University of Zaragoza, 1990
(Online edition 2005)
0.2. On Definitions and
Concepts
0.3. The Linguistic Approach
to Narrative
0.4. Basic Directions
in Analysis
0.5. Identity and Difference
Between Narratives and Narratological Models
0.7. Vertical Analysis
in Aristotle
A
narrative is a semiotic representation of a series of events connected in
a temporal and causal way. Films, plays, comic strips, novels, newsreels,
chronicles and treatises of geological history are all narratives in this
widest sense. Narratives can therefore be constructed using a wide variety
of semiotic media: written or spoken language, images, gestures and acting.
Since here we shall concentrate on the literary genres of the novel
and the short story, we will use the word in a more restricted sense, meaning
a linguistic narrative text, or the representation of a series of events
by means of language. The fact that in literature the events are mostly
fictional has only indirect consequences at the level of analysis we shall
undertake here, and in studying the structure of a narrative text we can
disregard the difference between fiction and nonfiction for the moment.
We should remember, moreover, that this difference is not an absolute one.
Fictional and nonfictional narrative situations can be clearly defined and
distinguished in theory and for most practical purposes as different discourse
activities taking place in well-defined contexts (e. g. we expect a novel
to be fictional, but a news programme is supposed to give us actual facts).
But in specific cases the borderline between one situation and another may
be blurred, and several sets of conventions may be at work at once (e. g.
in a literary biography). And beyond this communicative level in which a
"fictional pact" (or other types of illocutionary pact) are established
between the participants, there remains the problems of representation.
On one hand, fiction is not entirely fictional in the sense that its materials
are taken from reality. On the other, reality is not all that solid, since
any representation involves a measure of fictinalisation. Any representation
involves a point of view, a selection, a perspective on the represented
object, criteria of relevance, an implicit theory of reality. Narrative
structures may be at their most elaborate in artistic texts, but narrativization
is one of the commonest ways of imposing an order and a perspective on experience.
Even those historians or journalists which try to represent the bare facts
must do so using narrative patterns. Together with other linguistic resources
such as tropology, narrative acts a shuttle between formal, ideal perception
and representation, and the concreteness of experience which must be given
a shape. It always involves in some measure the intrusion of poetry and
rhetoric upon any naive notion of purely transparent, immediate representation.
In literature and other narrative arts we can study the fantasies of representation
engaging the real in different ways. After a close study of narrative, we
will no longer be able to speak of the real without taking into consideration
at the same time the way it is narrated to us, the way we narrate it.
We
have defined narrative provisionally as "a semiotic representation
of a series of events linked in a temporal and causal way". There is
no absolute definition of this or of any other concepts or phenomena. Definitions
are a kind of translations: they allow us to grasp a phenomenon in relation
to other phenomena which are already available to us and are (strategically)
supposed to need no definition. Therefore, a definition of a particular
object will vary according to the "language" in which we want
to formulate it. A definition answers to a particular purpose --it must
therefore be contextualized-- and can be more or less specific or detailed
according to the contextual needs it answers. Definitions of narrative,
of point of view, of plot, etc. are to be looked at in this way. It is not
that we define what a plot is more accurately than Aristotle did: it is
that Aristotle did not need to relate the concept of plot to so many areas
of human activity (psychology, linguistics, history, sociology, politics,
literature, etc.) as we do nowadays, owing to the increased specialization
of discourse in our society. Definitions therefore will never be accurate
in one sense, and will always be in another. The problem of their accuracy
is to some extent a pseudo-problem. The real problem is their usefulness
in a particular context, or rather their usefulness in helping to relate
two areas of knowledge which were previously unrelated. Concepts, therefore,
are tools which we use to grasp a flow of phenomena which otherwise remains
unnamable according to a post-metaphysical (or Nietzschean) ontology. And
narrative is precisely one of the main ways in which we organize concepts
and impose order on the world. Analyzing narrative patterns is one way of
getting to know the nature of that order.
