Genette+-+Fictional+Narrative+Factual+Narrative

Fictional Narrative, Factual Narrative Gérard Genette; Nitsa Ben-Ari; Brian McHale Poetics Today, Vol. 11, No. 4, Narratology Revisited II. (Winter, 1990), pp. 755-774. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0333-5372%28199024%2911%3A4%3C755%3AFNFN%3E2.0.CO%3B2-9 Poetics Today is currently published by Duke University Press. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/duke.html. 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For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. http://www.jstor.org Sat Jul 14 15:58:55 2007 Fictional Narrative, Factual Narrative Gerard Genette Ecole des Hautes Etudes, CNRS If words have meaning (or even rnultiple nieanings), then "narra- tologyn--whether in its formal aspect, as the study of' narrative dis- course, or its thematic aspect, as the analysis of the sequences of events and actions related by this discourse-ought by rights to concern itself with stories of all kinds, fictional and otherwise. It is evident, however, that the tlvo branches of narratology have until now devoted their attention almost exclusively to the behavior and objects of fictional narrative alone.[ And this has not been a sinlple enipirical choice, im- plying no prejudice tolvard whatever might, for the tinie being, have been explicitly excluded froni consideration; rather it has involved the implicit privileging of fictional narrative, ~vhich has been hypostatired as narrative par excellence, or as the niodel for all narratives ~vhat- soever. 'I'he few researchers-l'aul Ricoeur, Hayden Ll'hite, or Paul Veyne, for instance-lvho have sholvn any interest in the figures or intriguesof' historical narrative, have done so fro111 the perspective of some other discipline: philosophy of teniporality, rhetoric, episte- 1. 'l'his has alreadb been established b) Paul Kic-oeur (1984: 13). .A str~king 111~1s- tration of this state of th111gs IS furnished by two more or less contemporaneous texts bb Roland Barthes (1966. 1965). The first. desp~te ~ t s \erv general title ("lritroduc tion i I'analyse struc-turale des rPc its"). deals with rial-rative fiction o n l ~ . and the second, despite an initial antithesis bet~veen "historical narrative" and " t i c - - tional narrati~e." completely neglects the narrative aspects of h~storical discourse. \vhich is rejected as a de\iation b e l o~ lg i~~g to the nineteenth c-e~lturb (.-\ugustin 'l 'hierr)), and devalued in the name o f the "anti-historical-eve~~t" of the pr i~lc~ples French school. Po t , t ~ \Todaj 1 1 :.1 (it'inter 1990). Copyr~ght % 1990 bv ' rhe Porter I ~ l s t ~ t u t e for Poet~csand Semiotics. (.(:(: 0333-5352190/%2.5U. 756 Poetics Today 1 1 :4 mology. And when Jean-Fran~ois l.yotard applied the categories of Dlscoz~rs d u rbrlt to a newspaper story on the death of a niilitant, he did so in order to efface the frontiers of fiction (I>yotard 1980). Ft'hatever the merits and faults of fictional narratology in its present state, it seems unlikely that it can spare is fro111 having to undertake a specific study of factual narrative.' In any case, it is certain that fictional narra- tology cannot indefinitely postpone asking whether its results, that is, its methods, apply to a domain lvhich it has never properly explored but only silently annexed, lvithout exaniination or justification. Having said this, I have evidently confessed lily ow11 guilt, for not only did I once use the title Discolcla d u rbrit for a study nianifestly confined to fictional narrative, but I even repeated the offense nlore recently in , V ~ I ~ ~ J P ( I Udiscoz~rs (11~ rbrit, despite having lodged a protest there (Genette 1983: 1 1 ) against this overly unilateral practice of lvhat might be c;illed rrstrzrtpd n c ~ n , c ~ t o l o g ~ . have neither the in- However, I tention nor the means to redress the balance here by undertaking a study of the characteristic features of the discourse of' factual nar- rative. This would necessitate majol- research into such practices as history, biography, diaries, nelvspaper stories, police reports, judicial nnrratio, everyday gossip, and other fornls of what XlallarmC called "l'universel reportagen-or, at the very least, a systematic analysis of certain major and supposedly typical texts, such as Rousseau's Corlfes- sions or Xlichelet's Histoirc. dc. la R4~~o lu t io r lf ra?