Narrative II

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Narrative II
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Narrative Situations

• Franz K. Stanzel (1923 in Graz, Austria)
• Typische Formen des Romans (Göttingen,1964)
• Theorie des Erzählens (Göttingen, 1984)

• Gérard Genette
• (1930 in Paris, France)
• Discours du récit (1972)
• Nouveau discours du récit (1983)
• dt. Die Erzählung (1994)

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Narrative Situations

• Stanzel
• First-Person narrative situation
• Authorial narrative situation
• Figural narrative situation
• Genette
• Covert vs. Overt narrator
• Homodiegetic vs. Heterodiegetic narrator
• Intradiegetic vs. Extradiegetic narrator

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Franz K. Stanzel

• Stanzel intended to show how narratives render
  their mediacy (Mittelbarkeit) and to systematize
  the various kinds of mediacy in a typological
  circle
• constitutive elements of mediacy
• Person (first person or third person)
• Perspective (internal or external)
• Mode (narrator or reflector)

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F. Stanzel Theorie des Erzählens

• First-person Narrator Authorial

external p.o.v. omniscience
homodiegetic/ Identität der Seinsbereiche
internal p.o.v/ limited p.o.v.
heterodiegetic/ Nichtidentität der Seinsbereiche
Reflector
Figural
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Narrative Situations (Stanzel)

• first-person narrative situation (Ich-Erzähler)
• authorial narrative situation (authorial
  narrator auktorialer Erzähler)
• figural narrative situation (personale
  Erzählsituation)

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First-Person Narrator

• narrator who is present as a character in
  his/her story
• events s/he has experienced himself
• narrator (narrating I) is also a character
  (experiencing I)
• I-as-protagonist / I-as-witness (Moll Flanders/
• Nick The Great Gatsby )

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First-Person Narrator

• If you really want to hear about it, the first
  thing you'll probably want to know is where I was
  born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and
  how my parents were occupied and all before they
  had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of
  crap, but I don't feel like going into it. In the
  first place, that stuff bores me, and in the
  second place, my parents would have about two
  haemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty
  personal about them. They are nice and allI'm
  not saying thatbut they are also touchy as hell.
  Besides, I'm not going to tell you my whole
  goddamn autobiography or anything. I'll just tell
  you about this madman stuff that happened to me
  around last Christmas before I got pretty
  run-down and had to come out here and take it
  easy.
• (Salinger, Catcher in the Rye, 1951, p. 5)

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First-Person Narrator

• My true name is so well known in the Records, or
  Registers at Newgate, and in the Old Baily, and
  there are some things of such Consequence still
  depending there, relating to my particular
  Conduct, that it is not to be expected I should
  set my Name, or the Account of my Family to this
  Work...
• Had this been the Custom in our Country, I had
  not been left a poor desolate Girl without
  Friends, without Cloaths, without Help or Helper
  in the World, as was my Fate
• (Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders)

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Authorial Narrator

• no character in the story itself (impersonal
  narration)
• status of an outsider gt godlike abilities such
  as omniscience and omnipresence
• may speak directly to their addressees, in order
  to comment on action and characters and to engage
  in philosophical reflection or socio-political
  criticism and the like

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Authorial Narrator

• It is nearly thirty years since the Wolfes lived
  here. Their lives were like those of their class
  incessant labor, sleeping in kennel-like rooms,
  eating rank pork and molasses, drinkingGod and
  the distillers only know what with an occasional
  night in jail, to atone for some drunken excess.
  Is that all of their lives?of the portion given
  to them and these their duplicates swarming the
  streets to-day?nothing beneath?all? So many a
  political reformer will tell you, and many a
  private reformer, too, who has gone among them
  with a heart tender with Christs charity, and
  come out outraged, hardened.
• (Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills)
• (embedded authorial narrator in I-narrator frame)

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Figural Narrative Situation

• through perspective of a character in story gt
  third-person (but this character is not
  narrating)
• subjective reflector internal focalizer
• effect attract attention to the mind of the
  reflector-character and away from the narrator
  and the processes of narratorial mediation

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Figural Narrative Situation

• He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of
  the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high
  overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine
  trees. The mountainside sloped gently where he
  lay but below it was steep and he could see the
  dark of the oiled road winding through the pass.
  There was a stream alongside the road and far
  down the pass he saw a mill beside the stream and
  the falling water of the dam, white in the summer
  sunlight.
•      Is that the mill? he asked.
•      Yes.
• (Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1)

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Gérard Genette

• voice (Who speaks?)
• focalisation (Who perceives? Who is focus?)