One of the areas of our course into which we aim to translate the
concepts of narratology will be the area of semiotics. This is not just
one more discursive area. It is more like a universal coinage where the
contributions of different theories can be compared to one another. From
a semiotic point of view, we can study narrative in its syntactic, its semantic
or its pragmatic aspect, just as we study any other linguistic phenomenon.
For
our first approach it will be useful to consider a narrative as an expanded
phrase, which can be analyzed at the levels of description used in linguistics
and other semiotic disciplines: the levels of syntax, semantics and pragmatics.
á
Narrative cannot really be defined syntactically if we take the term syntax
at its face value, since a narrative structure is generally acknowledged
to be a suprasentential phenomenon. Syntax as we usually understand it is
a formal manifestation of semantic relationships which have become standardized
or congealed at sentence level (f. i. the case of the passive voice, or
of theme and rheme structures). But there are some narrative germs in syntactic
structures. We can establish some syntactic patterns which look more narrative
than others: a narrative typically consists of a subject and a verb --"John
came." The narrative becomes more interesting if the number of actions
and participants increases, if there are objects as well (direct and indirect)
and if the circumstances of place, time, cause, etc. are specified: "Against
his better judgment, John forced himself to accept Cartwright's suggestion;
he gave him the password." The passive voice is in a certain way a
narrative with a perceptible manipulation of point of view and action role:
"Someone is watching Tom" / "Tom is being watched."
Imperatives, on the other hand, are not narratives; they are more like drama,
if anything. Impersonal constructions make boring narratives: "It is
raining", so what. And attributive sentences are not narrations, but
descriptions. These linguistic analogies are of course reelaborated when
the sentences actually work within a text, but the relative frequency of
certain types of linguistic constructions can be subjected to stylistic
analysis and shown to create particular effects.[1]
Likewise, whole narrative texts might be compared to basic sentence constructions
and shown to be rather "passive" than "active" or more
"attributive" than "predicative." But of course from
the moment we abandon the simplicity of abstract syntactic analysis these
analogies become more and more metaphorical, since they are based on semantic
as well as on purely syntactic considerations.
á
Semantically, the definition of narrative is a definition of narrativity.
Several issues can be raised in this connection to circumscribe an area
of discussion:
-
Does narrative involve human or at least animate agents?
-
Does it necessarily involve action or process verbs?
-
What about verbs of cognition or perceptual activity? Or modal verbs?
-
Can there be one-phrase narratives?
Etc.
Different
theorists work with different assumptions as to what is or is not narrative
with respect to these or other criteria. Several degrees of narrativity
will be defined according to which of the questions we answer in the affirmative.
The highest degree of narrativity is defined by the presence of human agents
involved in deliberate and intentional action, articulated in a well-defined
temporal and causal connection. The traditional patterns of myth or folk
narrative (for instance, the hero's quest as described by Campbell or Propp),
or the rules of classical stagecraft set down by Aristotle, Corneille or
Freytag would serve equally well to illustrate this ideal of maximum narrativity.
The classical narrative ideal involves not only a connected sequence of
actions, but also the construction of a unifying pattern which establishes
a maximum of connexion between the individual actions.
According to Genette's influential theory ("Frontieres
du recit"), the borders of narrative are threefold:
-The
opposition between narration and representation (here he deals with Plato's
notion of mimesis as opposed to diegesis, a question we shall be concerned
with next week).
-Description
is another limit: while narration is concerned with time, description extends
itself in space. Genette conceives of description as an indispensable element
within narration itself. The relationship between narration and description
is paradoxical: while description can be conceived to appear without narration,
whenever it appears in narration it is an ancillary mode, subordinate to
the narrative element. But such an account would give too rash a view of
the function of narrative structures in literary texts. Quite often, in
lyrical poetry for instance, the narrative element is insignificant, a mere
prop to sustain symbolic, descriptive or meditative elements. These texts
can be considered to have narrative elements, but they are not primarily
narratives. This is one of the criteria traditionally used, for instance,
to classify a poem as lyric or epic.
