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East Dane Designer Men's Fashion. Shopbop Designer Fashion Brands. Withoutabox Submit to Film Festivals. One can't describe the techniques of a novel without such terms, any more than one can describe the workings of a car without the appropriate technical vocabulary. But while someone who wanted to learn about cars would have no trouble finding a manual, there is no comparable work for the student of literature.
These basic concepts have been developed in an ad hoc, piecemeal fashion and, paradoxically, though they are supposed to identify all the various elements and possible tech- niques of the novel, they have not been put together in a sys- tematic way.
Even Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction, from which students of the novel have learned a great deal, is primar- ily limited to problems of narrative perspective and point of view. There has been no comprehensive survey. Gerard Genette's Narrative Discourse is invaluable because it fills this need for a systematic theory of narrative. As the most thorough attempt we have to identify, name, and illustrate the basic constituents and techniques of narrative, it will prove in- dispensable to students of fiction, who not only will find in it terms to describe what they have perceived in novels but will also be alerted to the existence of fictional devices which they had previously failed to notice and whose implications they had never been able to consider.
Every reader of Genette will find that he becomes a more acute and perceptive analyst of fiction than before. The project, as defined in Barthes's Critique et verite and To- dorov's "Poetique" in Qu'est-ce que le structuralisme? The structures and codes which Barthes and Todorov studied must be taken up and organized by a narrative; this activity is Genette' s subject. But if Narrative Discourse is the culmination of structuralist work on narrative and shows, in its terminological exuberance, a Gallic delight in the adventures of thought, it is also wholly conversant with Anglo-American discussions of narrative, which it cites, uses, and occasionally refutes.
This is no provin- cial exercise but a broadly based theoretical study. It is also, however — and this is doubtless more surprising — a 1 For discussion and bibliography see Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Cornell Univer- sity Press, Cornell University Press; London: Foreword 9 remarkable study of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. It is as though Genette had determined to give the lie to the skeptics who maintained that the structural analysis of narrative was suited only to the simplest narratives, like folk tales, and, in an act of bravado, had chosen as his object one of the most com- plex, subtle, and involuted of narratives.
But in fact, this is not an act of bravura. Genette has long been concerned with Proust, and the three volumes of his Figures, 3 from which Narrative Discourse is taken, contain three other essays on Proust's work. Given the focus on Proust, our ordinary notions of criticism ask us to choose between two ways of viewing Genette's pro- ject: In his preface Genette quite rightly refuses to choose between these alterna- tives, but this does not mean that his work should be viewed as something of a compromise, neither one nor the other.
On the contrary, it is an extreme and unusual example of each genre. On the one hand, the fact that it uses Proust so voraciously gives it great theoretical power, for it is forced to take account of all the complexities of Proustian narrative. Not only is this a severe test of categories, which doubtless leads to the discovery of new distinctions, but the theory is constantly confronted with anomalies and must show how they are anomalous. On the other hand, the fact that Genette is trying to elaborate a theory of narrative while studying Proust gives him a signal advantage over other interpreters of the Recherche.
He need not hasten to offer a thematic interpretation of every incident, decide what is Proust's vision of life, his conception of art. He can dwell on the strangeness of Proustian discourse, constantly pointing out how 3 Figures Paris: In addition to the three other discussions of Proust one in each volume these collections contain essays dealing with Stendhal, Flaubert, Robbe-Grillet, Barthes, baroque poets, and various issues in literary and. More recently, Genette has published his immense Mimologiques Seuil, , a study of writ- ings through the ages that have denied the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign.
Compelled by his special perspective to ask questions about what is usually taken for granted, he continually tells us things we did not know about the book and achieves something that most interpreters do not: Since Genette's presentation and Jane Lewin's translation are admirably clear, there is no need to outline the book's argument, and one can introduce it simply by indicating several major areas of interest. One important and original proposal bears on the traditional notion of point of view. Most theorists, Genette argues, have failed to distinguish properly between "mood and voice, that is to say, between the question who is the character whose point of view orients the narrative perspective?
And conversely, in what is traditionally called a first-person narrative the point of view can vary, depending on whether events are focalized through the consciousness of the narrator at the moment of narration or through his consciousness at a time in the past when the events took place. Insistence on the difference be- tween narration and focalization is a major revision of the theory of point of view. The notion of focalization leads to some interest- ing problems in its own right.
One commentator, Mieke Bal, has argued persuasively that Genette uses focalization to cover two cases which are so different that to treat them as variants of the same phenomenon is to weaken his important new concept. Foreword 11 zation is something altogether different: For example, in Hemingway's "The Killers" or in the novels of Dashiell Hammett we are told what the characters do but not what they think or see.
