4.14.2006
Narrative Fiction (Narrative)
Title
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London: Methuen, 1983.
Field
Narrative
Summary
This book is about narrative fiction. "By 'narrative fiction' I mean the narration of a succession of fictional events...the term narration suggests (1) a communication process in which the narrative as message is transmitted by addresser to addressee and (2) the verbal nature of the medium used to transmit the message." (2) S-K uses Genette's tripartate division of narrative to order her book: story, text, and narration. Story is the abstraction of the narrated events from the text and restructering of those events into chronological order. Text is "a spoken or written discourse which undertakes their [the events] telling."(3) Narration is "the act or process of production" of the text..."narration can be considered as both real and fictional. In the empirical world, the author is the agent responsible for the production of the narrative and for its communication."(3) She begins with Story: Events. She contrasts deep structure to surface structure: "Wheras the surface structure of the story is syntagmatic, i.e. governed by temporal and causal principles, the deep structure is paradigmatic, based on static logical relations among the elements." (10) Narratives must have a story, but a narrative can have non-story elements in it. "An event...may be said to be a change from one state of affairs to another." (15) She contrasts Chatman here. Events make up micro-sequences which then make up macro-sequences, which make up a story-line, which makes up a story. Events are combined together based on time and causality. "Temporal sucession is sufficient as a minimal requirement for a group of events to form a story." (18) She discusses Propp, functions and fairytales. And Bremond who critiques Propp for the lack of freedom in the formalist functional analysis and adds in bifurcationary choice (at any point in the story, there is the possibility of success or failure, like a choose your own adventure). Then we have Story: Characters. Structuralists aren't too down with characters. They like actants. "Like any scientifically orientated discipline, formalist and structuralist poetics recognizes the methodological necessity of reduction, especially in preliminary phases of an inquiry. Since action seems more easily amenable to the construction of 'narrative grammars' (often baed on verb-centered grammars of natural languages), it is convenient to reduce character to action - at least in the first stage." (34) S-K says that instead of subordinating character to action or vice versa, it is better to look at them as interdependent. "Character can be seen as a tree-like hierarchical structure in which elements are assembled in categories of increasing integrative power." (37) Next she moves to Text: time. "Time in narrative fiction can be defined as the relations of chronology between story and text." (44) Text-time has to be linear - that's how text works. You read it from right to left (or left to right) but in a progression. Time is viewed in three respects: order (When?), duration (How Long?), and frequency (How Often?). So discrepancies in order are analepsis (flashback) and prolepsis (flashforward). Duration gets messed with in acceleration and deceleration, summary, ellipses, scene is when story-duration equals text-duration. Next: Text: Characterization. Characterization is the textual indication of character. there are two types: direct definition and indirect presentation. Analogy is used a a reinforcement of characterization. It is purely textual, it doesn't have anything to do with story-causality. Next, Text: Focalization. Again, drawing on Genette, focalization is the mediation of some textual "prism" that presents a particular "view" of the story. It's basically a more precise and better way of saying point-of-view. It also doesn't get all tangeld up with narration. Focalization implies a subject, the focalizer, and an object, the focalized. It can be internal (say, a character in the story) or external(closer to the narrator) to the story. This takes into account space and time because an internal focalizer will not have a total view and it will be simultaneous to the time of the story. THe opposite is the case for an external focalizer. Same goes for restricted and unrestricted knowledge, objectivity and subjectivity, and authoritative ideology. OK moving on to narration: levels and voices. S-K critiques Booth via Chatman's construct of implied authors and readers and basically just focues on Real Author/Reader and Narrator/Narratee. Narration must take into account time (is it simultaneus to the story time, anterior to it, etc.). Then there are levels: "Narration is always at a higher narrative level than the story it narrates. Thus the diegetic level is narrated by the extradiegetic narrator, the hypodiegetic level by a diegetic (intradiegetic) one." (92) Confused? Think Arabian Nights. A heterodiegetic narrator is absent from the story line, a homodiegetic narrator takes part in it. Reliability is also an issue with narration. "When an extradiegetic narrator becomes more overt, his chances or being fully reliable are diminished, since his interpretations, judgements, generalizations are not always compatible with the norms of the implied author. Intradiegetic narrators, especially when they are also homodiegetic, are on the whole more fallible than extradiegetic ones, because they are also characters in the fictional world. As such, they are subject to limited knowledge, personal involvement, and problematic value-schemes, often giving rise to the possibility of unreliability." (103) On Narratees: "the narratee is the agent addressed by the narrator, and all the criteria for classifying the latter also apply to the former...the same narrative may, of course, contain both an extradiegetic and an intradiegetic narratee, just as it may include both types of narrators." (104) Next! Narration: Speech Representation. What is this diegesis crap we've been talking about? Diegesis, according to Socrates, is when the poet himself speaks. Memesis is when the poet creates the illusion that someone else is speaking (not like, ventriloquism, just like, you know...) However, Aristotle in the poetics looks at it a little different. here, mimesis an imitation of action, thus it can contain diegesis. We can think of diegesis v. mimesis as showing v. telling. The other thing is that since narrative is verbal, there really is never any mimesis, you can never really show because you always have to use language, you always have to tell. S-K focuses a lot of Free Indirect Discourse (Did he love me?)