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Voice Who Speaks?

• A narrator is the speaker or 'voice' of the
  narrative discourse. He or she is the agent who
  establishes communicative contact with an
  addressee (the 'narratee'), who manages the
  exposition, who decides what is to be told, how
  it is to be told (especially, from what point of
  view, and in what sequence), and what is to be
  left out.
• (Genette 1980 1972 186).

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Who Speaks? (Genette)

• covert narrator (verborgener Erzähler)
• invisible
• voice that reports information
• overt narrator (expliziter Erzähler)
• seems to have a distinct personality
• makes his or her own opinions known
• makes explicit judgements or implicit evaluations

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Gérard Genette

• Relationship to the story
• The real question is whether or not the narrator
  can use the first person to designate one of his
  characters. We will therefore distinguish here
  two types of narrative one with the narrator
  absent from the story he tells (Homer in the
  Iliad, Flaubert in LEducation sentimentale), the
  other with the narrator present as a character in
  the story he tells (Wuthering Heights). I call
  the first type, for obvious reasons,
  heterodiegetic, and the second type
  homodiegetic.

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From which Position? (Genette)

• homodiegetic narrator narrator who is present as
  a character in the story
• autodiegetic narrator narrator tells the story
  of his or her own life
• heterodiegetic narrator narrator who is not
  present as a character in the story

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Gérard Genette cont.

• Level of the narrative
• We will define the difference in level by saying
  that any event a narrative recounts is at a
  diegetic level immediately higher than the level
  at which the narrating act producing this
  narrative is placed. A characters writing of
  his fictive memoirs is a literary act carried out
  at a first level, which we will call
  extradiegetic the events told in those memoirs
  are inside this first narrative, so we will
  describe them as diegetic, or intradiegetic.

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Example Intradiegetic/ Extradiegetic Level

• my Mother was convicted of Felony and
  being found quick with Child, she was respited
  for about seven Months, in which time having
  brought me into the World, she obtaind
  the Favour of being Transported to the
  Plantations, and left me about Half a Year old
  and in bad Hands you may be sure. This is too
  near the first Hours of my Life for me to relate
  any thing of myself, but by hear say tis enough
  to mention, that as I was born in such an unhappy
  Place Newgate prison, I had no Parish to have
  Recourse to for my Nourishment in my Infancy, nor
  can I give the least Account how I was kept
  alive, other, than that as I have been told, some
  Relation of my Mothers took me away for a while
  as a Nurse, but at whose Expence or by whose
  Direction I know nothing at all of it.
• (Defoe, Moll Flanders)

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On Which Level?

• intradiegetic narrator narrator of the story
  within the story (embedded narrative)
• extradiegetic narrator narrator of the frame
  narrative
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

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Example Voice

• my Mother was convicted of Felony and
  being found quick with Child, she was respited
  for about seven Months, in which time having
  brought me into the World, she obtaind
  the Favour of being Transported to the
  Plantations, and left me about Half a Year old
  and in bad Hands you may be sure. This is too
  near the first Hours of my Life for me to relate
  any thing of myself, but by hear say tis enough
  to mention, that as I was born in such an unhappy
  Place Newgate prison, I had no Parish to have
  Recourse to for my Nourishment in my Infancy, nor
  can I give the least Account how I was kept
  alive, other, than that as I have been told, some
  Relation of my Mothers took me away for a while
  as a Nurse, but at whose Expence or by whose
  Direction I know nothing at all of it.
• (Defoe, Moll Flanders)

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Example Voice

• A hundred times Edna had pictured Roberts
  return, and imagined their first meeting. It was
  usually at her home, wither he had sought her out
  at once. She always fancied him expressing or
  betraying in some way his love for her. And
  there, the reality was that they sat ten feet
  apart, she at the window, crushing geranium
  leaves in her hand and smelling them, he twirling
  around on the piano stool, saying
• I was very much surprised to hear of Mr.
  Pontelliers absence its a wonder Madamoiselle
  Reisz did not tell me and your moving
• (Kate Chopin, The Awakening)

