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The Time of Narrating (Erzhlzeit) and Narrated Time (Erzhlte Zeit)

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The Time of Narrating (Erzhlzeit) and Narrated Time (Erzhlte Zeit)

PAUL RICUR

Ricur's work as a whole provides a bridge between narratology, contemporary theology and existential philosophy. He is one of the most important practitioners of the hermeneutic philosophy inaugurated by Heidegger in his Being and Time. Like Heidegger, Ricceur considers that the experience of time is constitutive of human reality. In the section from Time and Narrative reprinted here, Ricceur takes up Gnther Mller's distinction between 'Erzhzeit' and 'erzhlte Zeit' and compares it to Grard Genette's structuralist work on the interpretation of time in fiction. Although Mller's and Genette's approaches are widely different, they coincide in articulating their analyses of fictional time at two levels: the time of the act of narrating and the time that is narrated. In addition to these two kinds of time, Ricur proposes a third one that is not intrinsically textual: the time of life. In other words, his analysis of the conjunctions/disjunctions of time runs along a threefold axis: utterance -- statement -- world. Ricceur argues that the analysis of this third category of time, generated by the writer's selection, pacing and distribution of the most meaningful sequences, captures some important experiential aspects of narratives which are left out by formalist approaches.



With this distinction introduced by Gnther Mller and taken up again by Grard Genette, we enter into a problematic that [ . . . ] does not seek in the utterance itself an internal principle of differentiation that would be apparent in the distribution of the tenses, but instead looks for a new key for interpreting time in fiction in the distinction between utterance and statement.

It is of the utmost importance to state, without further delay, that [ . . . ] Mller introduces a distinction that is not confined to within discourse. It opens onto a time of life which is not unlike the reference to a narrated world in Weinrich. This feature does not carry over in Genette's structural narratology and can only be pursued in a meditation belonging to a hermeneutics of the world of the text. [ . . .] For Genette, the distinction between the time of the utterance and the time of the statement is maintained within the bounds of the text, without any kind of mimetic implication.

My aim is to show that Genette is more rigorous than Mller in his distinction between two narrative times, but that Mller, at the cost perhaps of formal coherence, preserves an opening that is left to us to exploit. What we require is a three-tiered scheme: utterancestatement-world of the text, to which correspond a time of narrating, a narrated time, and a fictive experience of time projected by the conjunction/disjunction between the time it takes to narrate and narrated time. Neither of these two authors replies exactly to this need. Mller does not clearly distinguish the second from the third level, and Genette eliminates the third level in the name of the second one.

I am going to attempt to reorder these three levels by means of a critical examination of these two analyses, to which I am indebted for what are, at times, opposite reasons.

The philosophical context in which Mller introduces the distinction between Erzhlzeit and erzhlte Zeit is very different from that of French structuralism. This framework is that of a 'morphological poetics,' 1 directly inspired by Goethe's meditations on the morphology of plants and animals. 2 The reference of art to life, which constantly underlies this morphological poetics can only be understood within this context. As a result, the distinction presented by Mller is condemned to oscillate between an overall opposition of narrative to life and a distinction internal to narrative itself. His definition of art allows both these interpretations: 'narrating is presentifying [vergegenwrtigen] events that are not perceptible to the listener's senses' (p. 247 ). It is in this act of presentification that the fact of 'narrating' and the thing 'narrated' are distinguished. This is therefore a phenomenological distinction by reason of which every narrating is narrating something (erzhlen von), yet something which itself is not a narrative. From this basic distinction follows the possibility of distinguishing two times: the time taken to narrate and narrated time. But what is the correlate of presentification to which narrated time corresponds? Here we find two answers. On the one hand, what is narrated and is not narrative is not itself given in flesh and blood in the narrative but is simply 'rendered or restored' (Wiedergabe). On the other hand, what is narrated is essentially the 'temporality of life' (p. 251 ). However, 'life does not narrate itself, it is lived' (p. 254 ). Both these interpretations are assumed by the following statement: 'every narrating is narrating something that is not a narrative but a life process' (p. 261 ). Every narrative since the Iliad narrates this flowing (Fliessen): 'je mehr Zeitlichkeit des Lebens, desto reinere Epik' -- 'the richer life is in temporality, the purer the epic' (p. 250 ).

