Notes on Gérard Genette's 
Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method
(Discours du récit [1972])

Gérard Genette
(b. 1930)
Addendum to Notes for MLLL 4063: Early Literary Criticism (OU, Fall 2006)
Course taught by 
Prof. A. Robert Lauer

GÉRARD GENETTE:
NARRATIVE DISCOURSE: AN ESSAY IN METHOD (Discours du récit [1972]) [Eng. trans. by Jane E. Lewin, Foreword by Jonathan Culler {Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press}]: I. TIME: A. Order, B. Duration, C. Frequency; II. MOOD, and III. VOICE.
     FOREWORD (by Jonathan Culler): This is a systemic theory of narrative.  Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction is primarily limited to problems of narrative perspective and point of view.  Gérard Genette, along with Roland Barthes and Tzvetan Todorov, are structuralists; as such, they are not interested in interpreting literature but in investigating its structures and devices.  Structuralists devoted considerable attention to plot structure or the “grammar” of the plot.  Some of Genette’s ideas on TIME are that, with respect to ORDER, events occur in one order but are narrated in another [by means of  flashback {analepsis}, foreshadowing {prolepsis}, beginning in medias res, etc.]; with respect to pace or DURATION [scene, summary], the narrative devotes considerable space to a momentary experience [a scene] and then leaps  over or swiftly summarizes a number of years [summary]; with respect to FREQUENCY, the narrative may repeatedly recount an [iterative] event that happened only once or may recount once what happened frequently [pseudo-iterative].  With respect to MOOD, Genette, in addition to mimesis and diegesis, include the scandalous (from a point of view) polymodality.  With respect to VOICE, Proust is “transgressive.”
     PREFACE:  This is a structuralist study of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (1912-1927) [Remembrance of Things Past (Eng. 1934)].  It is a method of analysis and a theory of narrative or narratology.
     INTRODUCTION: “Narrative” (récit) is 1) the oral or written discourse that undertakes to tell of an event or a series of events, 2) the succession of events, real or fictitious, that are the subjects of this discourse, and to their several relations of linking, opposition, repetition, etc., and 3) the event (but not the one recounted but) that consists of someone recounting something: the act of narrating taken in itself.  The word “story” (histoire) refers to the signified or narrative content; diegesis refers to the story as signifier (the statement, discourse, or narrative text itself):
 

VOICE: Mode of action of the verb in its relation with the subject.

Genette’s Five Categories: ORDER, DURATION, and FREQUENCY (which deal with time), MOOD, and VOICE.

