T h e o r y a n d I n t e r p r e tati o n o f N a r r ati v e

James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, Series Editors

Postclassical Narratology
Approaches and Analyses

Edited by
Jan Alb er a n d Mon i k a Flud e rni k

T h e O h i o S t a t e U n i v e r s i t y P r e ss / C o l u m b us
Copyright © 2010 by The Ohio State University.
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Postclassical narratology : approaches and analyses / edited by Jan Alber and Monika
Fludernik.
p. cm. — (Theory and interpretation of narrative)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-5175-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8142-5175-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-1142-7 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8142-1142-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
[etc.]
1. Narration (Rhetoric) I. Alber, Jan, 1973– II. Fludernik, Monika. III. Series: Theory and
interpretation of narrative series.
PN212.P67 2010
808—dc22
2010009305
This book is available in the following editions:

Cloth (ISBN 978-0-8142-1142-7)

Paper (ISBN 978-0-8142-5175-1)
CD-ROM (ISBN 978-0-8142-9241-9)

Cover design by Laurence J. Nozik

Type set in Adobe Sabon
Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American
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Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992.

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction
Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik 1

Part I.
Extensions and Reconfigurations of Classical Narratology

1 Person, Level, Voice: A Rhetorical Reconsideration

Richard Walsh 35

2 Mise en Cadre—A Neglected Counterpart to Mise en Abyme:

A Frame-Theoretical and Intermedial Complement to
Classical Narratology
Werner Wolf 58

3 Large Intermental Units in Middlemarch

Alan Palmer 83

4 Mediacy, Mediation, and Focalization: The Squaring of

Terminological Circles
Monika Fludernik 105

Part II.
Transdisciplinarities

5 Directions in Cognitive Narratology: Triangulating Stories,

Media, and the Mind
David Herman 137
vi   Contents

6 Hypothetical Intentionalism: Cinematic Narration Reconsidered

Jan Alber 163

7 Sapphic Dialogics: Historical Narratology and the Sexuality of Form

Susan S. Lanser 186

8 Narrators, Narratees, and Mimetic Desire

Amit Marcus 206

9 Narratology and the Social Sciences

Jarmila Mildorf 234

10 Postclassical Narratology and the Theory of Autobiography

Martin Löschnigg 255

11 Natural Authors, Unnatural Narration

Henrik Skov Nielsen 275

Contributors 303

Author Index 307

Subject Index 315

Acknowledgments

This book has benefited greatly from the advice and support by a number of
people. First of all, we would like to thank Sandy Crooms from The Ohio
State University Press for guiding this volume so expertly to its finishing line.
Our gratitude extends also to Jim Phelan, Peter Rabinowitz, and the anony-
mous external reader for their hard work on the manuscript as well as their
extensive and perceptive comments on it. We have tried to incorporate their
insights into the final version of the volume, but any remaining infelicities
are of course our own responsibility. Finally, for editorial assistance and help
with the proofreading, we would like to thank Ramona Früh, Moritz Gansen,
Theresa Hamilton, Carolin Krauße, Luise Lohmann, and Rebecca Reichl.
An earlier version of Susan S. Lanser’s contribution appeared as “Novel
(Lesbian) Subjects: The Sexual History of Form,” in Novel: A Forum on Fic-
tion 42.3 (2009): 497–503.

vii
 Jan Alber and
Monika Fludern ik

Introduction

The title of this collection of recent narratological work, Postclassical Narra-

tology: Approaches and Analyses, openly alludes to David Herman’s seminal
bimillennial volume Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analy-
sis (1999b), in which he introduced the term postclassical narratology1 and
defined it as follows:

Postclassical narratology (which should not be conflated with poststruc-

turalist theories of narrative) contains classical narratology as one of
its “moments” but is marked by a profusion of new methodologies and
research hypotheses: the result is a host of new perspectives on the forms
and functions of narrative itself. Further, in its postclassical phase, research
on narrative does not just expose the limits but also exploits the possibilities
of the older, structuralist models. In much the same way, postclassical phys-
ics does not simply discard classical Newtonian models, but rather rethinks
their conceptual underpinnings and reassesses their scope of applicability.
(1999a: 2–3)

As Herman here indicates, recent postclassical narratology has to be con-

trasted with what he calls classical narratology. What is subsumed under
classical narratology primarily embraces the work of the French structural-

1. David Herman originally coined the term “postclassical narratology” in an essay

called “Scripts, Sequences, and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical Narratology” (1997).

1
2   Introduction

ists (Roland Barthes, Claude Bremond, Tzvetan Todorov, A. J. Greimas, and

Gérard Genette), but also the German tradition in narrative theory (Eberhard
Lämmert and Franz Karl Stanzel). Herman, in turn, refers back to Shlomith
Rimmon-Kenan’s classic study Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics
(1983) (Herman 1999a: 1), which—together with Seymour Chatman’s Story
and Discourse (1978) and Gerald Prince’s work (e.g., 1982, 1987)—most
clearly shaped the image of what narratology is for a wide readership of stu-
dents and academics. Other influential spokespersons at first seen to fit the
same groove were Meir Sternberg (1978), Thomas Pavel (1986), and Susan
Lanser (1981).2 Yet, one could argue that these representatives of classical
narratology already started to drift away from the structuralist model, if ever
so slightly and imperceptibly. Where Rimmon-Kenan felt she had to cling to
the “geometric imaginary” of narratology (Gibson 1996) in order to ward off
deconstruction (Herman 1999a: 1), Lanser began to incorporate questions
of gender and ideology (see her debate with Diengott—Lanser 1986, 1988;
Diengott 1988), Sternberg went beyond mere chronology to focus on the
dynamics of narrative design, Thomas Pavel founded possible-worlds theory,
and Seymour Chatman started to analyze film narrative.
Herman uses the term narratology “quite broadly, in a way that makes it
more or less interchangeable with narrative studies” (1999a: 27, n1; original
emphasis). In fact, it is more or less synonymous with the phrase “narra-
tive analysis” in his subtitle and in the final sentence of the “Introduction,”
which provides an outlook for “narrative analysis at the threshold of the
millennium” (27).3 In order to understand how Herman conceives of the
originary quality of classical narratology, it is therefore useful to contrast it
with its postclassical progeny. As Herman sketches the distinction in the pas-
sage cited above, postclassical narratology introduces elaborations of classi-
cal narratology that both consolidate and diversify the basic theoretical core
of narratology. Such work is exemplified by the essays in the first section
of the volume. Moreover, postclassical narratology proposes extensions of
the classical model that open the fairly focused and restricted realm of nar-
ratology to methodological, thematic, and contextual influences from out-
side. These reorientations reflect the impact of literary theory on academia in
the 1980s and 1990s. Herman in this second area notes three major lines of

2. All of these scholars have groundings in Russian Formalism and linguistics-based nar-
rative semiotics. The term narratology was coined by Todorov in Grammaire du Décameron
(1969), where he writes: “Cet ouvrage relève d’une science qui n’existe pas encore, disons la
NARRATOLOGIE, la science du récit” (1969: 10).
3. For a critique of this broad usage see Nünning (2003: 257–62) and Meister’s more
radical suggestions concerning a narratological fundamentalism (2003).
 Introduction   3

development which reflect sections two to four of the collection: the rise of
“new technologies and emergent methodologies”; the move “beyond literary
narrative”; and the extension of narratology into new media and “narrative
logics.” (Compare the table of contents and 1999a: 14–26 in the “Introduc-
tion.”)
With some historical hindsight one could now perhaps regroup these
developments slightly differently and focus on four types of interactions. The
first category is roughly equivalent to Herman’s revisions of classical prob-
lems. It includes work that extends the classical paradigm intradisciplinarily
by focusing on theoretical blind spots, gaps, or indeterminacies within the
standard paradigm. Methodological extensions of the classical model, sec-
ondly, absorb theoretical and/or methodological insights and import them,
producing, for instance, narratological speech act theory (Pratt 1977), psy-
choanalytic approaches to narrative (Brooks 1984, Chambers 1984, 1991),
or deconstructive narratology (O’Neill 1994, Gibson 1996, Currie 1998).
The third orientation integrates thematic and therefore variable emphases
into the classical model, whose core had consisted of invariable, i.e., uni-
versal, categories. Examples are feminist, queer, ethnic or minority-related,
and postcolonial approaches to narrative (see Nünning’s diagram listing the
many new versions of narratology [2003: 249–51]). Contextual versions of
postclassical narratology, constituting the fourth trend, extend narratological
analysis to literature outside the novel. Narratology now includes a consid-
eration of various media (films, cartoons, etc.), the performative arts as well
as non-literary narratives. Conversely, the narrative turn (Kreiswirth 2005,
Phelan 2008b)4 in the (social) sciences and humanities has resulted in an
awareness of the centrality of narrative in many areas of culture, from auto-
biography and history to psychology, the natural sciences, banking or even
sports (Nash 1990).5
Thus, while some scholars continue to work within the classical paradigm
by adding analytical categories to the original base of structuralist concepts,
others attempt to instantiate a more or less radical break with the tradition
by transcending the assumptions and categorical axioms of the classical para-
digm. The motives for such a reconceptualization of the theoretical models
and even the discipline of narratology often relate to the consequences of the
narrative turn. Put differently, it is because narrative theory can now service

4. See also, for current relevance, the ESRC seminar “The Narrative Turn: Revisioning
Theory” at the Centre for Narrative and Auto/Biographical Studies at the University of Edin-
burgh (2007–2008). www. sps.ed.uk/NABS/AbstractsSem1.htm.
5. For extensive surveys see Fludernik (2000), Nünning (2000), Nünning/Nünning
(2002), Ryan (2004), and Phelan/Rabinowitz (2005).
4   Introduction

many different sciences (or serve quite diverse masters) that an adaptation
of its theoretical bases becomes necessary. In this way new light tends to be
shed on hitherto unquestioned axioms which had been developed in relation
to literary narrative, most often the novel, and which are therefore not ideally
suited to their new contexts of application.
The present volume abides by Herman’s dual focus on what one could call
a critical but frame-abiding and a more radical frame-transcending or frame-
shattering handling of the classical paradigm. The first part of this book deals
with extensions of classical narratology that take the achievements of struc-
turalism as a starting point for close scrutiny and then suggest revisions of
the traditional paradigm. Here the emphasis is on adding new distinctions,
questioning unacknowledged presuppositions, and on radically revising the
standard concepts and typologies, redesigning the conceptual underpinnings
of structuralist approaches. The second part, on the other hand, focuses on
narrative analyses that move beyond the classical framework by extending
their focus to a variety of medial and thematic contexts, from the visual realm
to the generic (e.g., autobiography), the queer, and the non-literary (e.g.,
medical interviews). Some contributions also arrive at radical revisions of the
classical model because the intermedial or thematic applications they have in
hand require such trimming or redesigning.
The essays in this volume moreover address potential overlaps between
the various postclassical approaches. For instance, they link ethnic concerns
with those of gender, visual narration with reader response, the autobio-
graphical mode and psychoanalysis with issues of gender and sexual orienta-
tion, formal concerns with sociological analysis, or the rhetorical approach
with the unnatural. More generally, this collection presents new perspectives
on the question of what narratives are and of how they function in their dif-
ferent media. We also wish to suggest that, as the first decade of the third
millennium draws to a close, we are now perhaps beginning to see a second
phase of postclassical narratology. David Herman’s volume Narratologies
could be argued to represent the first adult phase in a Bildungsroman-like
story of narratology. In this reading, Shklovsky and the Russian Formalists
figure as narratology’s infancy and the structuralist models of the 1960s and
1970s as its adolescence. This

[ . . . ] adolescence of narratology was followed by a reorientation and diver-

sification of narrative theories, producing a series of subdisciplines that arose
in reaction to post-structuralism and the paradigm shift to cultural studies.
[ . . . ] Out of the diversity of approaches and their exogamous unions with
critical theory have now emerged several budding narratologies which beto-
 Introduction   5

ken that the discipline is in the process of a major revival. (Fludernik 2005:
37)

Herman’s narratologies would therefore correspond to a phase of diversi-

fication. In postclassical narratology’s second phase, which is one of both
consolidation and continued diversification, one now has to address the ques-
tion of how these various narratologies overlap and interrelate (see also Her-
man/Biwu, 2009). Narratology, to continue our metaphor, in settling down,
will now have to align with one another the numerous centrifugal models
that arose in the first phase of postclassicism; it will now have to determine
how these thematic and contextual inflections of narratology can be linked
to the structuralist core in methodologically sound ways. This is not a call
for a prescriptive unity of methods and models but an attempt to align the
many disparate ways of doing postclassical narratology (phase one) and to
check out their moments of overlap as well as the extent of their incompat-
ibilities. Newer developments also focus on the no doubt fuzzy boundary
line between a general literary study of narratives and more specifically nar-
ratological analysis of the same texts. No one overarching model is envisaged
here, but in our opinion considerable consolidation despite continuing diver-
sity is called for at this moment. By taking phase-one developments seriously,
postclassical narratology will moreover subject its structuralist core to severe
critical scrutiny, lopping, modifying, revising, or redesigning the foundations
of the discipline. In what follows, we will first discuss the diversity of current
narratological research and then turn to developments that suggest a more
centripetal tendency in the process of establishment.

Postclassical NarratologY: PHase One

Multiplicities, Interdisciplinarities, Transmedialities

As Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck put it, the differences between the classi-
cal structuralist paradigm and the new postclassical research program can be
characterized as follows: “Whereas structuralism was intent on coming up
with a general theory of narrative, postclassical narratology prefers to con-
sider the circumstances that make every act of reading different. [ . . . ] From
cognition to ethics to ideology: all aspects related to reading assume pride of
place in the research on narrative” (2005: 450).
Ansgar Nünning has captured the extent and variety of new approaches
in a useful diagram (2003: 243–44) that provides a visual map for what he
considers to be the most important distinctions between classical and post-
6   Introduction

classical narratologies.6 He contrasts (1) classical text-centeredness with post-

classical context orientation and (2) the treatment of narrative as a langue
with the pragmatic focus on the parole of individual (use of) narratives in
postclassical approaches.7 As in the syntax vs. pragmatics dichotomy, Nün-
ning also (3) sees classical narratology as a closed system and postclassi-
cal narratologies as emphasizing the dynamics of narration. He moreover
(4) subsumes the shift from the functional analysis of features to a reader-
oriented focus on strategies and applications in the dichotomy and (5) con-
trasts classical bottom-up analysis with postclassical top-down inferencing.
Nünning’s table next opposes (6) “(reductive) binarism” with a “preference
for holistic cultural interpretation” and (7) structuralist taxonomy with the-
matically and ideologically directed analysis. As a consequence, (8) where
classical narratology remained shy of moral grounding, postclassical nar-
ratologies open themselves to moral issues, analogously causing (10) a shift
from descriptive to interpretative and evaluative paradigms. Thus, (9) classi-
cal narratology’s aim to provide a “poetics of fiction” (in alignment with the
semiological thrust of narratology) is superseded by “putting the analytical
toolbox to interpretative use.” Nünning also sees the rise of diachronic or
historical narratology as a postclassical phenomenon (11). His summary in
the diagram of the dichotomy classical vs. postclassical consists in the con-
trasts of (12) universalism vs. particularism (which is equivalent to contex-
tualism), and (13) the opposition between a relatively unified discipline vs.
“an interdisciplinary project consisting of heterogeneous approaches” (all
243–4). Paradoxically, Nünning’s rhetorical strategy of establishing open,
non-taxonomic postclassical narratologies actually involves the dualism of a
before and after and therefore relies on a structural binarism of the very kind
that it is trying to transcend.
Generally speaking, then, postclassical narratologies along the lines
sketched by Nünning seem to move toward a grand contextual, historical,
pragmatic and reader-oriented effort. Such integration and synthesis allows
researchers to recontextualize the classical paradigm and to enrich narrative
theory with ideas developed after its structuralist phase. While classical nar-
ratology was a relatively unified discipline or field, postclassical narratologies
are part of a large transdisciplinary project that consists of various heteroge-
neous approaches (see also Herman 2007).

6. The numbering in what follows corresponds to Nünning’s order in the diagram.

7. To put this slightly differently, the chief concern of structuralist narratologists was
“with transtextual semiotic principles according to which basic structural units (characters,
states, events, etc.) are combined, permuted, and transformed to yield specific narrative texts”
(D. Herman 2005: 19–20).
 Introduction   7

Feminist narratology can serve as a good example of the types of strate-

gies and extensions of the classical model that are being practiced in postclas-
sical narratologies. Feminst narratologists such as Robyn Warhol or Susan
Lanser have highlighted the fact that narratives are always determined “by
complex and changing conventions that are themselves produced in and by
the relations of power that implicate writer, reader, and text” (Lanser 1992:
5). Much feminist narratology studies elements of story and/or discourse
against the foil of gender differences. Such a deployment of narratological
models places narratives in their historical and cultural contexts, highlighting
the central significance of gender stereotypes. As a consequence, some femi-
nist narratologists like Susan Lanser (1986, 1988) and Ruth Page (2006) have
proposed that one take the gender of authors, authorial audiences, actual
readers, narrators, narratees, and characters into consideration, thus initiat-
ing a rewriting of classical models. The question of a narrator’s properties
needs to incorporate their sex and gender; the explicit naming of narrator
figures, their external appearances, and actions often yield information on the
basis of implied genderization by means of dress codes, behavioral patterns,
and cultural presuppositions. Feminist narratologists moreover supplement
classical theories about actants by sociocultural roles. Under the heading of
“the engaging narrator,” Robyn Warhol has postulated the existence of dif-
ferent types of narratorial discourse in texts by nineteenth-century male and
female authors (1989), adding a consideration of popular literature to this
field of inquiry (2003). Kathy Mezei (1996) and Ruth Page (2003), on the
other hand, look at “male” and “female” plot structures (e.g., one climax vs.
several climaxes or no climax at all).
It is also worth noting that Judith Roof (1996) and Lanser (1995, 1999,
this volume) have extended feminist narratology into queer studies. For
example, in Come As You Are, Judith Roof looks at the reciprocal relation
between narrative and sexuality. Queer narratology should disclose the traces
of heterosexuality in narratives, pointing out “the production of sexual cat-
egories whose existence and constitution depend upon a specific reproduc-
tive narrative heteroideology” (1996: xxvii). Thus, narrative analysis should
uncover “the preservation of literal and metaphorical heterosexuality as (re)
productive (and hence valuable).” At the same time, Roof pleads for a “con-
stitution of narrative that includes both heterosexuality and homosexual-
ity as categories necessary to its dynamic” (xxvii). This raises the following
narratological problem: In what way do feminist and queer approaches go
beyond the thematic highlighting of male (patriarchal and heteronormative)
dominance in literature and beyond an analysis of counterhegemonic and
subversive discourse in general? One way of answering this question is to
8   Introduction

describe feminist/queer (or postcolonial) strategies by resorting to narrato-

logical categories. Thus, the use of second-person fiction in Edmund White’s
Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978) allows the author to inveigle the
heteronormative reader into sympathizing with a love relationship, which
only later emerges as homosexual (cp. Fludernik 1994b: 471).
Analogously, postcolonial narratologists centrally address the question
of how the narrative text is imbued with colonial or neocolonial discourse
that correlates with the oppression of native populations and how the dis-
course simultaneously manages to undermine this very ideology (Pratt 1992,
Spurr 1993, Doyle 1994, Aldama 2003). Brian Richardson (2001a, 2006,
2007b), for instance, has suggested that we-narration occurs strategically in
postcolonial fiction, reflecting the anti-individual conception of traditional
cultures.8 While these two examples focused on the use of a prominent exper-
imental form of narrative for the purposes of conveying non-normative or
counterhegemonic messages, other narratologists have tried to argue that the
categories of narratology need to be modified or extended in order to accom-
modate the concerns of race, power, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.
In a recent MLA panel on “Race and Narrative Theory,” Dorothy M. Hale
proposed that narratology could not adequately deal with postcolonial writ-
ing since its categories were imbued with colonial logocentrism (Hale 2008).
Though we do not share this viewpoint, we do agree that colonial, sexist, or
racist literature often uses narrative devices and strategies that through their
use in these ideologically loaded texts may seem to acquire phallogocentric
and discriminatory overtones. Yet postcolonial, queer or antihegemonic nar-
ratives may be using the same writing strategies for quite subversive ends.
Such a technique of “double-voicing” can be fruitfully compared with Henry
Louis Gates’s category of “signifying” (Gates 1988) and of course with
Mikhail Bakhtin’s characterizations of heteroglossia (Bakhtin 1981). Narra-
tive devices by themselves do not carry any ideological freight; often they are
neutral modes of focusing attention that only acquire normative or critical
meanings in their various contexts of use.
Another important feature of postclassical narratologies already noted in
Herman (1999a) is their emphasis on new media. While traditional narra-
tologists such as Stanzel and Genette primarily focused on the eighteenth-cen-
tury to early twentieth-century novel, transmedial approaches seek to rebuild
narratology so that it can handle new genres and storytelling practices across
a wide spectrum of media. An interesting issue in this context is the question
of how narrative practices are shaped by the capacities of the medium in
which the story is presented. In their attempts to determine the different lan-
8. For work in the area of cultural narratology see also Nünning (1997 and 2000).
 Introduction   9

guages of storytelling, proponents of transmedial narratology look at plays,

films, narrative poems, conversational storytelling, hyperfictions, cartoons,
ballets, video clips, paintings, statues, advertisements, historiography, news
stories, narrative representations in medical or legal contexts, and so forth.9
For instance, much attention has recently been paid to the analysis of drama
(Richardson 1987, 1988, 2001b, 2007a, Fludernik 2008, Nünning/Sommer
2008) as a narrative genre. Thus, the question of whether it makes sense to
posit a dramatic narrator (Jahn 2001)10 or whether one will need to introduce
a level of performance into narratology (Fludernik 2008) has been raised.
Work on drama as narrative has highlighted the numerous narrator figures in
plays (Richardson 1988, 2001b; Nünning/Sommer 2008). Analogously, film
studies have underlined narrator-like elements in film such as voice-over nar-
ration (Bordwell 1985, Kozloff 1988, Branigan 1992). The concept of a dra-
matic narrator as the instance that tells the story of the play similarly echoes
discussions about the existence of a “cinematic narrator” in film; both resort
to the narrator category from novels or short stories (Chatman 1990: 127).11
Other transmediality narratologists such as Marie-Laure Ryan, Jörg
Helbig, and Werner Wolf have studied the potential narrativity of hyperfic-
tions (Ryan 1999, 2001; Helbig 2001, 2003). They also focus on possible
narratives in paintings, poetry, and even musical pieces (Wolf 1999, 2002,
2003; Ryan 2004). Transgeneric extensions of narratology (see especially
Ryan 2008), in addition to the analysis of drama and poetry (Müller-Zettel-
mann 2002, in progress), target autobiography, historiography, legal narra-
tive, documentaries, and conversational storytelling (see also Nünning and
Nünning 2002).
Besides the theoretical and medial extensions just outlined, some forms of
postclassical narratology ground themselves in a rhetorical framework. For
both Genette and Booth, rhetoric served as a mastertrope for their textual
analyses. Rhetorical narratology moreover integrates findings from reader-
response theory. Rhetorical theorists such as Wayne C. Booth, James Phelan,
and Peter Rabinowitz are particularly interested in the contexts of narra-

