Important Concept in Gerard Genette’s Narratology

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Name Joshi Tejasvi A

Course M.A. Sem 02

Roll no. 21

Paper no. 07 (Literary Theory &Criticism)

Batch- 2015-17

Topic:  Important Concept in Gerard Genette’s Narratology

Submitted to: Department of English

 

Gerard Genette - Important Concepts in Genette's Narratology

Contents

1 Life

2 Works

3 Important concept of Genette’s Narratology

3.1 Order

3.2 Frequency

3.3 Duration

3.4 Voice

3.5 Mood

Life

Genette was born in Paris, where he studied at the Lycee Lakanal and the Ecole Normale Superieure.
After leaving the French communist party, Genette was a member of Socialisms ou Barbarie during 1957-8.
He received his professorship in French literature at the Sorbonne in 1967.
In 1970 he, Helene Cixous and Tzvetan Todorov founded the journal poeticque and he edited a series of the same name for Editions du seuil.
Among other positions, Genette was research director at the Ecole des hautes etudec en sciences socials and a visiting professor at Yale University.
Work
 Gérard Genette's work (1972 and 1983) fits into the German and Anglo-Saxon academic tradition, and is intended to serve as both a culmination and a renewal of this school of narratological criticism. We should point out that internal analysis, like any semiotic analysis, exhibits two characteristics. Firstly, it is concerned with narratives as independent linguistic objects, detached from their context of production and reception. Secondly, it aims to reveal an underlying structure that can be identified in many different narratives.
Genette is largely responsible for the reintroduction of a rhetorical vocabulary into literary criticism, for example such terms as trop and metonymy. Additionally his work on narrative, best known in English through the selection Narrative Discourse: an Essay in Method, has been of importance. His major work is the multi-part Figures series, of which Narrative Discourse is a section. His trilogy on Textual transcendence, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second degree (1982), and Para texts. Thresholds of interpretation (1997).

Important concepts in Genette's Narratology
This outline of Genette's Narratology is derived from Narrative Discourse: an Essay in Method. This book forms part of his multi-volume work Figures I-III. The examples used in it are mainly drawn from Proust's epic In search of lost time. One criticism which had been used against previous forms of Narratology was that they could deal only with simple stories, such as Vladimir Propp’s work in Morphology of the folk tale. If Narratology could cope with Proust, this could no longer be said.
Below are the five main concepts used by Genette in Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. They are primarily used to look at the syntax of narratives, rather than to perform an interpretation of them.

Order

Say a story is narrated as follows: the clues of a murder are discovered by a detective (event A); the circumstances of the murder are finally revealed (event B); and lastly the murderer is caught (event C).
Add corresponding numbers to the lettered events that represent their order chronologically: 1, 2, and 3.
If these events were described chronologically, they would run A1, B2, and C3. Arranged in the text, however, they run B1 (discovery), A2 (flashback), C3 (resolution).

This accounts for the 'obvious' effects the reader will recognise, such as flashback. It also deals with the structure of narratives on a more systematic basis, accounting for flash-forward, simultaneity, as well as possible, if rarely used effects. These disarrangements on the level of order are termed 'anachrony'.

Order is the relation between the sequencing of events in the story and their arrangement in the narrative. A narrator may choose to present the events in the order they occurred, that is, chronologically, or he can recount them out of order. For example, detective novels often begin with a murder that has to be solved. The events preceding the crime, along with the facts leading to the killer, are presented afterwards. The order in which the events actually occurred does not match the order in which they are presented in the narrative. This mixing of temporal order yields a more gripping, complex plot.
The term Genette uses to designate non-chronological order is anachrony. There are two types of anachrony:
1. Analepsis: The narrator recounts after the fact an event that took place earlier than the present point in the main story.
Example (fictitious): I woke up in a good mood this morning. In my mind were memories of my childhood, with Mum singing every morning, her voice ringing out.
2. Prolepsis: The narrator anticipates events that will occur after the main story ends.
Example (fictitious): How will my adventure in Europe affect me? I will never be able to look at my family and friends in the same way; surely I will become contentious and distant.
There are two factors that can enter into analepsis and prolepsis: reach and extent. "An anachrony can reach into the past or the future, either more or less far from the "present" moment (that is, from the moment in the story when the narrative was interrupted to make room for the anachrony): this temporal distance we will name the anachrony's reach. The anachrony itself can also cover duration of story that is more or less long: we will call this its extent"
Anachronies can have several functions in a narrative. While analepses often take on an explanatory role, developing a character's psychology by relating events from his past, prolepses can arouse the reader's curiosity by partially revealing facts that will surface later. 