Let us keep for later discussion this apparent ambiguity concerning the status of narrated time, and let us turn toward the aspects of the division into the time of narrating and narrated time that result from a morphological poetics.

Everything stems from the observation that narrating is, to use an expression borrowed from Thomas Mann, 'setting aside' (aussparen), that is, both choosing and excluding. 3 We should thus be able to submit to scientific investigation the various modes of 'folding' ( Raffung) by means of which the time of narrating is separated from narrated time. More precisely, comparing the two times truly becomes the object of a science of literature once literature lends itself to measurement. Whence comes the idea of a metric comparison of the two times in question. This idea of a metric comparison of the two times seems to have come from a reflection on Fielding's narrative technique in Tom Jones. It is Fielding, the father of the novel that recounts the growth and development of a character, who concretely posed the technical question of Erzhlzeit. As a master, conscious of playing with time, he devotes each of his eighteen books to temporal segments of varying lengths -- from several years to several hours -- slowing down or speeding up, as the case may be, omitting one thing or emphasizing another. If Thomas Mann raised the problem of Aussparung, Fielding preceded him by consciously modulating the Zeitraffung, the unequal distribution of narrated time in the time of narrating.

However, if we measure something, just what are we measuring? And is everything measurable here?

What we are measuring, under the name of Erzhlzeit, is, as a matter of convention, a chronological time, equivalent to the number of pages and lines in the published work by reason of the prior equivalence posited between the time elapsed and the space covered on the face of a clock. It is by no means, therefore, a question of the time taken to compose the work. To what time is the number of pages and lines equivalent? To a conventional time of reading that is hard to distinguish from the variable time of actual reading. The latter is an interpretation of the time taken to tell the story which is comparable to the interpretation that a particular orchestra conductor gives to the theoretical time of performing a piece of music. 4

Once these conventions are admitted, we may say that narrating requires 'a fixed lapse of physical time' that the dock measures. What is then compared are indeed 'lengths' of time, both with respect to the now measurable Erzhlzeit as well as to narrated time, which is also measured in terms of years, days, and hours.

Can everything now be measured by means of these 'temporal compressions'? If the comparison of times were limited to the comparative measurement of two chronologies, the inquiry would be most disappointing -- although, even reduced to these dimensions, it leads to surprising and frequently neglected conclusions (so great is the attention paid to thematics that the subtleties of this strategy of double chronology have been largely overlooked). These compressions do not consist only in abbreviations along a variable scale. They also consist in skipping over dead time, in precipitating the progress of the narrative by a staccato rhythm in the expression ( Veni, vidi, vici), in condensing into a single exemplary event iterative or durative features ('every day,' 'unceasingly,' 'for weeks,' 'in the autumn,' and so on). Tempo and rhythm thus enrich, in the course of the same work, the variations of the relative lengths of the time of narration and the time narrated. Taken together, all these notations contribute to outlining the narrative's Gestalt. And this notion of a Gestalt opens the way for investigations into structural aspects further and further removed from linearity, sequence, and chronology, even if the basis continues to be the relation between measurable timelapses.

In this respect, the three examples used in Mller essay 'Erzhlzeit and Erzhlte Zeit,' namely, Goethe Wilhelm Meisters Lehrejahre, Virginia Wooff 's Mrs. Dalloway, and Galsworthy Forsyte Saga, are examined with an extraordinary minuteness, which makes these analyses models worthy of imitation.

By the choice of method, this investigation is based in each instance on the most linear aspects of narrativity but is not confined to them. The initial narrative schema is that of sequence, and the art of narrating consists in restoring the succession of events ( die Wiedergabe des Nacheinanders) (p. 270 ). 5 The remarks that shatter this linearism are therefore all the more precious. The narrative tempo, in particular, is affected by the way in which the narration stretches out in descriptions of scenes as if they were tableaux or speeds up through a series of strong, quick beats. Like Braudel the historian, we must not speak of time as being simply long or short, but as rapid or slow. The distinction between 'scenes' and 'transitions,' or 'intermediary episodes,' is also not strictly quantitative. The effects of slowness or of rapidity, of briefness or of being long and drawn out are at the borderline of the quantitative and the qualitative. Scenes that are narrated at length and separated by brief transitions or iterative summaries -- Mller calls them 'monumental scenes' -- carry the narrative process along, in contrast to those narratives in which 'extraordinary events' form the narrative skeleton. In this way, nonquantifiable structural relations add complexity to the Zusammenspiel at play between two time-spans. The arrangement of scenes, intermediary episodes, important events, and transitions never ceases to modulate the quantities and extensions. To these features are added anticipations and flashbacks, the interlinkings that enable the memory of vast stretches of time to be included in brief narrative sequences, creating the effect of perspectival depth, while breaking up chronology. We move even further away from a strict comparison between lengths of time when, to flashbacks, are added the time of remembering, the time of dreaming, and the time of the reported dialogue, as in Virginia Woolf. Qualitative tensions are thus added to quantitative measurements.