Genette argues that description is not opposed to narration in its
representative technique, since it too must be submitted to the successivity
of language. But the successive nature of the descriptive discourse does
not blur the frontiers between narration and description only: any other
structure which is linguistically conveyed will have to travel in time with
the chain of speech. And what if we consider the narrative versus the descriptive
elements in a picture, where there is no temporal development in the signifier?
The opposition between a descriptive element, such as the colour of a figure,
and a narrative element (the mythological anecdote of a Renaissance picture,
for instance) is still pertinent. Therefore, the difference between narration
and description is to be regarded as a difference between the represented
signifieds. In the case of narration, the basic articulations of the text
are events; in the case of description, the structure is a non-sequential
pattern of traits. The opposition between events and traits absolute precisely
because it is not an opposition between given elements; it is conceptual
and therefore ideal.
The third frontier of narrative described by Genette is no longer semantic. Since it concerns the modes of enunciation, we shall deal with it in a short while under the heading of narrative as a pragmatic phenomenon.
- Pragmatically, narrative is a communicative phenomenon. The scheme of the
communicative situation devised by Jakobson is well known:
Context
Sender ......................... Message ..................................
Addressee
Contact
Code
From
the 1960s on, the philosophy of language has extended its attention in the
direction of pragmatics, the contextual use of language and the specific
norms it creates. Language use is not a chaotic parole, as the Saussurian
model would lead us to think. There are norms of discursive interaction
beyond the level of the sentence. The speech act is the simple language
action that is effected through the communicative use of a proposition (e.
g. in order to make a statement, or give an order). The discursive act is
hierarchically is a web of such conventionalized speech acts, and it involves
not a single proposition, but an actual discourse event --in the case of
literature, the writing or reading of a literary text.
In his study of speech acts, Austin has proposed some fundamental
concepts. The first basic distinction is the opposition between locutionary,
illocutionary and perlocutionary acts. A locutionary act is a speech act
considered from the point of view of classical linguistics: as an abstract
phrase consisting of a form and a meaning, devoid of context (or rather
with an in-built conventional context) and considered in its morphological,
syntactic or semantic aspects. When the locution is uttered in a particular
speech situation, it becomes an illocution, a communicative act of some
kind whereby a social interaction is established between the speaker and
the addressee (an affirmation, an order, a promise). In order to occur,
a locutionary act must be identified as such by the hearer. A perlocution
or perlocutionary act is the non-conventionalized effect the illocutionary
act provokes on the hearer. Recognizing that a threat is a threat is an
illocutionary maneuver; the fear or laughter which may result from the threat
are perlocutionary effects.
According to Austin, a classification of illocutionary speech acts
could establish the following types:
(1)
Verdictives (giving of a verdict by a jury, arbitrator, etc.).
(2)
Exercitives (exercising powers, rights, etc. E. g, voting)
(3)
Commissives (they commit the speaker; promise)
(4)
Behabitives (attitudes of social interaction, e. g. apologizing)
(5)
Expositives (they make clear our use of words; e. g. "I hold that .
. . ").
As
such, none of these categories is adequate to describe narration. Simple,
true narration of real facts would seem to be a kind of expositive speech
act, derived from the simple statement, affirmation or telling of a fact
(cf. How to do Things with Words 162). Other kinds of narration could be
derived from this basic type of narration.
Austin and Searle study speech acts in a very abstract and simplified
way, as if they always consisted of one-sentence utterances occurring in
conventional contexts. But in fact speech acts occur only in discursive
activity. What we might call primitive speech acts are linked, combined
and transformed as they are used in wider units of social interaction. These
units can be called discourses, discourse acts or discursive activities.
A piece of discourse can often be described as a macro-speech act, a wide-ranging
speech act to which the micro-speech acts occurring at sentence level are
subordintated. Micro-speech acts are therefore instrumental in the configuration
of macro-speech acts or discursive acts, which in turn are determined by
the structure of social relationships.
Linguistic (including literary) narrative is one variety of discursive
act: more specific varieties can be established according to the needs of
the classification. This approach can offer a new perspective on the literary
genres and modes of discourse. For instance, we can use it to rethink the
third frontier of narrative drawn by Genette.
