth in the action as well as in the narration.


non-Aristotelian limit of monopoly on artistic status and value, often indeed on plotting at large. Such misunderstandings would perhaps not arise, or not so widely and imperceptibly, if Aristotle himself were more consistent in his teleology at this key juncture as well as more explicit about chronology elsewhere. That the case turns out to be otherwise suggests how the lure of surface form is hard to resist within or without time, even where the logic of the theory points, and to some extent actually goes, in the opposite direction.

Succumbing to this lure carries its penalties, and they typically reach beyond the internal consistency of the approach to its scope and, further, to its very heart, mimesis. In scope, like all distortion-elevating theories since then, the first Poetics blanks out not only chronological poetics, quite a hole by itself, but also all the resources and parameters of deployment that it shares with the antichronological. Having suf-

ficiently outlined and crisscrossed this blank earlier (Sternberg 1990a:

esp. 928-45), let me recall just one measure of special weight, namely, cut-off points.

In a treatise so directed toward action sequences as the Poetics, one

might predict the blindness to all nonactional (hierarchical, perspectival, deictic, linguistic) mechanisms of sequence; nor could one expect any glance at suprasequential development (even in the form of, say, drastically "complicated" or reversed analogy between characters, e.g., Odysseus and Agamemnon as returners in Homer, first paired, then

opposed). For such axes and their linearities to be incorporated, or so much as discerned, the theory (and not this theory alone) would have to change its very premises about discourse, time-art, the making and reading of plot. On the other hand, since Aristotle did introduce the notions of beginning, middle, and end within the proper actional whole, it is sad to find how little he has to offer about the two extremes as the strongest junctures along the finished plot. How little, I mean, his account makes it possible to capture and explain their time- features, beyond the yes/no registration of one surface variable: their accord/discord with the whole's chronology. But do those plot limits involve (dis)ordering in fact or in effect, in the line or in the sense of time, or in both? Against what norm? Why?

As we go from formal to perceptible marking, the returns steadily diminish. Within the complex plot, Aristotle could at most (though he actually doesn't) register the deviation of these two cut-off points from the "whole" order, but not their deviant force (always except- ing surprise, as distinct even from novelty value between convention and invention); within the simple plot, he could register nothing at all, not (say) the sharpest departure from beginning/end conventions beneath the surface of temporal harmony with the whole. This would leave unregistered, for example, the multiple historic novelty of the


Bible's opening with the creation of the world ex nihilo by the word of a single, disembodied, mysterious divinity; or the force of Thucydides' choice to start with the causes of the Peloponnesian War, in opposition to epic's (the Iliad's, most pointedly) jump in medias res. The orderly looking cut-off goes with an unsettling sense of a new world order and/or a newly motivated, reanimated historical order. Their salience and significance outstripping any conventional surface disorder, in shock effect as otherwise, such "simple" beginnings must therefore be assigned a role by any temporal account, on pain of inadequacy; and so must their "complex" equivalents in innovation. But Aristotle's scheme reflects neither. Moreover, it is to the Rhetoric (1415a, 8-24) that we owe his only glance toward the focus-building role launched by, among other beginnings, Homeric invocation and dramatic prologue ("A foretaste of the theme is given, intended to inform the hearers of it in advance"). This is a thematic, cognitive role of the first importance, yet sadly out of the Poetics' reach, because it affects the processing of all linear discourse and so eludes the chronological simple/complex antithesis. He could not do better even if he would, once the forms of time have lost or arrested their reference to operative norms and processes of all (textual, contextual, intertextual) kinds.

If this seems little for a theory of sequence to offer by any measure, including its own, consider that hard-line formalism a la Genette (which does not even theorize initiating/closural force, surprise effect, or anything beyond deviation value per se) yields even less: descriptive scope shrunk at best to a minimum, namely, anachrony; systematic explanatory power, to a virtual blank. The less reasoning there is from the bedrock of generic ends-necessarily temporal(ized) in accordance with narrativity-the less hope there is for encompassing the arsenal and combinations of discursive means, or even for reasonably treating such means as happen to attract the analyst's notice. The appearances to the contrary must not obscure the shrinkage. Actually, the proliferation of terms bearing on "order" in Genette's Narrative Discourse (e.g., analepsis/prolepsis, ellipsis/paralipsis, homodiegesis/heterodiegesis, reach/extent, often further ramified) singles out for analysis the "complex" form of event-ordering elevated since Aristotle; the artistic drives toward such complexity-other than the taste for disorder per se, neither shared by Aristotle (or by many after him) nor sufficient to explain specific choices within disorder itself- emerge in piecemeal, ad hoc fashion, if at all; and the lack of any principled cross-reference between how's and why's in sequence-making compromises, as well as restricts, even the scheme of disorderly features. Nor is this lack, with its costs, repairable from within Genette's method (as is Aristotle's ranking of plot orders, by counterargument from catharsis), but only against the grain. Either you settle for the bal-


ance of profit and loss-such as it is, and its unhealthiness does tend to escape notice-or you must abandon the very basis for a higher, firmer ground: much in the same way that the missing reference point for difference/equivalence among Propp's variants has already been found in the contextual teleo-logic, rather than in any immanent, de- tachable chronologic, of folktale.

However elaborate (in part, new) the analytic apparatus, therefore, it again marks a strategic, if not programmatic, regression vis-a-vis the first Poetics; and in hands other than Genette's, or for texts less respon- sive to wit and ingenuity, the apparatus itself visibly yields poorer (because "purer") returns.15 In essentials, whetherjudged by the standard of explanatory power or of testability or of enabling advance toward a

general narrative poetics, those two methods, the Aristotelian and the Structuralist, are nothing like equally fruitful (any more than they are

compatible, except in questions of detail): and I mean, as will soon appear, demonstrably, indeed predictably, unequal. If we have to make a choice, and up to a point we do, then better a half-reasoned account of complex plotting as art's optimum, yet without excluding the simple "whole" minimum, than an ostensibly self-justifying table of complex ("anachronic") plot elements, barely interrelated beyond their common opposition to a hypothetical, inartistic, unchanging zero-degree of simplicity ("chronology"). Here narratology reaches the limit of

typology-equipped only to classify, and only what lends itself to being classified as an "objective" (rather than a contextual, inferable, operative) violation of some fixed one-to-one correspondence (in order or

elsewhere) between the narrating discourse and the narrated world; and only, as will appear, part of such violations at that.

This already looks like another revival of positivism, its old ideals and illusions of pure objectivity now curiously wedded to a still older aesthetic bias toward disharmony, under the name of Structuralism. "Another," I say, because Propp's "morphologism" on the level of the narrated "fabula" or "story," allegedly immutable, finds its counter-

15. This is why even his Structuralist followers tend to look for "enrichment" elsewhere, not always with the same success, depending on the presence or absence of a basis for integration. Thus, having placed the field in a semiotic framework that is wider than usual, Chatman (1978: 11) can indeed reasonably hope "to synthesize the most powerful insights-Anglo-American, Russian, and French" as well as Aristotelian, while still finding others discordant with his idea of narratology (see, e.g., Chatman 1990). By contrast, a survey like Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan's (1983) anchors one chapter on time in Paris (i.e., in Genette's Narrative Discourse) and another in Tel Aviv (especially in works by Menakhem Perry and/or myself, beginning with Perry and Sternberg [1968]), in complete disregard for the

incongruity of the two source languages, the typological vs. the "processual": eclec- ticism carried to self-division. Genette's own views on the limits of compatibility frequently emerge in the polemical retrospect (Genette 1983).


part here in the Genettean domain of freely manipulable "narrative" or "plot"; and a very odd counterpart it is, too, because the more

manipulable the sequence (or, for that matter, the tempo or the viewpoint) in relation to the happening, the less classifiable it becomes without a sense of purpose in the telling and reading. Does not choice imply (and its widening, underline) purposiveness, meaningfulness, structuredness? As it is, this antistructural Structuralism boomerangs. Against the very idea of structure as a network of relations, it omits to generalize the structuring forces of narrative and accordingly misses or mishandles the component elements in play: the forms or "figures" that go (and, of course, integrate) into narrative discourse in protean means/end combinations, irreducible to any ready-made linkages. The enterprise of isolating parts (temporal or other deformities) without principled reference to wholes (generic, subgeneric, individual) raises foreseeable questions all along the line-foreseeable, yet strangely un- noticed.

Why, for example, should texts or junctures along the same text so vary in deployment, one devising anachrony by "analepsis," another by "prolepsis," still another none at all? How, if not by their workings in communication, are we to distinguish "major" from "minor," perceptible from negligible, stereotyped from innovative forms of anachrony-or chronology? What in reason justifies the monopoly on anticipation given to "prolepsis" by overt statement, such as a narrator's foretelling or a hero's foreboding of death, at the expense of established (if tacit) convention to the same effect, such as our foreknowledge of the unhappy end in tragedy; or at the expense of straight chronological development, inevitably generating and often polarizing expectations about the future toward which it marches; or to the loss of backward-looking ("analeptic") glances, themselves always capable, reversely, of throwing attention forward-through, say, disclosures that affect for good or for ill the hero's chances of ultimate success? (Thus the series of retrospects on Odysseus's lively career, pointed and counterpointed by the fate of earlier homecoming kings as well as by explicit divine scenarios, all working for suspense about his imminent conflict with the Suitors: a typical variety of means, some overt, others covert, some ahead of time, others behind time, others yet across time, are deployed and orchestrated by Homer to a strategic forward-looking end.) Inversely, why tie retrospection to overt "analepsis" after the fact? Narrative can surely evoke the past through other measures altogether, all retrospective in force yet neither analeptic nor always overt in form. Such measures include prolepsis, whereby anticipation itself impels us backward to figure out how the anticipated event will come to pass; or an unforeseen turn, inviting resolution in terms of what has gone before; or even nontemporal devices like


analogy, which may illuminate or ambiguate a character's antecedents by implicit comparison to some analogue in the present, hence without any surface disordering whatever. Like the future, then, the past hardly requires an official, least of all an ill-timed, visit from the narrator to come into narrative play; just as such a visit, although a departure from the event-line, would by itself hardly suffice to energize either time zone, let alone in a predetermined direction and to a perceptible extent.

The consequences variously reflect on other axes, such as reported discourse and point of view. They also have their positive side, which I theorized elsewhere as the Proteus Principle and will develop in the next section. Meanwhile, they go far enough to disconfirm Genette's entire sequence analysis, even on its own ground: by the logic of

typology, applied to the privileged types at that. Evidently, there is no

package-dealing of form (analepsis vs. prolepsis) and function (retrospection vs. anticipation) in narrative. But neither do the two forms themselves cover all the resources for anachronic effect (from chro-

nology to analogy), or even the subforms of overt anachrony. Take the paradigmatic figure that "inaugurated our (Western) literary tradition": Where does in medias res belong? Its late-before-early jump can in no way fall under "analepsis"; but neither would it count as

"prolepsis" because it violates (or evades) the formal condition "of

narrating or evoking in advance an event that will take place later" (Genette 1980: 40). This untimely and late opening yet evokes noth-

ing "in advance," nothing "later" than itself, nothing even otherwise relatable to some antecedent mediatory juncture ("first narrative") in the discourse, for there is no such preopening juncture here by definition.16 The maneuver just slips through another large hole in the net, that is, the absence of any parameter that will immediately refer discourse to story order-as concurrent beginning-middle-end processes running in and/or out of step (cf. Sternberg 1978: 33-57 et

passim). On top of everything else, Genette's scheme thus compounds Aristotle's inability to register the finesse of "simple" beginnings by leaving unmapped such a disorderly jump as no reader, from Homer's onward, could possibly miss. Still less could the scheme handle the ter- minal equivalent of in medias res-the abrupt or premature cut-off as such, however otherwise orderly-because it lacks even an Aristote- lian sense of wholeness, whereby to tell open from closed endings by their push against or for chrono-logical conclusiveness. Never mind

16. In turn, since the "first narrative"juncture is assumed to orient the description throughout, its irrelevance to the issue of in medias res becomes symptomatic. It indicates further lacunae in the coverage of order and then of "narrative levels," so coming to tell against the orienting signpost as such, down to its very "firstness": the chain reaction is easily traceable, but not here.


the ending's novelty value-screened out by the Poetics, too-here the very question of its subversive plot value must fall into limbo, together with the late opening. (At either plot extreme, as always, the facts of discontinuity themselves will escape notation unless suitably related to effects notable in interpretive practice-to felt ruptures, which acti- vate gaps and invite closure by disturbing our experience of time.) And so it goes, all the way to the dissolution of some major typological parameters, such as the "ellipsis/paralipsis" or "homodiegesis/heterodiegesis" contrasts: the boundary drawn within each pair so wavers, for lack of a firm reference point, that the opposed terms grow virtually interchangeable.

Throughout, the trouble goes too deep to be cured, even by ad hoc patchwork, and argues for a radical alternative. The assorted ills invariably come down to the anchorage in the narrative's manifest disordering of story-time-rather than in its pointed (perceptible from the reader's side, purposive from the teller's) ordering and reordering as well as disordering, which can all variously manifest themselves on the narrative surface. Once objective disordering comes to figure as a type and means of effective (re)ordering-in itself neither more nor less viable, no weaker or stronger than the rest, because equally subject to the overall forces at work-the picture and prospects of the field undergo a sea change, and hardly, I think, for the worse. To go only by the set of problems just indicated, they would already seem to have found a reasonable (if not yet comprehensive enough) resolution in such a framework, as others of the same family have done before.

