3

3.7. Distance

The problem of narrative distance is a complex one: it involves a wide variety of issues, from verisimilitude and mimetic accuracy to the problems of dialogism and irony inherent in the simultaneous presence of a variety of voices in the novel. Plato offers what is probably the first extant discussion of narrative distance when he discusses the appropriate style of a poem: "All mythology is a narration of events, either past, present or to come . . . . And narration may be either simple narration, or imitation, or a union of the two" (Republic III; 1971: 27). That is, the poet may speak in his own voice (simple narration) or he may speak in the voice of a character (imitative narration). Tragedy and comedy are wholly imitative, in dithyramb and other genres the poet is the sole speaker, "and the combination of both is found in epic, and in several other styles of poetry" (1971: 28). There is more here, of course, than a discussion of narrative distance. This is also the first theoretical definition of literary genres on a formal basis, and the first theoretical approach to the problem of narrative voice, one we shall deal with later on. We may as well point out that "narration" is to be taken in the more general sense of "enunciation"; it is obvious that this classification accounts for other genres apart from narrative.

The following diagram reflects Plato's classification of narrative modes and genres.

Three types of narration:

(diégesis)

1) Simple narration

(haplé diégesis)

2) Imitative narration

(mimesis)

3) Mixed narration

Dithyramb Epic, etc. Tragedy, comedy

Human nature, according to Plato, is incapable of imitating many things well; there is a need of specialization. That may be one reason why poets are either tragedians, or comedians, or epic poets. In any case, imitative genres are dangerous because imitations "at length grow into habits and become a second nature, affecting body, voice and mind" (Republic 29). Many of the themes the poet will be dealing with will be unworthy, and imitation of them would be below a reasonable man. Therefore, only one narrative mode is decent when dealing with unworthy themes , "unless in jest." Only the imitation of good men acting wisely is allowed. In general, the ideal poet will have a definite style: "His style will be both imitative and narrative; but there will be, in a long story, only a small proportion of the former" (Republic, 1971: 29).

The two basic Platonic modes could be said to either show the character in action or tell about its action. "Showing" and "telling", understood as immediate or mediated presentation, will be the main degrees of distance. "Telling" is restricted, of course, to the verbal element of narrative, while we may "show" both verbally and nonverbally. Any narrative can represent both linguistic and nonlinguistic motifs. Film can represent iconically both visual and verbal phenomena, it shows most of the story, while it may also tell some sections through voice-over or the characters' accounts. Literature, being linguistic, can imitate language iconically in a way it cannot imitate visual impressions or physical actions.

In our approach to mode in literary narrative we can therefore, for the sake of convenience, consider the discourse of characters separately from other narrated motifs. We have, then, narrative of events and narrative of words. In each of them we shall examine the techniques used to either "tell" or "show" the story's existents and happenings.

Distance: Represented discourse

Several degrees of distance can be established here. For the sake of convenience, we shall classify them into four types: direct discourse, free indirect discourse, indirect discourse, and narrativized discourse.

The citation of a character's words is the minimal distance between the narrative and the action. A citation is a perfect copy of the original words using the same substance they are made of: language. Indeed, the words produced in the action, though they are the object of the narrative's imitation, cannot in one sense be said to be more "original" than their imation is, since both are tokens of a single language type.

We use the term "citation", which may seem inappropriate. However, the structure of narrative representation is based on a hierarchy of enunciation. A character's direct discourse is also indirect to the extent that it is the character's speech as rendered and quoted by the narrator. Only the extradiegetic narrator speaks directly and freely organizes his discourse to address an extradiegetic receiver. Otherwise, all characters would be narrators and speak from the same plane. If we listen to a character's direct discourse, it is because the narrator has organized his discourse in that way, not because the character's discourse is immediately available to us. Quoted speech is intrinsically doubled, and is understood in two simultaneous contexts: the original action context where the words are spoken by the character, and the context of the narrator's discourse where they are retaken.[1]

There is a contiuum of forms of speech representation between the minimum distance (direct discourse) and indirect discourse. The label "free indirect discourse" is a loose description for a variety of forms which, nevertheless, share some common traits.

Indirect discourse is the representation of speech through grammatical subordination to the narrator's discourse, a subordination which involves its assimilation and transformation. The most salient characteristics of this subordination are the use of a speech verb linking the character's discourse to the narrator's, and the grammatical modification of the former into a variety of syntactic structures of subordination. The vocabulary and the indexical structure of the subordinated discourse may be kept or may be translated into the narrator's register and referential system. As in the case of free indirect discourse, a wide range of forms are possible here; in fact, there is no sharp line separating indirect from free indirect discourse, and hybrid forms may be used by writers. On the whole, however, the presence of the grammatical structures of subordination we have noted make it easy to classify a given construction as indirect or free indirect speech.