What is it, then, that inspires in this way the transition from the analysis of the measurement of time-spans to an evaluation of the more qualitative phenomenon of contraction? It is the relation of the time of narration to the time of life through narrated time. Here Goethe's meditation comes to the fore: life in itself does not represent a whole. Nature can produce living things but these are indifferent (gleichgltig). Art can produce only dead things, but they are meaningful. Yes, this is the horizon of thinking: drawing narrated time out of indifference by means of the narrative. By saving or sparing and compression, the narrator brings what is foreign to meaning (sinnfremd) into the sphere of meaning. Even when the narrative intends to render what is senseless (sinnlos), it places this in relation to the sphere of making sense ( Sinndeutung).

Therefore if we were to eliminate this reference to life, we would fail to understand that the tension between these two times stems from a morphology that at one and the same time resembles the work of formation/transformation ( Bildung-Umbildung) active in living organisms and differs from it by elevating meaningless life to a meaningful work by the grace of art. It is in this sense that the comparison between organic nature and poetic work constitutes an irreducible component of poetic morphology.

If, following Genette, we may call the relation between the time of narrating and the narrated time in the narrative itself a 'game with time,' this game has as its stakes the temporal experience ( Zeiterlebnis) intended by the narrative. The task of poetic morphology is to make apparent the way in which the quantitative relations of time agree with the qualities of time belonging to life itself. Conversely, these temporal qualities are brought to light only by the play of derivations and insertions, without any thematic meditation on time having to be grafted onto them, as in Laurence Sterne, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Mann, or Marcel Proust. A fundamental time is implied, without itself being considered as a theme. Nevertheless, this time of life is 'codetermined' by the relation and the tension between the two times of the narrative and by the 'laws of form' that result from them. In this respect, we might be tempted to say that there are as many temporal 'experiences' as poets, even as poems. This is indeed the case, and this is why this 'experience' can only be intended obliquely through the 'temporal armature,' as what this armature is suited to, what it fits. It is clear that a discontinuous structure suits a time of dangers and adventures, that a more continuous, linear structure suits a Bildungsroman where the themes of growth and metamorphosis predominate, whereas a jagged chronology, interrupted by jumps, anticipations, and flashbacks, in short, a deliberately multidimensional configuration, is better suited to a view of time that has no possible overview, no overall internal cohesiveness. Contemporary experiments in the area of narrative techniques are thus aimed at shattering the very experience of time. It is true that in these experiments the game itself can become the stakes. But the polarity of temporal experience ( Zeiterlebnis) and temporal armature ( Zeitgerst) seems inescapable.



In every case, an actual temporal creation, a 'poietic time' (p. 311 ) is uncovered on the horizon of each 'meaningful composition' (p. 308 ). This temporal creation is what is at stake in the structuration of time at play between the time of narrating and narrated time.

Utterance, Statement, and Object in Genette's Narrative Discourse

Gnther Mller Morphologische Poetik has in the end left us with three times: the time of the act of narrating, the time that is narrated, and finally the time of life. The first is a chronological time; it is a time of reading rather than of writing. We can measure only its spatial equivalent, which is counted by the number of pages and lines. Narrated time, for its part, is counted in years, months, and days and may even be dated in the work itself. It is, in turn, the result of the 'compression' of a time 'spared' or 'set aside,' which is not narrative but life. The nomenclature Grard Genette proposes is also temary. 6 But it cannot, for all this, be superimposed upon Mller's. It results from the effort of structural narratology to derive all of its categories from features contained in the text itself, which is not the case for Mller with respect to the time of life.