Indeed, that the trouble with Genette's "figures" now reveals a family likeness to the Propp formulas ("misfortune" equals "lack," the "improvable" opposes the "degradable" state) is perhaps the ultimate measure of its depth and typicality. In both cases, we have a bid for taxonomy, whether actional or discursive, without an articulated teleology to orient and (con)textualize the procedure, that is, to build into it the (or a) sense of what differences make a difference, what regulari- ties or disturbances count as such, what equivalences resist equation in the telling/reading. Given the life of forms, better to have some debatable or partial model of what animates their relations (in, say, our narrative experience) than to have none offered, acknowledged, or wanted. The Poetics at least went some of the way under the guidance of one, first classing imitations together as uniquely pleasurable and then dividing them by their proper pleasures: tragedy from comedy by its catharsis, the chrono-logical from the episodic formation by its integrity and memorability, complex deformation by its surprise. Our two modern projects of narratology, however, look for guidance elsewhere, to supposedly harder rules, more "scientific" and less "subjective." Otherwise so divergent, neither project has anything like a


repertoire of narrative and narrativizable ends (forces, norms) that would coordinate-presumably also widen-its repertoire of means (forms, variants) into a supple many-to-many system of relations; and both pay accordingly in their respective domains.

Again, if the analyst's adherence to the chrono-logic of action still leaves the sequence a measure of reality-like unity and continuity, even without the appeal to artistic teleology, as in Propp et al., then the shift to surface forms of dechrono-logizing must tear the discourse into pieces: an analepsis here, a prolepsis there, now an ellipsis, now a

heterodiegesis, with nothing in the spirit of taxonomy to bridge, motivate, or interlink them. No principle of coherence runs through the bits and pieces of disorder themselves; much less, if possible, coherence with their orderly neighbors or, for that matter, with disorderly absentees and escapees, such as in medias res; least of all with the rest of the elements and patterns distributed along the given sequence. (Indeed, point of view apart, most of those elements-from character to language to thematics-never come into the Genettean picture at all, sequenced or unsequenced. The fragmentariness steadily rises in inverse proportion to the coverage.) As with discursive wholeness, so with actional: clean forgotten, apparently, is even the generic premise that all those fragments are supposed to be reassembled into a more or less continuous, early-to-late story. For how can they (re)form a

chronological line of happenings except by the progressive sense they make together in actual linear unfolding, especially when deformed? (We are in order, to quote the Bard, when we are most out of order.) Or, if "the Odyssey or the Recherche is only . . . an amplification (in the rhetorical sense) of statements such as Ulysses comes home to Ithaca or Marcel becomes a writer" (Genette 1980: 30), where is the amplified equivalent of such one-clause "minimal forms of narrative"? Where is the all-important generic commonality between the nuclear and the full-bodied, the accordant and the arbitrary, to come from? -Not from analysis without power of synthesis. Little wonder that Genette, despite frequent mentions of Proust's will to coherence and architec- ture, ends by refusing to attempt any "final 'synthesis' in which all the characteristic features of Proustian narrative noted [throughout] will meet and justify themselves to each other" (ibid.: 266). Rationalize the choice as he may, he cannot do otherwise than refuse, considering that the most elementary unity involved in the simplest readings and texts lies beyond his method's reach. The more anachronic in orientation, as well as generally taxonomized, the more atomistic the narrative- or, rather, the narratology.

"Traditional categories" were inadequate, one survey characteristi-

cally winds up, "until Genette pushed them to an Aristotelian extreme

by labeling everything" (Martin 1986: 126). "Extreme," yes; "Aristo-


telian," or "everything," hardly. In Aristotelian terms, such zest for classifying stops exactly where poetic (like any other) science begins, that is, with cause/effect reasoning, whereby to tell essentials from accidentals, to generalize particulars into rule-governed patterns, and to differentiate patterns by their relevant particulars: to obtain knowledge, in short, motivated and comprehensive networks of taxonomy included. Actually, failing such a rationale, Aristotle would not even consider an inventory the product of "formalism" but, rather, of low- level materialism, as he did the reduction of anything to a number of constituents. (Nor is it for nothing that the same practice equally offends against Structuralism's own articles of faith: for example, that a langue entails combinatory rules along with basic units.) Much as Aristotle would in principle deplore the "materialist" extreme, however, his own partial divorce of how's from why's anticipates it in a milder way, to the cost of the apparently "simple," the formally non- deviant sequence. The latter, as is so often the case, incurs and highlights in turn a still deeper failure, bearing on nothing less than narrative in general. To put it baldly, the fact that Aristotle assigns a distinctive function to the complex plot (surprise, intensifying pity and fear) but none to the simple (demoted for lacking in surprise value) reveals that he has no general theory of plot effect-of plot at work as such, hence of narrative and narrativity proper.

Doubtless a far-reaching (and in Aristotelian eyes, also most em- barrassing) conclusion, this, yet it is inescapable if you reconsider a set of data already noted. To be sure, "narrative" in the wide sense coincides with what the Poetics defines as mimesis, namely, the representation of an action. But this epoch-making definition, although it has persisted down through the ages in one guise or another, would not by itself satisfy Aristotle's own criteria: not as long as it remained mimetic without a poetic thrust to govern and distinguish the mimesis. (Leaving it representational, instead of appropriately teleological, would be like defining tragedy as the mimesis of a "serious" action, without regard for catharsis.) What, then, is the teleology of narrative; where the power and sense of narrativity?

The harder we look, the more evident the conclusion that Aris- totle, for once, nowhere supplies an answer, nor could he supply any on demand within the existing framework. Recall that the effects he does single out, and pairs with a form to match, belong to a quartet of distinct though intersecting categories, or crosscuts, of representation: (1) art at large; (2) tragedy; (3) whole; (4) complex plot. None of the effects behind the four, not even in combination, will do duty or otherwise provide for our missing fifth term, narrativity.

The "pleasure" given by art as mimesis does not qualify here, considering its all-inclusive scope. It equally attaches to artworks that no-


body would consider narrative, such as paintings of "animals and of dead bodies" (Poetics: chap. 4). Space, like time, is an object "we de-

light to contemplate" for the pattern and suggestiveness of its images; the world at rest offers as viable a field of mimesis as the world in motion. Therefore, art's paradox-that even what causes pain in life

gives pleasure in the rendering of life-holds across all representational variables. But if so, it obviously cannot distinguish the literary art of representation, least of all in its narrativity.

As "mimesis of a serious action," on the other hand, tragedy is, of course, essentially narrative, whether in epic or dramatic manner- and Aristotle would be happy to add the cinematic as well. But how will its rationale, catharsis, make any sense of other subgenres of narrative, beginning with comedy as the imitation of a "nonserious," and so non- cathartic, action? (Not to mention corpora ruled out of art, namely, historiography, or yet unborn, like melodrama.) If art's teleology is too

general for the purpose, then tragedy's is too specific. Next in line, the pattern of "whole" promises to strike the required

balance. Distinctive of all (and only) literary mimesis, it brings together tragedy and comedy under the law of Aristotelian poetics. Thereby, "wholeness" forms the condition of plot as an artifact vis-a-vis the episodic sequence; and it might accordingly appear to equate literariness with narrativity carried to the highest degree. So it might, except that, at this juncture, how's outshine and outrun why's. The analysis gets too involved in the formal mimetics of whole-making to spare much

thought for the functional poetics below the surface. There they remain buried: out of sight, not just because out of Aristotle's mind, but primarily because outside his system's ken. The chrono-logic of wholeness receives such, and so much, notice as will favor, first, its own title to artistic dignity in arrangement-as against historical or

history-like chronology-then its "complex" disarrangement in the

plot. And the drive to invidious distinction within either pair of se-

quences (chrono-logical vs. chronological, complex vs. simple) comes to obscure whatever features all the members may share as narrative

sequences. We thus find chapters 7 through 9 constraining the representation

of events into a determinate, well-formed ("beginning-middle-end") whole, without likewise particularizing the goals and effects of such

representation into something like a teleology of wholeness proper. The appearances to the contrary will not bear inspection, not even by the argument's own logic. Aristotle does argue for a number of poetic effects-above all, representational unity and ontological representativeness-supposed to explain or rationalize the model. Once you look closer, however, these turn out to have nothing particular to do with wholeness as such, that is, as a differential form imposed on an event-

Sternberg ? Telling in Time (11) 501

sequence, among all objects of mimesis. Rather than duly specifying why whole-making should be so and not otherwise, qua event formation, the analysis actually recommends the formation by appeal to constants of good world-making. The reasons given again prove to be artistic universals, all-embracing in scope because coextensive (notjust consistent) with "pleasure" at its most general-as Aristotle's earlier and ongoing glances at other arts indicate.

Take the most promising of those reasons, the art constant that appears to lend itself best to specification into properly narrative function:

It is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened but what may happen-what is possible according to the law of probability or neces-

sity .... The work of Herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with metre no less than without it. The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular. By the universal I mean how a person of a certain type will on occasion speak or act, according to the law of probability or necessity.... The particular is-for example-what Alcibiades did or suffered. (Ibid.: chap. 9)

This famous opposition of "poetry" (whole, literary mimesis) to "history" (episodic chronicling) ultimately rests on a single ground. The various pairs of terms in which it is drawn-"what may happen" versus "what has happened," "particular" versus "universal," more versus less "philosophical"-can replace one another because all oppose the presence to the absence of a strong logic of causality. Through tight causal concatenation of what happens, poetry builds the general into the particular, the rule or type into the enacted case, thereby afford- ing us in turn the enjoyment of inference ("learning") from the given case to the underlying generality by "the law of probability or necessity." For example, where "history" settles for telling "what Alcibiades did or suffered," poetry will also refer his doing or suffering to his (recorded or invented, explicit or implicit) features as "a person of a certain type." To use more modern terms, "wholeness" works for ontological representativeness in the product combined with enjoyable token-to-type suggestiveness in the process.

So far, so good-except that such an opposition of chrono-logic to chronology leaves out of account the shared ("chrono") axis and working of sequence itself. Granting everything else, therefore, the argument here would amount to a necessary, but not at all sufficient, condition of the "whole" as a temporal process and product. Yes, if "philosophy" deals with universals and "history" with singulars, "poetry" represents singularized universals, universalizable singulars; but then so does art at large, across all media, objects, and patterns,


simply by virtue of its defining feature, mimesis. A portrait, we recall, satisfies the human instinct for "learning or inferring" (as well as for

artistry, coherence, magnitude) no less than does a plot. So how will causal (con)sequentiality be marked off from the otherwise equivalent impact of spatial configuration: for example, from the inference-

making whereby the beholder of a portrait identifies the underlying type and delightedly exclaims, "Ah, that is he"? (ibid.: chap. 4). To

respond that the one operates on sequents and the other on existents is, of course, to beg the question: Where does the operational difference reside? For that matter, nowhere does the argument draw the line between sequence and coexistence in mimesis, temporal and spatial form, much less between narrative and descriptive force. As given, then, the effects of wholeness are at most enough to set the event- chain apart from the looser and allegedly inartistic chronicle series, but not from the rest of art, however devoid of narrativity or even

opposed to it. The specification becomes yet more conspicuous for its absence once

the Poetics goes on to distinguish the complex from the simple plot by virtue of its surprise effect. Plots being either complex or simple, what in turn distinguishes the simple variety? Why should we make, stage, read it? And again, granting for the sake of argument that the simple plot has nothing distinctive about it, except the lack of

complexity ("without peripety and discovery") which reduces it to the minimum function of the "whole," then what is this function-taken as the common denominator of complexity and simplicity in the temporal mimetic artifact? If an artwork is what an artwork does-Aristotle's basic premise-what must an artwork do through(out) the whole, vari-

ably outdone or redone in the finished plot? It must render or enchain a line of happenings, of course, but to what specifically linear effect in the telling? And how do we go from telling effect to telling discourse, from narrativity to narrative?

That the questions receive no answer, nor even a clue to one, pin- points the major hole within the system, complete with the reason for it (and we shall again find both paralleled in later versions, or rever-

sions). Hitherto admirably consistent, Aristotle's teleological analysis breaks down as soon as it approaches chronological ordering, first in the whole, then in the simple plot, only to resume with the positive, but special, argument for disordering in complexity. Ergo, no generic whole/plot/narrative function.

2.3. The Forest and the Trees, or: Where Do We Go from Here? So much, I think, remains beyond doubt, but is it still retrievable? No and yes, depending on one's commitment to the letter as against the spirit of the founding text: to the Poetics vis-a-vis narrative poetics within a general theory of literature and discourse.