This last distinction refers to the opposition between histoire and
discours first introduced by Benveniste in his discussion of the tense system
in French. In histoire, there are no signs of enunciation; in discours there
are references to the speaking subject with first-person pronouns, to the
time or place of enunciation by means of deictics, etc. Discours is the
natural mode of speech, while histoire is defined by a series of exclusions.
But it can never completely exclude the marks of enunciation. The reason
is not, however, that a certain quantitative proportion of enunciation always
seeps in, as Genette seems to think in this passage. Every narrative text
is also and primarily an enunciation, an act of (literary) discourse. Only
by means of an abstraction can we consider it as an histoire, a story.
The conceptual distinctions we shall use in our analysis (fabula,
story , text) are to be understood in this same way: what we have direct
access to are texts: we construct stories from them, and we construct fabulas
from the stories. But let us return to our definition of narrative in order
to have a closer look at these concepts.
In
which sense can we analyze narrative? How can we begin? From the definition
of narrative we have proposed, "the representation of a series of events",
we already see that narratives are composite entities in a number of senses.
In the definition we mention a series of events: therefore, the narrative
can be analyzed into the events that compose it. Also, these events can
be studied according to their temporal sections. In a series of events some
are at the beginning, some in the middle, some at the end. So, in our first
approach, a narrative consists of a number of successive parts: it has a
longitudinal structure of time and actions.
A narrative is a compound in other senses, too. Let us note that
in our definition a narrative is not "a series of events", but
"the representation of a series of events". Here the composite
nature of narrative appears not as a number of succesive parts, in length
or horizontally, but, as it were, vertically, in depth: the narrative is
not that which it seems to be; it is only a sign. What we get in a narrative
text are not events as such, but representations of events. Here an infinite
amount of complexity begins to appear. In which way are the events represented?
How is the narrative similar or different from the events it represents?
The following chapters will largely consist of possible answers to these
questions.
We see, then, that the very definition of narrative leads us into
the beginning of analysis, and in several directions at once. We shall examine
different theories which analyze narratives either horizontally, or vertically,
or both. As far as horizontal analysis is concerned, we have spoken so far
of beginning, middle, and end. Other concepts will complicate this simple
account of parts. As far as vertical analysis is concerned, we may speak
of levels of analysis. Our definition distinguishes at least two levels:
if narrative is a semiotic representation of a series of events, one level
of analysis will examine the events represented. The structure of the representation
involves study at another level. We shall find that the narratological theories
often differ when it comes to defining these levels. Some theorists will
distinguish two levels of analysis, others speak of three or four levels.
Mieke Bal tells us that there are three basic levels of analysis of narrative:
fabula, story, and text; Tomashevski only speaks of two, fabula and siuzhet.
In fact, this problem appears in all areas of literary study. Theories which
are presumably about "the same" often turn out to be different.
Let us concentrate for one moment on this issue of identity and difference.
Identity
and difference are not absolute concepts; they involve an abstraction and
need a reference point. Saussure pointed this out with reference to semiotic
phenomena as a whole, using the example of the 8.45 PM express train from
Geneva to Paris. Is it the same train from one day to the next? It depends
on how we see it. Saussure used the train as a convenient example to illustrate
the structural functioning of language. Language is a system where the relationship
between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. It is not the intrinsic
nature of the signifier which determines its signification, but only the
place assigned to it within a system of differences. Semiotic identity,
that is, is determined by the relationships created within a signifying
system, not by the materiality of the signifying phenomenon. In Saussure's
words, "The linguistic mechanism rests entirely upon identities and
differences, the latter being merely the counterpart of the former"
(151). Thus the possibility of meaning, the origin of the sign, is founded
on the possibility of identity through repetition: different material phenomena
will be the manifestations of only one sign, because they are interpreted
according to a particular convention which disregards their differences.
Saussure's example works both ways. Trains, just as language, are
from one point of view semiotic phenomena. The 8.45 PM Geneva-Paris is to
some extent an abstract entity: it may be composed of completely different
coaches and a different locomotive each day, but its identity remains the
same for the practical purposes of the passengers.