The least mimetic form of representing speech is dealing with it as with just any other event.[2] When discourse is narrativised, the speech act is represented as an act. Here the fact that speech represents speech loses its specificity, since the representation is not iconic. The speech act can be represented in greater or lesser detail, but just in the same way any human action, being meaningful, can be communicated or represented in a variety of ways. The narrator may interpet the character's (speech) action to a greater or lesser degree, or s/he may leave that intepretive task to the reader.

Distance: Nonlinguistic motifs

However, the notions of realism, of verisimilitude, of mimetic accuracy are among the most common everyday critical terms. Some modes of presentation are more realistic than others. This is due to many different factors. For instance, a worn-out literary technique does not seem realistic any more, and must be renewed through defamilirization, through an original reworking of its possibilities. Mimetic realism is to a great degree a matter of convention and illusion, a rhetorical effect. It may depend as much on the consistency with which a narrative technique is used as on the inherent mimetic potential of that technique. A mixture of narrative modes destroys the illusion of immediacy.[3] The question of realism is complex, and we can barely broach it here. Suffice it to say that some narratives are recognised as closer to real experience than others. This is one possible meaning of "distance": realistic narrative is less mediated than stylized or obviously patterned narrative.Let us now examine the inherent mimetic potential of specific techniques.

Narrative is essentially distant, a mediation through language, and reaches immediacy only when language becomes the object of its imitation. The notion of an unmediated presentation of nonlinguistic events might then seem to be a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless, there is a whole current in early modernist fiction which argues precisely the contrary: that fiction has a dramatic potential it should exploit, that it should not be content with "telling"—the domain of plain language—but should aim at "showing" its subject, giving it the immediacy that becomes a lived experience for the audience. The difference is not only a theoretical one: Genette's (and Plato's) views are abstract and theoretical, they are aimed at discovering the essence of narrative, while dramatic theories of narrative are developed by practising novelists, such as Henry James, who sought new ways to write and were concerned not so much with the essence of genres as the possibilities of manipulating language in order to create specific impressions.

The theory of the novel had been neglected during the emergence of the genre in the 17th and 18th centuries. It is not to be found in the classifications of Boileau or in the criticism of Dryden: the most interesting statements come from the novelists themselves, such as Fielding's definition of his "new province of writing" as a comic epic poem written in prose. In the 18th and early 19th centuries the critical statements which are found are usually far behind the theorical developent of the criticism of poetry. Soon, however, the novel will claim a place as an art form, in the works of Walter Besant, Henry James, or Friedrich Spielhagen. One central statement about technique in all of these theorists is that the novel should try to attain the status of a dramatic experience: that it should escape in some way the bounds of narrative in order to provide the reader with a direct, unmediated experience. The most forceful theory in this respect comes from the German theorist and novelist Spielhagen, perhaps the first explicit proponent of the doctrine that the author should disappear behind the tale—or, more specifically, that the narrator should not be given any personality, relevance or protagonism of his own; that he should not explicitly comment on the action or impose an arbitrary structure on it; that he should not use omniscient panoramas, narrative summaries or descriptive accounts. James voices similar ideas. This emphasis on dramatization, on an experiential narrative technique, is based on their conceptions of the novel as a moral force and on their realist creed.

Earlier novelists had already recognized and valued the dramatic potential of the novel: the writer must not tell the whole of the story in his own person: he must rather show, make his characters tell the story by themselves through the use of dialogue and action. Richardson observes that the best novelist is the one who uses the most dramatic method: "narration will not be lively, except he frequently drops himself and runs into dialogue: all good writers therefore have thrown as much as possible of the dramatic mode into their narrative."[4] The most finished form of this dramatic narration in the 18th century will be the epistolary technique which Richardson himself used in Pamela or Clarissa; in the twentieth century, the equivalent might well be the interior monologue. Early in the nineteenth century, Stendhal proudly notes that all other novelists tell the story, while only he shows it to the reader. In a letter to a prospective lady writer, Dickens makes a similar point:

It strikes me that you constantly hurry your narrative (and yet without getting on) by telling it, in a sort of impetuous breathless way, in your own person, when the people should tell it and act it for themselves . My notion always is, that when I have made the people to play out the play, it is, as it were, their own business to do it, and not mine.[5]

In connection with the doctrine that literature must be direct and dramatic we may also remember Aristotle's and Lessing's praise of Homer's dramatic style and Coleridge's denunciation of Wordsworth's "ventriloquism."