No, if you want to retain the substance of Aristotle's argument -however liberally interpreted, updated, or adjusted to empirics- as the Chicago Neo-Aristotelians very much want to do. True, unlike their Renaissance and Neoclassical predecessors, they would be quick to disclaim idolatry or, with less justice, even the label of Neo- Aristotelianism. For example, having made a list of our debts, R. S. Crane (1953: 80; see also 1952: 17) goes on to profess allegiance to nothing but the Master's critical "language." So do his fellow Chica- goans, including his best-known pupil, Wayne Booth, himself author of a Rhetoric rather than a Poetics: "The method, not any one of Aris- totle's conclusions, is what is decisive" (Booth 1970: 115). Yet somehow that powerful "language" or "method" never comes down to them alone, empty-handed, as it were, and free to "speak" or inquire anew. Rather, it carries over a legacy of special interests, predispositions, even more or less ready-made "conclusions" about various substantive issues that may and must be reopened, if only by its own deepest premise. I mean the inquirer's (along with the artist's) right, indeed duty, of appeal from ends to means, from practical to taxonomic and teleological novelty. Despite important extensions and variations, however, manifold doctrinal attitudes persist, recur, often intersect in the Chicago anthology Critics and Criticism (Crane 1952) and elsewhere: not least suggestively where taken for granted. Such Aristotelian doc- trines bear on the range of poetic effects, on the typology of genres, on the status of medium versus object, on the comedy/tragedy division versus the narrative/non-narrative, mimetic/nonmimetic, or literary/ nonliterary, or on the merits of complex relative to simple plotting. Whether taken individually or together, these issues are all problem- atic and all relevant to our concerns, if only because the more fixed and numerous the subdivisions made after the Poetics, the less visible the unity of the narrative field. But a Neo-Aristotelian will hardly find it easy to challenge, say, Aristotle's sharp cut between literature and historiography-although the one now includes numberless episodic works and the other has gravitated toward well-made plots- because the chain reaction is liable to shake the entire inherited house of mimesis. (If anything, we now find barriers erected within narrative fiction itself, such as the "mimetic/didactic" polarity.) Nor, to my knowledge, has the complex/simple hierarchy been levelled, despite its being a more obvious and less dangerous target of functional re- valuation. On the contrary, Olson (1966: 52) upholds "the superiority of the complex plot"; Crane (1952) generalizes the makings of the comic plot from Tom Jones, a fine companion piece to Oedipus Rex; both Crane (1953: 172-73) and Booth (1963: esp. 188-90) would, typically, invest Macbeth with the dignity of a complex "recognition" plot, or would save it from the indignity of tragic simplicity, where Aristotle himself might well have hesitated. In matters such as these, perhaps


only the Renaissance tradition, with its counterparts in Formalist and Structuralist narratology, has a larger stake. For even more of their enterprise stands or falls on the "artificial" (or "poetic") order's departure from the "natural" (or "historical"), the sujet from the fabula, the discours from the histoire.

And, yes, I have nevertheless always believed, we can move from the Poetics toward a grand narrative poetics that it otherwise blocks by omission and commission, if we are willing to go back to the funda- mentals and work our way upward again. By this I mean suspending all commitments, large or small, other than to the functional spirit of analysis, with the generic primacy of "action" as its corollary, and

proceeding from there. A bare start and a tall order, perhaps, but not

quite so bare or so tall as may appear, least of all nowadays. Building on this minimum, after all, we have already drawn from

Aristotle himself (as well as from his supposed heirs and counterparts) a set of positive and, especially, negative lessons about such a poetics; and still more remain to be drawn as we go along. Nowhere do these lessons throw into question the viability, any more than the value, of the enterprise. On the contrary, even the most negative of them suggest that (and, to some extent, how) the Poetics itself, given its method, could or should reason better than it does. (In what ensues, it will become still clearer how Aristotle, or an Aristotelian, might have gone a considerably longer way toward a genuine narrative theory of the limited "mimetic" kind he envisages, chrono-logical whole and all, by adding a few essentials or simply by dispensing with nonessentials.) And building on those lessons in turn, we should be in a position to do even better today, by reference to the best that has been achieved since then-and the best is fine as well as rich indeed, especially on matters of relative detail and of large theory. In a sense, too fine and too rich for its own health, even apart from the ills of interdisciplinary noncoordination.

On the one hand, the refinements tend to come at the expense of

unity, the field's and the text's. Whatever variety happens to enjoy privileged treatment (e.g., fiction, novel, verbal art, telling out of time, limited and self-limited viewpoint, or the respective opposites) loses touch in analysis with the rest of the genre, as even its own elements do with their overall structure. Knowing and caring so much about

specialized detail, we are now only too liable to neglect its relation to the basics of narrative and hence to lose our bearings: the old story of not seeing the forest for the trees. On the other hand, possibly at the same time, we have become so involved in general theories-

regarding signs, art, literature, language, discourse, reference, read-

ing, culture, ideology-that the particular generic object of study will often slip out of focus. Now as before, of course, some would defocus

Sternberg * Telling in Time (I1) 505

narrative in the first place-reducing it instead to a wider common denominator of the kind just mentioned-and they are welcome to the consequences of reduction. Odd as it may sound, however, much of what counts as narratology (point-of-view analysis alone would supply endless examples from all schools) is not particularly about narrative either, because it is not anchored in narrativity: another old story, dating back to Aristotle's curiously portrait-like "whole," of not seeing the trees for the forest. Unsought and unsuspected, the consequences of divorcing how's from why's, narratology from narrativity, are nonetheless unfortunate. A functional theory of narrative offers a principled alternative-and-corrective to both extremes-the atomistic and the reductionist-so that, once developed, the theorist could re- view their achievements and turn them to the best account within an integrated framework. But for ways of developing beyond the stage in the argument that we have now reached, such a theory must look elsewhere.

We have already seen enough of atomism (whether in the manner of a Propp, divorcing the told action from the telling/reading activity with a view to a pure morphology, or of a Genette, splitting and classifying the discourse into forms of deviance from the story with no sense of generic purpose, hence no force for inclusiveness and continuity) to establish its fundamental hopelessness in this regard. Yet much the same picture, down to the discrepancy between intention and execution, unfolds at the opposite extreme: I do not mean just among those who would assimilate narrative (or an aspect of it) to some larger category, such as literature or writing or politics, but also in less expected quarters, reductionist despite themselves.

Of these lapses into reduction, already anticipated by the Poetics' skipping over narrativity, more later; for one modern counterpart, however, we may now glance at the idea of "narrative point," introduced by the sociolinguist Labov (1972) and recently imported into literary study (beginning with Mary Louise Pratt [1977]).17 Labov would seem poles apart from Aristotle in discipline, in subject matter (Harlem "natural narrative"), in valuation (chronology promoted), in everything but the functional approach to storytelling, which he actually claims to have originated. Most important of all, he asserts, is "what we term the evaluation of the narrative: the means used by the narrator to indicate the point of the narrative, its raison d'etre: why it was told and what the narrator is getting at" (Labov 1972: 366). Nevertheless, one finds Labov, in turn, oblivious to the generic point or anything remotely like it.

If we reconsider his minimum definition (p. 464) in this light, the

17. See the recent evaluation in Chatman (1990: esp. 310-19).


idiosyncratic reference and features that he would impose on "narrative" now pale beside the key element missing within the boundaries

imposed. That Labov comes close to depopulating the genre (with in- medias-res telling singled out for invidious exclusion) would leave his own project narrow but otherwise unexceptionable, if only he man-

aged to focus and coordinate the workings of what remains: to generalize "the point . . . the raison d'etre" for which the "means" of "evaluation" operate within the one variety that still qualifies as narrative. But he doesn't even try. What, for instance, makes chronology so critical that it becomes criterial? Why does "narrative" invariably look for its point to this of all orderings, and in sixfold Abstract-to- Coda alignment at that? Far from being addressed, the issue does not even arise, as though the six parts in their (sharply observed) linguistic detail could make sense without regard to the function of the whole. Nor does Labov so much as ask why any "point," generic or otherwise, requires narrativizing in the first place. If the point happens to lie in "self-aggrandizement" (ibid.: 368), for example, why shouldn't the Harlem speaker in question make it by way of self-portrayal rather than storytelling? As with the inferential pleasure given by Aristotle's

plot and portrait alike, what marks off narrative from descriptive self-

aggrandizement? Unthinkingly, and all too typically, Labov assimilates narrative to an all-discourse function, irreducible tellability to cross-

generic representability. Again, compared with self-aggrandizement and the like, Aristotle

has much better rationales ("points") to offer on either side of nar-

rativity: not only the (all-inclusive) pleasure in artistic imaging, but also the (over-exclusive) surprise in complex ordering. Aristotle does

put a premium on surprise as a (or rather, the) contributing factor to tragedy's catharsis; but although this valuation turns out to be too

high in terms of his own project, it remains a good plea for complexity and, if anything, needs to be raised still higher within a more general framework. Actually, as the horizon widens from tragic to narrative

plotting and temporality, we would do well to invert Aristotle's scale of affective priorities between catharsis and surprise.

This is because pity-and-fear, so important to him and shared by all tragic plots, has nothing special to do with time beyond its dependence on the mimesis of an action, that is, the omnipresent change of fortune. Any extras required by it, on top of this minimum "whole," concern and explain purely semantic features, such as a certain deed

(act of suffering) performed or contemplated between certain agents (relatives, friends). Incorporated into the whole, these components are enough to unroll Aristotelian tragedy's peculiar narrative: someone's injuring or being about to injure someone close to him, with the

appropriate impact on the audience as well as the parties directly in-


volved. So catharsis ultimately belongs to the represented matter in the world (pitiful-and-fearful objects) rather than to any manner or strategy of representation in the discourse: to the sphere of the told rather than the telling, which can at best help where, and only where, the whole gets "complicated" in the plotting.

On the other hand, I would argue, surprise is not only among the few primary, universal narrative interests-together with curiosity and suspense-but also among the still fewer effects that absolutely live by temporal maneuvering. Aside from any intrinsic importance, I therefore believe, tracing its operations promises to throw invaluable light on the temporality/teleology/narrativity crux, and especially on two questions that have arisen all along. Methodologically, it provides a standard whereby to distinguish true from false claims made for dechronologizing and, even more elusive, true claims for dechronologizing from false claims against narration by chronology. Theoretically, surprise leads straight to the heart of narrative dynamics, uniquely interrelating the communicative with the mimetic process.

The point is somewhat complicated, or so it may look in the present state of affairs, as well as being central to my entire argument. I will try to make and generalize it briefly, though, by drawing together some threads from my earlier work on narrative interest as the key to the genre's dynamics of ordering and reading (see, e.g., Sternberg 1973a, 1973b, 1974, 1978, 1981, 1985, 1990b; for a thoughtful extension to film, see Bordwell 1985). Leaving the flesh there, the skeleton should also become easier to trace from the twofold viewpoint required here: the workings of narrative temporality and its still wider implications for defining narrative/narrativity, for integrating narrative with extranarrative features, as for other tasks and challenges that cannot be met except by the teleo-logic wanted in narrative theory. Finally, considering that Aristotle for his own reasons does privilege surprise, the first and virtually the only one among poetic system builders to do so,18 it would be appropriate to conduct the initial part of the argument in the closest possible relation to his own system, if mostly by way of opposition.

18. A rare non-Aristotelian exception is E. M. Forster (1962 [1927]), where the effect migrates to the domain of ethos: the line drawn between simple and complex plot finds its equivalent in that between "flat" (therefore predictable) and "round" (hence surprising) character. Despite Forster's hostility to Aristotle, reciprocated in advance, the two notions and the two domains maintain close links, which would repay study. A few hints about this plot/character nexus in its temporal context will appear below. More entangled, theoretically and historically, is the question of Shklovsky's "making strange": a near relative, as I called it, and a topic for another "Telling in Time."


3. Narrative in Its Narrativity

3.1. The Narrative Dynamics of Recognition: Surprise as Interest/Gap/Plot between Times

Granting for the moment that narrative surprise manifests itself in acts of discovery and peripety, then, where exactly does it come from? Surely not from those acts as experienced by the characters within the narrated world-whenever, according to Aristotle, ignorance dra- matically turns into knowledge or happiness into unhappiness-because here lurks their surprise, not necessarily ours. The two may, but need not, run parallel: theirs derives from the living, ours from the telling about their living. The action that the dramatis personae go through is one thing; the plot that the artist makes (with "compli- cations" superimposed on that action at will), and the reader makes sense of, is quite another. Whatever the dynamics of happening in the world-the shifts from one represented state to the next-all narrative effects as such attach to the dynamics of its communication in the text, as given, read, processed, from moment to moment.

The foregoing paragraph already repairs three of the Poetics' mis-

placed emphases, all of them doctrinal, fundamental, and widely recurrent ever since; and nowhere are they more concentrated and

symptomatic than in the treatment of surprise. These three emphases bear on communicative power, partnership, and processing.

3.1.1. Communicative power. By "power" I mean the play (or balance) of representation and communication: mimetics and poetics, world and discourse, happening and telling, fiction and function, surface and deep motivation, the referential and the rhetorical. These pairs of terms are roughly, and usefully, interchangeable, all converging on the two forces or faces of teleo-logic: the one lifelike (e.g., the advance from the hero's character as cause to his misfortune or surprise as effect); the other born of art and going in reverse (the work's need for

tragic misfortune or surprise effect to "cause" the hero's character, i.e., leading the tragedian to invest him with such features as will generate the needed action or reaction in the guise of human probability). How do the two rival teleo-logics stand in relation to each other? Can either one operate independently, in (say) factual reporting versus nonobjec- tive art? Which prevails when it comes (as it easily may outside realism) to a tug-of-war?

A major critical battleground over the ages, these and kindred questions can again be traced back to the Poetics, which exerts its usual

spell even where overtly resisted. (For details, see my study [Sternberg 1983b] of the lines of divergence, with a proposal for an integrated theory.) In narrative as well as other genres, therefore, it is imperative to establish the autonomous, indeed dominant, power of communica-


tion because Aristotle (and many after him, from Renaissance criticism, through the Jamesian theory of the novel, to present-day narratology) brings it under representation. To his mind, that is, the poetics needs building into or beneath the mimetics, with a view to a unity in which the functional and the fictional chains of cause and effect will run together-their inverse logics kept in peaceful coexistence and concurrence. For example, while it is really tragic operations (catharsis, misfortune, heightening by peripety/discovery) that produce Oedipus's character, hubris and all, the character in the finished work will nevertheless appear to produce them naturally by his own psycho- dramatic momentum; the art objectified, and so dissimulated, in the life, the final in the formal cause. This would give mimesis something like veto power, hence real if negative control, because everything else must go through it and assume its guise, that of "necessary or probable sequence," above all. The sequence of devices and pleasures and effects must hide under the reverse sequence of events actually made by and for it; the telling as plotted must find its motivation throughout in the happening as lived and enacted; the dynamics of our experience from start to finish, in the dramatis personae's. Aristotle, accordingly, so focuses the common reference of "whole" and "plot" to the world- in-motion, say, as to obscure their distinct force, true priorities, and protean interplay within the discourse composed about that world.