This Saussurean example is a convenient way of coming back to the
question of the levels of analysis of a text. Signs may be signs in several
senses:
á
They may be signs of a referent; that is, we may study their referential
function, their connection to the objects or events we are referring to
whenever we use a sign.
á
Signs may also be signs of themselves insofar as they are signs, that is,
they are signs of their meaning, their signified.
á
They may also signify themselves insofar as they are signifiers, that is,
they may be signs of their form.
A
sign, therefore, is a complex entity which may be read at different levels,
in the manifold relationships which tie it to the world. Narratives, being
complex signs or structures of signs, can also be considered at several
levels of abstraction. This amounts to reading the text according to different
interpretive conventions. There can be many kinds of such interpretive conventions,
and all need not be narratologically significant.
For instance, according to Scholastic hermeneutics, the sacred texts
could be submitted to a fourfould interpretation, to yield a variety of
meanings. The literal sense was opposed to the mystical sense. And there
were three possible ways of reading a mystical sense in a sacred text: moral
readings, allegorical readings, anagogic readings. Each kind of reading
consisted in relating the text, translating it meaningfully into a particular
realm of experience: moral action, history (understood as the unfolding
of God's scheme of salvation), and theology. We could call these four types
of reading "levels of analysis" of a text, as well --Northrop
Frye makes use of such levels of analysis in his Anatomy of Criticism. All
this should make us keep in mind that there is no such thing as absolute
levels of analysis: that these and other narratological concepts are interpretive
constructions developed for specific interpretive needs. The levels of analysis
we will use here attempt to examine the specificically narrative characteristics
of a text. The levels of analysis distinguished by Frye, for instance, are
not specifically narratological: they can apply to any literary work, be
it a narrative or not.
When we speak of two narratives dealing with the same story, we are
of course using "the same" in a relative fashion. The text is
"the same" with respect to our immediate purposes of analysis,
just as the Geneva-Paris express is "the same" from one day to
another only for certain purposes. If two narratives dealt with exactly
"the same" story, we would not have two narratives, but one. While
we speak of two stories having "the same fabula", we still can
recognize that the stories, not to speak of the texts in which they are
conveyed, are different. When we speak of "the same story" in
two narratives, we are implying that they still are different texts. And
we may even speak of "the same text" to refer to a work and its
translation, if the language issue is not relevant for our immediate purposes.
"The same text" may also be handwritten, registered on tape or
printed in different types, if these differences are not relevant for our
analysis.
It follows, too, that considering a text as a narrative is also the
result of a methodological choice: it amounts to focusing on certain aspects
of its structure and possibly disregarding others. Narratological analysis
is therefore not a variety of criticism; it is a conceptual instrument used
by criticism. While it enhances awareness of the textual structures, it
also furthers certain directions in criticism and interpretation. But the
mere analysis of a text using the concepts of narratology is not a critique
of that text; there are whole areas of literary study that such an analysis
completely ignores, and which have to be taken into account if an interpretation
is to be balanced and well informed.
We see, then, that the instruments of narratology are not "neutral"
or "aseptic," in the sense that they are the result of an interpretive
choice and lead to further interpretive decisions. While the conceptual
distinctions may be clear-cut, these instruments do not have absolute values
in practical analysis, since each interpertive act defines the mode of their
application. The same heuristic proviso applies to narratological models.
Narratological models, too, are not all the same. In the long run, they
all have an axe to grind, and they offer different perspectives of the structure
of a narrative text. None of them is completely right, and therefore the
differences between them must be considered as meaningful and meaning-producing,
and not (generally speaking) as blunders or errors of the critics.
Our attention in this introductory section will be devoted above
all to the narratological concepts proposed by each of the theorists, but
we can test the efficiency of these or the range of their useful application
in a variety of narrative texts: literary or historical texts, newspaper
stories, films, advertisements, paintings, comic-books, etc. Since every
narrative theory is contextual (it answers a particular aim) it is to be
expected that each will be devised to deal with a specific kind of narrative
objects, and will prove less useful when applied to other kinds of objects.