Then we get to a chapter on the text and reading - the phenomenology of reading. S-K discusses the use of frames "To use a frame, it seems to me, is to ground a hypothesis in a deja-vu model of coherence. The dynamics of reading can thus be seen not only as a formation, development and modification, and replacement of hypothesis, but also - simultaneously - a construction of frames, their transformation and dismantling." (124) She discusses suspense and the use of delay and gaps (125).
S-K concluded by wondering what deconstruction and new ways of looking at narrative means for poetics. Will it lead to the end of poetics or to exciting new places? "Because of their tendency to draw attention to their own rhetoricity and fictionality, literary narratives become a kind of paradigm, used to unearth narrative elements in texts where such consciousness is usually less explicit. Seen in this way, the study of narrative is no longer restricted to poetics but becomes an attempt to describe fundamental operations of any signyfying system."(131)
Other Thoughts
Teleology can be tautological (when Hermione and Ron and Harry are in a fight for most of PoA because if Hermione is around too much they'd totally figure out she was using a time turner but her absence pushes the story along even though her absence is neccesated by pushing the story along).
"How to make a bagel? First you take a hole...And how to make a narrative text? In exactly the same way." (127)
Other QE Works Cited
Aristotle. Poetics (Narrative)
Bal, Mieke. Narratology (Narrative)
Barthes, R. S/Z (Narrative)
Barthes, R. Image Music Text (Narrative)
Barthes, R. Writing Degree Zero (Narrative)
Chatman, S. Story and Discourse (Narrative)
Cohn, D. Transparent Minds (Narrative)
Genette, G. Narrative Discourse (Narrative)
Lacan, J. Ecrits (History and Theory of the Body)
Matejka, L and Pomorska, K. Readings in Russian Poetics (Narrative)
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London: Methuen, 1983.
Field
Narrative
Summary
This book is about narrative fiction. "By 'narrative fiction' I mean the narration of a succession of fictional events...the term narration suggests (1) a communication process in which the narrative as message is transmitted by addresser to addressee and (2) the verbal nature of the medium used to transmit the message." (2) S-K uses Genette's tripartate division of narrative to order her book: story, text, and narration. Story is the abstraction of the narrated events from the text and restructering of those events into chronological order. Text is "a spoken or written discourse which undertakes their [the events] telling."(3) Narration is "the act or process of production" of the text..."narration can be considered as both real and fictional. In the empirical world, the author is the agent responsible for the production of the narrative and for its communication."(3) She begins with Story: Events. She contrasts deep structure to surface structure: "Wheras the surface structure of the story is syntagmatic, i.e. governed by temporal and causal principles, the deep structure is paradigmatic, based on static logical relations among the elements." (10) Narratives must have a story, but a narrative can have non-story elements in it. "An event...may be said to be a change from one state of affairs to another." (15) She contrasts Chatman here. Events make up micro-sequences which then make up macro-sequences, which make up a story-line, which makes up a story. Events are combined together based on time and causality. "Temporal sucession is sufficient as a minimal requirement for a group of events to form a story." (18) She discusses Propp, functions and fairytales. And Bremond who critiques Propp for the lack of freedom in the formalist functional analysis and adds in bifurcationary choice (at any point in the story, there is the possibility of success or failure, like a choose your own adventure). Then we have Story: Characters. Structuralists aren't too down with characters. They like actants. "Like any scientifically orientated discipline, formalist and structuralist poetics recognizes the methodological necessity of reduction, especially in preliminary phases of an inquiry. Since action seems more easily amenable to the construction of 'narrative grammars' (often baed on verb-centered grammars of natural languages), it is convenient to reduce character to action - at least in the first stage." (34) S-K says that instead of subordinating character to action or vice versa, it is better to look at them as interdependent. "Character can be seen as a tree-like hierarchical structure in which elements are assembled in categories of increasing integrative power." (37) Next she moves to Text: time. "Time in narrative fiction can be defined as the relations of chronology between story and text." (44) Text-time has to be linear - that's how text works. You read it from right to left (or left to right) but in a progression. Time is viewed in three respects: order (When?), duration (How Long?), and frequency (How Often?). So discrepancies in order are analepsis (flashback) and prolepsis (flashforward). Duration gets messed with in acceleration and deceleration, summary, ellipses, scene is when story-duration equals