9. For instance, Jarmila Mildorf’s essay in this collection addresses the potential useful-
ness of narratology in the social sciences, while Martin Löschnigg looks at autobiographies
from the perspective of cognitive narratology.
10. Manfred Jahn argues that “all narrative genres are structurally mediated by a first-
degree narrative agency which, in a performance, may either take the totally unmetaphorical
shape of a vocally and bodily present narrator figure (a scenario that is unavailable in written
epic narrative), or be a disembodied ‘voice’ in a printed text, or remain an anonymous and
impersonal narrative function in charge of selection, arrangement, and focalization” (2001:
674).
11. For a detailed discussion of the concept of the cinematic narrator see Jan Alber’s essay
in this volume.
10   Introduction

tive production and reception. More specifically, they see narrative as an act
of communication between the real author and the flesh-and-blood reader,
but also between the implied author and the authorial audience (or implied
reader), and, finally, between the narrator and the narrative audience (or nar-
ratee). In short, the rhetorical approach attempts to ascertain the purpose of
stories and storytelling.
Thus, Wayne C. Booth, in the context of the neo-Aristotelianism of the
Chicago School, introduced the term implied author as a heuristic tool. The
“implied author” denotes the real author’s “second self,” and as such satis-
fies “the reader’s need to know where, in the world of values, he stands, that
is, to know where the author wants him to stand” (1983: 73). Booth argues
that analyses along the lines of the implied author enable us “to come as
close as possible to sitting in the author’s chair and making this text, becom-
ing able to remake it, employing the author’s ‘reason-of-art’” (1982: 21).
Similarly, James Phelan defines the implied author as “a streamlined version
of the real author,” and this version is “responsible for the choices that cre-
ate the narrative text as ‘these words in this order’ and that imbue the text
with his or her values” (2005: 45; 216).12 The ultimate goal of narrative criti-
cism is to asymptotically approximate the condition of “the authorial audi-
ence,” i.e., the ideal audience for whom the author constructs the text and
who understands it perfectly (Rabinowitz 1977: 121–41; see also Rabinowitz
1998; Phelan 1996: 135–53). According to Phelan, “the rhetorical model
assumes that the flesh and blood reader seeks to enter the authorial audi-
ence in order to understand the invitations for engagement that the narrative
offers” (Phelan 2007b: 210).
Furthermore, rhetorical theorists argue that narrative texts permanently
invite us to make ethical judgments—about characters, narrators, and implied
authors (Phelan 2007a: 6). Phelan thus discriminates between four ethical
positions. The first involves (1) the ethics of the told (character-character rela-
tions); the second and third concern the ethics of the telling, namely (2) the
narrator’s relation to the characters, the task of narrating, and the audience,
and (3) the implied author’s relation to these things. The fourth ethical posi-
tion relates to (4) the flesh-and-blood audience’s responses to the first three
positions (Phelan 2005; 2007a: 11).
12. For discussions of the implied author see Kindt and Müller (2006) and the contribu-
tions by Jan Alber and Henrik Skov Nielsen in this collection. In The Rhetoric of Fictional-
ity, Richard Walsh reintroduces the actual author. More specifically, he suggests eradicating
extra- and heterodiegetic narrators in narrative fiction: “Extradiegetic heterodiegetic narrators
(that is, ‘impersonal’ and ‘authorial’ narrators), who cannot be represented without thereby
being rendered homodiegetic or intradiegetic, are in no way distinguishable from authors.”
He therefore concludes that “the narrator is always either a character who narrates, or the
author” (2007: 84; 78).
 Introduction   11

Finally, it is worth noting that a narrative’s development from beginning

to end is governed by a textual and a readerly dynamics (along the pattern
of instability—complication—resolution) (Phelan 2007a: 15–22), and under-
standing their interaction provides a good means for recognizing the purpose
of the narrative. Recent rhetorical narratology can therefore be seen as a con-
tinuation and deepening of the rhetorical framework of Boothian theory and
as an underlining of discourse narratology’s rhetorical foundations. At the
same time, it can be regarded as an important contextualizing venture that
opens the text to the real-world interaction of author and reader, and hence
provides a perfect model for discussing the ethics of reading and the treat-
ment of ethical problems in narrative fiction.
So far, we have listed several extensions of narratology that tried to take
into account theoretical developments in academia since the 1970s—reader
response theory, feminism, gender and queer studies, postcolonialism, the
ethical turn. We would now like to turn to developments in narratology that
are not linked to external stimuli but have arisen from inside the discipline
and in reaction to extensive analysis of the theoretical models, their gaps,
inconsistencies, even contradictions. However, it should be noted that this
distinction is not a watertight binary opposition but rather a convenient way
of highlighting intrinsic and extrinsic developments that are both affecting
postclassical narratologies, sometimes in combination with each other. Gen-
erally speaking, we feel that this contest between different positions is healthy
for narratology because it generates different kinds of valuable knowledge
about narratives.
Besides accommodating many diverse intellectual currents, postclassical
narratology also seeks to address and potentially remedy some of the short-
comings of traditional narratology. For example, structuralist narratology
did not pay much attention to the referential or world-creating dimension
of narratives (perhaps because structuralism’s precursor, the Swiss linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure, excluded the referent from his theory of the sign
and instead favored the dichotomy signifier vs. signified) (see also Herman/
Biwu, forthcoming). Cognitive narratologists, like Monika Fludernik (1996,
2003b), David Herman (2002, 2003), Manfred Jahn (1997, 1999b, 2003),
and Ralf Schneider (2000), on the other hand, show that the recipient uses
his or her world knowledge to project fictional worlds, and this knowledge
is stored in cognitive schemata called frames and scripts.13 The basic assump-
tion of cognitive narratology is that readers evoke fictional worlds (or story-

13. “Frames basically deal with situations such as seeing a room or making a promise
while scripts cover standard action sequences such as playing a game of football, going to a
birthday party, or eating in a restaurant” (Jahn 2005: 69).
12   Introduction

worlds) on the basis of their real-world knowledge; cognitive narratology

seeks to describe the range of cognitive processes that are involved. Alan
Palmer (2004) and Lisa Zunshine (2006), for instance, argue that the way in
which we attempt to make sense of fictional narratives is similar to the way in
which we try to make sense of other people. They argue that we understand
narratives by understanding the minds of the characters and narrators, that
is, their intentions and motivations. Most importantly, cognitive approaches
are based on a constructivist theory of reading, arguing that what we read
into texts is not necessarily “there” as a pre-given fact. This emphasis ties in
with non-essentialist, pluralist, and generally pragmatic concerns and pre-
occupations, thereby establishing connections with recent developments in
linguistics, where the direction of research has also moved from syntax to
pragmatics and on to cognitive approaches. Cognitive narratology can thus
be argued to affect the status of categories of narratological analysis; it shifts
the emphasis from an essentialist, universal, and static understanding of nar-
ratological concepts to seeing them as fluid, context-determined, prototypi-
cal, and recipient-constituted.
Possible-worlds theory is an area of narratological study which links
with postclassical narratology in interesting ways. The basic assumption of
possible-worlds theory is that reality is a universe composed of a plurality
of distinct elements. The actual world (AW) is the central element, and it is
surrounded by various alternative possible worlds (APWs), such as dreams,
fantasies, hallucinations, and the worlds of literary fiction. For a world to be
possible it must be linked to the center by “accessibility relations.” Important
possible-worlds theorists are Lubomír Doležel (1998), Marie-Laure Ryan
(1991, 1999, 2001, 2005, and 2006), and Ruth Ronen (1994). It could be
argued that Marie-Laure Ryan’s more recent research (1999, 2001, and 2004)
constitutes an interesting postclassical development over Doležel’s and her
own earlier work (Ryan 1991). Her forays into media studies highlight the
way in which the underlying cognitivist and transmedial aspects of her 1991
model have been extended and explicated in the last fifteen years. Further-
more, Ryan has recently shown that postmodern narratives have found in the
concepts of possible-worlds theory “a productive plaything for [their] games
of subversion and self-reflexivity” (2005: 449). She also looks at potential
analogies between parallel universes in physics on the one hand and possible
worlds in narrative fiction on the other (esp. Ryan 2006). Ryan’s concept of
immersion (Ryan 2001), moreover, builds a bridge to cognitive studies of nar-
ration.
We just referred to the pragmatic revolution in linguistics with the devel-
opment of context-oriented models in text linguistics, speech act theory,
 Introduction   13

sociolinguistics, and conversation analysis. For narratology, the analyses of

conversational narrative by William Labov (1972), Deborah Tannen (1984),
and Wallace Chafe (1994) have been seminal. Discourse analysis has had
a major impact on the postclassical narratological work of David Herman
(1997, 1999c, 2002) and Monika Fludernik (1991, 1993, 1996). In the wake
of linguistic pragmatics, narrative analysis has started to include nonfictional
narrative in its analyses. Conversation analysis in narratology has largely fed
into cognitive strands of narratology. In Fludernik’s work (1996, 2003a) it
has moreover impacted diachronic narratology. This trend is complemented
by extensive interest in narratology on the part of conversation analysts. Lin-
guists and psychologists like Michael Bamberg (2007; Bamberg et al. 2007),
Brigitte Boothe (2004), Anna de Fina (2003), Mark Freeman (1999), Alexan-
dra Georgakopoulou (1997) and others are doing research on narrative iden-
tity, performance and empathy. A true interdisciplinary field has here been
emerging.
A fourth development that rewrites the classic design of narratology con-
cerns the discovery of narrative’s evolution over time. This comes in two
forms, as a study of how narrative changes through the centuries and, in con-
junction with this descriptive focus, a revision of narratological categories as
a response to the different aspects and textual features that one finds in earlier
texts. Thus, Fludernik’s diachronic study of narrative structure (1996, 2003a)
provides a functional re-analysis of patterns from earlier narrative at later
stages of literary storytelling besides discussing the move from oral to written
forms of narrative. Another diachronically focused study is Werner Wolf’s
analysis of anti-illusionism (1993). Nünning’s volume Unreliable Narration
(1998) not only produces a new extensively outlined model of the signals of
unreliability in the introduction but also includes a series of essays illustrating
the historical development of this narrative strategy (see also Zerweck 2001).
David Herman’s volume The Emergence of Mind (2011) is probably the most
perfect example of the diachronic approach. It includes essays on the repre-
sentation of consciousness which systematically cover all periods of English
literature from the Middle Ages to the present time.
In recent years, a number of radical critiques and suggestions for rewriting
the classical model have been proposed. Besides suggesting specific extensions
or supplements to the classical paradigm, this type of research has addition-
ally aimed at restructuring the basic setup of Genettean typology. The catego-
ries that have so far come in for most critical attention include focalization,
voice, person, the status of the narrator and the implied author, and the
story-discourse distinction. Thus, focalization figures in the already classical
rewrite of Genette by Mieke Bal (1983, 1985/1997), but has been the focus
14   Introduction

of further revision by, among others, Chatman (1990), Edmiston (1991) and
Jahn (1996, 1999a). Voice has been targeted in Aczel (1998, 2001), Fludernik
(2001), and in Walsh (2007, this volume). Walsh (2007) moreover queries
the story-discourse distinction (see also Fludernik 1994b, this volume) and
the existence of a heterodiegetic extradiegetic narrator (see also this volume),
in continuation of Ann Banfield’s theses in Unspeakable Sentences (1982;
see also Fludernik 1993). Massive attention has recently been given to the
implied author and the issue of unreliability, and even a return of the author
into narrative studies is being promoted in clear violation of what has almost
become a taboo in literary studies.14 The list could be extended to include
many more issues and critics and a large variety of supplementary proposals
and critical restructurings.
A final postclassical area of research is the study of unnatural narratives,
that is, anti-mimetic narratives that challenge and move beyond real-world
understandings of identity, time, and space by representing scenarios and
events that would be impossible in the actual world.15 Brian Richardson
(1987, 1997, 2000, 2002, 2006) is the most important representative of this
type of postclassical narratology that looks at anti-mimeticism, but recently
a number of younger scholars such as Jan Alber (2002, 2009a, 2009b, in
progress), Henrik Skov Nielsen (2004), and Rüdiger Heinze (2008) have also
begun to look at the ways in which some (primarily postmodernist) narra-
tives challenge our real-world parameters.16 Even before the invention of
the term “unnatural,” Brian McHale (1987, 1992) and Werner Wolf (1993)
devoted themselves to the range of specific techniques employed in post-
modern or anti-illusionist narrative texts. McHale lists a substantial num-
ber of metafictional strategies, all of which are designed to foreground the
inventedness of the narrative discourse. Wolf’s study attempts an exhaustive
description of anti-illusionistic techniques which are meant to cover all anti-
illusionistic writing, not just the specific kind of anti-illusionism practiced in
postmodernist texts. Unnatural narratology, in a sense, is a combination of
postmodernist narratology and cognitive narratology. It could also be argued
to constitute an answer to poststructuralist critiques of narratology as guilty

14. On the implied author debate see Nünning (1998, 2005, and 2008) as well as Phelan/
Martin (1999), Phelan (2008a), and Kindt/Müller (2006); on unreliability see also Yacobi
(1981).
15. Alber argues that unnatural narratives confront us with physically or logically impos-
sible scenarios or events (2009a; 2009b; in progress; Alber/Heinze in progress; see also Tammi
2008: 43–47 and Alber/Iversen/Nielsen/Richardson 2010). Alber’s Habilitation (in progress)
also contains a historical analysis of the development of unnaturalness in English literary his-
tory.
16. See also the essays by Jan Alber and Henrik Skov Nielsen in this volume.
 Introduction   15

of logocentrism and displaying a “geometrical imaginary” (Gibson 1996; see

also Currie 1998). However, rather than deconstructing narratology’s con-
stitutive binaries, unnatural narratology (as a development from Fludernik’s
“natural” narratology and cognitive narratology in general) tries to set up a
narratological model for experimental texts that complements classical nar-
ratology and also connects with it by means of a cognitive framework.

Phase two: Consolidation and

Continued Diversification
Essays in this Volume

The essays collected here typically combine the resources of various disciplin-
ary traditions of postclassical narratology. They also reach back to concerns
and theories already current in the heyday of classical narratology, though
not usually discussed as “narratological,” like the work of Girard, Bakhtin,
and David Lodge.17 All Anglo-American work on narrative moreover takes
its reference point in the seminal thought of Henry James and E. M. Forster,
which proved to be of continuing relevance even during the heyday of struc-
turalist narratology. In our summary of the essays, we will foreground their
potential as indices of where narratology may be heading at the moment. In
our view, the research that follows seems to suggest that we have reached
a new stage at which one has to ponder the overlaps and potential areas of
cross-fertilization between the numerous flourishing narratologies.
The volume divides into two parts. A shorter first part deals with a num-
ber of extensions and criticisms of classical narratology. It includes creative
additions to the standard model by Werner Wolf and Alan Palmer and a
radical critique of the category of voice (as well as other cherished staples of
narratology) by Richard Walsh, and an analytical essay on mediacy versus
mediation by Monika Fludernik. Part II, called “Transdisciplinarities,” docu-
ments a number of innovative blendings of narratological issues with generic,
medial, gender-related, psycho-analytic, and nonfictional contexts.
Richard Walsh opens the volume by radically questioning key axioms of
narratology. His point de repère is the question of voice. In development of
his 2007 book The Rhetoric of Fictionality, Walsh here proceeds to link his
questioning of the category voice with his reservations about the communi-
cative model of narratology, i.e. the assumption that every text must have a
narrator figure. He conceptualizes narrative representation as rhetorical in

17. We owe this point to James Phelan (personal communication).

16   Introduction

mode, and as semiotic (rather than narrowly linguistic) in scope. The rhetori-
cal orientation of his argument appropriates Plato’s emphasis upon the act of
narrative representation as diegesis or mimesis. Walsh draws out the recur-
siveness implicit in that formulation, and discriminates between its legitimate
scope as a model of agency and the rather different issue of rhetorical effect.
The semiotic nature of narrative representation is asserted through the meta-
phorical nature of the concept of voice, and through Walsh’s efforts to take
the full measure of that fact with respect to other narrative media (principally
film, but also the cognitive medium of mental representation).
Werner Wolf’s is the first of two essays that attempt to close gaps in the
traditional narratological model. Noting that the concept of mise en abyme
has no conceptual counterpart relating to its frame, he proposes the con-
cept of mise en cadre for this lacuna. Wolf outlines how the addition of this
concept can help to describe a number of textual features and how it can
also be applied to medial contexts. Wolf’s contribution aims at bridging the
gulf between classical and postclassical narratology by proposing a “neo-
classical” variant. He suggests that the concepts devised by classical narratol-
ogy have not lost their relevance. On the contrary, they are open to a fruitful
development and supplementation and can be adapted to recent approaches.
Alan Palmer contributes to the extension of narratological categories by
proposing a theory of intermental thought. Such thinking is joint, shared, or
collective and community-based, as opposed to intramental, individual, or
private thought. It can also be described as socially distributed, situated, or
extended cognition, or as intersubjectivity. Intermental thought is a crucially
important component of fictional narrative because much of the mental func-
tioning depicted in novels occurs in large organizations, small groups, work
colleagues, friends, families, couples and other intermental units. It could
plausibly be argued that a large amount of the subject matter of novels is
the formation, development and breakdown of these intermental systems.
So far this aspect of narrative has been neglected by traditional theoretical
approaches and fails to be considered in discussions of focalization, char-
acterization, story analysis, and the representation of speech and thought.
Palmer therefore crucially contributes to closing this gap in the traditional
narratological paradigm.
Monika Fludernik in her contribution returns to a both historical and
critical analysis of the relationship between the terms mediacy, mediation,
and focalization. Following on from earlier work on drama as narrative,
Fludernik considers the status of mediality for narrativity and contrasts Stan-
zel’s and Genette’s complex negotiations with the story-discourse dichotomy,
the status of the narrator as mediator, and with the placing of focalization
 Introduction   17

or perspective in relation to the story-discourse binary. The essay revisits

the exchange between Chatman and Barbara Hernstein Smith on the notion
of narrative transmission. It also engages extensively with Richard Walsh’s
no-mediation thesis (Walsh 2007) and places the mediacy and (re)mediation
debate within the framework of her own narratological model. Like Walsh’s
paper in this volume, this essay queries some long-held beliefs or basic axi-
oms of narratology.
David Herman opens Part II of the volume by looking at William Blake’s
poem “A Poison Tree” (1794), a text which operates across various com-
municative media. Herman inquires into “(1) the structure and dynamics of
storytelling practices; (2) the multiple semiotic systems in which those prac-
tices take shape, including but not limited to verbal language; and (3) mind-
relevant dimensions of the practices themselves—as they play out in a given
medium for storytelling.” According to Herman, Blake’s poem articulates
and enacts a model according to which a more effective engagement with the
world is premised on the ability to take up the perspectives of others. And,
according to Herman, this is one of the most important features of narra-
tive in general: narrative is centrally concerned with qualia, i.e., the sense of
“what it is like” for someone or something to have a particular experience,
and hence narrative is uniquely suited to capturing what the world is like
from the situated perspective of an experiencing mind. Herman’s contribu-
tion merges cognitive and transmedial narratology; he sees his essay as a first
step toward an investigation of the potential overlaps between different post-
classical approaches. His contribution also has an openly ethical slant, thus
linking to the paper of Amit Marcus.
Jan Alber’s essay can be situated at the crossroads of transmedial narra-
tology, the rhetorical approach to narrative, and unnatural narratology. He
reconsiders the process of cinematic narration from the perspective of hypo-
thetical intentionalism, a cognitive approach in which “a narrative’s meaning
is established by hypothesizing intentions authors might have had, given the
context of creation, rather than relying on, or trying to seek out, the author’s
subjective intentions” (Gibbs 2005: 248). Alber argues that when we make
sense of a film, we always speculate about the potential intentions and moti-
vations behind the movie, without ever knowing whether our speculations
are correct. In a second step, Alber shows that there is a convergence between
the functions of the cinematic narrator, that is, “the organizational and send-
ing agency” (Chatman 1990: 127) behind the film, and those of the implied
filmmaker, who mediates the film as a whole and guides us through it (Gaut
2004: 248). Replacing the filmic narrator and the implied filmmaker (analo-
gous to the “implied author” [Booth 1982: 21; Phelan 2005: 45]) with the
18   Introduction