~pise . ' Rather, I would like to examine, provisionally and in a niore theoretical and a priori way, why factual narrative and fictional narrative 1 behave differently tolvards the story which they "report" by the niere fact of this stol-)-'s (supposedly) being in one case "truthful" (as Lucian put it), in the 2. For lack of a better term I shall use here the adject~ve "factual." tvhich 1s not lvithout ~ t s difficulties (for fiction too co~~sis ts sequences of fact\), in ol-del. to of ,+\(>id the sbsternatic- use of negative locutions ("nonfic-tion," onfic fictional") \I hich reflect and perpetuate the very privileging of fiction that 1 \v,int to put into ques- tlOL1. 3. 011 this last text, see Kigney (1988). Pursuing the approach pioneered bv Ha)- den \Vhite. Kigne) is less c - o~ l c e r~~ed the means with rial-I-ati\e strategies than ~ { i t h for ~ r ~ d u c i ~ ~ g 111 a text which. dehned ;is essentially (and au the~~ t i ca l l \ )~nea~l i l l j : retrospec tive, is therefore constantly drau.n to ,lnticipation. FOI- spec~lic and generic studies, see Ph~l l ippe Lqje~me ( 1 97.7) on narrative order in Sal-tre's Lf~r.\lot\ and Daniel hladelenat (1983: 1 I!)-58) on choic-es of node, (11-tiel-.ant1 \peed in biog- raph). 4. For otxious reasons I shall leave out of the account here non-narratlle and nonvel ha1 t i ~ r ~ n s of fiction (e.g.. drama. silent film). r h e non\erb.il forms ,ire non- literar) b) definition, that is, by theil- choice of medi~um: on the othel- hand. among the f o r~n s of narrative l i c t i o~~ the distinction bet\\een \\I-itten and OI-al does not seem pertinent here. and the distinction bet~veelr lite~.ar\ (canonical) and nonlitel-- ; ~ r y (popular. t:imili,lr. etc.) fic-tion seems too relatile and conditional to be taken illto con side ratio^^. Genette . FictionalIFactual 757 other case fictional, that is, invented by someone, whether the present storyteller or someone froni who111 the latter has inherited the story. I specify "supposedly" because historians do on occasion invent details or arrange "intrigues," and novelists do on occasion draw inspiration from topical events. Ll'hat counts here is the official status of the text and its reading horizon. One opinion, among others, which denies the pertinence of such a venture is that of John Searle, for \vhoni a priori "there is no tex- tual property, syntactical or seniantic [or, consequently, narratologi- cal,] that \\.ill identify a text as a lvor-k of fiction" (1975: 325 ) because :I fictional narrative is purely and sirnply a pretence or siniulation of a factual narrative, where the novelist just nlakes believe ("pretends") that he is telling a true story \vithout seriously asking the reader to believe in it, but also without leaving in the text the slightest trace of its non-serious, siniulated character. However, this opinion is not uni- versally shared, to say the least. It clashes, for instance, lvith that of Kate Hamburger ( 195f) , lvho restricts the field of "niake-believe" (Fin- gi~rtlteit) to the first-person novel, an indiscernible siniulation of the authentic autobiographical story, while, on the contrary, eniphasizing in fiction proper (i.e., third-person fiction) its incontestable textual "indices" (sq~nptoms) of fictionality."~n one sense, the summary exami- nation \vhich follows ailus to adjudicate between these t~vo theses. For reasons of convenience, and also perhaps because of rny inability to iniagine any other way of proceeding, 1 propose to follow here the procedure tested in Disrozcrs du ?-kit, successively addressing questions of order, speed, frequency, niood, and voice. Order In 1972 I wrote a bit hastily that the folktale follo\vs an order niore faithful to the chronology of events than does the literary tradition of narrative initiated by the Ilicld, with its in-niedias-res beginning and completive analepses. I retreated sonie\vhat frorn this position in ,Vou- ~ J P ( I Z ~(Iisrours d l 1 rhrlt (1983), observing that the use of anacht-onies is i naug~~ra t edinstead b>- the O(lyssr?, not the Iliad, and is perpetuated rnore in the novel than in the epic tradition. Rlean~vhile, in a very inter- esting article that I discovered only belatedly, Barbara Herrnstein Snlith has invited nie to retreat on a different front, arguing 5. For a co~npal-isonhet\veen Hamburger's theses and the methodologic-a1 postu- lates of narratolog). see Sc-haefter (1987).LL'ithout committir~g himself on fictiori iri general. as Searle does, Lxje~uie, like Kite Ha~nburger , observes 11o difference b e t h e n autobiography and the autobiographical ~ ~ o v e l "if one remains at the level o f the internal dnalvsis of the teat" (1971: 2 I ) . The differe~lccs \vhich he later introduces and to ~vhich \ve shall return belo\v. are of' a paratextual rather rl la~l properly ~larratologic-al order. riot only that absolute