But how else, if not through such interplay, would it be possible for narrative to vary the relations between the hero's and our own adventures, all the way from identity in knowledge, understanding, disclosure (e.g., equal ignorance followed by equally astonishing enlightenment), to polar contrast (ignorant hero vs. knowing reader, or vice versa)? Again, we may wonder, what else could motivate (i.e., determine for the author, explain to the reader) the choice made among the range of variants, if not the end sought by the discourse (e.g., em- pathy vs. irony) and manifested in the shaping of the whole into the appropriate plot? And why should even plotted discourse confine or slant its operations to manipulating the "whole," when it enjoys access to both nondevelopmental elements (e.g., description) and nonrepresentational resources (e.g., purely verbal, analogical, or intertextual structure)? Indeed, what is to prevent such a work from minimizing the role and salience of world- and whole-making in the interests of discourse-making, so as to adjust the generic requirement of narrative as action mimesis (answered in the plot) to its own dominant concern with character, setting, society, ideas, language, abstract design, self- reference, or whatever? Isn't it exactly here that the narrative point may come to subserve the point of an individual narrative discourse or discourse-type? All this goes to show, I believe, not just the power but the priority of communication vis-a-vis representation: the one's


artistic teleology controls (and at will disturbs or demotes) the other's mimetic ordering and much more besides.

That Aristotle weights the two forces otherwise has proved most unfortunate. His own priorities originate in the very definition of art as mimesis, whereby there is no communication without representation, no literary ("plot") activity without a lifelike ("whole") action to start from and to operate on, no discourse line without story line, so that the former gets mistakenly subordinated or even assimilated to the latter. Mistakenly, because assuming that representation must

appear in art-and a represented action in literary art-why need it

appear throughout the artwork, much less in a central and constrain-

ing role? It is as if the definitional priority of the mimetic sequence within narrative carried over to the workings and options of poetic art: a beguiling yet discernible non sequitur.

As a typical consequence, the surprise elements get attached by fiat to "the internal structure of the plot, so that what follows should be the necessary or probable result of the preceding action" (Poetics: chap. 10). One may get the impression that for surprise to erupt and overtake the reader in the plot as actually communicated, it must be enacted in the world itself by way of an abrupt change of fortune

(peripety) and/or awareness (discovery) that befalls the dramatis personae themselves (e.g., Oedipus, Rastignac, Strether, Gatsby). But why need the discourse run parallel to the action, the art gear itself to the (or a) life? The condition is gratuitous, for we may equally experience surprise about what the characters have long known, expected, or

undergone (just as their peripety/discovery may be our irony): Gene- sis 20, in its last verse, thus springs the sexual plagues inflicted by God on Abimelech, beginning with Sarah's captivity; and One Hundred Years

of Solitude lures us into presuming Colonel Buendia's death through the reference to his being stood against the wall. The two options differ in the presence or absence, not of surprise along the narrative

(plotted, finished) sequence, but of mimetic motivation for surprise in terms of the narrated (whole, chrono-logical) sequence. Aristotle insists on such a linkage, or anchorage, because he will not grant communication any principled independence from representation: poetic teleology must work under the cover of mimetic teleology. Still less will he recognize actionless literature or nonrepresentational art, where

surprise typically breaks free of all this bondage without relinquish- ing its distinctive property, namely, the shock of the unpredictable. Rather, the effect manifests itself there in forms, levels, and orders of discourse other than those of the world-in-motion, such as the dynamics of sound, style, theme, or counterpoint-all equally twistable out of their expected deployment. Throughout, within or beyond representation, the foiling of expectation is a peculiar sequential constant; its locus and guise, a protean variable.


As always, the handling of surprise brings out even more general tendencies. Observe that Aristotle's repertoire of poetic effects is much smaller than that of mimetic patterns and is also conceptualized accordingly: assimilated to the representation, as though undefinable, because unrealizable, in its own communicative terms. For instance, to take a crosscut seemingly far removed, note how he translates (and so narrows) the entire issue of aesthetic discourse length to objective event duration. He begins with some sharp, groundbreaking insights into the constraint on the upper and lower limits of extension from the side of coherent retention; yet he does not finish by specifying the "length that can be easily embraced by the memory" in the same perceptual, psycho-poetic terms or the like (as when Poe finds the ideal tale to be one that is readable at a single sitting). Instead of the artistic cause, the conclusion specifies and encodes the mimetic result in the form of the whole: an innocent "metonymic" switch, you might think, even commendable for replacing psychology with hard textuality. Except that the two terms get so conflated in the switch as to exclude everything outside the whole's chain of events, from descriptive segments (a fortiori texts) to all nonrepresentational elements, patterns, and linearities. Don't these have their own constraints and resources of assimilability in discourse-time-such as my nonchronological mechanisms of sequence-which must somehow integrate with the represented chain along the dynamics of overall communication? For all that, Aristotle defines the limits of the artwork's "proper magnitude" by appeal not to our temporal perception of an object, but to the temporal object of perception: "The sequence of events, according to the law of probability or necessity, will admit of a change from bad fortune to good, or from good fortune to bad" (ibid.: chap. 7). As with duration, of course, so with direction. If Aristotle likewise ob- jectifies and channels surprise into discovery/peripety, he has no term whatever for the effect of a simple plot on the audience. Instead of describing its course as predictable, let alone suspenseful, he says that it moves in a single direction of change (ibid.: chap. 10).

This mimeticism has persisted down the ages in numerous shapes and schools, some even more extreme than the original. Renaissance and Neoclassical dogma would have the playwright, in Aristotle's name, superimpose the unities of time and place on that of action, with a view to maximizing the art/life concordance to the point of illu- sive verisimilitude. By a similar rage for lifelike motivation all over, only geared to internals here, the Jamesian school canonized the unity of perspective: the focus of interest (e.g., Strether) then doubles as the focus of narration; the narrator's maneuvering for effect (e.g., sequential play of ambiguity), as the reflector's groping for enlightenment. Differently but hardly less representation-minded, Propp sees nothing except the logic of action, whereby narrative no longer merely


appeals or even conforms, but returns, to nature. As a consequence, to reformulate our earlier findings, his one-track analysis screens out the corresponding track that all his predecessors would only dissimulate in its guise: the mimetic line of "functions" takes over the artistic. Propp thus incorporates discovery into his folktale sequence (1968: 60-62, 71-73) and with it, presumably, surprise value, but without so much as glancing at any correlation between story and text, cast and audience. Why bother with such variable cross-references where discovery, like all "functions," supposedly has its invariant existence, causes, and effects in the world alone? The attachment of "function" to the logic of action is among Propp's most unhappy bequests to narratology (above all, when mistaken for an updated Aristotelian doctrine). The

very limited reference of the term has proved a conceptual liability ever since, and the results show in the analysis of "high" as well as of "low" or folk narrative, their opposition included. Here arises all the loose, often complimentary talk about "nonfunctional" or "nonteleo-

logical" details, characters, incidents, even plots-meaning, in fact, that those reality units are irreducible to a Propp-like actional logic, mimetic role, etc., yet ostensibly alleging their principled resistance to

any design, direction, or teleology, as befits some modern credo. Evi-

dently, the narrated world may be without end in either sense of telos, limit or purpose; but the narrative discourse is always end-directed in both senses, if only with a view to narrating the "endlessness" of the world: its circular time, say, or its absurdity. To escape the teleology of communication altogether, such an ontology would have to remain untold.

Nor do the recent slogans against mimesis, as opposed to the play of discourse, always manage to loosen the hold it has maintained on critical theory and practice since Russian Formalism. Thus Genette (1980) would base analepsis, prolepsis, etc., on the supposedly objective facts of anachrony vis-a-vis story-time, to the detriment of all indirections structured into the same effects (e.g., analepsis transformed into prospective working, prolepsis into retrospectiveness, or chronology into

either), as though the favored departures from the story were not themselves all (and many demonstrably nothing but) constructs of and from the discourse. Bakhtin (1981 [1934]), on the "chronotope," even fails to mark off the reader's surprise from the hero's, dramatized from purely discursive recognition; nor is it an accident, seeing that his vigorous critique (Bakhtin 1985 [1928]) of Formalism's excesses overreaches itself in turn by dismissing the sujetlfabula antithesis.19

19. It is therefore odd to find his editor, Michael Holquist, attributing to me of all people the belief that the novel "might lend itself to tree diagrams and Freytag pyramids" (Bakhtin 1981 [1934]: xxx): the latter have been specifically rejected, in


Likewise, the early Barthes's (1977) three-level program for Struc- tural Analysis compromises its improvement over the Proppian single level by yoking together actional with narrational units under the term "function," which Propp himself kept for the former; and the post- structuralist Barthes's (1974) "hermeneutic code" appears to mix up afresh our own problem-solving exigencies, operations, and adventures in the reading with those of the agents in the living. On the highest level, the continuity with the first poetics shows in the mimeti- cist definition of the subject matter, narrative itself. Modern theory generally follows Aristotle in defining narrative as a represented given (one or several events, change of state, and the like) rather than as the product of communicative/interpretive moves, interests, strategies (discourse forces, in short) brought to bear on representation. The difference is radical, as I have already suggested and will soon bring to a point in and through the temporalities of narrative interest.

3.1.2. Communicative partnership. On top of the (im)balance of power between mimetic and discursive teleology, moreover, comes that found within the latter itself as a two-sided affair transacted between author and audience, telling and reading. Of the two parties to communication, Aristotle as a rule centralizes the producer's viewpoint and work at the expense of the receiver's. Typically, although founded on effects or affects, his account follows the route of their production, moving from whole (the chrono-logical point of departure for narrative arrangement) to plot (the finished narrative structure), never the other way. With poetics defined as an art of making, small wonder his theory addresses itself to the plot's construction by the artist out of some whole, not to its reconstruction, much less its interpretation, by the reader into some whole.

To Aristotle, for example, the main issue is how the tragedian, given a suitably whole action, devises a complex plot in the interests of surprise; but it would not occur to him to ask how the audience, once caught by surprise, works back from the given plot to the underlying whole that has been perceptibly complicated out of order and how the audience motivates the discordance by appeal to tragic effect. That such motivation on our part remains hypothetical, if not downright ambiguous (e.g., in the face of the unexpected, have we been misdi- rected before or just inattentive?), will suggest that the two activities, the constructor's and the reconstructor's, are not simple mirror-images but complementary engagements with discourse. Whatever their common ground, each party to the transaction has its own set of givens,

the very essay (Sternberg 1974) he cites, for perpetrating and all but perpetuating the same confusion between levels to which Bakhtin is liable.


problems, means/end resources and choices: their distinctiveness only sharpens in the art of sequence, which keeps it alive and may even twist it anew, down to the last word. Then, and then alone, does the

dissymmetry built into temporal communication straighten out, so that plot as the author's making and plot as the reader's sense-making ideally come together.

Here, I trust that Aristotle's followers and fellows in one-sidedness

throughout history, down to the present, spring to mind so readily that one example will do. Those acquainted with Russian Formalism

may recall how firmly, often flauntingly, its seminal analyses have been anchored in the producer-as-maker. The best and most programmatic of these include Boris Eichenbaum's (1965: 119-42) "How Gogol's 'The Overcoat' Is Made" and Shklovsky's (1990 [1929]: 72-100) "The

Making of Don Quixote" or, in practice if not in name, "The Novel as

Parody: Sterne's Tristram Shandy (ibid.: 147-70). Their ties to Aristotle are closer than one would gather from these poeticians' objections to

being identified with the first poetics. Besides quoting extensively from Aristotle in The Theory of Prose, Shklovsky incorporates the two devices of surprise, peripety/recognition, as well as enthroning their near relative: making sujet as "making strange."

By the same token, however, reversing the Aristotelian focus, as in much "reader response" criticism, just incurs the corresponding loss-or worse, when performed on doctrinal grounds ("the death of the author") rather than for new emphasis. To tip the balance on the other side is to substitute interpretation for production, yet still at the

expense of the realities of communication in time. No matter how lib- erated or creative our reading of The Ambassadors may be, we cannot

help experiencing surprise in the face of the pivotal river scene; our

surprise necessarily opposes James's foreknowledge and highlights the art of crooked disclosure that he has practiced on us, as on his hero; therefore, slogans apart, the interpretive extreme offers no more of an escape from correlating the two viewpoints than does the produc- tive extreme. Indeed, the undeniable (because factual, epistemological) dissymmetry of such effects and relations, built into the twofold

sequence of narrative, may explain why "reader response" criticism tends to avoid or marginalize them-in favor of extranarrative domains (language, world-picture, configuration, "meaning" in general) where readers can exercise their freedom with more plausibility. The last counsel of despair is to attack the sequential principle itself: as when Barthes preaches the free "reversal" of all given linearities-

especially the "proiaretic" and the "hermeneutic," both encoded in narrative-so that the reader can himself turn writer, or "writerly," in producing signification at will. Ironically, having taken every imaginable liberty with the narrative under analysis, as he has in S/Z with


Balzac's "Sarazine," he still never quite manages to overthrow the generic constraints on time, hence on our reading under authorial direction.