“hypothetical filmmaker,” Alber integrates the viewers’ speculations about

the conscious or unconscious motivations of the professionals responsible for
the making of the film into the analysis. He thus combines the views on inten-
tionality provided in Herman (2008) with a cognitive and reader-response
oriented model. Alber applies this new theoretical framework to an experi-
mental narrative, namely David Lynch’s film Lost Highway (1996).
Susan Lanser sketches the ways in which a particular topos, namely les-
bian desire, may be linked with historically variable narrative parameters,
thus combining feminist/queer narratology with a diachronic outlook on nar-
rative. More specifically, Lanser explores what she calls the “sapphic dia-
logic,” a form of narrative intersubjectivity in which erotic content is filtered
through the relationship between a (typically intradiegetic) female pairing
of narrator and narratee. Reaching back to the sixteenth century, Lanser
uncovers the history of a typical scenario in which female narrators tell other
women about heterosexual congress in a context in which the telling becomes
yet another erotic experience. Hence, Lanser identifies sapphic form as an
underpinning of the eighteenth-century novel’s domestic agenda. Linking
these analyses to the rise of the novel, Lanser is able to demonstrate that the
eighteenth-century novel female protagonist is not only swept up in the con-
solidation of the heterosexual subject; but further, the novel preserves within
its heterosexual frame the secret of domesticity’s dependence on the structural
deployment of lesbian desire. Lanser’s contribution therefore uses the com-
municative scenario of text-internal dialogue and storytelling to figure an
underlying sexual subtext. The paper combines a gender approach with a
framework of reader response and the concerns (if not the model) of rhetori-
cal narratology.
Our next contributor, Amit Marcus, merges narratology with psycho-
analysis by looking at René Girard’s notion of mimetic (or triangular) desire
(Girard 1965) and setting this in correlation with the story-discourse distinc-
tion. For Girard, the subject does not desire the object in and for itself. Rather,
the desire is mediated through another subject, who possesses or pursues the
object. This third figure (the mediator or rival) is admired by the subject but
also despised as an obstacle in achieving the object. In his contribution, Mar-
cus looks at narratives in which the narrator is both one of the main char-
acters in the story and the desiring subject. He shows that the narratives he
analyzes present several ways in which narration can be linked with mimetic
desire. While in two of the narratives he analyzes (Grass’s Cat and Mouse
and Genet’s The Thief’s Journal) mimetic desire only motivates the narration
and the narrator’s appeal to a narratee, without there existing a story on that
level, in Camus’s The Fall the story at the level of narration is woven into the
 Introduction   19

story of the past life of the narrator. In sum, Marcus argues that if mimetic
desire is the basis of the relation between the narrator and the narratee, then
narratorial authority seems to be motivated by the anxiety that the loss of the
narratee will cause unbearable pain to the narrator, whose mediator and rival
will no longer provide him with the (fragile) existential security that he needs.
The essay illustrates how the narrator-narratee relationship interacts with the
story-discourse level of narrative in ways which, incidentally, are also notable
in second-person narratives (Fludernik 1993, 1994a).
In her contribution, Jarmila Mildorf follows David Herman’s suggestions
concerning the development of a “socionarratology” (1999b) and shows that
narratology, if suitably adapted to social science requirements, can add fur-
ther insights into the particularly “narrative” features of oral stories. More
specifically, she analyzes two oral narratives from the database of personal
experience of health and illness (DIPEx) with a view to identifying possible
points of convergence between narratology and the social sciences. Mil­dorf
uses narratological terms such as the “experiencing I,” the “narrating I,”
“focalization,” “slant,” “filter,” and “double deixis” in you-narratives and
illustrates that frequently-evoked concepts in the social science literature such
as “social positioning,” “identity,” and the marking of “in-group” and “out-
group” relations can be further illuminated if reconsidered through a nar-
ratological lens. Her contribution is therefore a test case for narratology’s
ability to connect with work on storytelling outside the humanities. In par-
ticular, it provides a useful model for cooperation between narratologists and
sociologists or psychologists who have so far been using different models and
terminology. By showing that these models may be compatible with the nar-
ratological paradigms, Mildorf sketches an optimistic horizon for narratol-
ogy’s involvement with its neighbor disciplines in the social sciences.
Martin Löschnigg discusses models and categories of cognitive narratol-
ogy that may be relevant for a narratologically grounded analysis of autobio-
graphical discourse. More specifically, he merges cognitive and transmedial
narratology and, using Fludernik’s model of “natural” narratology, deals with
the discursive representation of experientiality in autobiography. He focuses
on the role of narrative in the formation of identity; the role of frames and
scripts in the textual representation of memory; and finally, on the question
of the fictionality of autobiography. Löschnigg argues that the new frame-
oriented models of cognitive narratology provide criteria for describing one’s
life as (re)lived, allowing one to emphasize the continuity of narration and
experience. This puts the binary narrator-experiencer model of classical nar-
ratology on a different and more flexible basis. He suggests that narrativity
is a determinant of autobiography; “narrativized” understandings of identity
20   Introduction

are based on lived experience and on the capacity of narrative to impose

order and coherence on what is otherwise a jumble of disconnected fragments
of experiences and memories. Löschnigg also demonstrates that the frames,
scripts, and schemata of cognitive narratology can help us grasp autobiog-
raphy’s temporal complexity by identifying processes of segmentation and of
creating coherence, which are especially important in memory-based narra-
tives. The essay closes with a consideration of the question of fictionality in
autobiography, which can now be approached in a more differentiated man-
ner. If narratology cannot provide criteria to distinguish between “fact” and
“fiction” in autobiographical writing, provided such a distinction is possible
at all, it can at least, according to Löschnigg, provide the theoretical basis
for describing the fictional as an integral element of life-writing. Löschnigg’s
paper is therefore located at the borderline of fictionality and in this way
reaches out from classical literary narratology to the wider area of real-life
storytelling practices.
Finally, Henrik Skov Nielsen discusses hybrid narrative texts which can-
not easily be categorized as either fiction or non-fiction. More specifically,
he looks at two types of texts. On the one hand, he considers what he calls
“underdetermined texts,” such as James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003),
i.e., texts that present themselves as neither fiction nor non-fiction. On the
other hand, he analyzes “overdetermined texts,” such as Bret Easton Ellis’s
Lunar Park (2005), that present themselves as both fiction and non-fiction.
Frey’s book was published as non-fiction but turned out to represent the expe-
riences of James Frey in an exaggerated and partly inaccurate way; Ellis’s was
published as fiction but is in many (though definitely not all) respects a factu-
ally accurate rendering of Bret Easton Ellis’s life. Nielsen notes that, interest-
ingly, both kinds of texts use techniques of fictionalization. He moves beyond
the fiction/non-fiction boundary by arguing that invention is a resource of
fictionality available as a rhetorical strategy in the real-world discourse of
the author. Nielsen therefore combines a rhetorical slant on narrative with
a reconsideration of the fiction/non-fiction divide and with a focus on the
curious status of autobiography. He also proposes some radical revisions of
the classical paradigm of narratology, thereby linking back to Part I of the
volume.

As this summary illustrates, one can observe many synergetic effects between
the diverse essays collected in this volume. Some of these connections arise
from a common focus on a specific genre (autobiography in the essays by
Löschnigg and Nielsen); the history of narratology (Walsh, Fludernik); ques-
 Introduction   21

tions of fictionality (in Walsh and Löschnigg); the central role of cognition in
narrative (in Palmer, Herman, and Alber); questions of authorship, responsi-
bility or authority (in Walsh, Wolf, Alber, and Nielsen); as well as the issues
of gender and queering (Lanser, Marcus).
Theoretically speaking, what is even more interesting is the fact that
these very different approaches document that the field of narratology has
now reached a phase which is dominated by partial consolidation without
any undue reaching after singularity. At the same time, the trends towards
commonality are offset by the diversity of approaches, a multiplicity of co-
operations with partner disciplines, and the general theoretical “promiscuity”
typical of postmodernity. All of the contributors to the volume are critical
of traditional theories, but not one of them wants to eliminate the classic
model as a whole. Rewriting the traditional paradigm in its various typo-
logical manifestations instead takes the form of querying one particular ele-
ment (voice, mediacy, the narrator) or of adding one more distinction to the
paradigm (Wolf, Palmer, Lanser), extending the model to cover new generic
applications (poetry, film) or linking it with new thematic foci (collectivities
in Palmer, sexuality and queerness in Lanser and Marcus, ethics in Marcus
and Nielsen). Some contributors also try to extend narratology theoretically
by adopting research questions, concepts, or frameworks from outside struc-
turalism: cognitive studies (Fludernik, Herman, Alber, Löschnigg), painting
(Wolf), Girard’s psychoanalysis (Marcus), and media studies (Walsh, Alber).
One could summarize these tendencies by saying that there is a consensus on
narratology as a transgeneric, transdisciplinary, and transmedial undertaking,
to echo Nünning and Nünning’s 2002 title.
Secondly, all contributors on the whole agree that narratology should
cover more than the classical genre of the novel. Postclassical narratology, one
could therefore argue, has a much wider conception of what counts as nar-
rative than just the traditional novel (Genette, Stanzel, Chatman, Rimmon-
Kenan). The debate on extending narratology to other genres has resulted in
a general consensus of crediting film as a narrative genre and a wide accep-
tance of drama, cartoons, and much performance art, as well as some paint-
ing, under the description of narrative genres. The borderline is now located
in the gray area made up of poetry, music, and science. One can therefore
claim that narratology’s object of analysis has shifted since the 1980s—nar-
rative now includes a much wider spectrum of “texts.” This change requires
a reworking of narratological concepts since the traditional model was based
on a very restrictive corpus of (generically) rather uniform verbal narratives.
Third, the extension of narrative into a variety of different media has been
accompanied by a shift from text-internal close analysis to context-relative
22   Introduction

cultural studies, particularly foregrounding the question of narrative’s func-

tion in social, historical, ideological, or psychological contexts. Rather than
merely analyzing how texts work, and which of their elements are responsible
for which meaning or design effects, the current emphasis lies on what these
narratives achieve in communication, which ideological or identity-related
messages they convey, what ‘cultural work’ (Tompkins 1986, Beck 2003) they
perform, and what possible effects they may engender in the real world. One
could, therefore, argue that all narratology nowadays is context-sensitive.
Fourth, we would like to propose that the cognitive model, which is one
of the many ongoing projects in the field,18 is slowly establishing itself as a
new basis for ever-increasing areas of narratological research. The cognitive
model provides a useful explanatory framework which offers a potentially
empirical grounding for dealing with textual features. It has also introduced
to narrative studies some new terminology and concepts which are perhaps
apt to replace more traditional elements in the paradigm. Among such new
concepts one can point first and foremost to the notion of the frame, which
has now been generally absorbed into narratology much in the same way that
linguistic terminology (e.g., of deixis and temporal modes) was in classical
narratology. A second major adoption from cognitive science is prototype
theory, which is becoming more widely accepted in narrative studies and is
beginning to replace the former insistence on clear distinctions between nar-
ratological categories. Deconstructive treatments of the binary oppositions
of classical narratology have helped to popularize a more relaxed attitude
towards classification. One could also count experientiality, originally pro-
posed by Fludernik in 1991 (see also 1996), as a cognitively based concept
that has meanwhile been adopted by a number of researchers such as Wolf
(2002) and Löschnigg (2006). A reliance on cognitivist and constructivist
principles is now common in postclassical narratology, for instance in recent
work by Ansgar Nünning (1998), Ralf Schneider (2000), Alan Palmer (2004),
Richard Walsh (2007), and Jochen Petzold (2008).19 This emphasis on cogni-
tive issues is linked to the medial extension of narratology since the classical
model was unable to deal with many of the newer types of narrative, and the
cognitive approach offers a model which can accommodate linguistic story-
telling besides a host of other forms of narrative.
What we are arguing here is that, although there is no unified new meth-
odology in sight for postclassical narratology (nor do we plead for such a

18. So-called cognitive narratology is usually associated with Monika Fludernik, David
Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Lisa Zunshine.
19. See also Fludernik (2001) as well as Alber (2002, 2009a, 2009b, and forthcoming)
and Aldama (2003).
 Introduction   23

development), there is sufficient justification for referring to current narrato-

logical work in the singular as postclassical narratology; one does not neces-
sarily have to foreground the existing diversity in a plural label—postclassical
narratologies. Our reason for emphasizing an incipient move toward congru-
ence, compatibility, and consolidation is our perception of recurrent strate-
gies of patchwork and blending as illustrated in the essays in this volume. We
are not saying that all future narratology will be based on cognitive theory,
or that all research in narrative will necessarily be transmedial and function-
oriented. What we are noting is a confluence of the various approaches that
David Herman so magisterially outlined in his 1999 volume. Almost none of
the essays printed in this book abides by any one single approach. The papers
all combine and creatively blend different approaches, cognitive or otherwise,
to achieve a synthesis that looks different in every individual essay but is a
synthesis nevertheless. We do not maintain that there is a unified postclas-
sical model on the horizon—nor would we want to invent one—but we are
arguing that narratologists nowadays see the object of their research as more
variegated than was the case twenty years ago; that they resort to very differ-
ent methods in combination when approaching a problem; and that they will
tend to ground their analyses in a rich contextual framework. To this extent,
and to this extent only, do we see postclassical narratology not as continuing
to proliferate into numerous new directions, but as beginning to sediment
and crystallize into a new modus vivendi.
24   Introduction

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——— (2002) “Das Problem der Narrativität in Literatur, bildender Kunst und Musik:
Ein Beitrag zu einer intermedialen Erzähltheorie.” Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, inter-
medial, interdisziplinär. Ed. Ansgar Nünning and Vera Nünning. Trier: WVT. 23–104.
——— (2003) “Narrative and Narrativity: A Narratological Reconceptualization and its
Applicability to the Visual Arts.” Word & Image 19.3: 180–97.
Yacobi, Tamar (1981) “Fictional Reliability as a Communicative Problem.” Poetics Today
2.2: 113–26.
Zerweck, Bruno (2001) “Historicizing Unreliable Narration: Unreliability and Cultural
Discourse in Narrative Fiction.” Style 35.1: 151–78.
Zunshine, Lisa (2006) Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus:
The Ohio State University Press.
 I
Extensions and Reconfigurations of
Classical Narratology
 1
Richard Walsh

Person, Level, Voice

A Rhetorical Reconsideration

My purpose in this essay is to critique the concept of narrative voice from the
vantage point of a rhetorical model of fictive representation. In its core sense,
narrative voice is concerned with the narrating instance, the various manifes-
tations of which are usually categorized in terms of person and level. These
distinctions provide for a typology of narrating instances which is conven-
tionally understood within a communicative model of narration—a model
in which the narrating instance is situated within the structure of narrative
representation, as a literal communicative act (that is, as a discursive event
that forms part of a chain of narrative transmission). By adopting a rhetori-
cal approach to voice, I am proposing to invert the hierarchy of that rela-
tionship between structure and act. From a rhetorical standpoint, narrative
representation is not conceived as a structure within which a communicative
model of narrative acts is implied, but as an act itself, the performance of a
real-world communicative gesture—which, in the case of fictional narrative,
is offered as fictive rather than informative, and creates, rather than trans-
mits, all subordinate levels of narration. Such a perspective upon narrative
representation exposes the fundamental incoherence of the standard commu-
nicative model, and establishes the need for some basic distinctions between
different senses of voice in narrative theory.
My argument, then, begins by demonstrating the incoherence of the rep-
resentational typology of narrative voice as embodied in the communicative
model of the narrating instance. This demonstration focuses upon the ele-
mentary categories of person and level that articulate this typology; its claim

35
36   Part I: Chapter 1

is that it is not possible to sustain the distinction between these two categories
in representational terms, and their collision results in contradiction. I go on
to show that a rhetorical model of instance, reverting to Plato’s distinction
between diegesis and mimesis and the recursive principle it embodies, can
accommodate the range of narrative possibilities more coherently and simply.
By elaborating upon the principle of recursiveness in representation I dem-
onstrate the need for a distinction between narrative voice as instance and as
idiom; closer attention to the function of voice in free indirect discourse and
focalization establishes a further distinction between idiom and a third sense
of voice I term interpellation; finally, a return to my overarching rhetorical
frame of reference clarifies the distinction between this third sense and the
sense of voice as instance with which I began.
The key premises for the whole discussion, for which I have argued else-
where, are the conception of narrative representation as rhetorical in mode,
and as semiotic (rather than narrowly linguistic) in scope.1 I comment further
upon these issues in the discussion that follows, so here I will only indicate
the forms in which they arise. The rhetorical orientation of my argument
straightforwardly appropriates Plato’s emphasis upon the act of narrative
representation as either diegesis or mimesis (the poet either speaking in his
own voice, or imitating the voice of a character); I merely draw out the recur-
siveness implicit in that formulation, and discriminate between its legitimate
scope as a model of agency and the rather different issue of rhetorical effect.
The semiotic nature of narrative representation is asserted here in my insis-
tence upon the (generally acknowledged) metaphorical nature of the con-
cept of voice, and my efforts to take the full measure of that fact in respect
of other narrative media (principally film, but also the cognitive medium of
mental representation). These two premises share the common definitional
assumption that stories, of whatever kind, do not merely appear, but are told.
Stories do not emerge circumstantially out of phenomena: they exist as
stories by virtue of being articulated (always admitting that this may be a
private, internal act of representation as well as a public, social one). The
immediate implication is that narration in its primary sense is never merely
narrative transmission but narrative representation—that is, the semiotic use
of its medium. Narrative transmission applies not to the telling of a story (as
if it pre-existed as such), but to the merely reproductive mediation of a prior
discourse. In fiction, transmission is an element of the rhetoric of represented
telling—that is, representing an intra-fictional narrative discourse as if you
were transmitting an extant discourse. Acts of narrative representation, in

1. See especially chapters 1 and 6 of The Rhetoric of Fictionality (Walsh 2007).

 Walsh, “Person, Level, Voice”   37

other words, are themselves among the possible objects of narrative repre-
sentation: one of the things a story may be about is the telling of a story. The
crucial point, however, is that this recursive possibility, however prominent
in fiction, does not account for fictionality itself: the effect of narrative trans-
mission is a subordinate and contingent product of the rhetoric of narrative
representation.
The dominant narratological sense of voice, that which bears upon the
narrating instance, is Gérard Genette’s. One of the main sources of confusion
around the concept of voice is that Genette’s version of the metaphor does
not draw upon the sense of voice as vocalization, but upon its grammati-
cal sense (active or passive voice): “‘the mode of action [ . . . ] of the verb
considered for its relation to the subject’—the subject here being not only
the person who carries out or submits to the action, but also the person (the
same one or another) who reports it” (1980: 213). It is no less metaphorical
for that—indeed, Genette acknowledges that his appropriation of linguistic
terminology throughout Narrative Discourse shows most figurative strain
at just this point (31–32). But the range of Genette’s metaphorical vehicle is
quite distinct from that of the more general, or more intuitive, usage; a major
consequence being that many of the concerns that fall naturally under voice
for other theorists are addressed separately by Genette. So free indirect dis-
course, for many the key issue in discussions of voice, is treated under mood
in Genette’s scheme. The chapter on mood is also where he presents the cru-
cial concept of focalization, which for theorists following Franz Karl Stanzel
is inextricable from the broader notion of mediacy—that is to say voice in
Genette’s own sense, as narrating instance. Given these terminological and
taxonomical discrepancies, it is perhaps all the more striking that both theo-
rists explicitly privilege language as the paradigmatic, if not intrinsic, medium
of narrative instanciation. Genette makes this axiomatic: he refers to media
such as film and the comic strip as extranarrative, “if one defines narrative
stricto sensu, as I do, as a verbal transmission” (1988: 16).
I am suggesting instead that a narrating instance may be considered as
any particular use of any medium for narrative purposes. Narration, on this
view, is essentially a representational act, not just a verbal one. Voice in Gen-
ette’s sense, as instance, is a figure for agency in narration: I take that to be
as inherently a part of film and drama as it is of the novel, and as crucial to
understanding the rhetorical import of narratives in those media. Seen in this
light the voice metaphor is in no way specific to language, and neither are the
main concerns that Genette addresses under this heading: person and level.
(Tense, Genette’s other concern under the heading of voice, is clearly spe-
cific to language unless taken more broadly as an index of the temporal rela-
38   Part I: Chapter 1

tion between represented narrations and the events they narrate; but see the
following discussion of his comments upon the intrinsic “homodiegeticity”
of present-tense narration.) Genette is himself quick to point out the strict
irrelevance of the linguistic category of person in the traditional distinction
between first- and third-person narration: the basis for his own distinction
between homo- and heterodiegetic narration, as well as the distinction of
level between extra- and intradiegetic narration, is the relation between the
narration and the represented world of the story (I am leaving aside auto-
diegetic, which is just a subset of homodiegetic; and metadiegetic, which is
just second-degree intradiegetic). I want to suggest, however, that even these
distinctions, whilst undeniably useful, are not finally well founded in terms
of their own theoretical premises.2 This points us towards a somewhat differ-
ent paradigm in which the salient fact is simply the recursive possibility that
a narrating instance may represent another narrating instance; or in Plato’s
terms, that narrative diegesis may give way to narrative mimesis.
It is clear that any narration, whether first-person or third-person (as
these terms are generally understood) may incorporate the event of another
act of narration, at a second level. Conversely, any narration, at whatever
level, may equally well be first-person narration or third-person narration.
The categories of person and level appear to be clear and distinct; the clas-
sification of a narrative discourse in either respect is not determined by its
classification in the other. Whence the possibility of such four-part typologies
of narrators as Genette’s (Figure 1.1), in which the categories of level and
person respectively define the horizontal and vertical axes (person, here, is
“relationship,” since Genette rejects the traditional terminology). Genette’s
more analytic terminology makes it clear that the category of person is not
really about the choice of personal pronouns, but rather a matter of the status
of the narrative act. The dominant issue for the “relationship” distinction
seems to be an epistemological one: with what kind of authority does the nar-
rator speak? That of omniscient or impersonal detachment from the events
related? Or that of an interested witness to those events? With regard to level,
on the other hand, the dominant issue seems to be ontological: from which
world does the narrator speak? Ours? Or the world of another narrative—the
world of the Arabian Nights, or of the Odyssey? What Genette’s terminol-