Genette's three levels are determined starting from the middle level, the narrative statement. This is the narrative properly speaking. It consists in relating real or imaginary events. In written culture this narrative is identical with the narrative text. The narrative statement, in its turn, stands in a twofold relation. In the first place, the statement is related to the object of the narrative, namely, the events recounted, whether they be fictitious or real. This is what is ordinarily called the 'told' story. (In a similar sense, the universe in which the story takes place can be termed 'diegetic.') Secondly, the statement is related to the act of narrating taken in itself, to the narrative 'utterance.' (For Ulysses, recounting his adventures is just as much an action as is massacring the pretenders.) A narrative, we shall therefore say, tells a story, otherwise it would not be a narrative. And it is proffered by someone, otherwise it would not be discourse. 'As a 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' ( Narrative Discourse, p. 29). 7 [ . . . ]

The relation to Gnther Mller is complex. The distinction between Erzhlzeit and erzhlte Zeit is retained by Genette but is entirely made over. This reworking results from the difference in status of the levels to which temporal features are ascribed. In Genette's terminology the diegetic and the utterance designate nothing external to the text. The relation between the statement and what is recounted is assimilated to the relation between signifier and signified in Saussurean linguistics. What Mller calls life is therefore set out of bounds. Utterance, for its part, does indeed come out of the selfreferential character of discourse and refers to the person who is narrating. Narratology, however, strives to record only the marks of narration found in the text.

A complete redistribution of temporal features results from this reorganization of the levels of analysis. First, the Zeiterlebnis is set out-of-bounds. All that remain are the relations internal to the text between utterance, statement, and story (or diegetic universe). It is to these relations that the analyses of a model text are devoted, Proust Remembrance of Things Past. [ . . . ]

What is the time of the narrative, if it is neither that of the utterance nor that of the diegesis? Like Mller, Genette holds it to be the equivalent of and the substitute for the time of reading, that is, the time it takes to cover or traverse the space of the text: 'the narrative text, like every other text, has no other temporality than what it borrows, metonymically, from its own reading' ( Narrative Discourse, p. 34). We must, therefore, take 'for granted and accept literally the quasi-fiction of the Erzhzeit, this false time standing in for a true time and to be treated -- with the combination of reservation and approval that this involves -- as a pseudo-time' (p. 79, his emphasis). 8

I shall not take up in detail Genette's analysis of the three essential determinations -- order, duration, frequency -- in terms of which the relations between the time of the story and the pseudo-time of narrative can be studied. In these three registers, what is meaningful are the discordances between the temporal features of the events in the diegesis and the corresponding features in the narrative.

With respect to order, these discordances may be placed under the general heading of anachrony. 9 The epic narrative, since the Iliad, is noted in this regard for the way it begins in medias res and then moves backward in order to explain events. In Proust, this procedure is used to oppose the future, become present, to the idea one had of it in the past. [ . . . ] Whether it is a question of completing the narration of an event by bringing it into the light of a preceding event, of filling in an earlier lacuna, or provoking involuntary memory by the repeated recalling of similar events, or of correcting an earlier interpretation by means of a series of reinterpretations -- Proustian analepsis is not a gratuitous game. It is governed by the meaning of the work as a whole. 10 This recourse to the opposition between meaningful and unmeaningful opens a perspective on narrative time that goes beyond the literary technique of anachrony. 11

The uses of prolepsis within a globally retrospective narrative seems to me to illustrate even better than analepsis this relation to overall meaning opened by narrative understanding. Some prolepses take a particular line of action to its logical conclusion, to the point of rejoining the narrator's present. Others are used to authenticate the narrative of the past through testimony to its persistence in current memory ('today, I can still see . . .'). [ . . . ]

Taking an overall view of the anachronies in Proust Recherche, Genette declares that 'the importance of the 'anachronic' narrative in Recherche du temps perdu is obviously connected to the retrospectively synthetic character of Proustian narrative, which is totally present in the narrator's mind at every moment. Ever since the day when the narrator in a trance perceived the unifying significance of his story, he never ceases to hold all of its places and all of its moments, to be capable of establishing a multitude of 'telescopic' relations amongst them' (p. 78 ). But must we not then say that what narratology takes as the pseudo-time of a narrative is composed of the set of temporal strategies placed at the service of a conception of time that, first articulated in fiction, can also constitute a paradigm for redescribing lived and lost time?