Frequency

The separation between an event and its narration allows several possibilities.

• An event can occur once and be narrated once (singular).
• 'Today I went to the shop.'
• An event can occur n times and be narrated once (iterative).
• 'I used to go to the shop.'
• An event can occur once and be narrated n times (repetitive).
• 'Today I went to the shop' + 'Today he went to the shop' etc.
• An event can occur n times and be narrated n times (multiple).
• 'I used to go to the shop' + 'He used to go to the shop' + 'I went to the shop yesterday' etc.

Duration

The separation between an event and its narration means that there is discourse time and narrative time. These are the two main elements of duration.

• "Five years passed", has a lengthy narrative time, five years, but a short discourse time (it only took a second to read).
• James Joyce's novel Ulysses has a relatively short narrative time, twenty-four hours. Not many people, however, could read Ulysses in twenty-four hours. Thus it is safe to say it has a lengthy discourse time.

Voice

Voice is concerned with who narrates, and from where. This can be split four ways.

• Where the narration is from
• Intra-diegetic: inside the text. e.g. Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White
• Extra-diegetic: outside the text. e.g. Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles

• Is the narrator a character in the story?
• Hetero-diegetic: the narrator is not a character in the story. e.g. Homer's The Odyssey
• Homo-diegetic: the narrator is a character in the story. e.g. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights

NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVE
A distinction should be made between narrative voice and narrative perspective; the latter is the point of view adopted by the narrator, which Genette calls focalization. "So by focalization I certainly mean a restriction of 'field' – actually, that is, a selection of narrative information with respect to what was traditionally called omniscience". These are matters of perception: the one who perceives is not necessarily the one who tells, and vice versa.

 

Mood

Genette said narrative mode is dependent on the 'distance' and 'perspective' of the narrator, and like music, narrative mode has predominant patterns. It is related to voice.
Distance of the narrator changes with narrated speech, transposed speech and reported speech.
Perspective of the narrator is called focalization. Narratives can be non-focalized, internally focalized or externally focalized.
In order to understand narratology's contribution to semiotics, it is important to grasp the distinction between its three fundamental entities: story, narrative and narration. The story generally corresponds to a series of events and actions that are told by someone (the narrator), and represented in some final form, producing a narrative. As a field of study, Narratology looks at the internal mechanisms of narrative, the form taken by a narrated story.

In the field of narrative discourse, we endeavour to identify the common, near-universal principles of text composition. Thus, we attempt to discern what relations are possible between the elements of the narrative/story/narration triad. These relations operate within four analytical categories: mood, the narrative instance, level and time.

NARRATIVE MOOD

When a text is written, technical choices must be made in view of producing a particular result in the story's verbal representation. In this way, the narrative employs distancing and other effects to create a particular narrative mood that governs "the regulation of narrative information" provided to the reader. According to Genette, all narrative is necessarily diegesis (telling), in that it can attain no more than an illusion of mimesis (showing) by making the story real and alive.
For Genette, then, a narrative cannot in fact imitate reality, no matter how realistic; it is intended to be a fictional act of language arising from a narrative instance. "Narrative does not 'represent' a (real or fictive) story, it recounts it – that is, it signifies it by means of language. There is no place for imitation in narrative".
 Thus, in place of the two main traditional narrative moods, diegesis and mimesis, Genette contends that there are simply varying degrees of diegesis, with the narrator either more involved or less involved in the narrative, and leaving less room or more room for the narrative act. However, Genette insists that in no case is the narrator completely absent.
Conclusion
Genette has developed a theory of Narratological poetics that may be used to address the entire inventory of narrative processes in use. According to Genette, every text discloses traces of narration, which can be studied in order to understand exactly how the narrative is organized. The approach advocated here clearly addresses a level that lies below the threshold of interpretation, and as such, it constitutes a solid foundation, complementing other research being done in the social sciences, e.g., in sociology, literary history, ethnology and psychoanalysis.

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