2. To clarify the scope and purpose of my argument here, it is worth noting that I do not
want to suggest that Genette’s typology lacks analytical value, or to diminish its significance
to narrative theory ever since the publication of Narrative Discourse. My claim is simply that
it is logically incoherent, and therefore should not finally be taken as an account of the repre-
sentational logic of fictional narrative, but as a testament to the fictive rhetoric that produces
and frames the appearance of such a logic.
 Walsh, “Person, Level, Voice”   39

LEVEL: Extradiegetic Intradiegetic

RELATIONSHIP:

Heterodiegetic Homer Scheherazade

Homodiegetic Marcel Ulysses

Figure 1.1.  from Narrative Discourse 248 (simplified)

ogy also implies, however, is that the categories of person and level do share
a common frame of reference, with respect to which all four of his terms are
defined: that is, the notion of diégèse, or story world.
Genette’s term diégèse does not relate to the Platonic term, diegesis, but to
a distinction originating in film theory between the diegetic universe (domain
of the signified) and the screen universe (domain of the signifier). So a diégèse
is the universe of the events represented by a given narration. Despite this
subordination of diégèse to narration, Genette’s classification of narrative
levels assigns each narrating instance to the diegetic level that includes it, so
that the first level of any narrative is necessarily extradiegetic.3 Well then, is
the extradiegetic a diegetic level? Genette needs it to be such, because the
primary narrating instance may be fictional, and so represented (as with Mar-
cel’s narration, or Pip’s, or Huck’s). At the same time he also needs it not to
be diegetic, because the primary narrating instance is directly addressed, he
says, to “you and me” (1980: 229).4 The equivocal status of the extradiegetic
level serves to evade the infinite regress of diegetic levels that must result
from the assumption, fundamental to the communicative model, that every
narrating instance is literal with respect to the events represented—that it is
ontologically continuous with the world on which it reports (this is simply a
precondition for narrative transmission). Such an assumption dictates that
if the events are fictional, the report is fictional, and therefore must itself be
represented; but the representation of that fictional event must then also be
fictional—and so we face the prospect of an endless series of implicit narra-
tors. This conception of narrative mediacy as literal (irrespective of whether

3. Note that extradiegetic narration is defined in relation to the most inclusive, or first-
level, diégèse, not in relation to the main action of the narrative. So Marlow relates the main
action of Heart of Darkness, but his narration is intradiegetic, represented as taking place
during a long night on the sea-reach of the Thames, waiting for the tide to turn. The point is
that Genette’s taxonomy of narration is a structural one, rather than a rhetorical one.
4. Richardson mentions a number of canonical modern texts for which it is unhelpful to
take this literalistic view of the extradiegetic narrative situation (2001b: 700–1); many more
examples could be added.
40   Part I: Chapter 1

or not the narrative is fictive) means that each act of narration, and the dié-
gèse to which it belongs, must be part of one continuous line of narrative
transmission through which that narration is channeled. If narrative mediacy
is always transmission, the communicative model of narrative levels allows
for no point of ontological discontinuity.5
The category of person, as re-articulated in Genette’s distinction between
homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narration, also has a problematic relation to
diégèse. In Narrative Discourse Revisited, Genette notes two circumstances in
which the apparently heterodiegetic status of a narration can be compromised
by a degree of “homodiegeticity” (1988: 80). The effect occurs in present-
tense narration and the narration of historical fiction. Present-tense narra-
tion, by foregrounding the narration’s contemporaneity to diegetic events,
pulls towards a sense of the narratorial perspective as that of a witness, who
would therefore be part of the diégèse (Genette cites the last chapter of Tom
Jones among his examples). The narration of a historical novel, on the other
hand, by virtue of its claims to historicity, undermines our sense of the narra-
tive’s discrete diegetic universe and consequently the narrator comes to figure
as a quasi-homodiegetic “subsequent witness,” in Genette’s phrase (1988:
80). As these examples make clear, in the communicative model diégèse is
not conceived of merely as an effect of signification, but as an ontological
notion; and the category of person comes down to a relation of identity or
non-identity between the narrator and some member of the story universe,
the complete set of states of affairs posited by the narrative. Accordingly, the
category of person has no place except within the ontology of fiction: non-
fictional heterodiegetic narration becomes meaningless. That is to say, the
distinction of narrative person depends upon ontological discontinuity (cp.
Genette 1993: 54–84; Cohn 1999: 109–31).

5. Genette, of course, does not believe that fictions are true. He offers his own account
of the ontological break between author and narrator required by his model, in an essay on
John Searle’s pretended speech act account of fiction (Genette 1993: 30–53). The thrust of
his argument is that the authorial act of pretending to assert is also an indirect speech act
instituting a fictional world, the world within which those same pretended assertions are the
true assertions of a narrator. Genette’s appeal to indirect speech acts is a good move, I think
(because it is a move towards a rhetorical model); his retention of Searle’s pretence account is
not. The essential feature of Searle’s account is that a pretended assertion has no illocutionary
force (that is what, for Searle, renders the falsehood of fictions unproblematic). The occasion
for an indirect authorial speech act, therefore, does not even arise; no speech act at all, direct
or indirect, is seriously performed. Yet Genette requires the pretence formula, as a basis for
the structural role of extradiegetic narration. Accordingly the only serious speech act available,
and the only candidate for the indirect institution of a fictional world, is the narrator’s—which
is within the world in question. This is the same logical paradox as I have been describing,
recast in a different form. See Walsh (2007: 74–78).
 Walsh, “Person, Level, Voice”   41

So, within the communicative model, the concept of level disallows onto-
logical discontinuity, because it is understood as a chain of literally trans-
mitted narratives; but the concept of person depends upon ontological
discontinuity, because otherwise there can only be homodiegetic narration.
The crunch comes when these contradictory implications of person and level
meet in the extradiegetic heterodiegetic narrator. Genette’s example in Figure
1.1 is Homer, which is rather evasive; elsewhere he also offers the narrator
of Père Goriot. This narrator, he says, unlike Balzac himself, “knows” (with
scare quotes) the events of the narrative as fact (1980: 214). If we take the
claim literally, it aligns with the logic of narrative levels and the principle
of ontological continuity, but contradicts the designation of this narrator as
heterodiegetic. If we do not take it literally, Genette forfeits his rationale for
distinguishing between this narrator and Balzac; and in terms of the com-
municative model such a heterodiegetic narrator would have to mediate the
narration of a further narrator who does indeed know the events of the nar-
rative as fact—and so we founder upon an infinite regress of narrative levels.
The collision between person and level, as I have articulated it here, follows
from the communicative model’s ontological notion of diégèse as story world
and its literal model of narrative transmission. And it should be clear that the
problem of ontological discontinuity is simply the problem, in this model’s
terms, of fictionality itself. The problem arises in the first place, then, because
of the logical priority the communicative model grants to the products of fic-
tive representation.
This is a mistake avoided by the most venerable alternative to the com-
municative account of person and level, Plato’s distinction between diegesis
(the poet speaking in his own voice) and mimesis (the poet imitating the
voice of a character). Such a distinction characterizes the act of fictive rep-
resentation, and taken as a typology of narration it identifies a single salient
feature: the recursive possibility that a narration may represent another nar-
ration. It makes the cut, in other words, between Genette’s extradiegetic het-
erodiegetic category (diegesis) and all the others (mimesis). A typology of
narration based upon Plato’s distinction, then, recognizes two hierarchical
modes of fictive representation, which may be a matter of information (dieg-
esis) or of imitation (mimesis). In fictive diegesis, the information is offered
and/or interpreted under the real-world communicative regime of fictionality,
in which an awareness of its fictive orientation is integral to its rhetoric. In
mimesis the imitation is specifically of an act of narration, so accordingly the
informative function of diegesis is performed at one remove. The rhetorical
gesture of fictionality, however, remains attached to the act of imitation itself.
Note that this act is an imitation of a discursive form of narration, not of a
42   Part I: Chapter 1

Young
Man’s Tale

Amina’s Tale

The Three
Ali Baba
Ladies of Baghdad

Arabian Nights Arabian Nights

Figure 1.2.  from “Stacks, Frames and Boundaries,” 880

(simplified)

specific, notionally prior narrative act—it is a representational rather than

reproductive use of the medium. The non-fictional version of this recursive
structure would indeed be the transmission of an extant narrative; that is
quotation, not mimesis. The two features of this model of fictive narration
that I want to emphasize, then, are first that the fictive rhetorical gesture is
always present, and always attached to the actual communicative act; and
second that the recursive capacity of the model is subordinate to this fictive
rhetoric, but also defined in terms of communicative acts. The permutations
of this relation between fictionality and narrative information can accommo-
date the range of narratorial possibilities identified by Genette’s typology in
Figure 1.1, whether the diegesis mediates a mimesis of non-fictive narration
(Ulysses), or of fictive narration (Scheherazade); or whether the mimesis is
coextensive with the narrative itself (Marcel).
In order to draw out the implications of this view of fictive communica-
tion and its capacity for recursiveness, I shall invoke Marie-Laure Ryan’s
interesting alternative to the narrative-level model of recursiveness, which is
the concept (borrowed from computer science) of the stack. The metaphor,
she explains, refers to a stack of trays in a cafeteria: “The stack is supported
by a spring, and the top tray is always level with the counter. When a cus-
tomer puts a tray on the top of the stack, the structure must be pushed down
in order to make the top tray even with the counter; when a tray is removed,
the structure pops up, and the next tray on the stack is lifted to counter level.
Being on top of the stack and level with the counter makes a tray the ‘current
tray’” (1990: 878). She illustrates the idea with an example representing the
tales within tales of the Arabian Nights, as in Figure 1.2.
These are snapshots of the stack at two different points in the narrative—
the “Tale of Ali Baba” and the “Young Man’s Tale.” The diagram is offered
as a representation of distinct ontological realms within the narrative, but it
 Walsh, “Person, Level, Voice”   43

Young
Arabian Nights Ali Baba
Man’s Tale

Arabian Nights Amina’s Tale

The Three
Ladies of Baghdad

Arabian Nights

Figure 1.3.  after Ryan (first revision)

Young
Man’s Tale
Ali Baba
Arabian Nights
Arabian Nights Arabian Nights

Figure 1.4.  after Ryan (second revision)

works equally well as a representation of distinct narrative acts; and as a dia-

gram of recursive narration it is something we can work with. But first of all,
as drawn it does not really capture the most suggestive feature of the stack
metaphor as Ryan herself glosses it, which is the notion of the “current tray”
at counter level. That would suggest the arrangement in Figure 1.3, in which
anything below counter level is beneath our threshold of attention at a given
point (I have added a snapshot of pure diegesis to clarify the idea).
But now I want to revise the model, because although intermediate layers
of narration may be occluded while we attend to the current narration, I have
argued that the fictive rhetorical gesture of the diegesis is not. So we need to
adjust the counter level, and represent the buoyancy of the stack as in Figure
1.4.
The actual communicative act here, The Arabian Nights, has a fictive ori-
entation that is necessarily apparent at all times, even when it is not the direct
focus of our attention; whereas any narrative levels (or degrees of recursion)
in between the diegesis and the current narration are virtually effaced. Not
absolutely effaced, because it is open to us at any moment to wonder, for
example, whether the current story is likely to interest King Shariah as much
as Sheherazade needs it to (which refers us, even during the “Young Man’s
Tale,” to the telling of “The Three Ladies of Baghdad”). So these levels are
collapsed, latent contexts of the current narrative situation. This is as true of
recursive narrative structures in which the intermediate levels of narration
44   Part I: Chapter 1

are all non-fictive with respect to each other. So, in Frankenstein, we attend
to the monster’s narration in its own right, not as Walton’s written record of
Victor’s oral relation of that narration. This is not at all to say that we do
not cross-reference between the monster’s narration and information gleaned
from our attention to these framing narrative acts when they are current; nor
does it exclude our response to thematic connections between levels, which is
provided for by our continual awareness of Mary Shelley’s fictive rhetoric.6
The collapsed intermediate levels in this diagram are a mark of the
insubstantiality of narrative transmission as conceived in the communica-
tive model. One of the merits of the most prominent alternative to Genette’s
typology of narration, Stanzel’s typological circle, is that it registers this
insubstantiality (Figure 1.5). The category of figural narrative treats the per-
spectival mode Genette called internal focalization as integral to narrative
mediacy, which implies a salutary disregard for the communicative model’s
commitment to a literal mode of transmission. Internal focalization is inher-
ently an imaginative alignment of the narration with a character perspec-
tive: its assimilation, under the heading of mediacy, within the same typology
as diegesis (the authorial situation) and mimesis (the first-person situation)
implies the equally imaginative status of the latter’s recursive structure. Both
are contingent devices of the rhetoric of fictive narration, and neither entails a
commitment to the literal logic of narrative transmission that leads the com-
municative model astray. On the other hand, the figural narrative situation
cannot be homologous with Stanzel’s other two categories in the sense that
they are with each other, precisely because the character perspective is not
part of any communication. Unlike first-person narrative, figural narrative is
not a recursive representational doubling of the narrative act that character-
izes authorial narrative. The same blurring of conceptual boundaries occurs
within a different paradigm when Mieke Bal proposes to incorporate focal-
ization into the recursive hierarchy of embedded narration. She notes that,
as a criterion of recursiveness, “the two units must belong to the same class”
(43), but then defines the relevant class, too broadly, as “subject-object rela-
tions” (45), which effaces the key difference between narration and focaliza-
tion—that is, communication. So too with the figural narrative situation: its
assimilation to the same class as diegesis and mimesis disregards the intrinsi-
cally communicative nature of narration. The figural narrative situation can-
not be reconciled with communication, not even self-communication, since it
definitionally involves a disjunction between narration and character perspec-

6. The concept of voice as idiom is also illuminated by this characteristic strategy, in the
Gothic novel, of embedding multiple layers of narration—as we shall see below.
 Walsh, “Person, Level, Voice”   45

First-person Authorial
situation situation
Teller-
character

Identity External perspective

of worlds (omniscience)

Internal perspective Non-identity

(limited POV) of worlds

Reflector-
character

Figural
situation

Figure 1.5.  from A Theory of Narrative xvi (simplified)

tive. Monika Fludernik aptly describes the figural narrative situation as “non-
communicative narrative” (1994: 445), which captures its incompatibility
with the literal logic of the communicative model. But from a more inclusive
rhetorical point of view, non-communicative narrative is a contradiction in
terms; and it is only from a rhetorical point of view that any parity between
(represented) narrative transmission and character perception can be counte-
nanced in the first place. Figural narration, from this perspective, is simply a
rhetorical option available to diegesis; one that exploits fiction’s imaginative
freedom from the literalism of the communicative model just as some features
of first-person narration do, but without the recursive structure of mimesis.
The categories of person and level, as conceived in the communicative
model, are logically incompatible with each other, then, and we can only
make sense of fictive narratives (and narratives within narratives) in terms of
a rhetorical paradigm more akin to Plato’s distinction between diegesis and
mimesis and the recursive options it accommodates. This rhetorical paradigm
involves awareness of fictionality at all times as an integral part of our inter-
pretation of fictions, so that recursive narratives do not at any point harden
into discrete ontological facts with logical implications beyond the rhetorical
focus of the particular case. Fictionality is a rhetorical gesture: as rhetoric it
is necessarily communicative; as a gesture it is semiotic, but not intrinsically
linguistic. This is important for two reasons. Firstly it accounts for a problem
that exercises Genette in his discussion of La Chute, which (because of its
46   Part I: Chapter 1

resemblance to dramatic monologue) he is tempted to say has no extradi-

egetic level (1988: 89); as well as the analogous issue of the status of interior
monologue, over which Stanzel and Dorrit Cohn disagree—Cohn sees it as
direct discourse, Stanzel as pure reflector mode (Cohn 1981: 169–70). These
problems arise because of an assumption that the fictive diegesis, to be dieg-
esis at all, must be a linguistic act—so that if there is no overt narration to the
reader, there is no diegesis. But communication is the semiotic use of media:
as long as the character discourse is understood as represented, not transmit-
ted, the fictive act of the diegesis is manifest. The second reason for insisting
upon a semiotic frame of reference is already apparent from the way these
two problem cases border upon drama: it is that a rhetorical model of fiction-
ality as a communicative gesture recognizes no categorical boundary between
fictions in language and fictions in other media. So whereas the model of
mediacy presented by Stanzel embodies a tradition in which mediacy is an
indirect form of representation, and its antithesis is the direct, immediate pre-
sentation of drama, or film, I am claiming instead that mediacy is a property
of media; and that the distinction between, for instance, fiction and drama
is not a distinction between indirect and direct form, but between different
semiotic means of representation: in one case symbolic (language), in the
other iconic (mise en scène, performance, etc.).7
There is an inherent possibility for any representational medium to repre-
sent an instance of its own use: for example, a film that represents the filming
of a series of events (e.g. The Blair Witch Project, in which the whole film
takes the form of documentary footage shot by the hapless characters; or The
French Lieutenant’s Woman, in which a relationship between two actors par-
allels that of their characters in the film they are making). Such recursive pos-
sibilities are rarely realized in the extradiegetic instance of a film, though the
film-within-a-film is common enough. By contrast, the equivalent in linguistic
fiction encompasses the whole range and history of homodiegetic narration,
as well as intradiegetic narration (whether homo- or hetero-); that is to say,
the whole order of narrative mimesis in Plato’s sense. The reason, presum-
ably, is that verbal narration is a native human faculty, whereas cinematic
narration is a sophisticated technological extension of human narrative pow-
ers. On the other hand, the private, internal faculty of narrative articulation
(that is, self-communication) may as readily be cognitively perceptual as lin-

7. Note that the language within dramatic performance is itself represented, and sub-
ordinate to the iconic function of the medium. My position here takes up the possibility of a
trans-media model of narrative raised by Manfred Jahn (2001: 675–76) and Brian Richardson
(2001a: 691), though emphatically not by postulating the agency of a dramatic (or filmic) nar-
rator, for the reasons I first set out in “Who Is the Narrator?” (1997).
 Walsh, “Person, Level, Voice”   47

guistic—as, for example, in dreams or memories. Techniques of literary nar-

ration that strive to represent this mental faculty (interior monologue, stream
of consciousness) can be seen as straining at the limits of their medium, and
depend upon the establishment of certain representational conventions; their
filmic equivalents—representations of dream narratives, for example—are
accommodated more straightforwardly by the medium (it is notable that
dreams figure prominently in the early history of film).8 The prominence, in
verbal fictions, of the mimetic paradigm (that is, of the narrating instance
as a product of representation) may account for a non sequitur that seems
to underlie the communicative model. Represented narrations are theorized
(modeled) in terms of actual narrations—a perfectly appropriate interpre-
tative strategy (though theory often extends it well beyond its legitimately
rhetorical scope by insisting upon a systematic logical equivalence that is by
no means inherent in the analogy, and sometimes obfuscatory); then, by a
kind of back-formation, actual narrations of fiction are themselves modeled
as represented narrations—a move that requires some such hypothesis as a
default narrator and a dummy representational frame. A trans-media sense
of narrating instance can be a helpful corrective here if we reflect upon the
redundancy of treating film in that way; as if there were any theoretical divi-
dend to be gained from regarding the discourse of every fiction film not as the
film itself, but as something ontologically framed and mediated by the film
(the discourse of a filmic narrator, communicating as fact the narrative of the
film, through the medium of film, yet being only a formal inference from the
fictionality of the film).9
By viewing the narrating instance as a representational act, then, I am
affirming two things. Firstly, that the most elementary and irreducible dis-
tinction among narrating instances is not symmetrical but hierarchical, cor-
responding to Plato’s distinction between diegesis and mimesis as, on the one