Nineteenth-century realists will often defend the artistic value of the novel on the grounds of the fullness and immediacy of its pictures of life, especially of the internal psychology of characters. For Walter Besant, a novel is a genre which gives a fuller experience of life than the other arts, because its privileged material is human psychology and relationships. Through precision and verisimilitude a novel ought to produce conviction, and through conviction to provide a fuller experience of life than we would otherwise enjoy, to endow us with the "power of vision and of feeling."[6]

We have already mentioned Besant's views with reference to selection, to the necessary relevance of each of the story elements we choose to represent. Besant further specifies his dramatic ideal with an explicit image of theatricals and with a reference to the audience—the test for dramatic presentation is to be full in the interest aroused in the audience:

Closely connected with selection is dramatic presentation. Given a situation, it should be the first care of the writer to present it as dramatically, that is to say as forcibly, as possible . . . . The writer is the dramatist, stage-manager, scene-painter, actor, and carpenter, all in one; it is his single business to see that none of the scenes flag or fall flat: he must never for one moment forget to consider how the piece is looking from the front. (Besant 24-25)

The depiction of character deserves special mention: it is the test for the dramatic ability of the writer. Clumsy writers will tell us about their characters, without allowing us the direct experience of their personality. Or they will give flat characterizations by means of a single trait of personality which allows the reader to recognize the character, albeit in a mechanic way.[7] The ideal is to describe full characters through their spontaneous action, to let themselves act in front of the reader so that he will get to know their personality, instead of being informed about them. In good dramatic characterization,

there is not a single word to emphasize or explain the attitude, manner, and look of the speakers, yet they are as intelligible as if they were written down and described. That is the highest art which carries the reader along and makes him see, without being told, the changing expressions, the gestures of the speakers, and hear the varying tones of the voice. . . . The only writer who can do this is he who makes his characters intelligible from the very outset, causes them first to stand before the reader in clear outline, and then with every additional line brings out the figure, fills up the face, and makes his creature grow from the simple outline more and more to the perfect and rounded figure. (Besant 27-28)

The aesthetics of early modernism will insist on the artistic virtues of showing as compared to telling. In symbolist aesthetics, to name the object is to destroy it, to prevent its spontaneous revelation to the receiver.[8] I. A. Richards formulates thus a general principle of artistic communication: whatever can be directly communicated should not be communicated in a mediated way.[9]

Henry James calls for the dramatization of the novel. In all good novels, character and incident define one another:

What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character? What is either a picture or a novel that is not of character? (1971: 665)

The relationship between action and character is defined as an organic one, but perhaps it could best be defined as a relation of organic subordination of action to character. Here James is arguing not only for an adequate description of the unity of a novel, but also for the novel of character and psychology against a narrow notion of the novel of action:

There are few things more exciting to me, in short, than a psychological reason, and yet, I protest, the novel seems to me the most magnificent form of art . . . . The other arts, in comparison, appear confined and hampered; the various conditions under which they are exercised are so rigid and definite. (1971: 668)

The novel (unlike drama) can reveal to us the inner life of characters, and this is the essence of the genre, which otherwise ought to adhere, in James' opinion, to a dramatic ideal of concentration.[10] James and his followers (Lubbock, Beach) also insisted on a rigid control over tone and voice. "Authorial intrusions" such as direct commentary or evaluation of characters were denounced as undramatic and therefore unartistic. The significance of a good story, according to the dramatic code, must emerge by itself. All perceptions, judgments, evaluations, etc. would have to come from the characters themselves; fiction should give the impression of transparency, of immediacy. The reader should build by himself his opinion of the characters' personality or behaviour, not be told in so many words by the narrator. The characters should be shown in process, in the making, not already made and defined by the authorial omniscience.[11]

The modernist reaction against Victorian narrative techniques is often a reaction against the explicit presence of the author's opinions and evaluations. The authorial narrator is no longer "in", except in the case of first-person narrators, who are a part of the fictional world. The author must efface himself from the fictional sphere, make himself transparent, avoid preaching and moralizing the reader in the way Dickens, Kingsley or George Eliot would often do. Otherwise, the mimetic illusion of narrative is lost for these critics. According to Lubbock,

the art of fiction does not begin until the novelist thinks of his story as a matterto be shown, to be so exhibited that it will tell itself . . . . The thing has to look true, and that is all. It is not made to look true by simple statement. (1921: 62)