Genette's study of the distortions of duration leads me to the same reflections. I shall not go back over the impossibility of measuring the duration of the narrative, if by this is meant the time of reading (p. 86 ). Let us admit with Genette that we can only compare the respective speeds of the narrative and of the story, the speed always being defined by a relation between a temporal measure and a spatial one. In this way, in order to characterize the speeding up or slowing down of the narrative in relation to the events recounted, we end up comparing, just as Mller did, the duration of the text, measured by pages and lines, with the duration of the story measured by clock time. As in Mller, the variations -- here called 'anisochronies' -- have to do with large narrative articulations and their internal chronology, whether expressly given or inferred. We may then apportion the distortions in speed between the drastic slowing down of 'pauses' and the dramatic acceleration of ellipses by situating the classical notion of a 'scene' or 'description' alongside that of a pause, and that of a 'summary' alongside of that of an ellipsis. 12 A highly detailed typology of the comparative dimensions of the length of the text and the duration of the narrated events can then be sketched out. However, what seems to me to be important is that narratology's mastery of the strategies of acceleration and slowing down serves to enhance our understanding of procedures of emplotment that we have acquired through our familiarity with the procedures of emplotment and the function of such emplotment procedures. For example, Genette notes that in Proust the fullness (and hence the slow pace of the narrative, which establishes a sort of coincidence between the length of the text and the time taken by the hero to be absorbed by a spectacle) is closely related to the 'contemplative halts' (p. 102 ) in the hero's experience. 13 Likewise, the absence of a summary narrative, the absence of descriptive pauses, the tendency of the narrative to constitute itself as a scene in the narrative sense of this term, the inaugural character of the five major scenes -- morning, dinner, evening -- which by themselves take up some six hundred pages, the repetition that transforms them into typical scenes; all these structural features of Remembrance of Things Past -- features that leave intact none of the traditional narrative movements (p. 112 ), features that can be discerned, analyzed, and classified by an exact narratological science -- receive their meaning from the sort of temporal immobility created by the narrative on the level of fiction.

However, the modification that gives the narrative temporality of Remembrance 'a completely new cadence -- perfectly unprecedented' ibid.) is certainly the iterative character of the narrative, which narratology places under the third temporal category, that of frequency (recounting once or n times an event that occurs once or n times) and that it sets in opposition to the 'singulative' narrative. 14 How is this 'intoxication with the iterative' (p. 123 ) to be interpreted? The strong tendency of instants in Proust to merge together and become confused with one another is, Genette grants, 'the very condition for experiencing 'involuntary memory'' (p. 124 ). And yet in this exercise of narratology, it is never once a question of this experience. Why?



If the memory experience of the narrator-hero is so easily reduced to a mere 'factor in (I should say rather a means of) the emancipation of the narrative with respect to temporality' (p. 156 ), this is in part because the inquiry concerning time has been until this point artificially contained within the limits of the relation between the stated narrative and the diegesis, at the expense of the temporal aspects of the relationship between statement and utterance, described in terms of the grammatical category of 'voice.'

Postponing any discussion of the time of the narration is not without its drawbacks. For example, we cannot understand the meaning of the reversal by which, at the turning point in Proust's work, the story, with its steady chronology and the predominance of the singulative, takes control over the narrative, with its anachronisms and its iterations, if we do not attribute the distortions of duration, which then take over, to the narrator himself, 'who in his impatience and growing anguish is desirous both of loading his final scenes . . . and of jumping to the denouement . . . that will finally give him being and legitimate his discourse' (p. 157, his emphasis). Within the time of the narrative must therefore be integrated 'another temporality, no longer the temporality of the narrative but in the final instance governing it: the temporality of the narrating itself' (ibid.).

What, then, may be said about the relation between utterance and statement? Does it possess no temporal character at all? The basic phenomenon whose textual status can be preserved here is that of the 'voice,' a notion borrowed from grammarians and one that characterizes the implication of the narration itself in the narrative, that is, of the narrative instance (in the sense in which Benveniste speaks of the instance of discourse) with its two protagonists: the narrator and the real or virtual receiver. If a question about time arises at this level of relation, it is insofar as the narrative instance, represented in the text by the voice, itself presents temporal features.