I. TIME: 
     CHAPTER 1: A. ORDER:
     With respect to narrative time:  a) there is the time of the thing (histoire [erzählte Zeit: story time]) told (the signified) and b) the time of the narrative or récit (the signifier [Erzählzeit: narrative time]). 
     ANACHRONIES: These are all forms of discordances between the two temporal orders of story and narrative (since there is no perfect temporal correspondence between the two).  Anachrony (starting in medias res, ab ovo, in ultimas [extremas] res, retrospections [analepsis] {lepse > taking}, flashforwards or anticipations [prolepsis], ellipsis, paralipsis, returns, etc.) is one of the traditional resources of literary narration. 
     REACH, EXTENT: An anachrony can reach into the past or the future from a “present” moment.  The temporal distance covered is the anachrony’s reach.  The anachrony itself can also cover a duration of story that is more or less long: this is its extent.
     ANALEPSES (recalls): An anachrous (earlier) narrative (“then”) that is temporarily second or subordinate to the first (first narrative, “now”).  The secondary or subordinate narrative is “external” [whose reach is outside the temporal field of the first narrative] to the first (it [as an antecedent to the first narrative] never interferes with the first narrative).  There are also internal [whose reach is inside the temporal field of the first narrative] (heterodiegetic) analepses [these deal with a character recently introduced whose “antecedents” the narrtor wants to shed light on] and mixed analespsis.  There are also internal homodiegetic analepses (internal analepses that deal with the same line of action as the first narrative [repeating analepses or returns by which the narrative retraces its own path, also called Rückgriffe or “retroceptions”]).  Completing analepses or returns comprise the retrospective sections that fill in, after the event, an earlier gap in the narrative.  These earlier gaps can be called ellipses (breaks in the temporal continuity).  A Paralipsis is a lateral (or sidestepped) ellipsis (e.g., when narrating one’s family in the past one systematically conceals [puts aside] the existence of one person).  In retrospections, there are also iterative ellipses (ellipses dealing not with a single portion of elapsed time but with several portions taken as if they were alike and to some extent repetitive).  A partial analepsis [an interruprtion in the analepsis which gives a reader an isolated piece of information] occurs when a retrospection ends on an ellipsis without rejoining the first narrative.  A complete analepsis [which retrieves the whole of the narrative’s antecedents] is a retrospection which rejoins the first narrative (at the moment it was first interrupted). 
     PROLEPSES: Anticipation or temporal prolepsis is less frequent in Western literature (plot of predestination).  The first-person narrative lends itself better than any other to anticipation.  There are internal and external prolepses.  Digressions, epilogues, and allusions are external prolepses.  In Proust, they authenticate the narrative of the past. There are iterative prolepses (frequency).  Repeating prolepses play the role of advance notice (of a nearby resolution).  There are also advance mentions (simple markers without anticipation, like introducing a character who will speak later).  There are also false advance mentions or snares (as in detective stories) [but a false snare may become a genuine advance mention].  All prolepses are abrupt interruptions (some partial [“to anticipate for a moment          . . .”], and some that return to point zero [“I must now return to my interrupted narrative”]).  Anachronic narrative gives one a sense of omnitemporality.
     ACHRONY: Second-degree prolepses, analepses on prolepses, prolepses on analepses.  Double anachronies (“It would happen later, as we have already seen,” “It had already happened, as we will see later”).  When later is earlier, and earlier later, defining the direction of movement becomes a delicate task.  Open analepses are analepses whose conclusion cannot be localized.  Some events may also lack a temporal reference and become atemporal.  An event that is dateless and ageless is an achrony.  There are also achronic structures and geographic (instead of temporal) orderings (syllepses), present, e.g., in voyage narratives.  There are also thematic syllepses in episodic novels with multiples stories (groupings by place or by story instead of by time). 

TIME:
     CHAPTER 2: B. DURATION: 
     ANISOCHRONIES: No one can measure the duration of a narrative.  Nothing allows us to determine a “normal” speed of execution.  The reference point is degree zero.  A scene with dialogue gives us a sort of equality between the narrative section [the manner of telling] and the fictive section what is told.  A scene with dialogue has only a kind of conventional equality between narrative time and story line.  Speed is the relationship between a temporal dimension and a spatial dimension.  A narrative can do without anachronies but not without anisochronies, or effects of rhythm.  Diegetic time is almost never indicated (or inferable) with the precision that would be necessary.  The relations between external divisions (parts, chapters, etc.) and internal narrative articulations mainly determine the rhythm of a narrative (e.g., Combray, 140 pp, 10 years; Un amour de Swann, 150 pp, 2 years, etc.).  In Proust, chronology is neither clear nor coherent.  It also tends to become discontinuous. 
     The four basic relationships that have become the canonical forms of novel tempo (the four narrative movements) are: 1) ellipsis, 2) descriptive pause, 3) scene (as in dialogue, which realizes conventionally the equality of time between narrative and story), and 4) summary.  If ST designates story time, NT pseudo-time (or conventional time), ? > infinitely greater, and < ? infinitely less, we have the following:
 