8. Richardson’s discussion of memory plays (2001a: 682–83) provides further support

for this observation.
9. This is essentially David Bordwell’s point in Narration in the Fiction Film (1985),
where he argues for a view of filmic narration as the set of cues from which the viewer con-
structs the fabula, but denies that narration implies a narrator (1985: 62). His emphasis upon
the viewer’s understanding of the representational product inevitably slights the communicative
process, however, and arises from problems with the notion of fictionality that Bordwell does
not explore, despite the prominence of “fiction” in his title. Edward Branigan does discuss
communication in the context of fictionality, though preferring to “remain neutral” (1992:
107) on the merits of communication models. He finds himself caught between, on the one
hand, a sense of agency in narration—he himself speaks of “an implicit extra-fictional narra-
tion [ . . . ] the ‘voice’ of an ‘implied author’” (91)—and, on the other hand, the “anthropo-
morphic fiction” of a narrator (108–10). On this question, see also Jan Alber’s contribution in
this volume.
48   Part I: Chapter 1

hand, a first-degree act of narrative representation (Genette’s extra-hetero-

diegetic narration), and on the other hand, a second-degree narrative repre-
sentation of a narrative representation (extra-homodiegetic narration, and
all intradiegetic narration, homo- or hetero-). Second-degree narrative rep-
resentation is more prevalent in linguistic media than others, but in any case
encompasses all circumstances in which the need arises for a second sense of
voice, as represented idiom, in conjunction with the sense of voice as narrat-
ing instance, because such narrative mimesis encompasses all circumstances
in which the instance is itself an object of representation. Secondly, I am
affirming the importance of a distinction between narrative representation
and narrative transmission. Properly speaking, media cease to function trans-
missively (i.e. as technological conduits for independently semiotic content)
as soon as they themselves become semiotic—which is to say, here, represen-
tational. So it is possible in non-fiction for a narrating instance to be trans-
mitted within a framing instance (for example when a historian quotes an
eye-witness account, or when a literary biography quotes from the work of its
subject), but within fiction the appearance of such hierarchies of transmission
is itself a product of representational rhetoric. The various transgressions of
level that Genette classifies as metalepsis, whether foregrounded or inciden-
tal, are answerable only to that rhetoric: their significance is to be evaluated
in relation to the discernible import of the representational discourse, rather
than to the iron law of non-contradiction. Apart from the pragmatic, con-
textual circumstances of actual communication (including actual fictive com-
munication), the structure of narrative instanciation does not exist except as
a product of representation, and the logic of represented narrative transmis-
sion has no priority over the rhetorical emphases of the representational act
itself. Narrative theory and interpretation, then, must avoid the temptation
to impose the coherence of a systematic logical structure upon the process
of narrative representation, which is contingent and inherently protean in its
rhetorical emphasis and focus, direction and misdirection. In reading through
the represented structure of narrative transmission, narratologists should take
care not to mistake interpretative strategies for theoretical paradigms.
Where voice is used as a metaphor of idiom in narrative theory, it is a way
of bringing to the fore the mimetic dimension of the narrative discourse; its
capacity for representing the discourse of another. The represented discourse
concerned may itself be a narrating instance, or it may be a discursive act
of another kind; it may imply a particular discursive subject, or it may be
a generic representation. The defining feature of voice in the sense of idiom
is that it is always objectified, as the product of a representational rhetoric;
and in this respect it is crucial to keep it distinct from voice as instance. The
 Walsh, “Person, Level, Voice”   49

temptation is to apply the sense of voice as idiom equally to represented dis-

courses and first-degree narrative discourse, or diegesis, because intuitively,
narrative language does not only represent voices, but also exhibits voice.
In rhetorical terms, however, the function of voice in these two discursive
contexts—diegesis and mimesis—is quite different. It is true that we are likely
to focus upon a similar range of phenomena whether we attend to qualities
of voice in narrative diegesis or in a represented discourse; but the signifi-
cance of these phenomena for narrative interpretation is radically distinct in
each case. When attending to voice in diegesis we are attending to rhetorical
means (which may or may not be intentional, but are certainly authorial);
whereas in attending to voice in represented discourses we are attending to
rhetorical effects—even where these take the form of represented rhetorical
means, as for example in the case of a represented narrating instance (Hum-
bert Humbert’s, say). So in diegesis, questions of voice bear upon the sig-
nificance we attribute to the represented events, the narrative object; whereas
mimetic voice (which I am calling idiom) invites evaluation of the character
whose discourse it represents—the discursive or narrative subject. It is easy to
see why the notion of voice as idiom might seem applicable to all discourse,
but it is also apparent, I think, that such usage strains the range of a single
concept, given this disparity of rhetorical emphasis. In fact, the case in which
both senses of voice are applicable (that of a represented narrating instance)
does not obscure the difference between them, but highlights it. A narrative
told by a character, considered as idiom, contributes to the job of charac-
terization; considered as instance, it contributes to the job of narration. In
Moby-Dick, Ishmael’s narration considered as idiom tells us about Ishmael;
as instance it tells us about Ahab and the white whale. Most of the time there
is no incompatibility between these two functions, though the emphasis var-
ies widely from case to case; but fictions can include embedded narratives for
reasons that have nothing to do with characterization, and in fact the latter
may be an undesirable distraction. In such cases idiom defers to instance: this
is commonplace in film, where a character’s narration typically progresses in
quick succession from diegetic verbal discourse to voice-over, to impersonal
filmic narration (Citizen Kane, for example, provides several variations on
this technique); but consider also the Gothic novel, where the function of
elaborate narrative embedding often has much less to do with the narrat-
ing characters than with a generic strategy for bridging the gap between the
reader’s quotidian norms and the novel’s extreme, imaginatively remote sub-
ject matter (a similar strategy, in fact, to the “friend of a friend” framework
typical of urban legend). Perhaps the most extreme example is Melmoth the
Wanderer, the story of which is in part relayed via a Shropshire clergyman,
50   Part I: Chapter 1

Melmoth the Wanderer himself, the ancient Jew Adonijah and the Spaniard
Monçada to the student John Melmoth. Furthermore, these various narrating
instances span about 150 years; yet there is little attempt to distinguish the
idiom of any of them.
Even within narratives in linguistic media, voice is used in senses ranging
from the almost literal, for representations of oral discourse, to metaphorical
applications so far abstracted from orality that the term becomes virtually
interchangeable with vision: but throughout this spectrum the notion of voice
enshrines an assumption that the distinctive features of a discourse afford
an insight into an enunciating subject—that voice is expression. Indeed this
assumption provides the whole rhetorical basis for the representational evo-
cation of voice that I am categorizing as idiom: the point of representing a
character’s idiom is very much to invite inference about that character’s sub-
jectivity. Inference of this kind, however, is a much more hazardous and less
obviously relevant undertaking when the notional voice is not objectified, as
in narrative diegesis. In this case, many of the discursive features commonly
embraced by voice are equally, and perhaps better, understood as style: by
style I mean discourse features understood in their relation to meaning, as
conceived within the field of stylistics, rather than as the expression of sub-
jectivity. This substitution makes it easier to recognize that there is no inher-
ent expression of authorial subjecthood—no authentic self-presence—in such
discursive features; nor indeed is there inherently a singular authorial subject,
either in linguistic media or (more self-evidently) in non-linguistic media. Of
course stylistic analysis also relates discourse to ideological import, and this
intimates another sense of voice that remains usefully applicable to narrative
diegesis, but which relates narrative rhetoric to the constitution of a subject
position, rather than to an originary subject as such. I shall return to this dis-
tinction later.
For all forms of represented discourse, then, voice as idiom is a particular
(idiosyncratic or typical) discursive evocation of character. It is worth insist-
ing upon the correspondence between such rhetorical strategies in different
media, in order to grasp the phenomenon at a representational level rather
than a specifically linguistic level. The recursive model of represented voice
that I have invoked suggests that the place to look for analogies would not
be representations of verbal discourse in non-verbal media, but rather those
cases where a medium is used to represent an instance of its own use. I have
already suggested that the range of represented narrating instances in film
might be taken to extend from fairly literal representations of the use of filmic
apparatus to representations of the use of the medium’s semiotic channels, as
mimetic of cognitive narrative processes. On this basis represented narrating
 Walsh, “Person, Level, Voice”   51

instances, which occupy one part of the territory covered by the concept of
voice as idiom, would include dream or fantasy sequences, as in the films of
Billy Liar and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, both of which include filmic
representation of their protagonists’ day-dreams; but the same principle can
be extended to other represented discursive and cognitive acts, including any
point-of-view shot that represents the character’s own distinct cognitive-per-
ceptual subjectivity. A good example would be the recurrent shot, in Once
upon a Time in the West, of a blurred figure approaching, which turns out
to represent the memory of “Harmonica” (Charles Bronson): it is the per-
spective of his exhausted younger self (he has been struggling to support the
weight of his brother, who has a noose around his neck) as Frank (Henry
Fonda) approaches to torment him further by pushing a harmonica into his
mouth as he is on the point of collapse.
The most inclusive applications of the term voice in narrative—those that
are interchangeable with terms like vision—suggest the equal applicability of
linguistic and perceptual metaphors for the concept, which is a helpful sup-
port for the proposal that the issue of voice should be placed in the context of
representational rhetoric across all narrative media. The analogy with vision
also relates directly to another prominent metaphor in narrative theory,
which is focalization.10 But there is a crucial distinction between focalization
and the discursive features that fall under idiom. Voice as idiom always con-
structs a distinct subject (even if generic), by virtue of its objectification—that
is, its difference from the narrative diegesis (or a framing narrative mimesis)
within which it is represented. Focalization, on the other hand, constructs a
subject position only, which may or may not be aligned with a represented
character (external focalization is precisely not character centred). When
focalization is aligned with a character, its rhetorical means may very well
be a representation of idiom. Consider the relation between free indirect dis-
course (FID) and internal focalization. FID is one of the privileged topics in
discussions of narrative voice, and as represented discourse it falls within the
scope of voice as idiom. It also necessarily implies internal focalization (how-
ever momentary), though the reverse is not true: internal focalization does
not always involve FID, or any other representation of idiom. FID is a form of
discursive mimesis, whereas focalization is a feature of narrative diegesis (not,
I hasten to add, of narrative transmission: it is a product of representational
rhetoric, not an information conduit). Where FID and internal focalization

10. Fludernik, discussing the relation between voice and focalization, argues for the theo-
retical redundancy of the latter (2001: 633–35). I find it helpful to retain it, however, as an
aid to discriminating between the different senses of voice, which are often in play at the same
time.
52   Part I: Chapter 1

coincide, these are two sides of the same coin: the one oriented towards the
represented discourse, the other towards the subject position constructed by
that representation. The sense in which FID involves some kind of doubling
of voice was encapsulated in the title of Roy Pascal’s classic study, The Dual
Voice, as well as in Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of double-voiced discourse, of
which it is a very specific instance (I shall return to Bakhtin below). FID is a
representation of the idiom—the objectified voice—of another, in neutral or
parodic style, with sympathetic or ironic inflection, but in any case with a
certain distance inherent in the fact that the representing act itself remains in
the fore. The indices of the representational act persist within the representa-
tion itself in the form of temporal and perspectival markers (past-tense verbs,
third-person pronouns) that correlate with the subject position implied by the
narrating instance rather than that implied by the idiomatic voice. That is to
say, the narrating voice inhabits FID not as idiom, but as instance (overtly; it
also involves interpellation, as we shall see): FID is double-voiced only in the
sense that it is a synthetic product of distinct senses of voice.11
Whilst certain forms of focalization go hand in hand with representa-
tions of voice as idiom, such as FID, this is not the sense in which voice may
be understood as applicable to focalization in general. As idiom, voice is an
object of representation: it is offered up to the evaluative scrutiny of the nar-
rative’s audience, and so held at arm’s length. There is a structurally intrin-
sic detachment, however sympathetic, to the rhetorical function of voice as
idiom. Focalization in general, however, does not operate in this way: the
perspectival logic of a representation is not manifested as an object, but as
an implicit premise of the rhetorical focus of the representational act. That
is to say, while voice as idiom serves to characterize a discursive subject as a
more or less individuated object of representation, focalization as such func-
tions indirectly, to establish a subject position only; one that may or may
not coincide with a specific character, but which in any case is not an object
of representation but a tacit rhetorical effect of the discourse’s mode of rep-
resentation of another object. Where a specific character is involved, it is
possible to describe represented idiom as an effect of sympathetic or ironic
detachment, and focalization as an effect of empathetic subjective alignment
(as long as the term empathy can be understood as without evaluative preju-

11. The possibility of analogies for FID in other media raises interesting questions: con-
sider the way Hitchcock represents the experience of vertigo in the film of that name, in the
famous tower shot combining a zoom out and track in to maintain a constant image size, or
frame range, in a view down a (model) stairwell. The device is mimetic of James Stewart’s
struggle to make sense of his perceptions, but as an overtly filmic technique—a simultaneous
track and zoom—it is also part of the representational rhetoric of the diegetic narrative itself.
 Walsh, “Person, Level, Voice”   53

dice). The more general, abstract concept that applies to the latter effect,
however, is interpellation. This is the term I am using to define the third sense
in which voice is used in narrative theory and criticism.
Interpellation is the process by which an ideology or discourse “hails” and
constitutes individuals as subjects (Althusser 1971: 162). Narration always
involves perspectival choices, which necessarily carry with them some set of
presuppositions, ranging from the physical (spatio-temporal), through the
epistemological, to the ideological. This structure of presupposition may be
aligned with a character, as in first-person narration and internal focalization,
or it may not; but in every case the act of narrative comprehension requires
an imaginative alignment between the reader (or viewer) and the implied sub-
ject position of the discourse. Such alignment may, to an extent, be conscious
and qualified by reservations of several kinds; but to the extent that it is
unconscious, it has the ideological effect of making the implied subject posi-
tion seem to constitute the authentic selfhood of the narrative recipient.12
I have discussed the sense in which voice, as represented idiom, can be
understood as a rhetorical means of characterizing the subject of represented
discourse. It is a perfectly intelligible and modest figurative leap from there to
a usage of voice that refers to the subject position implied by any discourse
(represented or diegetic, aligned with a character or not). This is a distinct
sense of voice not only because it need not be representationally embodied
or owned by a character, or a narrating character, or indeed the author, but
also because its scope extends well beyond the category of the discursive, or
even the perspectival in any limited perceptual or cognitive sense (the domain
of focalization), to become an organizing concept for ideology. Where the
concept of voice is invoked in this sense, it seems to do quite various services
for critical orientations ranging from Bakhtinian dialogics to identity politics.
The figurative instability of the term itself is partly responsible, no doubt: it
allows for uncertain fluctuation between a usage in which the ideological sub-
ject position is a discursive construct, and a usage in which it is an authentic
manifestation of (subaltern) identity.13
In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin identifies a range of double-
voiced phenomena in narrative discourse, the dialogic nature of which is
only brought out by a theoretical approach he describes as “metalinguistic”
12. The mechanism of presupposition underlying the interpellation of subjects has been
explored by John Frow in relation to genre and Vološinov’s concept of the literary enthymeme,
or argument with an implied premise (Frow 1986: 77–78).
13. Susan Lanser’s Fictions of Authority (1992) is a useful example of the politicization of
voice from a feminist perspective. Lanser makes a clear distinction between voice in the sense
I am calling idiom and a sense that equates with instance/interpellation, though she does not
discriminate between the latter two senses.
54   Part I: Chapter 1

(181). This is because double-voiced discourse is only perceptible as a feature

of concrete, situated language use, from which the discipline of linguistics
(including formal stylistics) is necessarily abstracted. Double-voiced discourse
emerges, then, when the manifest voice of an utterance can be contextually
understood to be in dialogue with some other, implicit voice. Voice in this
second sense cannot be assimilated to voice as idiom, since it is not rep-
resented; or to voice as instance, since it is not even explicit.14 Its implicit
nature, and the fact that it is not necessarily attributable to a particular sub-
ject, or even any specific discursive form, marks this out as a sense of voice
that falls within the scope of interpellation. But clearly, since the dialogic
interaction that interests Bakhtin is ideological (ideology being the unify-
ing principle of the voice with which the discourse is engaged), the sense of
voice that applies on the explicit side of the dialogue also finds its integrity
in ideological terms, rather than as a set of formal discourse features, or the
represented idiom of a particular subject. So Bakhtin describes Dostoevsky’s
Notes from Underground as double voiced in that the Underground Man’s
discourse throughout is not only oriented towards its objects, but also in
dialogue with the anticipated response of another: “In each of his thoughts
about [the world, nature, society] there is a battle of voices, evaluations,
points of view. In everything he senses above all someone else’s will predeter-
mining him” (236). The ideological thrust of his own discourse is precisely
to establish the autonomy and integrity of the subject position he claims for
himself, yet the attempt itself involves him in an unresolvable dialogic vicious
circle: “What he fears most of all is that . . . his self-affirmation is somehow in
need of affirmation or recognition by another. And it is in this direction that
he anticipates the other’s response. . . . He fears that the other might think
he fears that other’s opinion. . . . With his refutation, he confirms precisely
what he wishes to refute, and he knows it” (229). In other words, the Under-
ground Man’s discourse projects a subject position that is nevertheless unoc-
cupiable. In general, Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony necessarily dissociates
voice from the individual subject; but without some other organizing prin-
ciple the polyphony would be too diffuse a phenomenon to be conceptually
useful—and in fact the notion of monologism, which Bakhtin retains, would
be unintelligible. The organizing principle at work in Bakhtin’s system is a
concept of voice as the relative agglomeration of ideological significance, the

14. The need to discriminate between senses of voice is apparent in the conclusion to
which Richard Aczel is led by a consideration of this specific Bakhtinian context: “Narrative
voice, like any other voice, is a fundamentally composite entity, a specific configuration of
voices” (1998: 483). If every voice is a configuration of voices, the term is being made to work
too hard.
 Walsh, “Person, Level, Voice”   55

integrity of which is not (even in the most monological instance) to be found

in the discursive subject as such, but in the projection of virtual subject posi-
tions: that is, in the mechanism of interpellation. By distinguishing between
voice as instance and as interpellation, I am contrasting a sense of the term in
which it represents the narrating agency of a particular individual or collec-
tive, with one in which it discursively insinuates an ideological nexus, a sub-
ject position with the potential to constitute a particular subject (represented
or otherwise). Such a distinction, I think, provides for a politicized sense of
voice in which the contextual production of situated political identities is at
stake (to be engaged critically, recognized or resisted), without hypostasizing
the concept as the authentic expression of such identities.
If my discrimination between the different senses of voice has any merit,
it is the result of approaching the issue with two key assumptions in mind.
First, an assumption that the senses of voice—instance, idiom and interpel-
lation—need to be conceived in terms of representational rhetoric, and in
particular the rhetoric of fictionality; and second, an assumption that the
issues covered by the term voice are not exclusively linguistic, but also semi-
otic, and relevant across the whole range of narrative media. It seems to me
that these premises are crucial, not only to expose the inadequacies of the
communicative model of narration, but also to take us beyond it. I have
insisted upon the metaphoricity of the notion of voice as the precondition
for its range of application both within and beyond linguistic media, and the
terms I have used to discriminate between senses of voice can only cover that
range themselves by virtue of a certain amount of extension and extrapola-
tion. So, I have used the term instance to refer to the sense of voice as an act
of narrative representation, which is to say the sense in which the empha-
sis falls upon communicative agency in narration. I have suggested that the
most fundamental distinction to be drawn within this category arises out of
the inherent possibility of recursiveness in narration, whereby one narrating
instance may represent another. I have shown how this distinction, which
corresponds to the Platonic distinction between diegesis and mimesis, cuts
across the fourfold typology of narrating instances Genette derives from his
oppositions between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic, and intradiegetic and
extradiegetic narration, and I have argued further for a rhetorical perspective
upon narration that does not confuse representation with transmission. My
use of the term idiom serves to group together senses of voice in which the
emphasis falls upon the discursive subject as an object of representation—
that is, where voice serves purposes of characterization. This definition pro-
vides for analogies between literary representations of voice and examples
of mimetic recursiveness in other media. It has also allowed me to make a
56   Part I: Chapter 1

principled distinction between represented voice and focalization (the latter

being a form of my third category of voice, interpellation), and to distin-
guish the different senses of voice that apply in the notably complex case of
free indirect discourse. Finally, I have used the term interpellation to refer to
those respects in which voice relates to a representational subject position
rather than to a represented or actual subject as such. Focalization, I have
suggested, is a special, restricted case of voice in this sense, in which the
subject position is defined in perceptual and cognitive terms. In the general
case, the sense of voice as interpellation embraces more abstract, ideological
constructions of a subject position, and I have shown how such a concep-
tion of voice can account for its use in the context of Bakhtinian dialogics. If
nothing else, this analysis of the metaphor of voice in narrative theory shows
that it has already gone a long way beyond words, and indeed that it is per-
haps too richly suggestive for its own good. There is little to be gained from
attempting to constrain the use of such a metaphor, but it is worth insisting
upon the need for more nuanced distinctions; the terms I have suggested
here—instance, idiom, and interpellation—offer one way of doing just that.

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Ryan, Marie-Laure (1990) “Stacks, Frames and Boundaries, or Narrative as Computer
Language.” Poetics Today 11.4: 873–99.
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Dir. Norman Z. McLeod. Samuel Goldwyn Company,
1947.
Stanzel, Franz K. (1984) A Theory of Narrative [1979]. Trans. Charlotte Goedsche. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Walsh, Richard (1997) “Who Is the Narrator?” Poetics Today 18.4: 495–513.
——— (2007) The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction.
Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.
 2
Werner Wolf

Mise en cadre­—
A Neglected Counterpart to Mise en abyme
A Frame-Theoretical and Intermedial Complement
to Classical Narratology

Positioning the Discussion of Mise en cadre in

the Field of (Post-)Classical Narratology

Part of the present “state of the art” of contemporary narratology seems to

be a paradox, for rather than presenting a static profile, this “state” of the art
is characterized by a highly dynamic situation. Indeed, narratology currently
appears to be undergoing a major paradigm shift: most narratologists have
recently announced the demise of classical, structuralist narratology and pro-
claimed the emergence of a “post-classical” era.1 The manifold alleged or
genuinely new developments in this post-classical narratology fall into three
categories. There is firstly, as the most radical and also most questionable
development, the deconstruction of narratology as a logocentric enterprise,
as epitomized by Andrew Gibson (1996). Secondly, there is a large group of
“applied narratologists,” who are principally interested in new synchronic
or diachronic reference fields. They use (and occasionally modify) the tools
provided by classical narratology for often highly topical applications to
contemporary or past reality and employ narratology for cultural-historical,

1. Cf. Herman (1997, 1999), Nünning/Nünning (2002), Fludernik (2003), Kindt/Müller

(2003), Nünning (2004).