Early modernist critics such as James, Lubbock or Beach will favour the use of consistent figural focalization in order to achieve this direct presentation of the story. Happenings acquire an air of immediacy if they are presented not "in themselves", as seen from the writer's interpretive viewpoint, but rather from a character's perspective. We see that at this point the issues of distance and point of view coalesce: a subjective point of view is one of the ways of achieving immediacy. Every thought, perception or experience narrated will have to come from the focal character, called "vessel of sensibility" or "reflector" by James.

As we have mentioned earlier, a summary implies a mediating narrator, while scenic presentation, most particularly through dialogue or through figural focalization, gives an impression of immediacy. Whatever is inherently narrative (such as summary) is not dramatic. Modernist novels tend to assume the shape of scene sequences, a system of well-defined spatio-temporal blocks. The narrative discourse moulds itself as closely as possible on the story, avoiding extraneous digressions.

The reaction against the dramatic ideal for the art of fiction takes the form of a revaluation of the figure of the narrator and the full range of effects which can be achieved through evaluation, directness, explicit comment and other forms of mediation. The narrator comes to the fore again and is appreciated as an important constuctive element in storytelling. At the same time, there is a certain reaction against the favourite techniques of modernist fiction: neutrality, ambiguity, restricted use of viewpoints, etc. The classical novel—Victorian or eighteenth-century—is celebrated again together with its outspoken and obstrusive narrators. This reaction appears in Germany as early as 1910 in Käte Friedemann's Die Rolle des Erzählers in der Epik, but the Anglo-American tradition has to wait until 1960 and Wayne C. Booth's Rhetoric of Fiction.

Booth's main tenet is that narrative cannot show, that showing is just a way of telling, and consequently that the opposition between them is misguided. According to Booth, the concept of "showing" is used in a vague and impressionistic way by James's followers. He points out that there is to start with a difference between a situation which is dramatic and a dramatic presentation of a situation. There are, he argues, two ways to show a scene in a dramatic way:

• To show characters dramatically engaged with each other, motive clashing upon motive, the outcome depending on the resolution of motives.

• To give the impression that the story is taking place by itself, with the characters existing in a dramatic relationship vis-à-vis the spectator, unmediated by a narrator and decipherable only through inferential matching of word to word and word to deed.[12]

There would be, then, a dramatism of the action and a dramatism of the presentation, of the story. Booth exemplifies the limitations of the Modernist concept of "dramatism" through an analysis of the following passage from Joseph Andrews, in which the naked and battered Joseph begs assistance from a passing stage-coach:

"O J-sus!" cried the lady; "A naked man! Dear coachman, drive on and leave him." Upon this the gentlemen got out of the coach; and Joseph begged them to have mercy upon him: for that he had been robbed, and almost beaten to death. "Robbed!" cries an old gentleman: "Let us make all the haste imaginable, or we shall be robbed too." A young man, who belonged to the law, answered, "He wished they had passed by without taking any notice: but that now they might be proved to have been last in his company; if he should die, they might be called to some account for his murder. . . ."

At last Joseph is given leave to enter the coach, but he refuses to do so without any clothes:

Though there were several great-coats about the coach, it was not easy to get over this difficulty which Joseph had started. The two gentlemen complained they were cold, and could not spare a rag; the man of wit saying with a laugh, that charity began at home: and the coachman, who had two great-coats spread under him, refused to lend either, lest they should be made bloody: the lady's footman desired to be excused for the same reason, which the lady herself, notwithstanding the abhorrence of a naked man, approved: and it is more than probable that Joseph, who obstinately adhered to his modest resolution, must have perished, unless the postillion (a lad who hath been since transported for robbing a hen-roost) had voluntarily stripped off a great-coat, his only garment, at the same time swearing a grat oath (for which he was rebuked by the passengers), "That he would rather ride in his shirt all his life, than suffer a fellow-creature to lie in so miserable a condition" ( Joseph Andrews I.12)

According to Booth, there is here strong dramatism of the first kind in spite of the obvious presence of the narrator and the indirect presentation of the characters' attitudes.