To treat this absence of focalization as another sort of focalization re- duces the precision of the concept. Bal has proposed emenda- tions to solve the problems which Genette's theory brings to light, and Genette seems quite happy to accept modifications. As he says in his Afterword, the very nature of poetics as a progressive, cumulative enterprise ensures that his formulations will one day be relegated to the rubbish heap. If this happens, it will doubtless be because they have inspired improvements.
Genette's attempt to be comprehensive where others have proceeded in more piecemeal fashion occasionally leads to the discovery of topics which have not been much dis- cussed but which prove, on investigation, to be extremely im- portant. Studying the possible relationships between the time of story or plot and the time of the narrative, he determines that they may be classified in terms of order events occur in one order but are narrated in another , pace or duration the narra- tive devotes considerable space to a momentary experience and then leaps over or swiftly summarizes a number of years , and frequency the narrative may repeatedly recount an event that happened only once or may recount once what happened fre- quently.
Now order and pace are well known to students of narrative: But frequency, as it happens, has seldom been discussed, though it turns out to be a major topic. Repetition, a common form of frequency, has emerged as the central tech- nique in certain avant-garde novels, and what Genette calls the iterative, in which the narrative tells once that something hap- pened frequently, turns out to have a variety of important functions.
Proust, of course, is much given to the iterative mode, but he also employs a fascinating figure which Genette calls the pseudo-iterative: Thus, in the long account of 22 Foreword what happened every Sunday at Combray are inserted extended conversations, unlikely to have been repeated every week. This mode produces strange narrative effects which have not been discussed; we owe our growing understanding of them to Genette's pioneering investigation of the iterative.
Genette's definition of the figures of fre- quency has the result of making anomalous hence the label "pseudo-iterative" a distinctively Proustian mode. Now one might expect an account of narrative based on Proustian exam- ples to work just the other way, making Proust's bizarre tech- niques the norm; but under each of the major categories — tense, voice, and mood — something typically Proustian is rendered anomalous by the system of distinctions. Discussing voice, Genette concludes that the movement from one level of narra- tive to another in Proust is often confused and is ruled by trans- gressions.
In the case of mood, not only does Proust prove "in- assimilable" to the basic distinction between mimesis and diegesis, but his "polymodality" is "a scandal" for the system of point of view. At moments when we are looking with Marcel through a window or keyhole and seeing only those actions he can see, we will be told the thoughts of the characters we are supposedly observing. In various ways, as Genette says, "Proust upsets the whole logic of narrative representation. Doubtless, if Proust can always be caught in flagrant violation of the system, this is because the categories for the description of narrative discourse are in fact based on what we may for conve- nience call a model of the real world.
According to this model, events necessarily take place both in a particular order and a definable number of times. A speaker has certain kinds of in- formation about events and lacks other kinds. He either experi- enced them or he did not, and generally he stands in a definable relationship to the events he recounts. However true this model may be, there is nothing to prevent narratives from violating it and producing texts which involve impossible combinations. A sentence such as "I watched George reach into his briefcase Foreword 13 for something while he thought about whether he might have lamb for dinner that evening" asserts a combination of knowl- edge and ignorance that in the world would be most unlikely, but novels frequently produce such combinations, though sel- dom within the space of a single sentence.
It may well be that narratives will usually prove anomalous because our models of narrative procedures are always based on models of reality. But it might also be the case that Genette's work is testimony to the power of the marginal, the supplementary, the exception. It is as though his categories were specifically designed to iden- tify as anomalous the most salient of Proust's techniques, so that in a sense these marginal phenomena, these exceptions, in fact determine the norms; these cases which the system seems to set aside are in fact crucial to it.
In its exemplification of this paradoxical logic, Genette's work communicates with the most interesting speculative strain of what is now called "post- structuralism": Jacques Derrida's investigation of the logic of marginality or supplementarity that is always at work in our interpretive schemes. Johns Hopkins University Press, Blossom [whose translation of vol- ume 7 was replaced in by Andreas Mayor's]; 2 vols.
Random House, ; also published in seven separate volumes by Random House. In this book the French title which means literally "in search of time lost" is retained, as are the French titles of the seven volumes forming the Recherche, listed here with their standard English translations: For quotations from French works other than the Recherche, all translations are mine unless the notes indicate otherwise. Exist- ing translations of other works by Proust and of French critical studies, listed in the Bibliography, have always been used, and in such cases the notes usually cite only the English edition.
For quotations from works originally written in English, the original has been quoted and cited, although Genette sometimes used French translations, as listed in the Bibliography. And for quota- tions from works originally written in a language other than French or English, I have used and cited published English translations. I have silently modified the French edition of this book by correcting obvious errors, occasionally supplementing the documentation, and giving both French and English versions of quotations from Proust when the French version seemed essen- tial mainly in Chapter 3.