3.1.3. Communicative processing. The art of sequence, then, radicalizes to varied effect both the dissymmetry between the parties in communication and the gradual, if zigzag or retrospective, movement toward symmetry, on the way to the last word. The more controlled the route, the more meaningful the play en route from start to finish-and in narrative, of all sequential arts, as meaningful for the implied as for the dramatized players. This in turn brings to the fore the process of telling/reading in relation to that of happening. Or rather, it should bring, since the Poetics' defocusing of communication, even from the maker's side, leads to a highly selective regard for the step-by-step march of discourse, plot routes included. The result here is the absence of a plot analysis comparable and complementary to the whole's all-embracing logic of action: an extreme change of fortune propelled in either direction (happiness to unhappiness or the reverse), from determinate beginning through middle(s) to determinate end, by a necessary or probable sequence. While the Aristotelian represented whole expands into a global process, the higher communicative force or teleo-logic of plot shrinks at its "complex" best into two midpoint junctures in glorious isolation, namely, the surprise turns of peripety and/or discovery. As officially defined, both form sudden, hence local, intensifying twists, at the expense of plot scope; both also relate to the middle, and without exhausting it at that, since they constitute two among many intermediate links. Even given a sequence with those star turns duly mid-posed, therefore, what keeps the plot going (if only on its way toward, through, between, or beyond them) and us with it?

Further, among the master strategies of twisting in time, Aristotle knows no more than one, and he localizes the one he does know. To use terms I shall soon refine, this is the one where the unperceived twisting of antecedents sets us up for their abrupt untwisting, in the interests of surprise. But an equally strategic mate remains to be explored, where the initial twisting is perceptible and the eventual untwisting expected, with a view to the play of "curiosity": we readers know that we do not know and proceed accordingly, looking back to the past for clues and forward to the future for rounded closure. Aristotle might well have ranged both interests or strategies under the complex plot, even on a rigorous definition. For one thing, each unfolds a discontinuous late- before-early sequence; for another, they join forces as early as his own paradigms in Homeric epic and Sophoclean tragedy.

As it is, the movement of the complex plot itself remains largely untraced and undetermined, as if it had neither resources nor work-


ings other than the two surprise highlights-indeed, as if it could not even expand them from points (acts, scenes) into processes (activities, scenarios) with beginning-to-middle-to-end trajectories of their own, such as the all-encompassing discovery ordeals of Oedipus Rex, Tom Jones, Ghosts, or The Ambassadors. And in regard to patterns other than the complex, this drastic selectiveness modulates into silence. The simple plot, enacting a unidirectional change of fortune in conformity with the "whole," does not receive from Aristotle even local affective features, devices, choices. Surprise is out of its reach by definition, and suspense value, let alone a work-length suspense strategy, by notable omission-an omission all the more notable, as I have already argued, for precluding any functional common denominator of narrative, any teleology of narrativity across plot forms.

Outside tragedy, in short, Aristotle's plot teleologies fall between

overgenerality and overspecificity: either diffuse artistic universals

(pleasure, coherence, magnitude) binding on all formations-across the entire field of mimesis, the visual included-or pinpoint extras

(e.g., shock effect) kept for certain event deformations. And if the entire middle, that is, the properly narrative range on this axis, remains bare, discourse axes other than plot are left yet barer, since the

approach excludes them altogether from temporal development and

impact. What keeps those discourse lines going, whether with, across, or against the line of plot?

Nothing, apparently, and for a doctrinal reason: about the workings of nonrepresentational sequence-above all, language deployment in or out of narrative-the Poetics has almost nothing to say, because it

grants representation an absolute monopoly on sequencing. There- fore, the Poetics does not (and cannot) address the surprise twists, or the movements from tension to release, executed by poetry on the levels of sound and syntax and sense as well as of reference. Nor would any other process-building measures be addressed, including the repertoire of nonchronological (scalar, deictic, thematic, suprasequential, etc.) ordering, unless these measures operated strictly by and for the logic of events-no matter what their influence on the event's own deployment or on the work's overall structuring in or out of time. How could it be otherwise, if the theory would in principle allow such orderings neither a discourse momentum of their own nor a route to integration with the plot's?

Here also lies the answer to the queries raised by Chatman (1978) about Crane's (1952) Neo-Aristotelian typology among plots of action, of character, and of thought, according to the locus of change. For

example, "Whose 'thought,' the implied author's, character's, narrator's?" Chatman asks (1978: 87n). The answer should now be obvious: the character's thought may form a plot, but not the author's, which


remains outside the field, and so the line, of mimesis, and not the narrator's, if left undramatized. "And why," Chatman goes on to ask, "stop with the first three? Why are there not plots of diction too ... or plots of spectacle and melody?" (ibid.). Surely, the answer is that the first three Aristotelian elements are all objects of imitation, hence by nature developmental and plottable, whereas the second three are not, belonging rather to the means or the manner of imitation. With regard to either question, then, the element must supposedly entail (as does action) or enable (as does character or thought) mimetic processing in order to qualify at all for artistic processing: either twofold sequential dynamics or (as with diction, melody, spectacle, authorial thought, even in the more flexible, Neo-Aristotelian scheme) nothing.

Once again, we find a narrow thrust and an awkward choice, possibly more disappointing than ever because most removed from the genre's peculiar life in time. But then who can afford to throw stones? For all the advantages that have accrued since Aristotle-his own achievements and shortcomings to learn from, millennia of experi- ment and experience with narrative upon which to draw, an unprecedented command of detail with which to back an advance-his modern successors have, on the whole, done still less to generalize the rationale, the workings, the coordination of the processes involved. If anything, fragmentation has instead become the rule-a leading method, at times doctrinal, among narratologists of otherwise varying interests, such as Proppians versus Shklovskians. One or another of the multiple sequences composing narrative thereby gets isolated from the rest, only to be broken down into its components and often left at that: decomposition with no visible way, or even generic title, to recomposition.

Recall how Propp does not quite manage to deploy his small and styl- ized corpus along a uniform chrono-logic, despite the liberty to keep so much out of the one level he would sequence: the world in action, minus character or setting. Conversely with others' dismissal of such action as artless beside its wrenching into a "sum of devices" in the finished narrative: Shklovsky himself would marvel at the lengths to which his early iconoclasm (1990 [1929]) has since been carried. Thus discourse narratology a la Genette comes down at best to a deviation- favoring analysis without the power of synthesis; and Barthes (1974) would make an ideology of such dismemberment by appeal to an ideal of modernist writing, admittedly unachievable in the face of narrative's will to unity, chronological and otherwise formative. So either enterprise, to put it mildly, "involve[s] neglecting textual energy and movement" (Pavel 1990: 350). But elsewhere that neglect arises from preconceptions and priorities much different, even diametrically opposed, to both. Thus, if a narratology centered on verbal narrative


(as story or discourse) oddly makes no provision for the line of words, among other absentees, you might almost expect to find a counterpart that brushes aside story line and anachronic discourse themselves for the glory of the turns of language. An example would be Stanley Fish's (1971: 22ff., 340ff.) Surprised by Sin, which locates the meaning and true form of Paradise Lost in the reader's (surprise-full) experience of the poem, as opposed to its "outer or physical form": the "Aristote- lian superstructure-beginning, middle, end," the flow of events, the

epic plunge in medias res, all are deemed "incidental and even irrelevant." This amounts to denarrativizing the narrative: if "there is no

plot except the plot of reader's education," then the epic might as well have been a piece of tortuous description or argumentation concern-

ing "sin," to the reader's equal "surprise." (So might the gospel tale sermonized by Lancelot Andrews in Fish [1973].) We have come back

by a different route to Aristotle's or Labov's portrait-like action, except that this time the narrativity would be considered well lost; indeed, the Fish-type analysis must lose it somehow, or else the epic (or the

gospel) would resist the practice of "affective stylistics" modelled on alien kinds of writing, non-narrative surprise included.

Beyond any other single measure, all of these exercises in decom-

position go to show that the discipline, pronounced mature by pro- ponents and moribund by opponents, is actually in its infancy. No amount of specialized detail will offset, or even camouflage for long, the escape from the most basic realities of narrative at work to whatever happens to suit one's tastes or tools. "Growing up" accordingly hinges, above all, on inverting the point of the exercise: learning to live and deal with the composite world/discourse sequence that the genre variously, yet invariably, unrolls before us as a condition of being and

becoming, sense-making, even of decomposability. My own theory, as will soon emerge, not only keeps the two omni-

present (world vs. discourse) dynamics apart in principle and their ver- satile interaction necessary and peculiar to narrative; it also suggests how every extranarrative (intrinsically unplottable) component lends itself to narrativizing. But for such a theory to develop, we first need to redress the three strategic and persistent Aristotelian imbalances re-

garding communication, namely: power, partnership, and processing. Put to the test of surprise, their common representational bias is un-

mistakably exposed, for better and worse, producing the most seminal account of what happens in the narrated world, while localizing or for the most part blanking out its relation to what happens in narrative discourse as such.

As such, I emphasize, because it is the relation between the two forces

(sequences, processes) that holds the key to narrativity-not the Aris- totelian imbalance or its reversal. To be sure, communication by way


of sequenced discourse is all that we actually encounter and progressively experience. Yet this would be equally true of whatever presents itself in time, including the least narrativized description that unfolds a static object piecemeal or, for that matter, the least "objective" music. What distinguishes narrative effects as such from all others is less their play over time than their interplay between times. For it is the interplay of the represented and the presented dynamics, whether in "iconic" concordance or "arbitrary" tension, that sets narrative apart as a discourse with a double time-pattern. And among narrative effects, surprise evidently lives on tension, because a sequence communicating the events in their proper order of occurrence would reveal all and so leave nothing unexpected.

To begin with, therefore, we must supply the missing link in Aris- totle by referring the surprise values and elements of the "complex" plot to its divergence from the orderly "whole" (or "fabula" or "histoire," the logic holding regardless of label). But even such divergence does not by itself generate surprise; in the form of anticipation, say, it may instead work for suspense. So we must proceed to mark off this surprise-generating temporal divergence from other varieties by appeal to its peculiar dynamics of presentation.

The bare essentials of the process will do for a start. What makes the difference is the covertness whereby the text manipulates sequence for the purpose of withholding and distorting antecedents in the telling, until the time comes to spring (and, at will, to repair) the fact of misdirection. There is no shock of discovery without a hidden gap in plot continuity for the reader to discover behind time, no reversal of narrative expectation without a more or less imperceptible reversal of chronology in the narrative: late before early, effect before cause, deed before doer's (real) motive, world-stuff before world-picture, always secretly distributed to give a first and false impression-persuasive yet at best partial-before full and true knowledge is attained, if only knowledge of the trick played by art on our ignorance, credulity, stock responses, habits of reading and thinking.

By this "dynamics of recognition," as I call it, Oedipus Rex or Tom Jones or Light in August twists our route to the hero's origins, as does Njals saga to the unyielding pride in the heart of the peaceable Gun- narr, Emma to the exposition of the secret engagement, A Raw Youth to the awareness of the fateful letter and its purpose, Ulysses to Bloom's sexual oddities, the detective story to the identity of the murderer ("the least suspected person"), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold to the triple cross behind the spy's defection. Whether from the author's or the reader's side, the process of twisted communication remains determinate throughout, and all is grist that comes to its mill.

To appreciate how much so, consider a set of key variables against


the background of the Poetics. If Aristotle overlooks some of these variables altogether, while imposing constraint or fixity on others, their reduced play marks his own limits, empirical and doctrinal. As usual, his limits have had considerable influence on the approach to

plot ever since, its very depreciation in modernism included. Aristotle would thus keep surprise in a role that is localized (for pinpointed im-

pact), mimeticized (into fortune-reversing act), contributory (to pity- and-fear), and otherwise dependent (on well-formedness), instead of

casting it as a universal narrative force in its own right. As such a universal, for one thing, the surprise mechanism freely

extends in magnitude: from a single covert gap (favored by Aristotle), for example, to an entire plot disordered into a series of revelations (a mystery tale, a Jane Austen novel, any narrative based on round-and so, unpredictable-character or existential instability, Kafka-fashion). Along a related axis, the proportions of the distinctively twisted se-

quence may range from a sentence-length plot to an episode to whatever lies between an extended text's cut-off points, as when a novel's

surprise ending replaces a false with a true beginning. (Fielding's comic reversals, in fact, operate on discourse-units of all sizes.) Again, this flexibility of the surprise turn resists all attempts to define narra-

tive/narrativity in terms of the narrated world or the narrating text. The appeal to the represented world can be traced back, of course, to Aristotle's mimesis of action in beginning-middle-end enchainment, a formula that has since been endlessly reiterated or recast into demands for some event-line, change of state, or "problem-solving," with or without further mimetic specification. And just as this world- oriented approach reaches its formal limit in conditions on the number of events, so does its text-oriented counterpart in strings attached to the number of sentences. (Recall the variants of minimal narrative in my opening.) Yet both approaches fail a test as elementary as the one posed by the exclamations "A fire!" or "A ghost!"-which instantly trigger a surprise mini-plot, without formally representing any event or running to a complete sentence. (For instance, startled by the excla- mation, we operate on it accordingly: we fill out and extend the spatial reference into an unforeseen development, whose own cause-objective or subjective-is now possibly inferable after the event, in still

longer retrospect. All with a view to the best contextual fit.) An ele-

mentary test, this, but therefore all the more decisive for establishing the priorities between function (e.g., the shock of the unexpected) and manifestation (as mimesis and/or medium): the sense comes before the surface, operationally as well as hierarchically speaking, because it alone has the power to shape the data into the appropriate narrative design, if not into narrativity in the first place. As makers of

sense, accordingly, the author and the reader are at one here, so that

Sternberg * Telling in Time (II) 521

the definition (complete with the definitional priorities) holds from either side. A surprise narrative, like all narrative/narrativity, is not given in representation-much less in any predetermined form-but (re)constructed in communication to produce the generic interplay between times, abruptly twisted for surprise.