58
 Wolf, “Mise en cadre”   59

post-colonial or feminist analyses, to mention a few examples.2 And there

is, thirdly, a group of “systematic narratologists,” who complement classical
narratology from a predominantly theoretical point of view by systematically
refining and completing its toolbox or by broadening narratology’s focus so
that it opens up towards other theoretical approaches such as possible-worlds
theory, cognitive theory3 and/or towards the non-verbal media, which are
increasingly being included in narratological studies.4 Not only the first but
also both of the latter groups move away from classical structuralist narra-
tology with its all but exclusive focus on intratextual phenomena of literary
works as static structures.
In spite of all the current rhetoric of “making it new,” one should not
forget that all of today’s narratology is based on the ground-breaking work of
the classical narratologists and that without them there would be nothing to
deconstruct, no new outlooks to engage with and no extensions of narratol-
ogy. In this spirit of acknowledging the achievements of the founders of the
discipline such as Gérard Genette, who, among many other notions, intro-
duced a fruitful typology of diegetic levels into the description of narratives
(1972: 238 f.), I would in this article like to add something to his findings, a
complement to classical narratology that is also meant as a compliment. My
contribution thus belongs to the third group of post-classical variants con-
centrating on systematic supplementation. It is inspired by both structuralist
analysis—which for me still has its merits owing to its ideal of methodologi-
cal and logocentric rigor, its attempt at terminological clarity, and its unparal-
leled contribution to the understanding of the internal make-up of (literary)
texts—and by a number of post-classical approaches, notably frame theory
and an intermedial perspective. Owing to this combination of classical and
post-classical elements, my approach could also be termed “neo-classical.”
My neo-classical complement takes its departure from the well-known
concept of mise en abyme as investigated by Dällenbach (1989), Hutcheon
(1984: 53–6) and others, and consists in highlighting a reciprocal, hitherto
neglected phenomenon, which I call mise en cadre. To be more precise, I pro-
pose to contribute to the study of what, with Jean Ricardou (using “text” in
a broad sense) one may call “similitudes textuelles” (1978: 75), that is, simi-

2. For a cultural-historical (re-)orientation of narratology see Erll/Roggendorf (2002),

Fludernik (2003), and Nünning (2004); for a post-colonial orientation see Birk/Neumann
(2002); and for a feminist or gender orientation see Allrath/Gymnich (2002) and Nünning/
Nünning (2004).
3. See Surkamp (2002), Zerweck (2002), Herman (2002, 2003).
4. See Cobley (2002), Wolf (2002b, 2004b), Herman (2004), Ryan (2004), and Abbott
(2005).
60   Part I: Chapter 2

larities that occur within a text or artefact. Thus the following discussion of
mise en cadre as a complement to mise en abyme is also a contribution to the
wide field of textual self-referentiality.5

Postclassical Intermedial and Frame-Theoretical

Approaches as Frames to Mise en cadre

Before discussing the concept of mise en cadre, I would like to briefly outline
the post-classical theoretical frameworks that will be shown to be relevant to
this concept.
My first framework is the theory of intermediality. I am referring to
“intermediality” here in its broad sense, which designates all phenomena that
involve more than one conventionally distinct medium of communication.
For my present purpose a variant of intermediality is relevant which deals
with phenomena that can be observed in more than one medium. In interme-
diality theory this variant has been called “transmediality.”6 Transmediality
is relevant also to many phenomena that have originally been described in
literary narratology, notably to the core concept of narratology, namely nar-
rativity.7 It is moreover important to “descriptivity,”8 meta-referentiality,9 to
name a few more examples, and it also extends, as we will see, to mise en
cadre. These are all phenomena that transcend, cross or go beyond the con-
fines of literary texts. The phenomenon of framing equally belongs to these
transmedial phenomena, which leads me to the second theoretical framework
requisite for the explanation of mise en cadre, namely frame theory.
Frame theory, as conceived in linguistics, social psychology and cognitive
theory (Bateson 1972, Goffman 1974), is actually the most important theo-
retical framework for my purposes. It takes its point of departure in the idea,
by now generally acknowledged, that all mental activity is ruled by cogni-
tive frames, that is, by meta-concepts, which in turn govern individual con-
cepts and thus help us navigate through our experiential and communicative

5. I am hereby enlarging on a form of self-referentiality which I first outlined in Wolf

(2001: 61–68); cf. also Wolf (2009: ch. 3.2.).
6. For transmediality as one of several basic forms of intermediality (which also includes
intermedial transposition, plurimediality and intermedial reference) see Wolf (2002a: 18 f.);
Rajewsky (2002: 206) also discusses it in the context of intermediality.
7. See for instance Ryan (2004), and Wolf (2002b).
8. See Wolf/Bernhart (2007).
9. See Hauthal et al. (2007) and Wolf (2009).
 Wolf, “Mise en cadre”   61

universe. Such frames also apply to literature and other media.10 Literature
in itself constitutes a macro-frame, and its production and reception are
shaped by further cognitive frames, for example, genres. While the applica-
tion of some, in particular seemingly natural, frames goes without saying
because they operate with implicit “default settings” and without “key-
ings” (Goffman’s term11), there are frames which require explicit keying or,
as I shall call it, framing. The various media, including literature, must be
counted among this latter group, since they form specialized modes of com-
munication based on “non-natural” frames that call for special “keyings”
or framings. “Framing” in this cognitive sense refers to a concrete coding
of abstract cognitive frames as mentally stored schemata, a coding that can
occur in mental activities as well as in physical manifestations either within
texts and artefacts or in their immediate contexts. In the temporal media,
framings in initial position are especially important since in this position
they are most efficient in contributing to, and controlling, reception process-
es.12 In what follows I will be concerned primarily, though not exclusively,
with such initial framings.
An important location of cognitive framings in literature are paratexts—
another element from Genette’s useful classical toolbox (1987). Additional
framings can be found in the framing parts of frame narratives (for instance
the “General Prologue” of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales) and as we will
see, picture frames. In literature as well as in the visual arts such framing
parts are commonly called “frames,” which could create confusion with the
frame-theoretical meaning of frame and framing as introduced above. How-
ever, neither the terminological closeness between “frame” as cognitive frame
and as physical text segment or picture frame nor the vicinity between cogni-
tive “frame” and “framings” should cause too many difficulties as long as
what is meant remains clear. From a cognitive perspective the terminological
similarity of “framing” and “frame” in their cognitive as well as common

10. For a detailed application of frame theory to literature and other media see Wolf/
Bernhart (2006).
11. See Goffman 1974: 40–82. According to Goffman the most important default setting
is what he calls the “primary framework” (1974: 21 and passim), which refers to reality; thus
it is only when a communicative exchange is not seriously meant as “real” that we need “key-
ing” as, for instance, in role playing. Goffman’s “keying,” which he defines as “[a] systematic
transformation [  .  .  .  ] across materials already meaningful in accordance with a schema of
interpretation” (45) is more restricted than my notion of “framing,” since “keying,” for Goff-
man, only marks the shift from reality to play, whereas “framing” can mark any cognitive
frame that guides mental activities.
12. For more details on frames and (initial) framing in literature and other arts see Wolf/
Bernhart (2006), in particular the introduction to that volume (Wolf 2006).
62   Part I: Chapter 2

senses may be said to point to a deeper functional relation. It consists in the

fact that the frames of frame narratives as well as picture frames are sites on
which cognitive framing (the coding of cognitive frames) frequently occurs
with particular density, even though such frames-as-text-segments—and this
is also true of paratexts and picture frames—can also serve other functions,
e.g. create suspense, give summaries of the following story, emphasize the
value of the framed work, etc. As regards the following discussion I would
like to note that I will primarily deal with framings in the cognitive sense
(in particular as physical markers of cognitive frames). More precisely, I will
concentrate on two basic forms of how framings can be realized (whether in
paratexts, the frames of frame tales, or elsewhere).
The physical codings of cognitive frames can occur either in the explicit
mode of telling (that is, by simply naming the relevant cognitive frames) or in
the implicit mode of showing (that is, by implying cognitive frames through
illustrations). The mode of telling may be illustrated by Chaucer’s “General
Prologue,” namely by the explicit mention of “myrthe” and the wish to “be
myrie” as the motivation for the host to ask the pilgrims to tell stories on
their way to Canterbury (Chaucer 1957: 773, 782). This triggers the cogni-
tive frame “entertainment” as one of the functions of the embedded tales. The
mode of showing, on the other hand, occurs when the text evokes, describes
or narrates something in a framing part which—usually proleptically, but
in some cases also analeptically—sheds light on the framed part and thus
triggers a relevant cognitive frame in the recipient’s mind that influences his
or her interpretation. In the mode of showing the establishment of similari-
ties between the framing and the framed is a particularly important device,
one that is also particularly apt for literature as an art that does not only
name concepts but also typically illustrates them. The distinction between
telling and showing can even be exemplified in the titles of literary works as
important instances of paratexts. There are titles that contain framings in the
mode of telling, for instance Defoe’s The Life and Strange Surprising Adven-
tures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner (1719), where the generic frame
“adventure story” is explicitly mentioned. By contrast, in Oscar Wilde’s The
Importance of Being Earnest (1895) the implicit mode of showing can (ret-
rospectively) be seen at work in the indirect invocation of the generic frame
“comedy” through the use of typical devices of comic entertainment: the title
establishes a similarity with humorous elements of the play by containing the
pun earnest/Ernest and by hinting at the playful non-fulfilment of expecta-
tions (seriousness as an “important” theme of a comedy!) that so conspicu-
ously informs Wilde’s witty comedy as a whole.
 Wolf, “Mise en cadre”   63

Mise en cadre as a Counterpart to Mise en abyme:

The Concept and Examples from Fiction and Painting13

The Concept of Mise en cadre as Opposed to Mise en abyme

The implicit mode of showing is particularly relevant to mise en cadre, nota-

bly when it employs similarities as a form of realizing framings in the cog-
nitive sense. One more—and more complex—example besides the title of
Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest shall prepare the ground for the
theoretical explanation of the concept in focus here: Joseph Conrad’s frame-
tale Heart of Darkness (1899), more precisely the relationship between parts
of the opening framing section and aspects of the framed text.
As is well known, the embedded story and main part of the text themati-
cally centers on the concept and in particular on the ambivalence of “dark-
ness” not only of colonized “Africa” as a fascinating and disturbingly wild
continent, whose “heart” Marlow’s expedition attempts to reach in search
of the missing Mr. Kurtz, but also of the white colonizers themselves, whose
motivations are revealed to have a remarkably dark side. Ultimately, the
“heart of darkness” of the novel’s title pessimistically refers to the human
heart, which is full of gloomy “abominations” underneath a “bright” but
deplorably thin varnish of “civilization,” consisting of moral and humanist
ideals.
This ambivalence, with an emphasis on the dark side of civilization, is
already conspicuously present in the landscape description contained in the
opening frame (Conrad 1986: 1814–18). This description serves as the cod-
ing of major elements of the text’s implied worldview and pessimistic view of
man and is thus a marker of a complex cognitive frame. The framing scene is
set on board a ship anchored in the river Thames. The river, which is made to
resemble “an interminable waterway [ . . . ] leading to the uttermost ends of
the earth” (1814–15),14 foreshadows—and parallels—the great African river
on which Marlow sets out on his expedition into the heart of the African
darkness. Even more revealing than the similarities in the spatial coordinates
is the play of light and gloom which the temporal setting provides, for the
framing scene takes place at sunset: “The day was ending in a serenity of

13. Parts of this chapter are a revised version of my interpretation of Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness in Wolf (2006: 201–3).
14. Moreover, in Marlow’s preface to his tale, the Thames is linked to the ambivalence
of the former Roman civilization, whose “[l]ight came out of this river” in the midst of the
“darkness” and “wilderness” of early Britain (1817).
64   Part I: Chapter 2

still and exquisite brilliance”—yet it is a “brilliance” tarnished in the west

by a “gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town
on earth” (all 1815). This darkness enveloping London, “the monstrous
town” (1816) at the center of the British Empire,15 is repeatedly mentioned
and forms one of the most salient features of the framing description. It is a
gloom which triggers ideas of decay and death: “[ . . . ] the sun sank low, and
from glowing white changed to a dull red without rays and without heat,
as if about to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that gloom
brooding over a crowd of men” (1815). The fact that the crew on board the
ship starts a game of dominoes referred to as “bones” (1815) chimes in well
with this image of death and decadence. All of these diegetic elements—and
there are more in this framing part—are remarkable anticipations of elements
in the ensuing hypodiegetic story and show revealing similarities with it. The
decadent ambivalence surrounding the Thames resembles the atmosphere
surrounding the African river in the embedded tale with its gloomy depictions
of the failing aspirations of colonialism and man in general. This ambivalence
also anticipates the fate of Kurtz; this “splendid pillar” of Western civiliza-
tion has apparently had experiences that lead to his famous dying words
“The horror! The horror!” (1873), an enigmatic but definitely rather gloomy
summing up of his life, which contrasts with its apparent moral splendor.
The entire framing landscape description is a fine specimen of a mise en
cadre. Like mise en abyme, this device rests on two formal criteria: 1) the
existence of a hierarchy of at least two different logical or narratological
levels; and 2) a similarity or analogy between them (including, as a liminal
case, also contrast, for contrast, in order to be discernible as such, always
implies a basic common ground between the contrasting phenomena). How-
ever, mise en cadre differs from mise en abyme in the direction in which this
similarity is made to operate. While mise en abyme is itself a distinct element
located on a lower level that sheds light on an upper level through revelatory
similarities in a “bottom up” process (Figure 2.1), mise en cadre is part of a
framing and thus upper-level structure that illuminates a lower, framed text
in a “top down” process (Figure 2.2). Narratology has failed to provide a
distinct term for this reversal of, and counterpart to, mise en abyme. I have
therefore proposed elsewhere to baptize it mise en cadre (Wolf 1999: 104,
Wolf 2001: 63–64), maintaining in the French term the connection with mise
en abyme. (Already in 1994 Guy Larroux had used the term but in a different
sense, namely that of “putting a frame around a tale.”16) My definition of the

15. The British Empire here stands metonymically for all European colonial empires. This
includes the Belgian Congo, where the African part of the embedded story is set.
16. Larroux, in his contribution to a colloquium which was held at the Université
 Wolf, “Mise en cadre”   65

term is as follows: As opposed to mise en abyme, in which a discrete lower-

level element or structure “mirrors” an analogous element or structure on
the framing higher level, mise en cadre consists of some discrete phenomenon
on an upper, framing level that illustrates—frequently, but not necessarily, in
an anticipatory way—some analogous phenomenon of the embedded level
so that a discernible relationship of similarity is established between the two
levels (compare Figures 2.1 and 2.2 below).
In frame-theoretical terms, mise en cadre can be said to concern the fram-
ing parts of texts or artefacts in which meaning is transmitted by reference
to an embedded phenomenon through some kind of similarity with it. The
meaning transmitted by mise en cadre is often a “framing” in the cognitive
sense. Technically, this is frequently an implicit kind of framing, since the elic-
iting of meaning here typically occurs in the mode of showing, not exclusively
in the mode of explicit telling (or thematization)17—combinations of both
modes being, of course, possible. Functionally, mise en cadre can be described
as a device that often serves as a framing (coding) of cognitive frames (meta-
concepts) and thus contributes to the understanding of the framed (embed-
ded) part of a text or artefact. However, mise en cadre can also serve other
purposes besides that of marking metaconcepts. Prologues—as in the case of
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet—may, for instance, include miniature narra-
tives summarizing the plot of the ensuing play. In Romeo and Juliet the con-
tent-related similarity through which the prologue foreshadows the dramatic
plot triggers the generic frame “love tragedy,” but it also provides informa-
tion concerning the action and the identification of Verona as the spatial
setting.
Interestingly, the aforementioned function of mise en cadre to code cog-
nitive frames is also shared by mise en abyme. For example, the reflections
of Philip Quarles, the novelist within Aldous Huxley’s novel Point Counter
Point (1928), at one memorable moment include extended reflections on a

Toulouse le Mirail in 1992 and which was published in 1994 (cf. Larroux 1994: 252), dis-
cusses different meanings of cadre and employs mise en cadre simply for denoting the fact of
adding a framing text to another, more important text. He thus does not distinguish mise en
cadre from “embedding” or mise en abyme and actually uses the term “enchâssement” as a
synonym of mise en cadre (247).
17. One could argue that a mere thematization, as in the mention of a generic frame in
a title, can also produce a similarity, namely a similarity of reference (for instance, “Adven-
tures” in the title of Robinson Crusoe may be said to refer to the same genre as the novel
itself, namely the novel of adventure); for practical purposes and in clarification of a perhaps
misleading earlier formulation (in Wolf 2001: 63, where I mentioned “Texttitel” in a discus-
sion of mise en cadre) I would like to exclude such liminal cases of simple and exclusively
referential “similarity” from the application of the term mise en cadre and reserve it for more
salient cases in which there is at least some kind of similarity in the mode of showing.
66   Part I: Chapter 2

new, experimental kind of novel-writing whose aesthetic principle he explains

as “the musicalization of fiction” (Huxley 1978: 302). As this term and the
illustration of musicalization given in Quarles’s metafictional reflections obvi-
ously provide a crucial key to the aesthetics underlying the entire novel (and
hence to a cognitive frame of the text), this mise en abyme can truly be said to
contain a framing in the cognitive sense).
This functional closeness of mise en abyme and mise en cadre is, of
course, no coincidence but stems from the fact that similarities (and con-
trasts) in works of literature and art are generally among the most common
devices of creating or enhancing meaning. It even happens that the coding of
cognitive frames occurs in what may be classified as a combination of mise
en abyme and mise en cadre. This is, for instance, the case in the prologue
to Longus’s classical love romance Daphnis and Chloe (2nd to 3rd century
a.d.). Here, the narrator or author tells the reader how he once, in a grove
dedicated to the nymphs, came across a beautiful picture representing various
aspects of love. He then goes on to describe this picture and uses this incident
as a motivation for his telling of the story of Daphnis and Chloe in emulation
of the painter. This charming episode unfolds a complex web of meaning and
similarities. On the one hand, it is an ekphrasis and thus within the prologue
a mise en abyme of representation. On the other hand, it intermedially antici-
pates the main theme of the main text, namely love. Owing to its multiple
manifestations including parental love, love between animals and humans,
heterosexual love, etc., as well as due to its generic value as pointing to the
ensuing love romance, the reference to love here clearly provides a cogni-
tive frame in the sense of a metaconcept. As this foreshadowing occurs on
the “upper level” of a paratext through a similarity with the main text, this
ekphrasis is also a mise en cadre with reference to this text.
The reciprocal relationships between mise en cadre and mise en abyme
discussed above can be illustrated as follows in Figures 2.1 and 2.2. The
arrows in the figures indicate the direction in which the “mirroring” implied
in both devices works in order to create or enhance meaning (this includes
the reference of framings in the cognitive sense): mise en abyme “mirrors” or
points to the “upper level,” thereby clarifying or shedding light on it bottom-
up, while mise en cadre does so with reference to the “lower level” and thus
works top-down:
Figures 2.1 and 2.2 actually illustrate particular cases of mise en abyme
and mise en cadre which are especially suited to enhancing the meaning of a
text or artefact by means of similarities. The particularity does not so much
relate to the mention of diegetic and hypodiegetic levels, which points to nar-
rative, perhaps even literary texts: the reference to this medium (fiction) is
 Wolf, “Mise en cadre”   67

Upper (e.g. diegetic) level XYZ

Lower (e.g. hypodiegetic) level xyz

Figure 2.1.  mise en abyme (in bold type)

Upper (e.g. diegetic) level XYZ ( )

Lower (e.g. hypodiegetic) level xyz

Figure 2.2.  mise en cadre (in bold type)

only incidental, and our example could in principle be taken from other, even
non-narrative texts, artefacts or media as well. The same openness applies
to the exemplification of levels through diegetic levels: other kinds of levels
would serve the same purpose, e.g. the difference between paratext and main
text in literature, or between frame and canvas in painting. Rather, the par-
ticularity in focus here refers to a special quantitative relationship between
“center’” and “periphery” or, in other words, between the dominant and
other, non-dominant parts of a text or artefact: in Figure 2.1 the “dominant”
is clearly the upper level, in Figure 2.2 the lower one. Even if ultimately the
relationship between “dominant” (in the sense of carrying the most impor-
tant text or constituent of the artefact) and other parts is not really a binary
opposition but a scale allowing for many degrees in between two poles, one
can immediately see that there are quite different possibilities of shaping
this relationship. As for representational mises en abyme in the form of dra-
matic plays within plays, Richard Hornby (1986: 33–35) aptly differentiates
between an “‘inset’ type” as opposed to a “‘framed’ type.” In the former case
the inner play is secondary and the framing play most important and longest
(as in Shakespeare’s Hamlet), while in the latter case it is the embedded play
that forms the center or “dominant” as opposed to a short framing part (an
instance of this latter case would thus be Shakespeare’s The Taming of the
Shrew). It should be noted that both of these types, including the basic rela-
tionships between dominant and other parts, are transgenerically as well as
transmedially applicable (e.g., in film), and this is not only the case in mises
en abyme but also in mises en cadre. As for the coding of cognitive frames as
an important function of both mises en abyme and mises en cadre, it can in
principle also occur in dominant mises en abyme (in Hornby’s terminology
in the “framed type”) as well as in dominant mises en cadre, yet this is not
typically so. The reason for this is that framings are functionally subservient
68   Part I: Chapter 2

to the framed and therefore also tend to be quantitatively non-dominant.