chronological order is as r c ~ t . ~in tolkloric narrative as it is in any literary tradition. but that it is \,irtually ~rnpo~~thl~for anv nar- rator to sustain it in an utterance of rnore than minimal leneth. In other words, by virtue of the very nature of discourse, nonlinearity is the rule rather thari the exceptiori in narrative accounts. Indeed, for that reason, the litern1\-h15torlcal ' p1ogres51on" 15 pobahl \ closer to being the rexerse of what Genette implies: that is, to the esterit that pr7Pc.t chronological order may be said to occur at all, it is likely to be fourid only in acutely self-conscious, "artful," o r "literary" texts. (1980: 2 7 ) t j This anti-Lessing inversion is perhaps as excessive as the hypothesis it inverts, and rny intention of course lvas not at all to establish a his- torical "progression" in opposing Horneric anachrony to the supposed linearity of the tales collected I,?. Pel-rault o r the HI-others Grimm. An?.- way, this opposition takes into account only tlvo or three genres (folk- tale, epic-novel) t)elonging to the dornain of fiction. But I do accept the point that no narrative, including extrafictional and extraliter- ary narrative, oral or written. can restrict itself naturally and without special effort to a rigorously chronological order. If, as I assume, con- sensus can easily be reached on this proposition, then another ensues a fortiori, namely, that nothing prevents factual narrative from using analepses or prolepses. I shall accept this in principle, for further, more precise comparisons would only be a statistical matter and would probably reveal great diversity according to periods, authors, and indi- vidi~al works, but also according to genres, fictional and factual. Fi-om this perspective, felver affinities ernerge aniong all fictional types, on the one hand, and all factual types, on the other, than betlveen certain fictional types and certain fkctual types-bet~veen, to choose an ex- anlple alniost at randoni, the diary-novel and the authentic diary. hIy "random" is not really innocent and suggests, 1 hope, an important reservation that I prefer to save for later. But Barbara Herrnstein Smith's article raises in another, niore radi- cal way the question of the differences betlveen fiction and nonfiction in their treatment of chronology: she wonders if and when the com- parison, which narratology postulates, between the order of the f(16111n and the order of the sy izhet is possible, and she answers that it is pos- sible only rvhen the critic has access, L)~IISI( /Pt h ~~ I ( I T T ( L ~ ~ Z I Pi t s ~ l f ;to an independent source of information about the tenlporal succession of the "reported" events-lacking which he can only receive and register these events lvithout discussion in the order in lvhicll the narrative de- 6. 'I'his cririclue is directecl s i rn~~ltanco~~sly cer-tain "classics" of narratolog).a#air~$t u c - h as Sevtnour Charman's and 111y o\vn. and against Kelsotl Goodman's essay "'I?visred 'Fales" (1980). whit h appears in the same issue of Crr l~cc t iI I ~ ( ~ I I ~ ? J .Good- tna~i's and (:hatman's replies to Srnith appear in a later issue of ( : r ~ t / c c ~ l111q11zrs (Goodman 1981 : 799-809). Genette . FictionalIFactual 759 livers them. L\ccorc-\ing to Smith, this possibility is present in two cases only: in the case of a ivork of fiction derived fro111 a previous ivork, for example, the latest version of C i n d ~ r ~ l l n ,and in the case of non- fictional lvorks, such as historical narratives. In these cases alone, she says, "it makes sense to speak of the narrative in question as having rearranged the sequence of some given set of events or the events of some given story" (1980: 227). In other words, in these cases alone do we or can we have access to at least narratives, of which the f i r l o first may be consider-ed the source of the second, the fabula relative to lvllich the possible distortions of the syu~he t may be gauged. So con- vinced is Smith of the impossibility of any other procedure that she does not hesitate to add: Indeed , one suspects that these two types o f nar-rati1.e~ (that is, historical repor ts a n d tr\-ice-told tales) ser1.e as unconscious p a r ; l d i gmsh r the narrzt- tologist, which rnay, in tu rn , help explain his rieetl t o posit nnderlying plot structures o r hasic stories to account for- the seqr~eritial f ta tures of' those r a the r different narr;tti\es that h e tlors study rnost closely. namely, works of l i terary fiction. ( 1980: "8) 'I'his is a totally gratuitous hypothesis, not in the least corroborated by the history of our discipline, for the narratologists who, since Propp, have w.orked on folktales have scarcely bothered lvith their chronologi- c-al aspect (or, more generally, their narrative form), while conversely the specialists in formal narratology, since I.ubbock and Forster, have sholvn little interest (unless very inco conscious" indeed!) in the folktale, let alone (as I have already complained) historical ~larrative. But above all, S~ilith's criticism (that narratologists speak of anach- rony in connection lvith tests of original fiction, where conlparison between fabula and syuzhet is impossible by definition) forgets or ne- glects one essential fact, which I n~ention in .