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Example Voice

• It is nearly thirty years since the Wolfes lived
  here. Their lives were like those of their class
  incessant labor, sleeping in kennel-like rooms,
  eating rank pork and molasses, drinkingGod and
  the distillers only know what with an occasional
  night in jail, to atone for some drunken excess.
  Is that all of their lives?of the portion given
  to them and these their duplicates swarming the
  streets to-day?nothing beneath?all? So many a
  political reformer will tell you, and many a
  private reformer, too, who has gone among them
  with a heart tender with Christs charity, and
  come out outraged, hardened.
• (Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills)

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Example Voice

• my Mother was convicted of Felony and
  being found quick with Child, she was respited
  for about seven Months, in which time having
  brought me into the World, she obtaind
  the Favour of being Transported to the
  Plantations, and left me about Half a Year old
  and in bad Hands you may be sure. This is too
  near the first Hours of my Life for me to relate
  any thing of myself, but by hear say tis enough
  to mention, that as I was born in such an unhappy
  Place Newgate prison, I had no Parish to have
  Recourse to for my Nourishment in my Infancy, nor
  can I give the least Account how I was kept
  alive, other, than that as I have been told, some
  Relation of my Mothers took me away for a while
  as a Nurse, but at whose Expence or by whose
  Direction I know nothing at all of it.
• (Defoe, Moll Flanders)

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Reliability of Narrator

• Reliable Narrator
• A narrator "whose rendering of the story and
  commentary on it the reader is supposed to take
  as an authoritative account of the fictional
  truth."
• Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction
  Contemporary Poetics,1983. p. 100.

• Unreliable Narrator
• A narrator "whose rendering of the story and/or
  commentary on it the reader has reasons to
  suspect. ... The main sources of unreliability
  are the narrator's limited knowledge, his
  personal involvement, and his problematic
  value-scheme."

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Reliable Narrator

• Her marriage to Léonce Pontellier was purely an
  accident, in this respect resembling many other
  marriages with masquerade as the decrees of Fate.
  It was in the midst of secret great passion that
  she met him. He fell in love, as men are in the
  habit of doing, and pressed his suit with an
  earnestness and an ardor, which left nothing to
  be desired. He pleased her his absolute devotion
  flattered her. She fancied there was sympathy of
  thought and taste between them, in which fancy
  she was mistaken.
• (Kate Chopin, The Awakening)

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Unreliable Narrator

• True!nervousvery, very dreadfully nervous I
  had been and am but why will you say that I am
  mad? The disease had sharpened my sensesnot
  destroyednot dulled them. Above all was the
  sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the
  heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in
  hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe
  how healthilyhow calmly I can tell you the whole
  story.
• (Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart)

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Focalisation

• A focaliser is the agent whose point of view
  orients the narrative text. A text is anchored on
  a focaliser's point of view when it presents (and
  does not transcend) the focaliser's thoughts,
  reflections and knowledge, his/her actual and
  imaginary perceptions, as well as his/her
  cultural and ideological orientation.
• External focaliser a narrator
• Internal focaliser a character
• fixed focalisation
• variable focalisation
• multiple focalisation
• collective focalisation
• Zero focaliser perspective not restricted,
  cannot be attributed

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Focalisation

• internal focalisation
• fixed
• variable
• multiple
• collective

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Focalisation

• Zero focalisation

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Example Focalisation
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Example Focalisation

• what a variety of smells interwoven in
  subtlest combination thrilled his nostrils
  strong smells of earth, sweet smells of flowers
  nameless smells of leaf and bramble sour smells
  as they crossed the road pungent smells as they
  entered bean-fields. But suddenly down the wind
  came tearing a smell sharper, stronger, more
  lacerating than any a smell that ripped across
  his brain stirring a thousand instincts,
  releasing a million memories the smell of hare,
  the smell of fox. Off he flashed like a fish
  drawn in a rush through water further and
  further. And once at least the call was even
  more imperious the hunting horn roused deeper
  instincts, summoned wilder and stronger emotions
  that transcended memory and obliterated grass,
  trees, hare, rabbit, fox in one wild shout of
  ecstasy. Love blazed her torch in his eyes he
  heard the hunting horn of Venus. Before he was
  well out of his puppyhood, Flush was a father.
• (Virginia Woolf, Flush, ch. 1)