There is no NT > ST for summary (which would be a scene in slow motion).  Pure dialogue cannot be slowed down [NB by ARL: but it can in film].  Big scenes in novels are extended by descriptive pauses or various insertions (analepses, prolepses, etc.).
     SUMMARY: Summary is the most usual transition between two scenes, the “background” against which scenes stand out, and thus the connective tissue par excellence of novelistic narrative, whose fundamental rhythm is defined by the alternation of summary and scene.  Most retrospective sections belong to this type of narration.  One of the most important and frequent uses of the summary is to convey rapidly a sketch of past life.  They can serve as recapitulations where the narrator tells us all we have to know.
     PAUSE: Descriptions (which take a lot of written space).  Epic ecphrasis (Shield of Achilles in Iliad, Book 18).  [METALEPSIS is when the narrator pretends to enter, with or without the reader, into the diegetic universe <Delicado in La loçana andaluza, Hitchcock in all his films>]  In descriptive passages the general movement of the text is governed by the step or the gaze of one or several characters.  The omniscient narrator wears Gyges’s ring to make him invisible as he surfs through the narrative.  In Proust, his descriptions are narrative and analytical impressions. 
     ELLIPSIS: Temporal ellipses are Paralipsis, that is, when one leaves aside lateral omissions.  A Definite Ellipsis is when an ellipsis is indicated (“Two years passed, . . .”); an Indefinite Ellipsis is when an ellipsis is not indicated (“Many years passed, . . .”).  There are also Explicit Ellipses (“Two years later, . . .”), Characterizing Ellipses (“Some years of happiness passed, . . .”), Implicit Ellipses (whose very presence is not announced in the text and which the reader can infer only from some chronological lacuna or gap in narrative continuity), and Hypothetical Ellipsis (impossible to localize and revealed after the event by an analepsis [trips to Germany, etc.]).  Ellipses represent a practically nonexistent portion of text. 
     SCENE: In the traditional novelistic alternation between scene (dramatic) and summary (non-dramatic = narrated), the scene deals with the strong periods of the action coinciding with the most intense moments of the narrative (while the weak ones [functioning as waiting rooms forming a liaison with scenes] are summed up in a summary). 

TIME:
     CHAPTER 3: C. FREQUENCY:
     SINGULATIVE / ITERATIVE: Narrative (or the relations of) frequency (repetition) between the narrative (story) and the diegesis is what grammarians call aspect. An event happens and can happen again or be repeated.  The repetition is a mental construction.  A narrative may tell once what happened once, n times what happened n times, n times what happened once, once what happened n times.  These are the four types of relations of frequency:
 

Generalizing or external iterations.  Internal or synthesizing iteration (where the iterative syllepsis extends not over a wider period of time but over the period of time of the scene itself).  Pseudo-iteratives scenes (by their wording in the imperfect they appear to happen several times: “the monologue was spoken not once but a hundred times”).  In Proust there is the “singularism” of the spatial sensitivity and the “iteration” of the temporal sensitivity. 
     DETERMINATION, SPECIFICATION, EXTENSION: Singular units are defined first by their diachronic limits or determination (between the end of June and the end of September in 1890), and then by their specification (the rhythm of recurrence: one day out of seven).  Then there is the extension (a Sunday in summer).  There are definite internal determinations (“I never thought again of this page”) and indefinite (“Starting from a certain year”). [RE-DO THIS]
     INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL DIACHRONY: [RE-VISIT].
     ALTERNATION, TRANSITIONS: Between summary and scene in the classical novel (or of the singulative and the iterative in Proust).
     Abruption: the figure by which one removes the customary transitions between the parts of a dialogue, or before direct speech, in order to make its presentation more animated and more interesting. 
     THE GAME WITH TIME: In traditional narrative, analepsis (an aspect of sequence) most often takes the form of summary (an aspect of duration, or of speed); summary frequently has recourse to the services of the iterative (an aspect of frequency); description is almost always at the same time pinpointed, durative, and iterative.
     Interpolations, distortions, temporal condensations: Proust’s novel is one of Time ruled, captured, bewitched, subverted, perverted.