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The publication history of Proust's novel enters into Genette's discussion and explains, as well, the occasional discrepancies between English and French versions of the Recherche. By , Proust had written a page novel in three sections: Proust's original first part would have run about pages in print, but the publisher, Grasset, refused to produce a volume of that size; his refusal forced Proust to play around with his ma- terial, shifting it to meet the page limit that Grasset im- posed for publication in Then came the war, delaying pub- lication of the remaining two sections — and giving Proust time to alter and expand his manuscripts, which he did assiduously.
As a result, when publication was resumed five years later, by Gallimard, it was with a volume entitled A V ombre desjeunes filles en fleurs, formerly planned as the opening chapter of the third volume; and Sodome et Gomorrhe was announced. In November Proust died. La Prisonniere came out in , Albertine disparue changed in to Proust's origi- nal title, La Fugitive in , Le Temps retrouve in Scott Moncrieff and Blossom's translation is based on these volumes.
Proust's method of working was such that the published edi- tions of his novel were rather unreliable — in some cases thoroughly so, as was learned when his manuscripts became available in the 's. He revised and expanded incessantly, adding to typescripts and page proofs without mercy. After , in poor health and driving hard to finish his work before death should come, he put his energies into creation rather than supervision, with the result that the volumes published in his lifetime were seen through the press by others, who had a great deal of difficulty coping with the never-ending flow of revisions.
The volumes published after his death were based either on manuscripts he had only partially revised or simply on rough drafts, but considerably rearranged and touched up by the orig- inal editors, whose first care was to put the drafts in readable and orderly shape. In , however, Pierre Clarac and Andre Ferre, having had access to the newly available manuscripts, published what is now the standard edition of the novel.
They restored the text of the later volumes to the state it had been in when Proust died. For the earlier volumes, to establish their text they struggled with Proust's habit of revising and adding, con- tinually creating his novel, and letting other people — who may have misunderstood his intentions or his handwriting — see the work into print. Because the French text on which the English translation of Le Temps retrouve was based was the one most changed by the Clarac-Ferre edition of , in Andreas Mayor published a new English translation based on the Clarac-Ferre text.
Mayor's avowed intention, however, was chiefly to please an audience interested in reading a good narrative; therefore he took the same kind of liberty with the restored text that the original French editors had taken with Proust's manuscripts. This statement immediately calls for two comments, of differing importance. The first bears on the nature of the Proustian corpus. Everyone today knows that the work whose canonic text was established in by the Clarac-Ferre edition is but the latest form of a work Proust labored at during his whole life, as it were, a work whose earlier versions are, for the most part, scattered among Les Plaisirs et les jours , Pas- tiches et melanges , the various posthumous collections or previously unpublished works entitled Chroniques , Jean Santeuil , and Contre Sainte-Beuve , 1 and the eighty- odd notebooks deposited in the manuscript room of the Bib- liotheque Nationale beginning in For this reason, plus the forced interruption of November 18, , the Recherche, more than all other works, must not be considered closed; and there- fore it is always legitimate and sometimes necessary to appeal to one or another of its variants for comparison with the "defini- tive" text.
The same is true with respect to the handling of the narrative. We cannot fail to appreciate, for example, how much 1 The dates given here are those of the first publication, but my references are naturally to the Clarac-Sandre edition in two volumes — jean Santeuil preceded by Les Plaisirs et les jours; Contre Sainte-Beuve preceded by Pastiches et melanges and followed by Essais et articles Pleiade, — which contain numerous pre- viously unpublished writings.
Even so, while waiting for the critical edition of the Recherche we must sometimes continue to turn to the Fallois edition of the Contre Sainte-Beuve for certain pages taken from the Cahiers. Therefore while my study will bear mainly on the final work, I will occasionally take into account its antecedents, considering them not for their own sake, which would make little sense, but for the light they can add.
The second comment concerns the method, or rather the ap- proach, adopted here. Readers may already have observed that neither the title nor the subtitle of this book mentions what I have just designated as its specific subject. The reason is neither coyness nor deliberate inflation of the subject. The fact is that quite often, and in a way that may exasperate some readers, Proustian narrative will seem neglected in favor of more general considerations; or, as they say nowadays, criticism will seem pushed aside by "literary theory," and more precisely by the theory of narrative or narratology.
I could justify and clarify this ambiguous situation in two very different ways. I could either — as others have done elsewhere — frankly put the specific subject at the service of the general aim, and critical analysis at the service of theory: I confess my reluctance — or my inability — to choose between these two apparently incompatible systems of defense. It seems to me impossible to treat the Recherche du temps perdu as a mere example of what is supposedly narrative in general, or novelistic narrative, or narrative in autobiographical form, or narrative of God knows what other class, species, or variety.