If the time of utterance is examined so briefly and so late in Narrative Discourse, this has in part to do with the difficulties involved in establishing the proper order of the relations between utterance, statement, and story, but more importantly, it has to do with the difficulty that, in Remembrance, is connected to the relation between the real author and the fictive narrator, who here happens to be the same as the hero, the time of narration displaying the same fictive quality as the role of the narrator-hero's 'I' calls for an analysis that is, precisely, an analysis of voice. Indeed, if the act of narration does not carry within itself any mark of duration, the variations in its distance from the events recounted is important for 'the narrative's significance' (p. 216 ). In particular, the changes referred to above concerning the temporal dimension of the narrative find a certain justification in these variations. They make us feel the gradual shortening of the very fabric of the narrative discourse, as if, Genette adds, 'the story time tended to dilate and make itself conspicuous while drawing near to its end, which is also its origin' (p. 226, his emphasis). The fact that the time of the hero's story approaches its own source, the narrator's present, without being able to catch up with it, is part of the meaning of the narrative, namely that it is ended or at least broken off when the hero becomes a writer.

Its recourse to the notion of the narrative voice allows narratology to make a place for subjectivity, without confusing this with the subjectivity of the real author. If Remembrance is not to be read as a disguised autobiography, this is because the 'I' uttered by the narratorhero is itself fictive. However, for lack of a notion like that of a world of the text (a notion I shall justify in the next chapter), this recourse to the notion of narrative voice is not sufficient to do justice to the fictive experience the narrator-hero has of time in its psychological and metaphysical dimensions.

Without this experience, which is just as fictive as the 'I' who unfolds it and recounts it, and yet which is worthy of being called 'experience' by virtue of its relation to the world projected by the work, it is difficult to give a meaning to the notions of time lost and time regained, which constitute what is at stake in Remembrance of Things Past. 15 [ . . . ]

Over and above the discussion of the interpretation of Remembrance proposed by Genette, the question remains whether, in order to preserve the meaning of the work, it is not necessary to subordinate the narrative technique to the intention that carries the text beyond itself, toward an experience, no doubt feigned but nonetheless irreducible to a simple game with time. To pose this question is to ask whether we must not do justice to the dimension that Mller, recalling Goethe, named Zeiterlebnis, and that narratology, by decree and as a result of its strict methodology, sets out of bounds. The major difficulty is then to preserve the fictive quality of this Zeiterlebnis, while resisting its reduction to narrative technique alone. [ . . . ]

Notes

Morphologische Poetik, ed. Elena Mller ( Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1968) is the title that was adopted by Gunther Mller for a collection of his essays dating from 1964-8.

It is worth recalling that Propp was also inspired by Goethe.

The term Aussparung emphasizes both what is omitted (life itself, as we shall see) and what is retained, chosen, or picked out. The French word pargne sometimes has these two meanings: what is spared is what is available to someone and it is also what is not touched, as when we say that a village was spared by (pargn par) the bombing. The word 'savings' (l'pargne), precisely, includes what is put aside for one to make use of and what is left aside and sheltered.

Mller is somewhat ill at ease in speaking of this time of the narrative in itself, which is neither narrated nor read, a sort of disembodied time, measured by the number of pages, in order to distinguish it from the time of reading, to which each reader contributes his own Lesetempo (ibid., p. 275).

For example, the study of Goethe Lehrejahre begins with a comparison between the 650 pages taken as 'the measure of the physical time required by the narrator to tell his story' ( ibid., p. 270 ) and the eight years covered by the narrated events. It is, however, the incessant variations in relative lengths that create the work's tempo.

GRARD GENETTE, ''Frontiers of Narrative,'' in Figures of Literary Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 127-44; Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin ( Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980); Nouveau Discours du ricit ( Paris: Seuil, 1983).