Therefore, when studying texts on narrative theory, we should remember that
it, too, is a biased conceptual construct. We should summarize it, find
the most characteristic emphasis of the text, its main innovations to earlier
texts, its dialogue with them--what the text includes, what it leaves out.
We should observe the discursive activity it takes as its object, and the
level of its theoretical formulations--which is as well a study of the audience
and the historical context of the text. A good way to test the theory is
to focus on some specific question of our own interest and evaluate the
theory's treatment of the issue, or to compare which aspects of narrative
structure are given greater prominence, and why (e.g. narrative time in
Genette's model, duplicitous function in Barthes's).
It is therefore useful to see the differences and the similarities
between narrative theories, and it is absolutely necessary to be able to
translate one model into each other's terms as far as possible by focusing
on the conceptual distinctions, and to tell them apart from those differences
which are merely terminological. Differences in vocabulary when referring
to the same concepts may be irritating, but they are intrinsic to the critical
activity. Critics are to some extent free to coin their own terms, and many
of them have done so. We may see a practical example by studying the differences
between some basic analytical concepts of one of the earliest narratologists,
Aristotle, and of a contemporary author, Mieke Bal.
Mieke
Bal proposes an framework of three levels of "vertical" analysis
of the narrative text: as text, as story, and as fabula. In the case of
Robinson Crusoe, the text is the linguistic artifact that we can buy and
read, written de facto by Defoe and supposedly by Robinson; the fabula,
which we may also call the action, is whatever happened to Robinson in his
travels and his island. The story is the precise way in which that action
is conveyed, the way the fabula is arranged into a specific cognitive structure
of information. In Bal's terms,
A
narrative text is a text in which an agent relates a narrative. A story
is a fabula that is presented in a certain manner. A fabula series of logically
and chronologically related events that are caused or experienced by actors.
(Narratology 5)
In
this quotation, each term is defined in a neat analytical way in terms of
the next, until we reach the atomic concepts of the theory, which are "to
cause", "to experience", "state", "transition",
"actor" etc., of which more later on. Apparently, the definition
of narrative text should be "a text in which an agent relates a story,"
in order to preserve the neatness of the conceptual chain. In an earlier
(and theoretically subtler) account of her theory, Bal had defined these
concepts as follows:
1.
A text is a finite and structured set of linguistic signs.
1.1.
A narrative text is a text in which an agent relates a story . . . .
2.
A story is the signified of a narrative text. A story signifies in its turn
a fabula.[2]
We
may represent these levels of signification by means of the following diagram[3]:
Author
Reader
The
fabula is, according to Bal, a bare scheme of the narrative happenings without
taking into account any specific traits which individualize actors or actions
into characters and happenings. In the description of the fabula or action
we should also neglect any temporal or perspectival distortions: there are
no flashbacks or variations in point of view at this level of analysis.
It is obvious that Bal's conception of the fabula is actually action-scheme:
it is an abstraction, not the concrete, full-blown action that we construct
when reading or watching a narrative. It is confusing that this second concept
of fabula, the fabula as concrete action, is used by other theorists. Of
course we shall preserve both concepts, since both are analytically significant:
we shall oppose the full-blown action or fabula to a more abstract and reduced
fabula-scheme or action scheme. So a modified diagram would picture the
vertical levels of analysis in the following way:
Text
Story
Action
Action-scheme
Of
course, we could also provide a scheme of story structures; in the case
of the text, the word summary would seem to be more appropriate to name
the equivalent, "reduced" version. Fabula-schemes, story-schemes
and summaries are used continuously as critical tools.
Let us further specify the concept of story. A story is a fabula
which has been given a shape: a specific point of view and temporal scheme
have been introduced, and we deal with individualized characters, no longer
mere actors in an actional scheme. We could say that a story is a fabula
as it is presented in a text. But the text is not the story: "story"
is still an abstraction we effect on the text. A text is a piece of language,
while a story is a cognitive structure of happenings. The same story can
give rise to a number of texts: for instance, when Kafka wrote The Castle
in the first person and then rewrote it in the third person, the story remained
the same, but the text became a different one. The same story could in principle
be told by means of different texts: a film, a comic book or a novel.