II.  CHAPTER 4: MOOD:
     NARRATIVE MOODS: Since the function of narrative is not to give an order, express a wish, state a condition, etc., but simply to tell a story and therefore to “report” facts (real or fictive), the indicative is its only mood.  Mood is the name given to the different forms of the verb that are used to affirm more or less the thing in question, and to express the different points of view from which the life or the action is looked at.  Indeed one can tell more or tell less what one tells, and can tell it according to one point of view or another.  When a novel takes a participant’s “vision” or point of view it takes a perspective with regard to the story.  Distance and perspective are the two chief modalities of that regulation of narrative information that is mood. 
     DISTANCE: There are two narrative modes (Plato, Republic, Book III): a) according to whether the poet himself is the speaker (pure narrative: Homer), or b) whether the poet delivers a speech as if he were someone else (imitation or mimesis: Ulysses telling a story).  Pure narrative is more distant than imitation, for it says less, and in a more mediated way (indirection and condensation are two distinctive features of pure narrative).  No narrative can show or imitate the story it tells.  All it can do is tell it in a manner which is detailed, precise, alive, and in that way give more or less the illusion of mimesis, for narration (oral or written) is a fact of language and language signifies without imitating.  There is also dialogue in indirect style and dialogue in direct style.
     NARRATIVE OF EVENTS: The narrative of events is always narrative, that is, a transcription of the supposed non-verbal into the verbal.  Showing can only be a way of telling.  Mimesis: maximum of information and a minimum of the informer.  Diegesis: a minimum of information and a maximum presence of the informer.  Proust’s novel is full of information and is, hence, “mimetic.” The narrator’s presence is constant.  The narrator as producer of metaphors. 
     The best narrative form is the story told as if by a character in the story, but told in the third person (a narrator who is not one of the characters but takes the point of view of one).  A character in the first person rarely succeeds in conveying the illusion of presentness and immediacy.  Far from facilitating the hero-reader identification, it tends to appear remote in time (the essence of this novel is retrospective: time has lapsed since the fictional time of the events of the story and the narrator’s actual time in recording those events).  When one writes a story in the third person from a past perspective, the illusion is created that the action is taking place. 
     NARRATIVE OF WORDS: Three states of characters’ (uttered / inner) speech:
     1) Narratized or narrated speech is the most distant and reduced (“I informed my mother of my decision to marry Albertine” [uttered speech]; “I decided to marry Albertine” [inner speech]).
     2) Transposed speech in indirect style (“I told my mother that I absolutely had to marry Albertine” [uttered speech]; “I thought that I absolutely had to marry Albertine” [inner speech]).  Free indirect style: where economizing on subordination allows a greater extension of the speech by the absence of a declarative verb: “I went to find my mother: it was absolutely necessary that I marry Albertine” (uncertain whether it’s uttered or inner speech). 
     3) The most mimetic form is where the narrator pretends to give the floor to his character: “I said to my mother (or: I thought): it is absolutely necessary that I marry Albertine.” This reported speech is a dialogue (monologue) in the “mixed” narrative first of the epic and then of the novel (mixing diegesis and mimesis).  [“She told me to bid you good day” is indirect discourse]. 

Interior monologue (or rather, immediate speech) takes the immediate form of the stage.  The relationship between “immediate speech” and “reported speech” depends on the absence or presence of a declarative introduction (example: Molly Brown’s monologue in James Joyce’s Ulysses).  Difference between an “immediate monologue” and “free indirect style”: In free indirect speech, the narrator takes on the speech of the character (that is, the character speaks through the voice of the narrator, and the two instances are then merged).  In immediate speech, the narrator is obliterated and the character substitutes for him.  [An interior monologue like the one by Molly Brown is a discourse without an auditor and unspoken, by which a character expresses his most intimate thoughts, those closest to the unconscious, prior to all logical organization, or thought in its dawning state, expressed by means of direct phrases reduced to their syntactical minimum, so as to give the impression of a hodgepodge].

PERSPECTIVE: Narrative perspective is the second mode of regulating information.  Point of view. 
 

Three types of novelistic situations:
1.  The auktoriale Erzählsituation: that of the omniscient author (Tom Jones).
2.  The Ich Erzählsituation: where the narrator is one of the characters (Moby Dick). 
3.  The personale Erzählsituation: where a narrative is conducted in the third person according to the point of view of a character (The Ambassadors).

Friedman (8 types):
Two types of omniscient narrating (with or without authorial intrusions).
Two types of first person narrating: I-witness or I-protagonist.
Two types of selective omniscient narrating: with restricted point of view, either multiple or single. 
Two types of purely objective narrating: the dramatic mode and the camera (a recording, without selection or organization).

Wayne Booth:
Voice: implied author and narrator (a narrator who is in turn dramatized or undramatized, reliable or unreliable).

Stanzel:
Narrative with omniscient author.
Narrative with point of view.
Objective narrative.
Narrative in the first person.

A three-term typology:
Narrative with omniscient narrator (“vision from behind”) or Narrator > Character (the narrator knows more than the character).
Narrator = Character (the narrator says only what a given character knows: narrative with a “restricted field” or “vision with”).
Narrator < Character: The narrator says less than the character knows.  This is objective or behaviorist narrative, or “vision from without.” 

