Narrative

2. Narrative theory

Work on the theory of narrative has largely concentrated on fictional narratives; the results so far constitute a suggestive taxonomy rather than a systematic theory. An important distinction should be made between the story presented and the discourse that presents it. For example, anachrony occurs when the temporal order of events as they happen in the story is not reflected in the discourse; we hear first of A and then of B, though B occurred before A. Again, it may be a feature of the discourse that the story is told by a certain narrator, or from the point of view of a certain character; these are not features of the story itself unless it is part of the story (or, as I shall say, it is fictional) that someone with knowledge of these events performs an act of telling.

Narration and point of view are themselves distinct concepts; the narrator may tell the story from the point of view of a character, with shifts in point of view without change of narrator. The narrative is said to be ‘focalized’ through a character when the narrator presents the story as it is experienced by that character. It is sometimes said that the story is focalized through the narrator when there is no character through whom it is focalized. This is confusing, because the narrator’s act of telling is not in general an act of experiencing the events of the story. Other unhelpful extensions of focalization have been made; it has been said that when character A hears character B speak of character C, C is focalized at the third degree. But C’s relation to B and to A in this case is not at all like the relation of a character to the narrator who narrates from that character’s perspective (Chatman 1986). Focalization needs a treatment of greater care and parsimony than it has yet received.

The narrator is often said to be distinct from the author. (Until now, I have been using ‘narrator’ in a sense which does not distinguish them.) The narrator is a construct of the work itself, and either within the world of the story tells us what they know or believe to be true (or, as in an unreliable narrative, tries to mislead us about what has happened), or, alternatively, from outside that world, tells us a fictional story. Watson is the internal or ‘intradiegetic’ narrator of the Sherlock Holmes stories, while the narrator of Tom Jones is external or ‘extradiegetic’. The author is also distinguished from the implied author, who is an imagined creature constructed by the reader as the personality who seems to have written this work; the implied author of Anna Karenina might be more tolerant, generous and understanding than the real Tolstoy apparently was.

Could the implied author take on the role otherwise assigned to the extradiegetic narrator? Advocates of the extradiegetic narrator point to works in which the narrator’s outlook is one the reader seems to be expected to reject; it is natural to say that there is in such cases a tension between narrator and implied author and consequently that we must conceptualize the work by invoking two distinct personalities. But cases of this kind can be handled without appeal to the extradiegetic narrator, by assuming that the implied author is speaking ironically; it is the implied author who speaks, but what is said is intended by that same speaker to be ridiculed or rejected. We can, therefore, dispense with the idea of an extradiegetic narrator in favour of the implied author. Intradiagetic narrators, on the other hand, are certainly present in some fictions; Watson, in the Holmes stories, is one. In other cases no narrator within the story is evident. Theorists have sometimes postulated hidden narrators, intra- or extradiegetic, for such works on the grounds that the events of the story must be told to us by someone (Chatman 1990: 133). Since the argument just given abolishes the extradiegetic narrator, let us concentrate on the claim that every fictional narrative requires an intradiegetic narrator, even where no such narrator is apparent in the text. In assessing this postulate, it is important to distinguish between what is true and what is fictional. It is true of all stories that they are told by someone, namely the author. The author’s act of telling is an invitation to us to imagine various things, and these things jointly constitute what is fictional in the story. Among the things we may be asked to imagine is that someone with knowledge of the events of the story is telling them to us as fact; in that case we have a fictional story with an intradiegetic narrator. On the other hand, we may be invited to imagine merely that the events of the story occurred and that no one in particular is telling them to us. Once we distinguish really telling a fictional story (something the author does) from fictionally telling a true story (something an intradiegetic narrator does) we see that while every fictional story is told as fiction, not every such story is fictionally told as fact. If the reasoning of this paragraph is correct, no works have extradiegetic narrators, only some have intradiegetic ones, and consequently some narratives have no narrator.

In dispensing with a narrator we need not reject the idea that a narrative needs to be understood as the product of an intending agent. But some writers in the structuralist tradition have claimed to identify a kind of writing that lacks the devices which signal the presence of a writer or speaker, such as indexicals or the past tense. They say that narrative in this sense is objective (or purports to be), and the events of the story ‘speak themselves’ (Benvenista 1966). This is a mistake. Even writing that contains no verbal indicators of agency presupposes the existence of one who speaks or writes, for something counts as language – and not as meaningless marks or sounds, – only if it was produced by an agent intending to conform their sound/mark production to the conventions of a language.