text-duration. Next: Text: Characterization. Characterization is the textual indication of character. there are two types: direct definition and indirect presentation. Analogy is used a a reinforcement of characterization. It is purely textual, it doesn't have anything to do with story-causality. Next, Text: Focalization. Again, drawing on Genette, focalization is the mediation of some textual "prism" that presents a particular "view" of the story. It's basically a more precise and better way of saying point-of-view. It also doesn't get all tangeld up with narration. Focalization implies a subject, the focalizer, and an object, the focalized. It can be internal (say, a character in the story) or external(closer to the narrator) to the story. This takes into account space and time because an internal focalizer will not have a total view and it will be simultaneous to the time of the story. THe opposite is the case for an external focalizer. Same goes for restricted and unrestricted knowledge, objectivity and subjectivity, and authoritative ideology. OK moving on to narration: levels and voices. S-K critiques Booth via Chatman's construct of implied authors and readers and basically just focues on Real Author/Reader and Narrator/Narratee. Narration must take into account time (is it simultaneus to the story time, anterior to it, etc.). Then there are levels: "Narration is always at a higher narrative level than the story it narrates. Thus the diegetic level is narrated by the extradiegetic narrator, the hypodiegetic level by a diegetic (intradiegetic) one." (92) Confused? Think Arabian Nights. A heterodiegetic narrator is absent from the story line, a homodiegetic narrator takes part in it. Reliability is also an issue with narration. "When an extradiegetic narrator becomes more overt, his chances or being fully reliable are diminished, since his interpretations, judgements, generalizations are not always compatible with the norms of the implied author. Intradiegetic narrators, especially when they are also homodiegetic, are on the whole more fallible than extradiegetic ones, because they are also characters in the fictional world. As such, they are subject to limited knowledge, personal involvement, and problematic value-schemes, often giving rise to the possibility of unreliability." (103) On Narratees: "the narratee is the agent addressed by the narrator, and all the criteria for classifying the latter also apply to the former...the same narrative may, of course, contain both an extradiegetic and an intradiegetic narratee, just as it may include both types of narrators." (104) Next! Narration: Speech Representation. What is this diegesis crap we've been talking about? Diegesis, according to Socrates, is when the poet himself speaks. Memesis is when the poet creates the illusion that someone else is speaking (not like, ventriloquism, just like, you know...) However, Aristotle in the poetics looks at it a little different. here, mimesis an imitation of action, thus it can contain diegesis. We can think of diegesis v. mimesis as showing v. telling. The other thing is that since narrative is verbal, there really is never any mimesis, you can never really show because you always have to use language, you always have to tell. S-K focuses a lot of Free Indirect Discourse (Did he love me?)
Then we get to a chapter on the text and reading - the phenomenology of reading. S-K discusses the use of frames "To use a frame, it seems to me, is to ground a hypothesis in a deja-vu model of coherence. The dynamics of reading can thus be seen not only as a formation, development and modification, and replacement of hypothesis, but also - simultaneously - a construction of frames, their transformation and dismantling." (124) She discusses suspense and the use of delay and gaps (125).
S-K concluded by wondering what deconstruction and new ways of looking at narrative means for poetics. Will it lead to the end of poetics or to exciting new places? "Because of their tendency to draw attention to their own rhetoricity and fictionality, literary narratives become a kind of paradigm, used to unearth narrative elements in texts where such consciousness is usually less explicit. Seen in this way, the study of narrative is no longer restricted to poetics but becomes an attempt to describe fundamental operations of any signyfying system."(131)
Other Thoughts
Teleology can be tautological (when Hermione and Ron and Harry are in a fight for most of PoA because if Hermione is around too much they'd totally figure out she was using a time turner but her absence pushes the story along even though her absence is neccesated by pushing the story along).
"How to make a bagel? First you take a hole...And how to make a narrative text? In exactly the same way." (127)
Other QE Works Cited
Aristotle. Poetics (Narrative)
Bal, Mieke. Narratology (Narrative)
Barthes, R. S/Z (Narrative)
Barthes, R. Image Music Text (Narrative)
Barthes, R. Writing Degree Zero (Narrative)
Chatman, S. Story and Discourse (Narrative)
Cohn, D. Transparent Minds (Narrative)
Genette, G. Narrative Discourse (Narrative)
Lacan, J. Ecrits (History and Theory of the Body)
Matejka, L and Pomorska, K. Readings in Russian Poetics (Narrative)
# posted by SMRT : 6:45 PM