The specificity of Proustian narrative taken as a whole is irreducible, and any extrapolation would be a mistake in method; the Recherche illus- trates only itself. But, on the other hand, that specificity is not Preface 23 undecomposable, and each of its analyzable features lends itself to some connection, comparison, or putting into perspective. Like every work, like every organism, the Recherche is made up of elements that are universal, or at least transindividual, which it assembles into a specific synthesis, into a particular totality. To analyze it is to go not from the general to the particular, but indeed from the particular to the general: What I propose here is essentially a method of analysis; I must therefore recognize that by seeking the specific I find the universal, and that by wishing to put theory at the service of criticism I put criticism, against my will, at the service of theory.
This is the paradox of every poetics, and doubtless of every other activity of knowledge as well: But to answer for methodological giddiness, even strabismus, by invoking science perhaps involves some fraud. I will there- fore plead the same case differently: May the reader also find in that relationship a sort of periodic diversion, like the insomniac turning over and over in search of a better position: Introduction We currently use the word narrative 1 without paying attention to, even at times without noticing, its ambiguity, and some of the difficulties of narratology are perhaps due to this confusion.
It seems to me that if we want to begin to see clearly in this area, we must plainly distinguish under this term three distinct notions. A first meaning — the one nowadays most evident and most central in common usage — has narrative refer to the narrative statement, the oral or written discourse that undertakes to tell of an event or a series of events: A second meaning, less widespread but current today among analysts and theoreticians of narrative content, has narrative refer to the succession of events, real or fictitious, that are the subjects of this discourse, and to their several relations of link- ing, opposition, repetition, etc.
A third meaning, apparently the oldest, has narrative refer once more to an event: If, on the other hand, we take Ulysses to be a liar and the adventures he recounts to be fictitious, then the importance of the act of narrating expands, for on it depend not only the exis- tence of the discourse but also the fiction of the existence of the actions that it "relates.
Without a narrating act, therefore, there is no statement, and sometimes even no narrative content. So it is surprising that until now the theory of narrative has been so little concerned with the prob- lems of narrative enunciating, concentrating almost all its atten- tion on the statement and its contents, as though it were com- pletely secondary, for example, that the adventures of Ulysses should be recounted sometimes by Homer and sometimes by Ulysses himself.
Yet we know and I will return to this later that Plato long ago found this subject worth his attention. As its title indicates, or almost indicates, my study basically has to do with the most widespread meaning of the term narra- tive, that is, with narrative discourse, which in literature, and particularly in the case that interests me, happens to be a narra- tive text. But, as we will see, analysis of narrative discourse as 1 Introduction 27 understand it constantly implies a study of relationships: Starting now, therefore, in order to avoid confusion and semantic difficulties, we must designate each of these three aspects of narrative reality by univocal terms.
I propose, without insisting on the obvious reasons for my choice of terms, to use the word story for the signified or narra- tive content even if this content turns out, in a given case, to be low in dramatic intensity or fullness of incident , to use the word narrative for the signifier, statement, discourse or narrative text itself, and to use the word narrating for the producing narrative action and, by extension, the whole of the real or fictional situa- tion in which that action takes place. It is fairly evident, I think, that of the three levels we have just sorted out, the level of narrative discourse is the only one directly available to textual analysis, which is itself the only instrument of examination at our disposal in the field of literary narrative, and particularly fictional narrative.
If we wanted to study on their own account, let us say, the events recounted by Michelet in his Histoire de France, we could have recourse to all sorts of documents external to that work and concerned with the history of France; or, if we wanted to study on its own account the writing of that work, we could use other documents, just as external to Michelet's text, concerned with his life and his work during the years that he 2 [Translator's note.
In a note at this point Genette speaks of the acceptability of his terms with respect to current French usage, and apropos of histoire "story" , he refers to Tzvetan Todorov's by now "fairly well accepted. Such a resource is not available to someone interested in either the events recounted by the narrative that the Recherche du temps perdu constitutes or the narrating act from which it arises: I do not mean to suggest that the narrative content of the Recherche has no con- nection with the life of its author, but simply that this connec- tion is not such that the latter can be used for a rigorous analysis of the former any more than the reverse.
As to the narrating that produced the narrative, the act of Marcel 4 recounting his past life, we will be careful from this point on not to confuse it with the act of Proust writing the Recherche du temps perdu. I will come back to this subject later; it is enough for the time being to remember that the pages of Du cote de chez Swann Grasset edition published in November and written by Proust some years before that date are supposed in the present state of the fiction to have been written by the narrator well after the war. It is thus the narrative, and that alone, that informs us here both of the events that it recounts and of the activity that sup- posedly gave birth to it.