Narrative theory has never, in fact, stopped oscillating between bipartition and tripartition. The Russian formalists recognize the distinction between sjuet and fabula, the subject and the tale. For Schklovsky, the tale designates the material used in forming the subject; the subject of Eugene Onegin, for example, is the elaboration of the tale, and hence a construction. Cf. Thorie de la littrature. Textes des journalistes russes, collected, presented, and translated by Tzvetan Todorov, Preface by Roman Jakobson ( Paris: Seuil, 1965), pp. 54-5. Tomashevski adds that the development of the tale may be characterized as 'the passage from one situation to another' ( ibid., p. 273 ). The subject is what the reader perceives as resulting from the techniques of composition ( ibid., p. 208 ). In a similar sense, Todorov himself makes a distinction between discourse and story ( 'Les catgories du rcit littrair). Bremond uses the terms 'narrating narrative' and 'narrated narrative' ( Logique de rcit, p. 321, no. 1). Cesare Segre, however, proposes the triad: discourse (signifier), plot (the signified in the order of literary composition), and fabula (the signified in the logical and chronological order of events) ( Structures and Time: Narration, Poetry, Models, trans. John Meddemmen ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1979)). It is thus time, considered as the irreversible order of succession, that serves as the discriminating factor. The time of discourse is that of reading, the time of plot that of the literary composition, and the time of the fabula that of the events recounted. On the whole, the pairs subject/tale ( Schklovsky, Tomashevski), discourse/story ( Todorov), and narrative/story ( Genette) correspond rather well. Their reinterpretation in Saussurean terms constitutes the difference between the Russian and the French formalists. Ought we to say then that the reappearance of a tripartition (in Cesare Segre and Genette himself) marks the return to a Stoic triad: what signifies, what is signified, what occurs?

We might wonder in this regard if the time of reading, from which the time of the narrative is borrowed, does not belong for this reason to the plane of utterance, and if the transposition brought about through the metonymy does not conceal this filiation by projecting onto the plane of the statement what rightfully belongs to the plane of utterance. In addition, I would not call this a pseudo-time, but precisely a fictive time, so closely is it tied, for narrative understanding, to the temporal configurations of fiction. I would say that the fictional is transposed into the pseudo when narrative understanding is replaced by the rationalizing simulation that characterizes the epistemological level of narratology, an operation that I reemphasize once again is both legitimate and of a derivative nature. Nouveau Discours du rcit makes this more precise: 'the time of the (written) narrative is a 'pseudo-time' in the sense that it exists empirically for the reader of a text-space that only reading can (re)convert into duration' ( ibid., p. 15 ).

The study of anachronies (prolepsis, analepsis, and their combinations) may be superimposed rather easily on Harald Weinrich's study of 'perspective' (anticipation, retrospection, zero degree).

I refer the reader here to the lovely page in Narrative Discourse where Genette evokes Marcel's general 'play' with the principal episodes of his existence, 'which until then were lost to significance because of their dispersion and are now suddenly reassembled, now made significant by being bound all together. . . . chance, contingency, arbitrariness now suddenly wiped out, his life's portrait is now suddenly 'captured' in the web of a structure and the cohesiveness of a meaning' ( ibid., pp. 56-67 ).

The reader cannot help comparing this remark by Genette to Mller's use of the notion of Sinngehalt, discussed above, as well as the opposition between meaningful and unmeaningful (or indifferent) inherited from Goethe. This opposition, in my opinion, is entirely different from the opposition between signifier and signified coming from Saussure.

The notion of Raffung in Mller, therefore, finds an equivalent here in that of acceleration.

'The duration of these contemplative halts is generally such that it is in no danger of being exceeded by the duration of the reading (even a very slow reading) of the text that 'tells of' them' ( ibid., p. 102 ).

In his Maupassant, Greimas introduces the same categories of the iterative and the singulative, and, in order to account for them, adopts the grammatical category of 'aspect.' The alternation of iterative and singulative also forms a parallel with Weinrich's category of 'putting into relief.'

We ought to be able to say of the metaphysical experience of time in Remembrance of Things Past exactly what Genette says of the 'I' of the book's hero, namely, that he is neither entirely Proust nor entirely another. This is by no means a 'return to the self,' a 'presence to the self' that would be

postulated by an experience expressed in the fictional mode, but instead a 'semi-homonymy' between real experience and fictive experience, similar to that which the narratologist discerns between the hero-narrator and the work's signatory (cf. ibid., pp. 251-2 ).





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