Uspensky:
Constant point of view: fixed on a single character.
Variable.

FOCALIZATIONS:
1. Non-focalized narrative (narrative with zero focalization [without restrictions]).
2. Narrative with internal focalization, whether a) fixed, b) variable, or c) multiple [as in epistolary novels, or Rashomon] as in interior monologues.
3. Narrative with external focalization (adventure novels where the author does not tell us immediately all he knows).

ALTERATIONS:
Variable focalization of omniscience with partial restrictions of field.  Alterations are isolated infractions, when the coherence of the whole still remains strong enough for the notion of dominant mode/mood to continue relevant.  We are dealing with paralepses (taking up information [excess information] that should be left aside, as in “the young man did not understand his ruin” [the opposite of paralipsis, as in e.g., a detective story, where information cannot be divulged, or in Jules Verne’s Michel Strogoff]). 

POLYMODALITY:
The multiplicity of contradictory hypotheses in a narrative (the author’s, the narrator’s, or the character’s).  Double focalization: or double vision (concurrence between the “subjective” hero and the “objective” narrator).  A plural state of modality.

III. CHAPTER 5: VOICE:
     THE NARRATING INSTANCE:  Voice is the mode of action of the verb considered for its relations to the subject; the subject is the person who carries out or submits to the action as well as the person (the same or another one) who reports it.  Do not confuse [in fiction] the narrating instance with the instance of writing, the [fictional] narrator [sender] with the [real] author, or the [fictional] recipient [receiver, addressee of the [fictive] narrative with the [real] reader of the work. 

     TIME OF THE NARRATING: Time is more important than space in narrative.  At times the space is not even specified.  Also, the narrating can only be subsequent to what it tells (predictive narrative: prophetic, apocalyptic, oracular, astrological, chiromantic, cartomantic, oneiromantic).  In radio or TV reporting, the narrating follows the action closely, almost simultaneously, whence the use of the present tense.  From  the point of view of temporal position, there are four types of narrating: 
 

NARRATIVE LEVELS:
First level recounts in narration are extradiegetic (as when a character narrates at the first level about, e.g., fictive memoirs [an “author” addressing his public]).  Events inside this recounting [by a character who tells his story to another character] are diegetic or intradiegetic.  Events inside this second degree told by other characters would be metadiegetic. 

METADIEGETIC NARRATIVE: Second-degree narrative goes back to the epic, as when Ulysses narrates to the Phaeacians. The metadiegetic narrative is a variant of the explanatory analepsis.

METALEPSES (“taking hold of (telling) by changing level”): Any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator (author) into the diegetic universe that produces a sense of strangeness, humor, or the fantastic  (the author Delicado inside his own novel La loçana andaluza): a transgression.  Characters who escape from a painting, a photograph, etc., and defy verisimilitude.  If those characters are readers or spectators, we, the readers, might be fictitious.  Pseudo-diegetic (when someone else who has heard a story from another person tells the story himself).  The oracle of the Sphinx in Oedipus is a metadiegetic narrative.

PERSON: 
Heterodiegetic: The narrator is absent from the story he tells (Homer in Iliad).
Homodiegetic: The narrator is present as a character in the story he tells (Gil Blas).
Autodiegetic: The strong degree of the homodiegetic (Gil Blas), and not a secondary character, witness, or observer (Mr. Watson, I presume?). 

Narrative pathology: when a character switches from I to he, etc. 

The four basic types of narrator’s status are as follows:
 

THE NARRATEE: 
The extradiegetic narrator (author) can aim only at an extradiegetic narratee, who merges with the implied reader, in principle undefined (Sterne calls him Sir Critick).  A narrative is always addressed to someone.  Even a metadiegetic literary work like the Curious Impertinent (in Cervantes’s Don Quixote) aims at a reader who in principle is himself fictive.

COLOPHON: The real author of the narrative is not only he who tells it, but also, and at times even more, he who hears it.  And who is not necessarily the one it is addressed to: there are always people off to the side.

AFTERWORD: The goal of a literary work is to make the reader not a consumer but a producer of the text (Barthes, S/Z) [not readerly but writerly].