In other words, our knowledge of the two the events and the action of writing must be indirect, unavoidably mediated by the narrative discourse, inasmuch as the events are the very subject of that discourse and the activity of writing leaves in it traces, signs or indices that we can pick up and interpret — traces such as the presence of a first-person pro- noun to mark the oneness of character and narrator, or a verb in the past tense to indicate that a recounted action occurred prior to the narrating action, not to mention more direct and more 3 The bad ones present no inconvenience here, since their main defect consists of coolly attributing to Proust what Proust says of Marcel, to Illiers what he says of Combray, to Cabourg what he says of Balbec, and so on — a technique debat- able in itself, but not dangerous for us: I will explain this in the last chapter.
Introduction 29 explicit indications. Story and narrating thus exist for me only by means of the intermediary of the narrative. But reciprocally the narrative the narrated discourse can only be such to the extent that it tells a story, without which it would not be narra- tive like, let us say, Spinoza's Ethics , and to the extent that it is uttered by someone, without which like, for example, a collec- tion of archeological documents it would not in itself be a dis- course. As narrative, it lives by its relationship to the story that it recounts; as discourse, it lives by its relationship to the narrating that utters it.
Analysis of narrative discourse will thus be for me, essen- tially, a study of the relationships between narrative and story, between narrative and narrating, and to the extent that they are inscribed in the narrative discourse between story and narrat- ing. This position leads me to propose a new demarcation of the field of study. My starting point will be the division put forth in by Tzvetan Todorov. I for my part will hold those considerations in reserve for another order of prob- lems, obviously connected to the relationships between narra- tive and narrating.
The category of aspect 6 basically covered 5 Tzvetan Todorov, "Les Categories du recit litteraire," Communications, 8 Just as with the "time of enunciating," here too I think it is necessary to cut off the last series of problems, in that it focuses on the act of narrating and its protagonists; on the other hand, we must gather into a single large category — let us provisionally call it that of the modalities of representation or the degrees of mimesis — all the rest of what Todorov split between aspect and mood.
This redistribution thus ends us up with a division substantially different from the one that inspired it, a division that I will now formulate on its own account, having recourse for my terms to a kind of linguistic metaphor that should certainly not be taken too literally.
Since any narrative, even one as extensive and complex as the Recherche du temps perdu, 8 is a linguistic production undertaking to tell of one or several events, it is perhaps legitimate to treat it as the development — monstrous, if you will — given to a verbal form, in the grammatical sense of the term: This perhaps authorizes us to organize, or at any rate to formulate, the problems of analyzing narrative discourse accord- ing to categories borrowed from the grammar of verbs, 7 Rechristened "register" in and An aspect too often neglected by critics, but one Proust himself never lost sight of.
Introduction 31 categories that I will reduce here to three basic classes of deter- minations: We might be tempted to set this third determination under the heading of "person," but, for reasons that will be clear below, I prefer to adopt a term whose psychological connotations are a little less pronounced very lit- tle less, alas , a term to which I will give a conceptual extension noticeably larger than "person" — an extension in which the "person" referring to the traditional opposition between "first-person" and "third-person" narratives will be merely one facet among others: Meek [Coral Gables, Fla.
In Benveniste's essay "The Nature of Pronouns" , the "instances of discourse" are defined as "the discrete and always unique acts by which the language is actualized in speech by a speaker" p. The narrating instance, then, refers to something like the narrating situation, the narrative matrix — the entire set of conditions human, temporal, spatial out of which a narrative statement is produced. We will be careful, however, not to hypostatize these terms, not to convert into substance what is each time merely a matter of relationships. There is the time of the thing told and the time of the narrative the time of the signified and the time of the signifier.
This duality not only ren- ders possible all the temporal distortions that are commonplace in narratives three years of the hero's life summed up in two sentences of a novel or in a few shots of a "frequentative" montage in film, etc. More basically, it invites us to consider that one of the functions of narrative is to invent one time scheme in terms of another time scheme. It is less relevant 1 Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor New York, , p.
I have altered this translation slightly so as to align its terms with the terms used throughout this book. Kluck- hohn und Hermann Schneider, ; rpt. The status of written literary narra- tive in this respect is even more difficult to establish.
Like the oral or cinematic narrative, it can only be "consumed," and therefore actualized, in a time that is obviously reading time, and even if the sequentiality of its components can be under- mined by a capricious, repetitive, or selective reading, that un- dermining nonetheless stops short of perfect analexia: Books are a little more constrained than people sometimes say they are by the celebrated linearity of the linguistic signifier, which is easier to deny in theory than eliminate in fact.
However, there is no question here of identifying the status of written narrative liter- ary or not with that of oral narrative. The temporality of written narrative is to some extent conditional or instrumental; produced in time, like everything else, written narrative exists in space and as space, and the time needed for "consuming" it is the time needed for crossing or traversing it, like a road or a field. The narrative text, like every other text, has no other temporality than what it borrows, metonymically, from its own reading. This state of affairs, we will see below, has certain conse- quences for our discussion, and at times we will have to correct, or try to correct, the effects of metonymic displacement; but we must first take that displacement for granted, since it forms part of the narrative game, and therefore accept literally the quasi- fiction of Erzahlzeit, this false time standing in for a true time and to be treated — with the combination of reservation and ac- quiescence that this involves — as a pseudo-time.