Therefore, Figures 2.1 and 2.2 represent the typical cases of cognitively func-
tionalized mises en abyme and mises en cadre, namely a mise en abyme that
is non-dominant with reference to the upper level, and a mise en cadre that is
non-dominant with reference to the lower level.

Mise en reflet as an Additional Counterpart to Mise en abyme

For the sake of completing the picture of the variants of creating meaning
in discrete textual or artistic units that are related to other parts of the same
text or artefact through similarities, one may mention that such similarities
can basically also operate on the same level. In fact, as opposed to mise en
abyme and mise en cadre, which both presuppose a difference of levels across
which the similarity operates, there is, of course, the possibility of juxtapos-
ing, for instance, similar stories or text elements on the same hypodiegetic,
diegetic or extra-diegetic level. As in the case of mise en cadre, literary theory
has not provided a term for this phenomenon—in particular when referring
to complex similarities (and not only to mere semantic isotopies or other
recurrences of individual elements, as described by Jakobson [1960] in the
context of his theory of the “poetic function”). I have therefore called this
phenomenon mise en série or mise en reflet (Wolf 2001: 66), maintaining in
the French wording again a link with mise en abyme. Mise en série refers to
cases where there are more than two instances of similar entities on the same
level; for only two instances of similar entities on the same level, the term
used was mise en reflet. As in the case of mise en abyme and mise en cadre,
the elements of such same-level parallels can be of variable quantity, but there
is here, too, a tendency to find cognitive framings predominantly in non-dom-
inant, smaller or shorter elements (in the temporal media in preceding parts)
which code cognitive frames that are relevant to a dominant (subsequent) ele-
ment—and this for the same reason as mentioned above. Therefore, mise en
reflet (with one non-dominant element carrying framings that shed light on a
dominant one) is typical here, as illustrated in Figure 2.3.
An example of this phenomenon would be the “thought-reading episode”
in E. A. Poe’s inaugural detective fiction “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
(1841). After an initial essay-like framing regarding “the analytical power”
(1908: 381) as the main prerequisite of a good detective (a framing located
on the extradiegetic level), the text illustrates master-detective Dupin’s ana-
lytical abilities by a surprising instance of his seeming thought-reading when
he analyses the mindset of his friend, the story’s Watson-like narrator, and
 Wolf, “Mise en cadre”   69

one and the same level xyz XYZ

Figure 2.3.  mise en reflet (in bold type)

provides an ex post facto rational explanation. As opposed to mise en abyme

and mise en cadre, this episode is located on the same (intra-)diegetic level as
the crime story which follows. The murder mystery of this tale clearly forms
the center of the text, but the structure and the constituents of its telling—ini-
tial mystery, the subsequent process of detection carried out by Dupin with
his “analytical power,” and the surprising final solution—are illustrated and
foreshadowed in the “thought-reading episode” in remarkable detail. Over
and above this structural similarity, this episode also furnishes important keys
to the understanding of the main story, in particular of the frame “rational
solution of mysteries through observation and analysis,” and thus constitutes
a graphic illustration of a mise en reflet with a framing function.

How to Become Aware of Initial Mises en cadre,

and the Combination of Initial and
Terminal Forms of Mise en cadre

Mise en cadre has been defined as a “discrete phenomenon on an upper, fram-

ing level” which shows a “discernible relationship of similarity” with refer-
ence to the lower level. This definition raises two problems. The first refers
to the “discernibility” of the similarity required for mise en cadre. As a solu-
tion one may point out that there are different degrees of similarity, which
result in different degrees of saliency of mises en cadre—from liminal to clear
cases.18 The second problem is that of how one can know in literary texts,
in particular at a first reading, what discrete textual element forms a mise
en cadre. This is indeed a pertinent problem, not least with reference to the
aforementioned frequent function of mise en cadre as an implicit means of
marking cognitive frames in the mode of showing (as opposed to the explicit
marking in the mode of telling). Moreover, although mises en cadre by defini-
tion occur in upper level or framing parts of texts or artefacts, they need not
be co-extensive with such framings.
In the temporal media, mises en cadre—their occurrence as well as their
extension—are particularly difficult to identify in the process of reception if
they foreshadow something that has not yet been read or perceived. In this

18. Cf. above, note 17.

70   Part I: Chapter 2

context it is helpful when such a mise en cadre, as is so frequently the case

with other implicit devices, is supported by explicit devices. We can indeed
note such explicit clarifying elements in the framing part of Heart of Dark-
ness. Shortly before Marlow starts with his tale, the narrator expressly warns
the reader that in Marlow’s storytelling “the meaning [ . . . ] was not inside
like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a
glow brings out a haze [ . . . ]” (1817). This metatextual warning not only
points to the extra attention that the reader should invest in the quest for a
hidden meaning of the embedded tale, but, through the repeated use of the
terms “haze” and “glow,” points back to the description of the increasingly
obscure landscape, in which these terms also occur19 and which, as a part
of the framing, literally “envelop[s]” Marlow’s “tale.” This explicit empha-
sis on “obscurity” foregrounds the framing description and marks it as rel-
evant for the ensuing story, thus signalling a mise en cadre. In addition, the
general emphasis on the landscape description in Conrad’s framing is such
that an experienced reader, who knows that descriptions are rarely merely
“innocent” visualizations of a setting, arguably already expects some further
relevance. This very expectation also provides a sort of “keying” for the read-
ing of Marlow’s story, a keying that later on becomes confirmed when the
similarities on the embedded level become apparent and can be related back
to the framing in a process of spatialized reading, where, to borrow from
Joseph Frank’s seminal essay, “attention is fixed on the interplay of relation-
ships [ . . . ] independently of the progress of the narrative” (Frank 1945: 44).
Of course, the confirmation of this expectation of later relevance can only be
gained after having read the embedded tale, and thus, in a temporal medium
such as the novel, initial mises en cadre are usually revealed as such only
when one has the benefit of hindsight.
This is, however, not to say that all mises en cadre occur exclusively in ini-
tial positions. Rather, they can also be observed in internal and terminal posi-
tions as well as employing a combination of these possibilities. An example
of the combination of initial with terminal mises en cadre is Mary Shelley’s
Gothic frame-tale Frankenstein (1818). The opening frame, letters of Captain
Walton to his sister Margaret in England, already displays revealing simi-
larities with the ensuing story by Frankenstein in the mode of a traditional
initial mise en cadre. Walton is about to transgress a boundary, though a
relatively harmless geographical one, since he is engaged in a quest for a
“passage near the pole” (Shelley 1968: 270). Walton’s enterprise foreshadows

19. See “A haze rested on the low shores [ . . . ]” (1814), and “the sun sank low, and from
glowing white changed to a dull red [ . . . ]” (1815).
 Wolf, “Mise en cadre”   71

Frankenstein’s fateful ethical and religious transgression of the limits imposed

on man, rivalling God as a creator of animate beings. Moreover, Walton,
like Frankenstein, acts contrary to his father’s wish,20 purports to act for the
benefit of humankind21 while in reality being propelled by an overheated
Romantic “imagination,” “enthusiasm,” and scientific “curiosity.”22 Many
of these correspondences can even be traced to verbatim parallels on the level
of discourse, to phrases and keywords in Frankenstein’s hypodiegetic tale
that are anticipated by similar expressions in Walton’s diegetic story,23 while
others remain on the story level, for instance the fatal consequences which
both men risk, owing to their “ardent curiosity” (270). While Frankenstein’s
quest for artificial life produces a monster that actually kills several people,
Captain Walton is prepared to sacrifice human lives for his mission.24 Again,
this initial mise en cadre may be said to be difficult to identify at first read-
ing, but—as in Heart of Darkness—in this case, too, the text contributes to
the discernibility of the correspondence between Walton and Frankenstein by
explicitly making Frankenstein thematize the parallel shortly before starting
with his narrative: “Unhappy man! Do you share my madness? Have you
drunk also of the intoxicating draught?” (284).
At any rate, the mise-en-cadre correspondences between an initial frame
and the embedded story which trigger the frame “guilty scientific curiosity”
become clear retrospectively when reading Frankenstein’s story, and this will
arguably sensitize the reader for possible further correspondences between
this story and the terminal frame (which reverts to Walton’s diary-like letters).
In fact, when reaching the framing part that concludes the novel the reader

20. Compare, in reference to Walton: “[ . . . ] my father’s dying injunction had forbidden
my uncle to allow me to embark in a seafaring life” (270), and Frankenstein, whose father
equally tried to keep him from what he nevertheless ventured into: “In my education my father
had taken the greatest precautions that my mind should be impressed with no supernatural
horrors. [ . . . ] I knew well therefore what would be my father’s feelings, but I could not tear
my thoughts from my employment [ . . . ]” (311, 315).
21. Walton dreams of “the inestimable benefit which [he] shall confer on all mankind to
the last generation, by discovering a passage near the pole to those countries, to reach which
at present so many months are requisite; or by ascertaining the secret of the magnet, which,
if at all possible, can only be effected by an undertaking such as mine” (270). Frankenstein
claims that: “Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through,
and pour a torrent of light into our dark world” (314).
22. Thoughts of the pole kindle Walton’s “imagination,” “curiosity,” and “enthusiasm”
(269 f.). This foreshadows Frankenstein’s “enthusiasm” (297), “curiosity” (295) and “imagina-
tion” (313) with reference to the “physical secrets of the world” (296).
23. See the preceding note.
24. He says: “[ . . . ] gladly I would sacrifice my fortune, my existence, my every hope, to
the furtherance of my enterprize. One man’s life or death were but a small price to pay [ . . . ]”
(283).
72   Part I: Chapter 2

is again confronted with correspondences. This time they are centered on the
motif of failure and its evaluation. Walton must acknowledge that his quest
for the north passage has failed and that he must return. This mirrors Fran-
kenstein’s previous double failure, as narrated in his hypodiegetic story: his
failure as a God-like creator (he has created a monster instead of a being that
is beneficial to humankind); and his failure as an avenger, for he dies before
he is able to kill his murderous creature (which ultimately commits suicide).
In combination with the cognitive frame “guilty scientific curiosity” marked
by the initial mise en cadre this could be interpreted as the coding of the cog-
nitive frame “punishment” or “poetic justice,” and both together point to a
worldview in which providential justice seems to play an important role.
However, this terminal mise-en-cadre correspondence between Walton’s
and Frankenstein’s failures, which rounds off the impact of the initial mises
en cadre, is implicated, through the parallel reactions to these failures, in a
remarkable relativization of such a providential (moral or religious) reading,
and this not only of Frankenstein’s tale but of the entire novel. Frankenstein,
in the initial frame, explicitly thematizes the similarity between Walton and
himself, and he moreover prefaces his story by giving it a clear morally didac-
tic function. Frankenstein sees his own experience as a warning for Walton,
who shares his curiosity:

I do not know that the relation of my disasters will be useful to you; yet,
when I reflect that you are pursuing the same course, exposing yourself to
the same dangers which have rendered me what I am, I imagine that you
may deduce an apt moral from my tale; one that may direct you if you suc-
ceed in your undertaking and console you in case of failure. (285 f.)

However, when we read Walton’s letters at the end, he does not appear to
have learnt anything from Frankenstein’s biography. He is aware that the
lives of his crew “are endangered” through him, but his “courage and hopes
do not desert” him (486). He even says, “I had rather die than return shame-
fully, my purpose unfulfilled” (488). When he is nevertheless finally forced
to abandon his quest, he does not do so out of moral considerations, but
merely yields to the force of circumstances in bitter disappointment: “I have
consented to return if we are not destroyed. Thus are my hopes blasted by
cowardice and indecision; I come back ignorant and disappointed [  .  .  .  ]”
(488–89). His frustration is most clearly discernible in the way in which he
answers the dying Frankenstein’s question, “‘Do you, then, really return?,’”
Walton responds with a revealing sigh: “‘Alas! Yes [ . . . ]’” (489). All of this
renders the alleged moral effect of the embedded story highly questionable.
 Wolf, “Mise en cadre”   73

The failure of Frankenstein’s didactic intention with reference to Walton thus

retrospectively sheds light on the hypodiegetic story itself, undermining its
moral effect. Frankenstein himself, shortly before his death, acts in a curiously
ambivalent way as recounted in the concluding frame. On the one hand, he
continues to emphasize the moral function of his life’s story by a final admo-
nition: “Farewell Walton! Seek happiness in tranquillity and avoid ambition
[ . . . ]” (491). On the other hand, his own moral sensibility turns out to be
curiously blunt when he says, “I have been occupied in examining my past
conduct; nor do I find it blameable” (490). He concludes by giving utterance
to a frustration similar to Walton’s when he thinks about his “apparently
innocent” ambition “of distinguishing [him]self in science and discoveries”:
“I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed” (491).
This final mise en cadre, not of a moral concern but of a re-affirmation of
the very scientific curiosity which we witnessed at work in his hypodiegetic
autobiography, again undermines the moral message of the embedded story.
The monster’s terminal appearance in the concluding frame only partly re-
establishes the text’s moral message, since it centers on his own guilt and
remorse as a “fallen angel” (494); Frankenstein’s sin, his Prometheus-like
usurpation of God’s creative power ungraced with concomitant love and
responsibility, is not mentioned. Thus it appears that the mise en cadre of
the motif of failure is combined with a deeply disturbing ambivalence in the
effect which Frankenstein as a whole arguably has on the reader. The power-
ful impact of this Gothic novel does not so much stem from its character as
a moral tale but derives from something else, above all from its capacity to
“awaken thrilling horror,” as announced in the “Author’s Introduction to the
Standard Edition” (262). Frankenstein’s didactic failure to morally convince
the fictitious recipient of his tale, Captain Walton, can thus be regarded as a
mise en abyme of the dubious moral function of the entire novel Frankenstein
for the real recipient/reader. For the novel, while succeeding as a horror story,
may also very well fail to appeal to its readers if read only with an eye to the
“moral tendencies” and the “exhibition of the amiableness of domestic affec-
tion, and the excellence of universal virtue,” which P. B. Shelley claimed for
the text in his “Preface” (268).

The Transmedial Relevance of Mise en cadre,

and an Example from Painting

As said before, mise en cadre in a terminal position, such as in the concluding

frame of Frankenstein, is less frequent in literature than its initial, foreshad-
74   Part I: Chapter 2

owing variant and therefore often gives rise, in literature, to the aforemen-
tioned problems regarding the difficulty of recognizing the structural and
thematic similarities at play. In contrast to literature—a temporal medium—
spatial media tend to facilitate the deciphering of mises en cadre since here
the limitations of a first reading do not apply and similarities between fram-
ing and framed can be accessed more or less at first glance.
As an example let us turn to Caspar David Friedrich’s Tetschen Altar
(Illustration 2.1). As is well known in art history, this altar piece was revo-
lutionary (and controversial) in that it introduced the representation of land-
scape into the genre of religious painting to the extent that the picture could
be mistaken for a “mere” landscape painting25—that is, if one disregards
the gilt frame. This frame, which was produced by the sculptor Kühn (cf.
Kemp 1995: 13) following the directions of the painter himself, contains clear
clues—“framings” in the cognitive sense—which sufficiently clarify the reli-
gious content and thus the affiliation with religious painting, provided one is
prepared to disregard narrow generic boundaries and admit possibilities of
cross-fertilizations between genres. What renders these clues especially inter-
esting in our context is the fact that some of them operate on the basis of a
mise en cadre, that is, through a significant similarity between framing and
framed. Thus, the rays emanating from the triangular symbol of God’s eye in
the lower part of the frame unmistakably echo the sun’s rays in the painting
which appear behind a curiously triangular rock and touch the cross erected
on top of it. By this framing sign of God’s eye the frame announces and sta-
bilizes the religious meaning of the framed landscape and indeed codes the
canvas a “religious painting” (as opposed to a “mere” landscape painting).
This coding occurs in a logical (albeit not topological) “top-down-process”
(from frame to framed) and is based on the device of “showing” through
meaningful similarities. It is therefore as much a mise en cadre as in the liter-
ary examples discussed above and in fact the clearest case of mise en cadre
occurring in the Tetschen Altar.
The other religious symbols on the frame (the puttos and the eucharistic
signs of bread and wine) serve the same function of providing framing signals
for the correct decoding of the framed picture. Their similarity with reference
to the picture is, however, more indirect. It primarily operates on the level
of belonging to the same paradigm of religious symbols as the framed repre-
sented as a part of the framed landscape, which amounts to a merely referen-

25. For a detailed art-historical discussion of the Tetschen Altar with special reference to
its frame see Kemp (1995: 13–15).
 Wolf, “Mise en cadre”   75

tial similarity that is analogous to the mode of “telling” in verbal texts. Yet
the shape of the ears of corn and the vine in addition mirrors the clouds in
the picture and thus adds a note of formal similarity in the mode of showing.
Owing to the fulfilment of the condition of a “top-down” similarity of dis-
crete higher level elements mirroring lower level ones, these religious symbols
of the frame can thus also be classified as instances of a mise en cadre, albeit
less obvious ones. As opposed to this, the caption “Tetschen Altar,” which
accompanies the book illustration of the painting under discussion (Mendgen
1995: 14), while equally coding the religious cognitive frame, should not be
regarded as a mise en cadre, as it does not operate on the basis of similarity in
the mode of showing but exclusively through a simple reference in the mode
of (intermedial) telling.26
As we have seen, mise en cadre, like mise en abyme, in spite of having
originally been theorized in narratology, is actually a transmedial phenom-
enon that can be observed to occur beyond narrative and even beyond ver-
bal artefacts (the same applies to mise en reflet/série). It may, for instance,
not only be found in picture frames but also in paratextual sections of films
that already show relevant elements of the film proper or in opera overtures
anticipating important themes of the ensuing opera.27 Mise en cadre arguably
has this wider relevance as a transmedial phenomenon that occurs across
many media, since, besides coding cognitive frames, it also contributes to one
of the most essential features of human artefacts, namely the production of
meaningful and beautiful similarities and recurrences. Adding this concept to
the toolbox of scholarly description of media and artefacts of various kinds
is thus not a trivial matter: it allows us to see what the concept of mise en
abyme did not highlight, namely that in artefacts similarities can work not
only “bottom-up” but also “top-down.” Becoming aware of this fact and
being able to identify it by a specific term can form a substantial contribution
to our understanding of narratives and other artefacts. It can also provide
a description of how meaning is produced and how recipients are guided
by self-referential structures of artefacts of various media, narrative and
otherwise.