For another thing, such twisting of antecedents does not entail untwisting, or disclosure via full retrospective closure, one that makes it possible to reconstruct with certainty the "original" order of events ("whole," "fabula," "story," or whatever). Instead, surprise effects vary between sheer disruption and new resolution, according to whether they only unsettle or also resettle the earlier course of events. Given the necessity of imperceptible tampering with chronology to bait the trap for the reader, is it followed by perceptible yet persistent dechronologizing, or by belated rechronologizing? In short, our false sense of continuity having once been undermined, do we look back to find a permanent or a temporary gap? (For this distinction and its wider bearings, see especially Sternberg [1973a] and [1978: 50ff.].) In this light, the narrative corpus reveals systematic variations, both synchronic and diachronic.

Aristotle, who inaugurated the tradition of "well-made" narrative form, would thus not allow (nor even consider) anything but the latter, temporary possibility. For "ignorance" to turn into "knowledge," his complex plot must sooner or later unravel itself into the orderly whole that it entangled; or, in my other terms, the gap secretly opened and then disclosed for shock effect must thereafter be securely closed for the sake of unity, as in the Oedipus Rex paradigm. Indeed, this dynamic so lends itself to reconciling opposed effects along the way-error and learning, false and true certitude, novelty and recognition, sudden inferential flurry of activity and ultimate well-formed rest, all with or against the characters, our fellow interpreters-that no wonder it has since enjoyed wide appeal, especially among the branches of fiction. Epic, novel, short story, tragedy, comedy, melodrama, high and low art, written, staged, or filmed: all have not only manifested, but often also privileged or encoded such complex plotting, with the march of historiography alone (including the oral real-life story of the Labov type) left to its own cause-to-effect, exposition-to-resolution devices.

Still, the alternative option-surprise for the purpose of forcing an earlier stability or continuity into permanent ambiguity-is always available, too, and has increasingly been realized in the history of narrative. The Bible's David, the saga's man, the Dostoevsky hero, any character presented from the outside-whether by appeal to the constraints of the dramatic or cinematic medium, or to the self-limitations of modernist storytelling-may always baffle expectation without necessarily giving away his motive even after the fact. He then leaves


us forever guessing at his secret, caught among multiple hypotheses (their play now having become its own recommendation, actually sub- stituting for Aristotelian unity-by-closure as the poetic function of mimesis). So do tight-looking chains of events abruptly entangled, down to reversibility, or worlds thrown before our eyes out of one determinate reality-model without ever finding anchorage in another. So, nowadays, do even popular genres aspiring to "literary" respectability by way of open-endedness, like the detective or spy story (but not the

joke, which lacks other resources than the surprise turn, hence would be doomed, in the absence of a good return, to falling flat-to suicide by generic pointlessness).

In the reader's as well as the protagonist's experience of time, then, disclosure itself may come with or without closure, according to the focus of the appropriate teleology. What we traditionally call "dis-

covery" bears two senses and ranges between two effects within the

dynamics of recognition. One is negative and subject-oriented, that is, discovering one's initial ignorance (the latent gap or ambiguity now in

sight); the other positive and object-oriented, namely, discovering a, or the, truth about the world (resolution with the benefit of hindsight). Cumulatively, the two effects may well form stages along a (re)cognitive process. But they nevertheless remain distinct in theory and practice, even when thematized into the old-new epistemological paradox that, in the human condition, awareness of ignorance is knowledge. ("That is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.")

For still another thing, rather than being confined to any particular mental aspect or faculty singled out by this or that aesthetic- or method of analysis-surprise freely ranges over the entire mind

brought into narrative play. Thus, Aristotle's is an affective poetics, one as geared to impact and its formation (from pleasure in mimesis to catharsis in tragedy) as twentieth-century Anglo-American trends are to meaning and interpretation. His surprise effect is accordingly designed (as is, say, the hero's ethical make-up) to sharpen the affective states of pity and fear. Yet that peculiar thrust again limits the range of the approach, not of surprise itself, whose workings embrace and

engage all components and levels of human "psychology," however we

may parcel them out. Recognition makes a twisted but otherwise all- inclusive dynamics of cognition. Along with its affective force, it may therefore play on such axes of response to discourse as the formal, the

perceptual, the referential, the otherwise semantic or semanticized, the psychic, the aesthetic, the logical, the ideological, all variously interpenetrating. Or, given that our impressions and inferences are

always in the making and can always be overtaken along the sequence by the unpredictable, the operation of surprise cuts across the boundaries of pattern-making, world-making, address-making, theme-and-


judgment-making, and sense-making at large. Once unsettled, for example, continuity reveals itself behind time as discontinuity, the whole as at most a part, the univocal as ambiguous, the premise as a problem, the established fact as an open gap covered with or in error, the flat- looking agent as a mixture or a riddle, the straight face as an ironic mask, the omnicommunicative teller as suppressive or himself limited, ontological well-formedness as an epistemological trap and lesson for the subject caught in it.

As with the mind activated by narrative discourse, so with the elements of discourse itself: only a literalist would follow Aristotle in restricting surprise to plot externals, such as the discovery of mistaken identities and the abrupt peripety of situations from, say, good to ill fortune. For the distinctiveness of surprise relates to the manner and point of disordering, not (like catharsis) to the matter disordered into surprise-sequence. Accordingly, it subsumes and brings together all of the elements that make for retrospective enlightenment-for some hidden deformation of time and understanding, with a view to their belated reformation under the pressure of unforeseen (dis)closures. The object thus deformed and reformed in the telling can equally well include motive (Jonah refuses to announce Nineveh's doom, not out of pity, it transpires, but from fear for his prophetic image); or character (the metamorphosis of the Golden Dustman in Our Mutual Friend from paragon into miser and back again); or perspective (e.g., where earlier discourse shifts its bearing in retrospect from objective to subjective reference, from one subjectivity to another, from authority to irony, or from narratorial statement to free indirect style and other modes of quoting); or interpersonal relations (a show of love turning out to be a cover for hate and/or the reverse, Dostoevsky- style); or a picture of society (as when the initial contrast between the boardinghouse and the beau monde in Pere Goriot veers round into correspondence); or the text's entire reality-model (e.g., with the bursting of the supernatural, as in the grotesque or the ghost story, upon a frame of existence previously remarkable for its naturalism). The means accordingly recur as well: deferred and piecemeal exposition, impressions made only to be unmade or remade in the sequel, gaps first passing for continuities and then forced open into ambiguity, gap-fillings that repattern and reevaluate all that has gone before, and so forth.

The same principle holds for everything and anything within the narrated world, because whatever belongs to the world is by nature located in time and may therefore be dislocated by narrative out of its proper time, then at will relocated back in time. (Leave aside for the moment the consequences which the zigzags imposed on reality-items in the process have for all other, nonmimetic elements and structures,


from thematic design to the meaning of a single word.) Hence "surprise" is a useful shorthand for the dynamics of recognition, covering whatever process the narrative launches by the secret twisting, and springs on the reader by the abrupt questioning and/or straighten- ing, of its chronology. Across all variations, such processing remains essentially one and inescapable at that. For while overall surprise plots are common and surprise mini-plots or key gaps numberless, sur-

prise interest is nothing short of universal. It must be so, teleologically as well as logically speaking. Even a narrative which represents the most banal world cannot dispense with this interest altogether-to the exclusion of any new information, however unshocking-on pain of utter predictability and redundancy.20 Nor, strictly speaking, has any discourse ever arrived at this extreme of automatism-whether

through incompetence or for deliberate longueur, whether owing to the reader's jaded sensibility or to history's process of familiarization- because replicating the very same text in the very same context is a contradiction in terms. And so, therefore, except again in a relative sense, is the untellable tale. No matter how often the tale has been told before, each retelling is in fact a unique, unprecedented event, which logically always enables and pragmatically invites us readers to make it, somehow, somewhere, new in effect. And no matter how sel- dom the exigency arises in such drastic form, the principle yet needs to be emphasized, considering the loose, often all-or-nothing talk on the issue. As surprise extends from the shocking to the barely perceptible-from fateful reversal, Oedipus-style, to nuanced rehearsal- so do the degrees of tellability/readability where measured by novelty value in time, between times.

3.2. From Recognition to Retrospection and Prospection: Three Master Strategies In this absolute and exceptional dependence of ordering function on disordered temporal form, surprise is almost unique among narrative, as well as other, interests-almost, but not quite. It finds a mate and rival in the workings of curiosity or, more technically, the dynamics of retrospection. Let me quickly outline their family resemblance as

gap-dependent interests, sequences, hence forces for ambiguity and

hypothesis-making. Where "curiosity" differs from "surprise" is in the initial percepti-

bility of the gap about the world and, with it, of the movement toward closure. Rather than diverting attention from a missing antecedent, the narrative signals or even focuses its absence and the resultant loss in coherence; so belated recognition of disorder gives place to early

20. Or, from the receiving end of discourse: under the presumption of informa- tiveness, we look around for novelty value even in apparent redundancy, including literal repetition (as demonstrated in Sternberg 1977 and 1986).


retrospection on disorder, with the appropriate pressure for reorder-

ing. Who killed old Karamazov? Why does Iago victimize Othello? How has Odysseus fared since leaving Troy? Are the ghosts real or hallucinatory? What are we to make of the conflicting Rashomon versions? On our part, knowing that we do not know and may never be told for sure, we must take immediate steps to repair the breach in order and understanding as best we can at the moment-through provisional reconstructions of antecedents from their consequences, of the world from the discourse, of mimetic by appeal to poetic teleol-

ogy-in the hope of progressive enlightenment and ultimate closure. Here, then, perceived discontinuity makes for its own continuity in the

reading, whereby we go forward with our minds on the troubled past. (For analysis and examples of such operations, see Sternberg [1978: 56ff.] and [1985: 283ff.], with earlier references.)

Except for this strategic opposition in perceptibility, the equivalence of curiosity to surprise is complete: it includes all the parameters discussed in section 3.1 and by now readily applicable. Thus the rich variability in magnitude, from an opaque sentence to a novel- length detective plot; in the object (e.g., outer and inner life, detail and reality-model) thrown into disorder; in the faculty of the mind called into retrospective play, whether temporarily or permanently. By the same token, moreover, where a surprise gap is disclosed without being closed-the detective, say, shakes a perfect-looking alibi- it necessarily modulates into curiosity: false assurance into a quest for knowledge. Distinct, the two master interests are yet convertible.

With retrospection as with recognition, then, the narrative process hinges, from start to finish, on well-defined chronological turns and returns. Both dynamics of telling/reading look for their trigger and maintenance to the disturbance, and for their stabilization to the realignment, of the dynamics of happening; the quest for closure does not get under way unless (and, literally, until) a breach in order makes itself felt, nor will it come to a final rest, if at all, before arriving at a solid filling; cognitive inference of antecedents presupposes narrative incoherence, about and from which to make inferences; deformation of world-time operates for ambiguity, reformation for eventual lucidity behind time, with intermediate trial-and-error movement on our part. In this the two processes are at one, sui generis.

Even here, though, there is no automatic correlation (let alone equation) between form and effect. By the teleo-logic of narrative, temporal displacement makes a necessary but not a sufficient condition for surprise and curiosity. Given the workings of the mind in and on time, you cannot indeed produce or experience either of these interests except through an event-line unfolded out of its order. Yet such unfolding need not by itself produce them because it may equally well arise from


other exigencies altogether, such as the jump over irrelevant matter, the introduction of new faces, the resumption of a plot line that had been suspended for a while, or looking ahead to key up expectancy. So every effect of curiosity or surprise in narrative requires temporal discontinuity between the telling and the told, but not every temporal discontinuity involves curiosity or surprise. These will be generated only where the form of discontinuity goes with a sense of discontinuity, immediate or belated-only where the discontinuity of what has gone before becomes relevant, perceptible, functional as such, in that it makes a difference, for better or worse, to our understanding of the world in time.

Even so, this bar to automatism still leaves the two master effects in a class of their own, invested with an exceptional distinctive force which no other effects share, not even other children of time-as-process. So exclusive is this force that it is denied (although, here, with an

equivalent duly supplied) to the third primary narrative interest itself, namely, suspense, with its dynamics of prospection. The prospective bearing on time replaces, and freely dispenses with, the crooked telling out of time. Of course, suspense may well arise from a late-before- early deployment, whereby a narrator or speaker anticipates an event to come: God foretells the Hebrews' descent into Egypt; the Olympian assembly votes for Odysseus's homecoming; Fielding warns that Tom

Jones will get himself hanged; Dostoevsky smuggles into his prelimi- naries an advance reference to the murder of old Karamazov; Muriel

Spark looks ahead to Miss Brodie's betrayal by one of her own set. But such overt foreshadowing, as a form of disordering, is no more

necessary than sufficient for suspense. It is not sufficient, because matters can be anticipated to quite differ-

ent ends, including the very dissipation of suspense: thus the glances forward to the afterlife, with which narratives may counterpoint some

ongoing development or bow a character out or wind up an entire plot line. Further, consider why Trollope gives us his word that Eleanor will not marry the awful Slope (in chapter 15 of Barchester Towers), a reassurance provided ahead of time by a novelist otherwise wedded to time, because doctrinally opposed to twisting, withholding, and

mystery-mongering. Doesn't he anticipate at this juncture for exactly the same reasons (e.g., lucidity, present-orientedness, omnicommunicative stance) that cause him elsewhere to go straight from exposition through complication to unravelling? And just as the forms of straight chronology and prospective anachrony will relate in context to the same teleology, so will either form relate to variant teleologies, includ-

ing maximum versus minimum suspense effects. From suspension to resolution of uncertainty about future issues: looking ahead may work both ways, and other ways too.