Order 35 Having taken these precautions, we will study relations be- tween the time of the story and the pseudo- time of the narra- tive according to what seem to me to be three essential determi- nations: Anachronies To study the temporal order of a narrative is to compare the order in which events or temporal sections are arranged in the narrative discourse with the order of succession these same events or temporal segments have in the story, to the extent that story order is explicitly indicated by the narrative itself or infer- able from one or another indirect clue.
Obviously this recon- stitution is not always possible, and it becomes useless for cer- tain extreme cases like the novels of Robbe-Grillet, where tem- poral reference is deliberately sabotaged. It is just as obvious that in the classical narrative, on the other hand, reconstitution is most often not only possible, because in those texts narrative discourse never inverts the order of events without saying so, but also necessary, and precisely for the same reason: Pinpointing and measuring these narrative anachronies as I 36 Narrative Discourse Order 37 will call the various types of discordance between the two order- ings of story and narrative implicitly assume the existence of a kind of zero degree that would be a condition of perfect tem- poral correspondence between narrative and story.
This point of reference is more hypothetical than real. Folklore narrative habitually conforms, at least in its major articulations, to chronological order, but our Western literary tradition, in con- trast, was inaugurated by a characteristic effect of anachrony. In the eighth line of the Iliad, the narrator, having evoked the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon that he proclaims as the starting point of his narrative ex hou de ta prota , goes back about ten days to reveal the cause of the quarrel in some retrospective lines affront to Chryses — Apollo's anger — plague.
We know that this beginning in medias res, followed by an expository return to an earlier period of time, will become one of the formal topoi of epic, and we also know how faithfully the style of novelistic narration follows in this respect the style of its remote ancestor, 5 even in the heart of the "realistic" nineteenth century.
To be convinced of this one need only think of certain of Balzac's openings, such as those in Cesar Birotteau or La Duchesse de Langeais. D'Arthez directs Lucien de Rubempre to follow this principle, 6 and Balzac himself chides Stendhal for not having begun the Chartreuse with the Waterloo episode, reduc- ing "everything that precedes it to some narrative by or about Fabrice while he lies wounded in the Flemish village.
On the contrary, it is one of the tra- ditional resources of literary narration. Furthermore, if we look a little more closely at the opening lines of the Iliad just referred to, we see that their temporal 5 A testimony a con trario is this appraisal Huet gives of Jamblique's Babyloniques: He has roughly followed temporal order, and did not toss the reader immediately into the middle of the subject as Homer did" Traite de I'origine des romans, , p.
Grab your subject sometimes sideways, some- times from the rear; finally, vary your plans, so as never to be the same" Balzac, Illusions perdues, Gamier ed. Beyle Geneva, , p. Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles Peleus' son, the ruinous wrath that brought on the Achaians woes innumerable, and hurled down into Hades many strong souls of heroes, and gave their bodies to be a prey to dogs and all winged fowls; and so the counsel of Zeus wrought out its accomplishment from the day when first strife parted Atreides king of men and noble Achilles.
Who then among the gods set the twain at strife and variance?
What is VOCANTO?
Even the son of Leto and of Zeus; for he in anger at the king sent a sore plague upon the host, that the folk began to perish, because Atreides had done dishonour to Chryses the priest. We are fairly close to an evenly retrograde movement. I take a fairly typical example from Jean Santeuil. The situation is one that will appear in various forms in the Re- cherche: Jean, after several years, again 8 Homer, The Iliad, trans. Genette's refer- ence in the text is to the French translation by Paul Mazon Paris, II 38 Narrative Discourse Order 39 finds the hotel where Marie Kossichef, whom he once loved, lives, and compares the impressions he has today with those that he once thought he would be experiencing today: Sometimes passing in front of the hotel he remembered the rainy days when he used to bring his nursemaid that far, on a pilgrim- age.
But he remembered them without the melancholy that he then thought he would surely some day savor on feeling that he no longer loved her. For this melancholy, projected in anticipation prior to the indifference that lay ahead, came from his love. And this love existed no more. We discover here, in brief, nine sections divided between two temporal positions that we will designate 2 now and 1 once , setting aside their iterative nature "sometimes".
Section A goes in position 2 "Sometimes passing in front of the hotel he remembered" , B in position 1 "the rainy days when he used to bring his nursemaid that far, on a pilgrimage" , C in 2 "But he remembered them without" , D in 1 "the melancholy that he then thought" , E in 2 "he would surely some day savor on feeling that he no longer loved her" , F in 1 "For this melan- choly, projected in anticipation" , G in 2 "prior to the indif- ference that lay ahead" , H in 1 "came from his love" , 7 in 2 "And this love existed no more".