We can turn Booth's criticism to positive use, as a clarification of what "showing" may mean in narrative, instead of dismissing the idea altoghether. When we examine the above passage, we see that its dramatism is not so intrinsic, and that it owes much to its presentation. That is, there are different kinds of dramatic presentation, to the extent that we can speak of "showing" a scene in spite of the absence of direct speech, detailed presentation, or subjective focalization on the part of the characters. Fielding, or Fielding's narrator, in spite of being a prominent presence who mediates and summarises the situation, deliberately avoids any explicit value judgments, and simply mentions the attitudes of the various characters towards Joseph. Of course, the value judgments are implied since the passage is highly ironic, but the reader is left to evaluate the situation and reach a conclusion, and even to construct the different characters and the narrator's attitude towards them. Characters are not explicitly described in their moral being: they perform dramatically to some extent when the reader knows them from their actions.

The action of narrative subjects contains therefore a dramatic element. This is true of the characters' doings, but also, of course, of their dialogues, which are after all speech events, speech acts. And the same goes for the narrator. The discursive activity of a narrative subject (character or narrator) may be interpreted as a speech act (e.g. laying the focus on its illocutionary force rather than on the propositional value of the sentences). To the extent that we assume this stance in reading or intepreting narrative, the dramatic mode can be said to permeate even the most monological of narratives.

This amounts to saying that all kinds of actions, verbal or otherwise, can be presented dramatically as long as the reader is given (or assumes) an interpretive role, as long as there is a possibility of greater significance coming from greater attention to the situation. The meaning of acts is not self-evident and univocal, but contextual: the same act, or the same speech act, can assume different senses depending on the situation in which it is performed. And, just as drama can be said to be a narrative genre in one sense, narrative is aptly described as dramatic in the sense that its unfolding requires constant interpretive attention.

We see it is difficult to give a univocal definition of narrative distance. If we define it provisionally as the greater or lesser dramatic quality of the novel we are still left with the task of defining those techniques or elements which have a bearing on distance. Actually, we have already witnessed some implicit distinctions at work. Distance increases as the narrator is more arbitrary, obstrusive or manipulative, and decreases when the story is presented in a non-evaluative way, and if possible through the perspective of the characters themselves. Distance decreases the more we are given a scenic, experiential approach to characterization and event. The more experiential the reading of the story, the lesser the distance. It increases the more a story is perceived as conventional, generically coded or mannered, and decreases with the "feel" of reality, when defamiliarization provides for verisimilitude. We can present these varying parameters of narrative distance as a set of opposite pairs:

Direct representation, / Mediated representation,

showing / telling

__________________________________________________________

1. Verisimilitude,

defamiliarization / Stylized or mannered presentation

2. Direct discourse / Indirect or narrativised discourse

3. Direct discourse / Narration of events

4. Scene / Summary

5. Figural focalization / Authorial narrator's focalization

6. First-person narration / Third-person narration

7. Nonevaluative description / Evaluation

8. Enunciation Enunciate

(narrative discourse) / Action, narrated world

9. Illocutionary force / Propositional content (locution)

10. Index / Sign

11. Icon / Sign

12. Specimen / Sign

13. Signifier / Signified

Perhaps "distance" should be described as a set of such phenomena bound by a loose "family relationship." Some of these categories partially overlap with others; some are more inclusive or are more basic semiotic oppositions. For instance, the opposition icon / sign governs to some extent the opposition scene / summary, since the story time of the scene has a higher iconic value than that of a summary. The concept of "distance" reveals its full complexity when we realize that several of these pairs of opposites may be at work in any narrative passage. We should note, moreover, that while most of these pairs refer to a direct representation of the action and the narrated world (e. g. 2 to 7) some of them (e.g. 8 and 9) refer to an immediate presence of the narrative process.

In conclusion, we cannot but say that distance is an effect, not a technique or a specific structure. It is the result of the whole texture of the narrative and the way it is experienced by the reader.

[1] Genette (1966: 156) wrongly assumes that the character's quoted words are the same as the original words of the action. The fact that the action is fictional is immaterial to this semiotic structure; fiction is fiction because it reproduces this semiotic process even if there is no real referent.

[5] Rpt. in Allott 1968, 270.

[7] Here Besant anticipates E. M. Forster's well-known classification of characters into flat and round. For yet an earlier formulation of this pair of concepts, see Dryden's essay on "The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy."

[8] See e. g. Mallarmé 1971: 689.

[10] James brings to mind here Aristotle's views on tragedy as a model for good, organic epics (Poetics ch. 23).

[11] See e. g. Lubbock 111 ff.; Pouillon 1970: 69ff.

[12] W. C. Booth 1961a, 185-186.