\hui'razr disc-olr,:\ du u;c.it (1983: 17) and which Nelson Goodman emphasizes in defending his olvn use of the notion (if not term) of anachrony. ?-his fact is that the majority of analepses and prolepses, in original fiction and else- where, are either explicit, that is, sig~lalled as such in the text itself by means of various \,erbal signs ("La comtesse ne survecut clue fort peu de temps a Fabrice, qu'elle adorait, et qui ne pitssa clu't~ne amlee dans sa Chartreuse"), or implicit but nevertheless obvious due to our knowledge of the "causal process in general" (chapter N: the countess dies of grief; chapter K+ 1: Fabrice dies in hcr C:h:~rt~-euse).' I11 both 7. I hake substituted these exanlples for C;oodman's: onlv the seco~ici of them, of course, is itllaginar?. L ' I I i c t o t n , clc /(I R J i v ~ l u / ~ o r if)ctriccci\r, offer4 at least one euatliple of anachrony whose legibility is not due to the lactu.ll character of the histox-ical narrative. I n his narrative of the e\ents o f , Ju l \ 14. 1789, .\fichelet first tells about a meeting rvith the dean of the guild at the f13tel d e L'ille: this r~leeting is in te~-- 760 Poetics Today 1 1 :4 cases, insists Goodman, "the twisting is lvith respect not to an absolute order of events independent of all versions but to what this version say.c is the order of events" (198 1: 799). And when, exceptionally, the text (as with Robbe-Grillet, for exarnple) does not declare either di- rectly (by verbal indication) or indirectly (by inference) what the order of events is, the narratologist can evidently only note, in the absence of any other hypothesis, the "achronical" character of the narrative and accept it as such (Genette 1972: l l 5 ) . V h u s one cannot oppose the factual narrative, lvhere the order of events rvould be provided by other sources, to the fictional narrative, where it would in prin- ciple be unidentified, and where the anachronies would consequerltly be indeterminable: apart from instances of exceptional reticence, the anachronies of fictional narrative are sirnply declared or suggested by the narrative itself-just like those of factual narrative, for that rnat- ter. In other words, and in order to indicate at the same time a point of agreement and one of disagreement with Barbara Herrnstein Srnith, fictional narrative and factual narrative are not to be distinguished lvholesale either by their use of anachrony or by the manner in which they signal this usage." Speed I lvould readily extend to what comes under the heading of narrative speed the principle suggested by Smith in connection with order: no story, fictional or otherwise, literary or otherwise, oral or lvritten, has the power-nor, therefore, the obligation-to impose on itself a speed rigorously synchronous with the speed of its fabula. The accelerations, decelerations, ellipses, and pauses which one observes, in the nlost diverse mixtures, in fictional narrative are also the lot of factual narra- tive, and are subject, in both cases, to the lalvs of efficacy and economy rupted by the arrival of a delegation a~~nounc i ng the taking of the Bastille and d i ~ p l a ~ i n gits ke)s. klichelet goes on: "La Bastille ne fut pas prise, il faut le dire. elle se livra. . . ." Then follo\is the stor), in analepse, of the f i l l of the Bastille. 8. I have alread! had the occasion to deny, as against Bruce hlorrisette, the possibility of "re-establishing" the chronological order of Kobbe-Grillet's stories (Genette 1966: '77). 9. klore generall?. I find it hard to see the import of Smith's criticis~n of what she calls the "ciualis~n" of narratolog?. 'l'he formula, of an intentionally pragmatic cast, which she proposes instead, runs: "verbal acts consisting of someone tell- ing sollieone else that something happened" (1980: 232). .This seems to nie in no way inco~lipatible with the postulates of narratolog?, and I take it to be entirel) self-evident. hloreover. the system of L)zcrours A11 isrirzt (h~stozrc,,