The formula of temporal positions, then, is as follows: We will observe in passing that on a first reading the difficulty of this text comes from the apparently systematic way in which Proust eliminates the most elementary temporal indicators once, now , so that the reader must supply 10 jean Santeuil, Pleiade ed.
Gerard Hopkins New York, , p. But simply picking out the positions does not exhaust temporal analysis, even tem- poral analysis restricted to questions of sequence, and does not allow us to determine the status of the anachronies: If we take section A as the narrative starting point, and there- fore as being in an autonomous position, we can obviously de- fine section B as retrospective, and this retrospection we may call subjective in the sense that it is adopted by the character him- self, with the narrative doing no more than reporting his present thoughts "he remembered.
C con- tinues with a simple return to the initial position, without sub- ordination. D is again retrospective, but this time the retrospec- tion is adopted directly by the text: E brings us back to the present, but in a totally different way from C, for this time the present is envis- aged as emerging from the past and "from the point of view" of that past: F brings us again to position 1 the past , on a higher level than anticipation E: G is again an anticipa- tion, but this time an objective one, for the Jean of the earlier time foresaw the end that was to come to his love precisely as, not indifference, but melancholy at loss of love.
H, like F, is a simple return to 1. I, finally, is like C a simple return to 2, that is, to the starting point. This brief fragment thus offers us in miniature a quite var- iegated sample of the several possible temporal relationships: As the distinction between subjective and objective anachronies is not a matter of temporality but arises from other categories that we will come to in the chapter on mood, we will neutralize it for the moment.
Moreover, to avoid the psychological conno- 40 Narrative Discourse tations of such terms as "anticipation" or "retrospection," which automatically evoke subjective phenomena, we will eliminate these terms most of the time in favor of two others that are more neutral, designating as prolepsis any narrative maneu- ver that consists of narrating or evoking in advance an event that will take place later, designating as analepsis any evocation after the fact of an event that took place earlier than the point in the story where we are at any given moment, and reserving the general term anachrony to designate all forms of discordance between the two temporal orders of story and narrative we will see later that these discordances are not entirely limited to analepsis and prolepsis.
We also see that the dynamic relationships analepses and prolepses come at the openings of brackets or parentheses, with the closings corresponding to simple returns. Finally, we observe that this fragment is perfectly self- contained, with the starting positions at each level scrupulously reinstated: Of course, numerical relationships allow us to recognize analepses and pro- 11 Here begin the problems and disgraces of terminology.
Prolepsis and analepsis offer the advantage of being — through their roots — part of a grammatical-rhetorical family some of whose other members will serve us later; on the other hand, we will have to play on the opposition between the root -lepse — which in Greek refers to the fact of taking, whence, in narrative, assum- ing responsibility for and taking on prolepsis: But no prefix taken from Greek allows us to subsume the antithesis prolana. Whence our recourse to anachrony, which is perfectly clear but lies outside the system, and whose prefix interferes regrettably with analepsis. Order 41 lepses, but we can clarify the formula even further, like this, for example: That situation is fairly rare, however, and before leaving the micronarrative level behind, we will take from Sodome et Gomorrhe a text that is much more complex even if we reduce it, as we shall, to its basic temporal positions, ignoring a few nuances , and that illustrates well the temporal omnipresence characteristic of Proustian nar- rative.
We are at the soiree given by the Prince de Guermantes, and Swann has just told Marcel of the Prince's conversion to Dreyfusism which, with a naive partiality, he sees as proof of intelligence. This is how Marcel's narrative makes connections I put a letter at the beginning of each distinct section: A Swann now found equally intelligent anybody who was of his opinion, his old friend the Prince de Guermantes and my school- fellow Bloch, B whom previously he had avoided C and whom he now invited to luncheon.
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If he were to sign your list, he would simply be compromising himself with his own people, would be made to suffer on our account, might even repent of his confi- dences and not confide in us again. He felt that his name was too Hebraic not to create a bad effect. Besides, even if he approved of all the attempts to secure a fresh trial, he did not wish to be mixed up in any way in the antimilitarist campaign. A request which assembled round the church of Combray a whole squadron of L those troopers over whose fate Francoise used to weep in days gone by, when she envisaged M the prospect of a war.