The story, then, can be looked on as a fabula which has undergone
a further structuration. It can be defined as the result of a series of
modifications to which the fabula is subjected. These modifications can
be relative to time or to informational selection and distribution (mode).
We shall deal with them in sections 2, 3, and 4. In sections 1 and 2 we
shall study those structures which occur at fabula level.
As
often happens with the basic concepts of literary criticism, the basic notion
of analysis of a text through a series of levels of abstraction can be traced
back to Aristotle's Poetics. Aristotle is concerned most of all with the
structure, the organization of the literary text, not so much with the reactions
of the audience to the text or with the creative inspiration of the author.
Concentrating on tragedy as the epitome of a poetical work, Aristotle considers
it as a compound formed of six elements: "Every tragedy . . . must
have six parts, which parts determine its quality¾namely, plot, character,
diction, thought, spectacle, song" (51, VI.7). Plot is the most common
translation of mythos. A tragedy is not all plot: we might as well say that
it is all spectacle or all character. Therefore, considering the plot of
a tragedy is considering only a possible aspect of the tragedy. The difference
between "plot" and "tragedy" is therefore a difference
in level of analysis. Aristotle defines plot as follows: "plot is the
imitation of the action¾for by plot I here mean the arrangement of
the incidents" (51, VI.6); "the structure of the incidents"
(52, VI.8). Plot is tragedy considered insofar as it is the imitation of
an action, tragedy insofar as it consists in a series of incidents.
So far we have two levels of analysis: on one hand, the whole thing,
the tragedy; on the other, the various aspects under which it can be examined.
From a narratological point of view this amounts to a difference between
the story and the text:
1st
level:
tragedy (narrative text)
2nd
level
plot (story)
But
let us look closer at the Aristotelian definition of plot, "the imitation
of an action." Tragedy as a whole (the narrative text) is also described
by Aristotle as "the imitation of an action" (51, VI.5). Aristotle
seems to mean that a tragedy is the imitation of an action insofar as it
contains a plot. Be as it may, it is clear that the dynamic element at the
bottom of the narrative, the source of narrative movement is action, and
it is different from plot. Plot is not action, it is only the representation,
the "imitation" of an action. We are here close to Bal's model
of three levels of analysis:
1st
level:
tragedy (narrative text)
2nd
level:
plot (story)
3rd
level:
action (fabula)
Aristotle
says that plot is a part of the tragedy, while he does not say that action
is a part of the plot. The relationship between the action and the plot
is not one of part to whole, but one of imitation (mimesis): the plot is
the imitation of an action.
But this imitation is not natural in any simple way: it is a construction,
something which has to be carefully crafted by the poet. Two opposite perspectives,
literature-as-reality and literature-as-construction can thus be traced
back to Aristotle's poetics. Some ages have stressed the first, others the
second. Now we seem to be in an age in which careful construction is more
appreciated than the aim to represent reality in a faithful way. Nowadays
we do not believe in faithful representations of things as they are: when
we watch a documentary on mountain climbing, we tend to ask "where
is the camera? how did they get to film this?" Our contemporary culture,
which has invented the name of semiotics, is interested in the structure
of representation, and will not be content if it is given merely the represented
object. It is perhaps because of this that narratology has developed more
during the twentieth century than for ages before. All the critics we shall
study see narrative as a rhetorical construct whose strategies can be uncovered
and examined. But we should remember that these theories are themselves
perspectives on reality, interpretations. And it is the fate of all interpretations
to be interpreted again.
[1] Cf. Halliday's article on Golding's The Inheritors.
[2] 1. Un texte est un ensemble fini et structure de signes linguistiques. 1.1. Un texte narratif est un texte dans lequel une instance raconte un recit . . . . 2. Un recit est le signifie d'un texte narratif. Un recit signifie a son tour une histoire. (Mieke Bal, Narratologie 4. Translation mine)