Nor is overt anticipation essential to suspense, because the future contrasts with the past (the focus of the two other interests) in being naturally opaque. To direct (misdirect, redirect) notice to the narrative past, already complete at the moment of narration, you must gap and deform it out of time sequence. But to achieve the same with regard to the narrative future-its expanses still open or veiled by every (ontological/epistemological) definition, its secrets remote if born at all, its conflicts yet to sort themselves out-nothing need be done beyond following developments in their proper sequence. Here the play between times, unique to all three narrative interests, requires no more than the built-in discrepancy between what has happened to the best of our knowledge and what will or may happen in the still-dark sequel. And something may always happen, up to (if not beyond) the last word, because while life goes on, in fact or fiction, there is always room for changes, flukes, hitches, sequels, contingen- cies of every kind. Owing to the pressure of these, narrative becomes doubly end-oriented, always reaching for a chronological, along with a textual, future and driven by a mimetic, as well as an artistic, teleology. (And against their pressure, indeed, not even the strongest assurance or firmest sense of an ending will really bring to an end our tendency to wonder about what comes next, as writers of series have always known and as Conan Doyle found out when his public re- fused to accept the extinction of Sherlock Holmes.) So, while surprise and curiosity arise from the untimely (dis)closure of the past through artifice, suspense hinges only on the time-bound development toward the future involved in the very reality-like logic of narrativity across all variations in particular narrative ordering, such as between chronology and anachrony. Will Hamlet act, Tom Jones hang, Raskolnikov confess, Emma Bovary ruin herself, Isabel Archer learn her lesson, Joe Christmas find peace, Dowell gain self-knowledge, the Ramsays visit the lighthouse, Charles Smithson track down the French lieuten- ant's woman? Will love prevail, the detective solve the crime; will the victory fall to the hero or the villain, to the individual or to society?

The examples could be multiplied without end, especially if you recall that such global conflicting scenarios find their expression and equivalent in a host of small-scale questions which arise from moment to moment throughout the reading process, down to the tiniest micro- sequence ("What will the agents do/say/think next?"). And as with surprise or curiosity, only more so, this equivalence between suspense- units also holds for any minimal narrative, on any definition: a one- clause event, say, is by nature alive with forked consequences, as well as antecedents, equal (and in the reading, extendable) to a chain's. Even a formally descriptive statement may well qualify for narrativity, if not narrative, once it has been transformed into the appropriate


axis and kinesis. (For such projection, just imagine an Elizabethan hearing, "The Queen is dead," or yourself hearing your flight captain announce, "Our engines are stalled." Sophisticated variants would be the descriptive shorthand or metonymy for action, or the code of

"proleptic epithets" [Sternberg 1981, 1985: 321-64] in literary art; Lessing's "pregnant moment" in visual art; or "ekphrasis" as a plot forecast [Yacobi 1990] in inter-art, word-to-image allusion.) Whatever their level or range, all such future-oriented gaps may, and most of them actually do, open and close in step with time. This also explains their high frequency relative to the past-oriented varieties: they are the most widespread in storytelling, the most universal of universals, because they demand and betray the least manipulation on the teller's

part while making equal claims to the reader's interest and energy in the processing of narrative. Consequently, it is not the suspenseful play of hypotheses regarding the future but, on the contrary, its neu-

tralizing or minimizing that for once demands temporal manipulation. Why else does Trollope break his cherished rule of chronology? The breach occurs under the pressure of artificially anticipating by fore- closure the outcome that his narrative would otherwise ambiguate by nature: the novelist must tip the scales of hope and fear toward hope for the heroine in order to counter what he views as the threat of our

expense of spirit on rival scenarios. This only perfects the contrast with the two other interests. Optional versus necessary dechronologizing for play, necessary dechronologizing versus necessary chronolo-

gizing for playdown: this is where the suspense strategy differs from

surprise and curiosity, the dynamics of prospection from the dynamics of recognition and retrospection.

The three remain allied in principle as well as infinitely meshing in

practice. They also exhaust the strategic possibilities of communicating action in that they bring together its natural early-to-late development in the happening toward a more or less ambiguous future and its ame-

nability to ambiguous disclosure in the telling: the focus on the one makes for suspense, on the other for curiosity and/or surprise, on both for compounded, multidirectional plotting of information, inference, interest. As a set, accordingly, they cover among them all the work-

ings that distinguish narrative in any medium from everything else. Those workings include the parameters already glanced at and easily extendable: story elements, magnitudes, devices, patterns, activities, skills, roles, effects, motivations, and experiences of various kinds- emotive, formal, perceptual, cognitive-all involving or assimilated to the play of temporalities between discourse and world.


4. A Functional Theory of Narrative: Basics, Powers, Implications

4.1. Narrativity and Narrative Redefined Given the theoretical senses just outlined, our three shorthand terms yield a definition of the field that would seem to capture both its immense variety and our intuitive knowledge of its unity as no other definition has done. I define narrativity as the play of suspense/curiosity/ surprise between represented and communicative time (in whatever combination, whatever medium, whatever manifest or latent form). Along the same functional lines, I define narrative as a discourse where such play dominates: narrativity then ascends from a possibly marginal or secondary role (e.g., as a temporal force governed by the space-making, descriptive function that always coexists with it [Stern- berg 1981, 1983a]) to the status of regulating principle, first among the priorities of telling/reading.

For narrativity, then, the discourse need not represent any, much less any well-formed, "action" (or some mimetic equivalent) on its surface; nor need theory waste any further energy on the impossible, as well as misguided, task of specifying the represented action in advance by appeal to the minimum number or content or linkage of the world-units involved-events, changes, causes, agents-let alone text- units. Rather, the suspense/curiosity/surprise play, once launched, entails and attests to our (re)constructing the given discourse into the "actional" representation appropriate to narrativity (if only as one force among others) or to narrative (as dominant). Quite simply, the effect somehow finds or shapes or invents a cause to match-as when, overtaken by surprise, you pack or read a twisted tale into the cry "Gone!" Indeed, for any narrative effect to take effect (e.g., for surprise to overtake the unsuspecting addressee), a suitable narrative cause must have been found already, in whatever shorthand, and now at most awaits further adjustments. How else would the effect arise if not through the narrativizing of the available discourse materials, such as they are? Beyond this constant, the rest is a matter of empirics. Across the widest variations in practice, authorial or interpretive, the Proteus Principle holds: the communicative dynamics map themselves onto the lifelike; the ultimate end (from the teller's side) or the immediate response (from the reader's) onto the mediating form; contextual role onto textual surface; all part of the defining interplay between times.

Here, therefore, beats the heart of narrative-as against both nonrepresentational discourse and the representation of objects in descriptive discourse, with their temporality (if any) mainly extending along the communicative axis. And where the heart of narrative as such beats, there should the study of narrative time be centered and the theory of narrative in general find its bearings and its starting-


point, as well-defined enterprises. Only such anchorage enables a reasonable advance from the genre's constants to the variables that go into the making of the narrative text, or of the text peculiar to a certain subgenre, medium, art form, culture, or writer. There could not be a greater mistake than the standard practice of addressing narrative in its textuality apart from narrative in its narrativity (or, what amounts to the same thing, bracketing the two). For even textual components and patterns that narrative texts share with non-narrative ones or with discourse at large, such as spatialities, points of view, language, themes, ideology, nontemporal ordering mechanisms, and time of communication itself, assume a distinctive reference and force where they are controlled and mobilized by the dynamics of narrative.

The power to mobilize (hence also to synthesize) the extranarrative in and through the dynamics of presentation has already been sufficiently outlined; so let me now bring into sharper focus how the

dynamics of events operate and cooperate to unique narrativizing effect. The narrated space, for example, will then unfold, not accord-

ing to the narrator's designs alone, as in descriptive writing, but also

through the agents' movements, like the scene shifts centered on wan-

dering heroes from the Odyssey to Ulysses; its make-up may even change under the pressure of the action, possibly to influence the action itself in turn, as when Njall's house goes up in fire and, with it, the equi- librium of Icelandic society. The same applies to the unique power of unfolding character by the logic of its own (suspenseful) development, as well as that of the temporal portraitist's (intriguing and/or

surprising) disclosure: if static character/characterization is the common property of all mimesis, and dynamic characterization of static character is an extra resource peculiar to temporal mimesis, then dynamic character is reserved for narrative mimesis, along with every other component of the world-in-motion. Likewise, narrative point of view may shift not only its anchorage from one reflector to another in mid(dis)course-a freedom equally available to, say, a philosophical treatise-but also shift its very outlook on the world as the old reflector gains new insights in mid-reflection: the observing Strether vis-a-vis the mysteries of Europe, or the narrating Dowell subjected to the shocks of The Good Soldier. Here, again, language is exposed throughout to the test of unstable realities; scalar ordering, to the breakdown of the scale that motivated it; theme, to the existential crises and conflicts among its carriers; every equivalence pattern (e.g., Odysseus = Agamemnon, Pension Vauqueur ? high society), to the vicissitudes awaiting one-time equivalents, reversal of fortune (and so, of pattern) included; ultimately, all textual sequence must refer to the uncertainties built, sui generis, into the chronological future.


In short, the various elements or axes instanced (although all too often taken as the property of narrative and its study) belong to discourse in general; yet no general theory of discourse (e.g., as reading, or semiosis, or ideology) will by itself capture their behavior within our discourse type, any more than will a narratology oblivious or hostile to narrativity. Intrinsically anything but specific, let alone energetic, those elements become so between the lines of movement. For the common denominators themselves lead a different (because a double) life under the law of narrative, which uniquely superimposes devel-

opment in mimetic time on disclosure in communicative time; thereby everything must go through the process of happening as well as of

telling and reading-hence through the dynamics of surprise, curi-

osity, suspense. Their play between times can alone oppose to what I called "atomism" a principled account of how narrative sequence holds together its multiple levels, threads, components, and devices, just as that play alone can oppose to "reductionism," on the same teleo-

logical grounds, an account of the irreducibly narrative difference of their cooperation or coherence in the process.

That is why there is no escaping chronology, presupposed by all three dynamics, if only as the manipulable (and accordingly, as best we can muster it, the reconstructed) direction of happening. That is also why I consider it so important to lift the three from the neglected, or at best marginal and pejorative, slots to which they are usually con-

signed, in a variety of guises, by defining and grouping them in terms of basic sense-making operations. I have no particular commitment to the labels, except as handy abbreviations that reasonably accord with

ordinary usage as well as with experience;21 but I do insist on the distinctiveness, the inclusiveness, and the universality of the strategies so labelled: recognition, retrospection, prospection. Surprise, whether mild or sharp, local or plot-length, actional or cross-level, is an index of false understanding and a belated call for realignment; the rise of curiosity signals that the past has been deformed into alternative formations; suspense throws us forward to the opacity of the future. Although different in thrust, all involve the construction of rival hy-

21. The psychological reality of these mechanisms, as theorized in Sternberg (1978), has indeed been confirmed since: thus the experiments recorded in Brewer and Lichtenstein (1982: esp. 480ff.). A welcome support, this, but not really unex-

pected because the theory did develop along cognitive and otherwise experiential lines in the first place-narratology's rage for formalism, Proppian or Shklovskian, notwithstanding. Hence, there is good reason to believe that further tests carried out directly on the overall sense of narrative/narrativity, as defined here in relation to those time mechanisms, would also yield positive results: all the more so if conducted in an interdisciplinary light.


potheses with which to fill in the gaps opened up by the sequence about the world's affairs and whatever attaches to them by nature or art, which in narrative means everything.

Thus defined, the three dynamics bring out the field's unity in

variety along with its variety in unity, and not only because they inter-

penetrate in practice. Taken together, they cut across all variations in

interpretive performance, expertise, community, and validity. How- ever a reader may (mis)take a narrative sequence-whatever the gaps and closures that he finds or values or misses or invents-he cannot

go forward without referring it to some teleology of sequence. This

commonality in variety, and well-defined variety at that, offers strong support to the teleologies involved and reveals afresh their explanatory power: the more closed the set of options in principle, the more

open in practice to interpretive (as well as authorial) diversity within the limits of the genre. Accordingly, the narrative principle cuts across issues that are hotly debated today-and that are often thought to militate against the very premises of narrative theory-such as the

alleged subjectivity, undecidability, politics, or culture-dependence of

reading. On my account, however, whatever may become of such questions, they all remain beside the generic point: the very lines of division

they would mark and multiply, in fact, speak for, not against, the law of narrative. Here, different readers only make (or combine) different choices within a strictly limited range of options; and the choice

having once been made, if only to be remade at a later phase, the

appropriate sense and response will follow. For example, the hidden discontinuities that arouse one reader's curiosity-pulling his attention back to the narrative past and alerting him to the textual future in the hope of closure-may so escape another's notice as to generate a surprise plot. Correspondingly, when the sequence at last untwists itself, the one reader's looked-for resolution (of causality, character, world-picture, judgment) is the other's unexpected, and possibly un- welcome, reversal. (Thus the disparity in the leading narrative interest, hence in overall experience, between those who guess and those who miss the secret engagement in Emma ahead of its final exposition.) Both performances show themselves to be markedly narrative; how one is to decide between them, if at all, remains, of course, outside the

jurisdiction of narrative theory proper. As with readers, so with read-

ings, notably including the shift in the balance of interest between the "first" and the "second"-to the gain of retardatory suspense, above all, which is now sharpened in rehearsal by the "ironic" foreknowledge concerning developments and disclosures alike.