N In short, Swann refused to sign Bloch's circular, with the result that, if he passed in the eyes of many people as a fanatical Dreyfusard, my friend found him lukewarm, infected with Nationalism, and a militarist. O Swann left me without shaking hands so as not to be forced into a general leave-taking. These positions are the following, in chronological order: The formula of positions is then the following: Moreover, cer- tain anachronies, HkeB andC, are juxtaposed without an explicit return to the base position: Order 43 the transition from C5 to D6 does not produce a true prolepsis since we never come back to position 5; it therefore constitutes a simple ellipsis of the time that passed between 5 the invitation and 6 the luncheon ; the ellipsis, or leap forward without any return, is obviously not an anachrony but a simple acceleration of the narrative, which we will study in the chapter on duration: This, then, is the complete formula: Needless to say, an analysis at this level cannot consider the details that belong to another scale, and therefore proceeds by means of very crude simplification: The first temporal section of the Recherche, which occupies the first five pages of the book, evokes a moment that is impossible to date with precision but that takes place fairly late in the hero's life, 13 at the time when, going to bed early and suffering from insomnia, he spent a large part of his nights recalling his past.
This first time in the narrative order is therefore far from being first in the diegetic order. Anticipating the analysis to follow, let us assign it at once to position 5 in the story. The second section I, is the account given by the narrator — but plainly inspired by the memories of the sleepless hero who fulfills here the function of what Marcel Muller calls the intermediary subject 14 — of a very limited but very important episode in his childhood in Combray: I will return to the distinction between hero and narrator in the last chapter. The third section I, brings us very briefly back to po- sition 5, that of the insomnias: The fourth probably also takes place somewhere within that period, since it brings about a modification in the content of the insomnias: Thus a fifth section follows, a second return to Combray but much vaster than the first in its temporal range since this time it covers not without ellipses the whole of the childhood in Combray.
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Combray II I, will thus be for us E2', contem- poraneous with B2 but largely overflowing it, the way C5 over- flows and includes D5'. The sixth section I, returns to position 5 insomnias: This position again serves as a springboard for a new memory-elicited analepsis, whose place is the earliest of all since it antedates the hero's birth: Un amour de Swann I, is the seventh section, Gl.
The eighth section is a very brief return I, to the position of the insomnias, thus H5. Again this position opens an analep- sis, one that this time is aborted, although its function as ad- vance notice or pointer is obvious to the attentive reader: Immediately coordinated with this, only now without a perceptible return to the transfer point of the insomnias, is the narrative this, too, retrospective with respect to the starting point of the dreams of traveling that the hero had in Paris, several years before his stay in Balbec; the tenth section will thus be J3: Parisian adolescence, love with Gilberte, partici- 15 After the madeleine, the "total" Combray will be integrated into the insom- niac's memories.
Order 45 pation in Mme. Swann's circle, then, after an ellipsis, first stay at Balbec, return to Paris, entry into the milieu of the Guer- mantes, etc.: The formula for this beginning is, then, according to our pre- vious conventions: Thus, the Recherche du temps perdu is launched with a vast movement of coming-and-going from one key, strategically dominant position, obviously position 5 insomnias and its variant 5' madeleine — positions of the "intermediary subject," who is insomniac or beneficiary of the miracle of involuntary memory. His recollections control the whole of the narrative, giving point ' the function of a sort of indispensable transfer point or — if one may say so — of a dispatching narrative: Its control does not loosen until the transition from Balbec to Paris, even though this latter sec- tion J3 , inasmuch as it is coordinated with the preceding sec- tion, is also subordinated to the remembering activity of the intermediary subject, and so it too is analeptic.
The difference — certainly essential — between this analepsis and all the preceding ones is that this one remains open, and its extent merges with almost the whole of the Recherche: We will come back to this particular characteristic later. At the moment, let us only note this zigzag movement, this initial — and as it were initiatory, or propitiatory — stammering: Not a motionless shifting back and forth, however, despite its repeated returns, since, thanks to it, a pin- pointed Combray 1 is succeeded by a more spacious Combray II, by an Amour de Swann that is earlier but has an already irrevers- ible movement, by aNoms de pays: These complexly structured openings, mimicking, as it were, the unavoidable difficulty of beginning the better to exorcise it, are seemingly part of the earliest and most lasting narrative tradi- tion: The particular charac- teristic of the exordium of the Recherche is obviously its multi- plication of memory-created instances, and consequently its multiplication of beginnings, among which each except the last can seem afterward like an introductory prologue.
First begin- ning absolute beginning: Reach, Extent I have said that, in its main articulations, the continuation of the Recherche was arranged in conformity with chronological order; but this general course does not exclude the presence of a great many anachronies in small points: Before taking up the analysis of these anachronies, let us make clear that we are concerned here only with temporal analysis, and furthermore temporal analysis limited solely to questions of order: In par- ticular, we will disregard an essential distinction between, on the one hand, the anachronies that the narrative takes direct responsibility for, and that thus stay at the same narrative level as their surroundings example, lines of the Iliad or the second chapter of Cesar Birotteau , and, on the other hand, the anachronies that one of the characters of the first narrative takes 16 But is not Swann's role in the bedtime scene symbolically paternal?
After all, it is he who deprives the child of its mother's presence.