From yet another side, our three dynamics establish the family resemblance between supposedly "low" thrills and "higher" interests. Given that world-making and discourse-making operate under the

Sternberg ? Telling in Time (11) 533

conditions of multiple flux, twofold at least, nothing separates in essentials the play of ambiguity as to what happens or happened or will happen in the story from the (re)construction of character or society or perspective or reality-model. And how is the line to be drawn between types of effect or response-affective versus semantic or cognitive, perceptual versus ideological and rhetorical-where they all undergo the same kinds of twofold processing from rise to resolution? A shock of discovery sprung by the narrative is a shock of discovery, no matter whether it bears on the emergence of a paragon's less at- tractive side, on post-hoc tightening in retrospect into propter hoc, on a humdrum world reversing into fantasy, on a long-past act's proving not to have been enacted or not from the supposed motive, on a reli- able narrator's exposing his fallibility, on a plain statement that turns out to have been a cover for reported discourse, or on a likeness between existents shown up as a contrast: all depend on our recognizing a gap where we earlier saw a fact and (re)acting accordingly. Likewise with the sense of wonder about antecedents, or with suspense about developments to ensue.

All of this goes to show that the generic universals energize and unify variables of every imaginable kind to make narrative a discourse type which combines singular power with singular flexibility. Given the principle, we badly need detailed studies of how and why the genre's universals interact with everything else in narrative practice: texts, authors, periods, canons, subgenres, media, audiences, compe- tences, and sociocultural frameworks. Apart from the light thrown on each individual object of study as an intersection of narrativity with textuality, such analyses promise to deepen our insight into the workings of the principle itself, its synchrony and diachrony, its latitudes and limits. They would also constitute the best argument for the two- way traffic between poetics and hermeneutics, theory and history, text and context, narrative and other forces or genres, the literary and the extraliterary, verbal and nonverbal representation: all pairs whose artificial divorce has not done much for either side, least of all in narratology. At the same time, demonstrating the gains of a principled study of narratives as such-and correspondingly, the loss incurred by its absence-might also give some food for thought to the odd alliance ranged against the discipline, largely for its own sins (thus the attacks on "formalism" as enemy to social and ideological life, to the arts of ambiguity, to the generation of meaning, to cross-discourse or cross- disciplinary bridges, or to practical criticism). One case study in this line, regarding a narrative system of the highest and most inclusive order, as of the closest possible interdependence with a revolution- ary culture, may be found in my Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Sternberg 1985).


4.2. Some Further Consequences So we come to the most significant and intricate parameter of unity and variety, the form/function crux. What I have been arguing, by implicit reference to a body of earlier work, theoretical and empirical, amounts to this. Our suspense/curiosity/surprise trio constitutes three master functions of narrative, as one process both disclosed and

developing in time, hence the arch-regulators of its assorted forms of ordering, disordering, and reordering. Whatever the appearances to the contrary, all other roles and effects operating in narrative are either actually subsumed under them or shared by discourse (components, genres, arts, media) outside the duality of time. In the former case, where those other roles bear on the world-in-motion, they are, of course, properly narrative; yet, as already argued, this only brings them all the more immediately and inevitably under the three master narrative dynamics, as variants or specifications of some kind, as tokens of a communicative type. But even in the latter case, as also already indicated, such nondistinctive, cross-discourse roles (e.g., involving language, viewpoint, spatiality, or nontemporal order) may always be

dynamicized, and so narrativized, by assimilation to the regulating forces. The nondistinctive element itself turns distinctive where curi-

osity, surprise, and suspense come to exert their pressure on its in-

telligibility and/or to hinge on its own, often ambiguous, implications for the ongoing plot: on the meaning assigned by a character to some

key word, on the authority of a report as between objectivity and sub-

jectivity, on a reflector's change of view, on the thrust of an analogy, on the dialectics of a theme, or on the bearing and timing of a de-

scription, complete with the twists and turns to which all these gaps lend themselves en route to (possible) closure. Whatever the three master regulators do not subsume by the nature of narrative is easily subsumable in the narrative process.

If so-and I have deliberately put the claim at its strongest-a good many consequences follow for a reconceived narrative theory. For our immediate purposes, let me briefly draw together those that bear di-

rectly on the form/function nexus in or out of chronology. First, there is no narrative sequence without narrative interest to

propel and channel our movement (complete with all sense-making operations) through the discourse. Obvious, even tautologous? All the better, then, considering how often the opposite has been assumed since Aristotle, especially about chronological telling (or, for quite different reasons, modern "plotlessness"). The question is never whether narrative interest arises, but which one(s), how, to what extent, as well as where focused or diversified, raised or lowered, satisfied or frustrated, and why.

Thus the historian or Trollope or Lawrence, or Aristotle's simple


plot or Propp's folktale or Labov's Harlem anecdote or the western, favors suspense; Fielding or Jane Austen, surprise; the detective story, curiosity; Dostoevsky or Henry James, the richest possible interrela- tion of the three dynamics. Even a single genre, author, text (etc.) may apply the favored strategy across all levels or may distinguish levels by the strategies peculiar to each. Fielding's surprise plots extend from the sentence level through episode to novel, as often do the mystery's shaping of curiosity and the suspense narrative's ups-and-downs on the way to the final showdown; the later Henry James aims for much the same homology (e.g., through the delayed specification of refer- ents), but geared to a compounding of these interests; while the Bible combines them with a difference in level, so that its grand chronology manipulates suspense and the component units surprise and curiosity too. As with the range of interest between dominance and distribu- tion, privilege and plurality, so with its focus on the narrated world: on externals, internals, interpersonal or intercultural relations, ontology, epistemology, being, becoming, etc., all amenable to diverse combinations of strategies as well as thematics. (Just compare the handling of psychosocial drama in, say, Trollope, Austen, James, and Proust.) The same holds true for other major crosscuts that we have noted, whether belonging to the integration of nontemporal (verbal, spatial, perspectival, thematic, even independently linear) axes with the narrative process or the variations between affective and cognitive impact. Throughout, no matter how various and pregnant the choices, they bear on the specifics, rather than the universals, of interest generated in telling.

Correspondingly, any appeal made to the twists of narrative interest always turns out to be a more or less special plea for a favorite pattern or scale of interest (e.g., surprise with Aristotle or curiosity with the champions of delayed, multigap exposition), never a principled argument against chronological telling, any more than against some differently twisted pattern of interest. And, of course, vice versa: recall how the opposite party (Gibbon, Trollope, Graves, or Labov) may over- reach themselves in advocating the "higher delights" of chronology, with its orderly movement from cause to effect. As these are determinate functional sequences, even the most valid recommendation of one entails no principled grounds for objecting to the other two, still less for their categorical rejection elsewhere. This by no means excludes comparisons and even value judgments, but rather places them where they belong. To flesh out a bit the generalities of the preceding paragraph a bit, for instance, we may well ask questions like: What, given their common foiling of expectation, divides Fielding's surprise endings from 0. Henry's? Whence comes the unbearable suspense in Dostoevsky, unrivalled (if at all desired) by other projectors of the


future? Why, amidst retrospection on a past riddled with ambiguities, should curiosity in the detective tale flatten into an intellectual game of closure, but in James thicken to engage all our faculties? How are we to describe and explain the variations in interest between tight and fragmentary plots, chronology and chrono-logic, reworked and

original story-stuff, history and fiction, comedy and tragedy, straight and parodic discourse, "first" and "second" reading, weak and strong or visual and verbal narrativity? But then such inquiries would oppose texts or methods on some well-defined basis in communicative

experience, not by reference to some a priori scheme of "good" versus "bad," deviant versus iconic ordering. Only where the ends remain constant-not just compatible, nor even just members of the same

family, like our universal trio-does it make sense to confront and evaluate the means.

Second, this rule assumes even greater force because the ordering means themselves cut across the patterns of reading experience. Recall that the surprise and curiosity dynamics exploit the very same repertoire of discontinuous forms to opposite effect, in accordance with the initial perceptibility of the gaps; so, to a lesser extent, does suspense, although diverging from both in its orientation to some future con-

tingency. A measure of this apparently ill-assorted partnership (and another nail in the coffin of taxonomy) is the fact that a single twisting device may operate within each or all of the three dynamics.

Thus overt anticipation, as when Fielding threatens Tom Jones with the gallows, has the power to evoke suspense-or, where more reli- able, the power to modulate genuine into retardatory suspense: "What will happen?" into "How?"-and this is usually considered its proper role. Why should the narrative run ahead of time, one might think, if not to project our attention ahead? But then God's foretelling of Abimelech's punishment in the Sarah affair ("thou art going to die because of the woman that thou has taken" [Genesis 20:3]) generates surprise by implying a crime against the matriarch where none, to our

knowledge, has been committed, still less with criminal intent. By an artful switch of direction, the forward reference to the effect ("going to die") pulls us backward in quest of the cause ("the woman . . .

taken"): the unexpected future springs an unexplained past. Again, the form of late-before-early ordering par excellence, the jump in medias res, functions to excite and sustain curiosity about the antecedents

jumped over. In yet other contexts, the glance forward may serve all three strategies at once or, for that matter, serve none of them especially, as when the teller winks in passing at the aftermath ("In later life, he would say thus and thus"): long-distance prospection for the

long perspective. The same vari-directional and multifunctional bear-

ing shows in the form of retrospection. As early as Homer and the


Bible, we find the narrative past riddled with gaps not, or not only, for curiosity and surprise (e.g., about Odysseus's heroic figure), but also for suspense (e.g., about his chances of victory, largely depending on heroism); just as our anxiety about the outcome sharpens, in turn, the need for antecedent data to be supplied or inferred with a view to its resolution. So the Proteus Principle works both ways: there is nothing like an automatic tie-up between the form and the focus, the reference and the sense of temporal (dis)arrangement. Within narrative econo- mies, the division of labor involves no division of working capital and means of production but, quite the contrary, a pooling of resources.

Third, to the extent that the resources are divided among the three strategies in a principled way, this applies only to the most basic working conditions and options. Suspense is the least conditioned of the three, and accordingly the richest in alternatives, because it works toward a temporal direction that is opaque (open, gapped, indeter- minate) by nature: the future that darkens the resolution of conflict, character change, personal dilemma, interpersonal entanglement, to- ing and fro-ing between ideologies, or any other developing entity in the world's arena. Alternative scenarios about the future, "hope" and "fear" included, may therefore arise from the straightest deployment as well as from the crookedest-always provided that the one should not merely go forward in time and the other not merely look forward ahead of time, but also throw our attention forward to some anticipated unravelling. Of the two polar arrangements, indeed, the straight one heightens this interest most. For the more radical the twisting by way of untimely prospection, the more moderate the ambiguity, and so the suspense, about the future. Once the unravelling becomes a foregone conclusion, as when Trollope reassures us about Eleanor, the in-between suspense becomes purely retardatory-shifting our incer- titude from "what" to "how"-whereas a perfect chronology combines the ambiguation with the retardation of the outcome. So writers freely range along the spectrum to coordinate suspense with their varying focus or their general poetics.

With surprise and curiosity, on the other hand, the need for crook- edness in the telling follows from their orientation to the relative past, which is all over by the time it comes up for treatment. In order for these two to arise, the discourse must ambiguate through twisting (i.e., leave the past mis-illuminated for surprise, half-illuminated for curiosity) what it otherwise might disambiguate at once, and what it very often will disambiguate sooner or later through retrospective untwisting. Short of telling in due time, the two strategies remain free to shuttle all the way between disordering extremes (e.g., looking behind and running ahead) as long as each maintains the appropriate dynamics of ambiguity about antecedents.


In short, although open to all varieties of narrative interest, dechro-

nologization is neither necessary nor sufficient for suspense, while it is necessary but not sufficient for curiosity and surprise. Considering the fog that surrounds the workings of time, it is of the utmost importance to bear in mind these key distinctions and their rationale. If the

phrasing in terms of elementary logic sounds pedantic, so be it. No substitute, I believe, captures nearly so well the elusive teleo-logic of narrative at work.

Fourth, since this trio together covers the operations peculiar to narrative-the universals of telling/reading attached to its multiple tem-

porality-all other effects supposedly reserved for (good) narrative are either particulars or pretenders. Of the particulars we have already seen enough to gain some idea of how widely they vary within the

strategic limits outlined, whether in regard to the object (dis)ordered along the sequence, or the mental faculty called into play, or the combination of means and ends, or indeed the terminology employed for either. Our business is now with the pretenders, by which I mean those claims about the workings of narrative (temporality) that prove to be false because they are reductionist: too inclusive or too restric- tive or both. Why have such claims been made (e.g., for in medias res, defamiliarization, spatialism, point, or viewpoint) and been widely ac-

cepted? What proves them false? Where do they truly belong? And how do they stand to the real forces of narrativity/narrative? To these

questions we come next.

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