26. For the classificatory problem involved here, see above, note 17.
27. For further examples see in Wolf/Bernhart (2006): e.g. on film Roy Sommer’s contri-
bution (“Initial Framings in Film,” 383–406), including examples of framing metareferences
foreshadowing highly metareferential films (401–3 on Adaptation and The Truman Show), and
on opera Michael Walter’s essay “Framing and Deframing the Opera: The Overture” (429–48).
Illustration 2.4.  Caspar David Friedrich: Tetschen Altar (1807–8)
 Wolf, “Mise en cadre”   77

Mise en cadre—
Why Yet Another Narratological Neologism? Or
Why Post-Classical Narratology Should Continue the Project of
Classical Narratology

The “scientism” and terminological rage of classical narratology in particular

has been the butt of much criticism over the past few decades.28 One must
therefore also expect such antagonism in the present context: is it really nec-
essary to introduce yet another neologism (mise en cadre) into narratology,
and a French one to boot? The answer ought to be emphatically yes! For,
in comparison to the many hundreds if not thousands of neologisms and
technical terms used in other disciplines (e.g. in medicine; even in rhetoric
there is a remarkable amount of terminology), the fuss about a few dozen
narratological terms appears exaggerated and ultimately negligible. Actually,
the real issue should not be the number of neologisms nor their euphonic or
cacophonic quality, but their heuristic value. Whether mise en cadre turns
out to be a useful concept is for the reader to judge. At any rate, it designates
a relatively frequent phenomenon, particularly regarding framing parts in
literature and other media, for which so far no precise term has been coined.
“Foreshadowing” is at once too narrow, since it is inapplicable to terminal
mises an cadre, and too imprecise, since it denotes only a function without
the device through which it is achieved. Moreover, mise en cadre (like mise en
reflet/série) forms an obvious counterpart to a well-known structural device,
namely mise en abyme, whose heuristic value is generally accepted. Generally
speaking, there should be a consensus in the humanities similar to the natural
sciences that the endeavor to classify and name phenomena is an indispens-
able prerequisite for any study meriting the name of scholarship. Moreover,
it is a well-known cognitive fact that the existence of a term triggers recog-
nition: having a concept at one’s disposal often helps one to become aware
of the corresponding phenomenon. Thus narratology should decidedly not
abandon its search for general features and its classical “rage” to describe,
classify and name them, if necessary by means of yet another neologism.
Of course, this enterprise rests on the premise that narratology—and
theory in general for that matter—are rational, logocentric projects. This
includes, for instance, the acknowledgment of narrative levels in narrative
texts on the lines of Rimmon-Kenan’s differentiation between diegetic levels
(1983: 94 f.). Detractors of logocentrism such as Gibson may sneer at this,

28. For a particularly pungent attack on “[t]he language of literary criticism and theory”
as “the ugliest private language in the world” see Currie (1998: 33) in a chapter aptly entitled
“Terminologisation.”
78   Part I: Chapter 2

but without a really valid reason. Gibson, for instance, claims that in some
texts levels are blurred, but this constitutes no argument at all against a hier-
archical text model. Rather, it is only against the background of such a model
that transgressive devices such as metalepsis (yet another term provided by
classical narratology, see Genette 1972: 243–51) can adequately be described
with reference to narratives in the first place since most metalepses form a
(really or seemingly) illogical transgression of boundaries between extra- and
intradiegetic or intra- and hypodiegetic levels. As for the majority of cases
in which such transgressions do not occur, a distinction of narrative levels
on the theoretical plane nevertheless makes sense, all the more so as the fre-
quency of frame narratives in literature requires an appropriate descriptive
terminology.
To conclude: where classical narratology has left lacunae, it is perfectly
legitimate to continue its project of systematically describing and naming
general features in literary texts. Mise en cadre provides a good example of
a useful extension of narratological terminology, all the more so as this text-
based, “structural” phenomenon can in fact be linked with post-classical
issues. As the above examples from fiction and painting show, mise en cadre
can be inscribed both into an intermedial context and into a frame-theoretical
one.29 It is in the latter framework that I originally coined the term (Wolf
1999: 104). In addition, the example from Conrad shows that mise en cadre
could also be used for a reader-response (or, transmedially speaking, recipi-
ent-response) approach as well as for post-colonial or culturalist interpreta-
tions. Yet this relevance of the concept under discussion to currently debated
specific contexts is not actually its most important point. For the core of
narratology—as of any theory—ought to be the potentially general;30 though
I hasten to add that the generalities involved in, or related to, narratives go
beyond what was in focus in classical narratology, and include, for instance,
cognitive processes elicited by narratives. It is indeed the general nature of a
theoretical concept that permits its application to, or modification for, a plu-
rality of contexts, and this certainly applies to mise en cadre, whether occur-
ring in narrative or non-narrative contexts.
As can be seen in the case of mise en cadre (or mise en reflet/série for that
matter), the study of “textual” generalities is not yet exhausted nor com-

29. It may indeed be the lack of a cognitive and a frame-theoretical awareness of classical
narratology that made it neglect mise en cadre as opposed to mise en abyme, for this latter
phenomenon can be described from an exclusively text-centered perspective.
30. I here agree with Gorman’s definition of narratology as “the study of narrative as a
set of potential features of any work” rather than “studies of individual works” (2004: 395).
 Wolf, “Mise en cadre”   79

pleted.31 I therefore would like to plead for the continuation of the narrato-
logical endeavor, not in the narrow frame of structuralist, exclusively text-cen-
tered classical narratology but in a neo-classical narratology which includes
textual features but also opens up towards non-structuralist approaches,
other media, and the various contexts in which texts are embedded—as long
as the focus on the general is maintained. In fact, this focus on the general is
what legitimates narratology as the theory of narrative artefacts in the first
place. Therefore I doubt if it really makes sense to speak of narratologies in
the plural as has become fashionable (Herman 1999), let alone of a “post-
colonial” or a “feminist narratology.”32 At best, these so-called “narratolo-
gies” are specific approaches to, and extensions of, classical narratology or
deal with special kinds of artefacts that are characterized by certain contents
and/or thematic concerns. Be that as it may, in view of phenomena such as
mise en cadre, it should be acknowledged that even after half a century of
systematic investigation of narratives something new or useful can be found
from the perspective of a general narratology. Nor should this perspective be
abandoned altogether in a (by now perhaps outmoded) postmodernist, cen-
trifugal spirit. For this perspective has revealed a rich trove of analytical tools
in the past, tools which, as the above example from painting shows, can even
be applied beyond the confines of literary narratives.33 There is every reason
to be confident that such a generalist, neo-classical approach may continue to
prove useful in the future, too.

31. Thus, to name but a few examples, the entire field of self-reference and metareference
in the media, narrative and otherwise, has only recently come into focus, and the same is true
of what actually constitutes “narrativity” across media. As a consequence, there is as yet much
to be done in these areas.
32. See Lanser (1986), Birk/Neumann (2002), and Allrath/Gymnich (2002).
33. For some possibilities but also the problems of exchanging terminology across disci-
plinary and medial boundaries see Wolf (2007).
80   Part I: Chapter 2

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 3
Alan Pal mer

Large Intermental Units in Middlemarch

Intermental thought is joint, group, shared or collective thought, as opposed

to intramental, or individual or private thought. It is also known as socially
distributed, situated, or extended cognition, and also as intersubjectivity.
Intermental thought is a crucially important component of fictional narra-
tive because much of the mental functioning that occurs in novels is done
by large organizations, small groups, work colleagues, friends, families, cou-
ples and other intermental units. It could plausibly be argued that a large
amount of the subject matter of novels is the formation, development and
breakdown of these intermental systems.1 However, this aspect of narrative
has been neglected by traditional theoretical approaches such as focaliza-
tion, characterization, story analysis and the representation of speech and
thought. Intermental thought in the novel has been invisible to traditional
narrative approaches and the many examples of intermental thought that fol-
low would not even count as examples of thought and consciousness within
these approaches. Nevertheless, this type of thought becomes clearly evident
within a cognitive approach to literature that is informed by findings in cog-
nitive, social and discursive psychology and the philosophy of mind. This
philosophical and psychological background to the concept of intermental
thought is contained in chapter five of my book Fictional Minds (2004) and
so I will not repeat it here.

1. For an excellent analysis of the small intermental unit of a marriage in a Virginia

Woolf short story, see Semino (2006).

83
84   Part I: Chapter 3

I have explored the issue of intermental functioning in George Eliot’s

Middlemarch in two previous essays. In “The Lydgate Storyworld” (2005a)
I discussed some small intermental units in the novel: chiefly the marriage of
Lydgate and Rosamond and the friendship between Lydgate and Farebrother.
In “Intermental Thought in the Novel: The Middlemarch Mind” (2005b), I
argued that one of the most important characters in the novel is the town of
Middlemarch itself. I called the intermental functioning of the inhabitants of
the town “the Middlemarch mind.” I went much further than simply sug-
gesting that the town of Middlemarch provides a social context within which
individual characters operate, maintaining instead that the town literally and
not just metaphorically has a mind of its own. To illustrate, I discussed the
construction of the Middlemarch mind in the opening few pages of the novel
and attempted to show that the initial descriptions by the heterodiegetic nar-
rator of the three individual minds of Dorothea, Celia and Mr. Brooke were
focalized through it.
This essay is my third and final one on the subject of intermental thought
in Middlemarch. Its purpose is to build on the work done previously and take
the analysis a stage further. I wish now to try to convey the subtlety of the fine
shades of intermental thought in the novel and the complexity of the relation-
ships between intermental and intramental thought in the novel. First, I dis-
cuss the various ways in which, over the course of the whole text, readers are
able to identify a number of distinct, separate Middlemarch minds within the
single intermental unit that is constructed at the beginning of the novel. After
saying a little about the techniques used for the constructions of these various
minds, I suggest that an analysis of the class structure of the town reveals the
existence of separate and well-defined upper class, middle class and working
class minds. I then refer to the complexity and fluidity of the myriad other
intermental units that occur at various points in the text and introduce a
tentative typology for the various forms of intermental focalization that are
present in the novel. The essay then turns to the roles played by individuals:
not only those inside the large intermental units who act as spokespeople or
mouthpieces for their views, but also those who, like Lydgate, Dorothea and
Ladislaw, find themselves outside these units and become the object of their
intermental judgments. These various intramental/intermental relationships
have a substantial impact on the plot of the novel.
A close study of Middlemarch reveals that George Eliot was fascinated by
the intermental process: its complexity, its causes and effects, its relationship
with individuals and so on. Thought in general and intermental thought in
particular are discussed frequently and explicitly. Group minds are capable
of great sophistication and of a wide range of cognitive functioning and they
 Palmer, “Large Intermental Units in Middlemarch”   85

cannot be understood in purely social terms. A very wide range of cognitive

terms are used to describe intermental activity in the novel: knowing, think-
ing, considering, believing, noticing, conjecturing, implying, suspecting, toler-
ating, hating, opposing, liking, wanting, and so on. These and the many other
examples that are to be found in the rest of this essay are verbs of thought
and of consciousness. The whole novel is saturated with clear evidence of a
variety of this intermental thought. The selection of this evidence that is pre-
sented in this essay comprises only a very small proportion of the total; ruth-
less pruning was required in order to present my argument in a manageable
form.
In the longer, indented quotes that follow, I will put all references to large
intermental units in italics. I do this for ease of reference, but also to empha-
size in visual form the sheer number of these phrases in the text. I sometimes
refer to the Middlemarch mind when it is clear from the context that I am
talking about the large intermental unit of the whole town; I will also refer
to a Middlemarch mind when it is clear that a subgroup of the whole town
mind is being discussed. This essay is about large intermental units and I will
not therefore be considering small units such as marriages, friendships and
families. It is no exaggeration to say that a short book could be written about
all of the intermental units in Middlemarch, both large and small.
Fictional minds form part of the storyworld or diegetic universe of the
novel. Put another way, they occur within the story, as opposed to the dis-
course, level. As I explained in chapter three of Fictional Minds, in studying
the mental functioning of characters that takes place in the storyworlds of
novels, I go beyond the information provided directly to the reader within
the categories of direct thought, free indirect thought, and thought report (or
psychonarration) that are the basis of the study of thought representation. I
go beyond them because I also take into account the information that is made
available to the reader by, for example, presentations of characters’ speech
and behavior.

The Construction of Intermental Minds

In my earlier essay on the Middlemarch mind (2005b), I identified four lin-

guistic techniques that are used in its construction. In order of degree of
directness, they are: explicit reference to an actual group, reference to a hypo-
thetical group in order to make a particular rhetorical point, use of the pas-
sive voice, and presupposition. The following passage neatly illustrates all of
these:
86   Part I: Chapter 3

(1) Doctor Sprague [a] was more than suspected of having no religion,
but somehow [b] Middlemarch tolerated this deficiency in him  .  .  .  it was
perhaps this negation in the doctor which made [c] his neighbours call him
hard-headed and dry-witted. . . .  At all events, it is certain that if any medi-
cal man had come to Middlemarch with [d] the reputation of having very
definite religious views . . . [e] there would have been a general presumption
against his medical skill. (125; emphasis added)

The passage marked (a) is the passive voice: it is the Middlemarch mind that
is doing the suspecting. The letters (b) and (c) indicate explicit references, and
(d) presupposition: a Middlemarch mind is presupposed because it is that
that would create Sprague’s reputation. Although (e) is also an example of
presupposition (a group would do the presuming), it is there to make a spe-
cific rhetorical point about intermental views on medicine and religion.
I will say a little more here about the first category: explicit references
to the names of a variety of intermental groups in the town. The most obvi-
ous names relate to the town itself. There are a number of variations: “the
Middlemarchers” (106) and (114), “good Middlemarch society” (108),
“Middlemarch company” (463) and so on. Another group of terms refers
to “the town” (112), “the respectable townsfolk” (105), etc. References to
Middlemarch can also be more specific when related to a particular context.
For example, during a discussion of the political situation, the text refers
to “buyers of the Middlemarch newspapers” (246). During consideration
of Bulstrode’s possible hypocrisy in example (18) below, there is an ironi-
cal reference to “the publicans and sinners in Middlemarch” (83). Finally, a
description of Rosamond’s popularity refers to “all Middlemarch admirers”
(114).
The Middlemarch narrator, as I mentioned earlier, is fond of explicitly
acknowledging the cognitive element in the book, particularly as it applies
to intermental cognition. Some of the many examples include “civic mind”
(65), “public mind” (99) and (246), “the unreformed provincial mind” (424)
and “many crass minds in Middlemarch” (106). There are other sightings in
the examples used below. At other times, very general terms are used such as:
“that part of the world” (151), “midland-bred souls” (71), “mortals gener-
ally” (105), “the company” at a party (107), “vulgar people” (114), “all
people young and old” (16), “public feeling required” (16), it was “sure to
strike others” (17) and so on. Some of the general and vague descriptions of
the workings of the Middlemarch mind involve oblique references to speech:
“gossip” (344), “the air seemed to be filled with gossip” (344), “the conver-
 Palmer, “Large Intermental Units in Middlemarch”   87

sation seemed to imply” (124), “general conversation in Middlemarch” (181)

and “It’s openly said” (72). Sometimes the reporting of the speech is focal-
ized through an individual: Mr. Featherstone “had it from most undeniable
authority, and not one, but many” (73), Lydgate “heard it discussed” (106)
and (an example of what David Herman [1994] calls hypothetical focaliza-
tion) “If Will Ladislaw could have overheard some of the talk at Freshitt that
morning . . . ” (433). Later, it is made clear what he would have heard being
said:

(2) “Young Ladislaw the grandson of a thieving Jew pawnbroker” was a

phrase which had entered emphatically into the dialogues about the Bul-
strode business at Lowick, Tipton and Freshitt. (533; emphasis added)

The three locations mentioned in example (2) deserve further attention. We

can only follow what happens in a storyworld if we follow the mental func-
tioning of the people in that storyworld. However, it is also essential to have
a certain amount of knowledge, however rudimentary, of the geographical or
material aspects of storyworlds. In the case of Middlemarch, we have to have
a rough idea in our heads of the fact that Middlemarch is a town surrounded
by a number of large country houses with accompanying parishes or villages.
These include Tipton (home of Mr. Brooke, and also Dorothea and Celia
before they marry), Freshitt (the home of Sir James Chettam, and Celia after
she marries), and Lowick (the home of Casaubon, and also of Dorothea after
she marries him). However, as this list shows, knowledge of the geographical
storyworld is closely linked with knowledge of the mental and social story-
world. Tipton, Freshitt and Lowick are important only because they are the
homes of these particular members of the gentry or upper classes who are
leading characters in the story. This is demonstrated by the fact that refer-
ences to the upper classes are couched in geographical terms, as in example
(2), as well as in more obviously social terms. In other words, these place
names function as metonymies for the upper classes or the gentry. Similarly,
references to the town of Middlemarch itself sometimes act in the same way
for the middle classes (as the Tankard pub does for the working classes).
As this discussion shows, the three social classes are amongst the most
prominent of the subgroups of the Middlemarch mind. The upper classes con-
sist primarily of the Brookes, the Chettams, the Cadwalladers and the other
members of the local landed gentry. The middle classes comprise the profes-
sional classes and, in particular, the various medical men. The working classes
are much less well represented and are confined mainly to Mrs. Dollop’s
88   Part I: Chapter 3

pub, the Tankard. Sometimes the text refers to the upper classes as the “Mid-
dlemarch gentry” (186), the “county” (4) or “the county people who looked
down on the Middlemarchers” (114). At other times, as in example (2), there
are more specific references to the place names: “all Tipton and its neigh-
bourhood” (151), “no persons then living—certainly none in the neighbour-
hood of Tipton” (17), “the unfriendly mediums of Tipton and Freshitt” (24),
“all the world around Tipton” (32) and “opinion in the neighbourhood of
Freshitt and Tipton” (58). Very occasionally, it is made clear that these place
names describe the middle or working classes who live in them, as in “both
the farmers and labourers in the parishes of Freshitt and Tipton” (34).
There are several passages that illustrate the class structure behind the
intermental functioning in the town. Here is one example:

(3) The heads of this discussion at “Dollop’s” had been the common theme
among all classes in the town, had been carried to Lowick Parsonage on one
side and to Tipton Grange on the other, had come fully to the ears of the
Vincy family, and had been discussed with sad reference to “poor Harriet”
by all Mrs Bulstrode’s friends, before Lydgate knew distinctly why people
were looking strangely at him, and before Bulstrode himself suspected the
betrayal of his secrets. (500; emphasis added)

This single sentence contains references to the whole social spectrum.

“All classes” can be subdivided into upper (Lowick Parsonage and Tipton
Grange), middle (the Vincy family and Mrs. Bulstrode’s friends) and lower
(Dollop’s pub).
At several points in the discourse the views of the Middlemarch mind are
arrived at through what Bronwen Thomas calls “multiparty talk” (2002)
(that is, conversations between more than two people). A surprisingly large
number of conversations, at least twenty I would say, feature three or more
people. Scenes of this sort in which Middlemarch minds are clearly at work
include the following:

A The dinner party at which Lydgate is introduced to Middlemarch society

(60–63)
B The public meeting at which the vote on the chaplaincy takes place
(126–29)
C Sir James Chettam, the Cadwalladers and Mr Brooke talk about politics
(261–67)
D Hackbutt, Toller and Hawley discuss Lydgate (308–9)
 Palmer, “Large Intermental Units in Middlemarch”   89

E The Chettams, the Cadwalladers, Dorothea and Celia have a discussion

about widowhood (378–79)
F The Bulstrode scandal breaks and comes to a climax at the public meet-
ing (494–505)
G The Chettams, the Cadwalladers and Mr. Brooke exchange views on
Dorothea’s second marriage (560–65)

There are two sorts of multiparty talk here. C, E and G are conversations
between members of the gentry that establish a set of characteristically upper-
class views on Dorothea’s marriages and on politics. By contrast, B, D and F
are the town or middle class views on Lydgate and Bulstrode (together with
the working class view in F). A is, as the text explicitly states, an uneasy mix-
ture of the upper and middle classes. In most cases, but particularly in F, there
is a mixture of direct speech in the form of dialogue and multiparty talk, and
intermental thought report. The hypothetical book on intermental thought in
Middlemarch that I referred to earlier would allow space for a detailed analy-
sis of the endlessly fascinating ways in which the intricately shifting dynamics
of the various group minds are traced in these passages. Unfortunately, there
is not enough space in this paper for such an analysis.
In addition to these big set pieces there are many short passages, often
only a paragraph in length, in which intermental views are presented. These
paragraphs act as a kind of low-level, continuous intermental commentary on
events in between the big set pieces. Several of these paragraphs are used for
illustrative purposes during the rest of this essay. In addition, there are several
dialogues that make it clear that intermental norms have been internalized to
such an extent that they have a subtle and indirect, though still profound and
pervasive, influence on intramental thought processes. This point is particu-
larly true of concerns about reputation or honor. To take just one example,
there is an important discussion between Sir James Chettam and Mr. Brooke
on the codicil to Casaubon’s will in which Mr. Brooke says:

(4) “As to gossip, you know, sending [Ladislaw] away won’t hinder gossip.
People say what they like to say, not what they have chapter and verse for
[ . . . . ] In fact, if it were possible to pack him off . . . it would look all the
worse for Dorothea.” (336–37; emphasis added)

Every word spoken by Mr. Brooke is informed by concern for intermental

approval. All their thoughts are dominated by these four, dreaded words:
what will people think?
90   Part I: Chapter 3

Subgroups and the Discursive Rhythm

Although the most common of the intermental minds at work in the town
are divided along class lines, such a distinction comes nowhere near reflect-
ing the complexity of intermental thought in the novel. A large number of
other ephemeral, localized, contextually specific groups can be identified. In
a number of the examples given in this essay, there is a bewilderingly com-
plex variety of perspectives, usually comprising the whole Middlemarch mind
together with some of its subgroups. Sometimes the subgroups appear to be
in agreement and therefore form the Middlemarch mind. They may be sepa-
rate from each other but have an overlap in membership; they may be distinct
from and even opposed to each other; sometimes sub-subgroups of a particu-
lar subgroup are featured. With the exception of the social classes, it is rare
for subgroups to be referred to more than once in different parts of the novel.
In the discussions that follow, it will be apparent that many of these groups
are mentioned in a particular context in order to provide a very specific per-
spective on a particular issue and then vanish. I was originally tempted to try
to create a kind of taxonomy or map of intermental thought in the novel by
listing all the groups mentioned and analyzing their relations with each other.
However, it took only a quick look at the large amount of evidence of inter-
mental thought in Middlemarch to see that such a task would be impossible.
The complexity would simply be overwhelming. In any event, little would be
achieved because of the contextual nature of many of the references to sub-
groups.
The narrator can sometimes be self-knowingly ironic about the impreci-
sion that is required when discussing these intermental units:

(5) At Middlemarch in those times a large sale was regarded as a kind of

festival. . . . The second day, when the best furniture was to be sold, “every-
body” was there. . . . “Everybody” that day did not include Mr Bulstrode.
(415; emphasis added)

The reader is alerted to the fact that locutions such as “everybody” and “all
Middlemarch” must not be taken literally. It is difficult to be precise about
the membership of large intermental units. Generalizations are required even
thought they may not be strictly accurate. To pursue this line of thought, the
narrator sometimes uses a particular example of intermental thought, as in
the discussion on prejudice in (6), to muse on the nature of intermentality
generally and the imprecision of descriptions of it in particular:
 Palmer, “Large Intermental Units in Middlemarch”   91

(6) Prejudices about rank and status were easy enough to defy in the form of
a tyrannical letter from Mr Casaubon; but prejudices, like odorous bodies,
have a double existence both solid and subtle. (300; emphasis added)

The narrator repeatedly points out that intermental units have a double exis-
tence which is both solid and subtle. On the one hand, the Middlemarch
minds are collections of very different individuals, all with slightly different
perspectives on the social issues affecting the town: they are subtle. On the
other hand, and at the same time, these large units come together with a col-
lective force, particularly as it appears to an individual, which is far greater
than the sum of their parts: they become solid.
It is obviously too simplistic to suggest that intermental units are so fixed
and clearly bounded that individuals are either inside or outside of them. The
situation is more complex than that. Some people occupy ill-defined positions
with regard to any intermental consensus. The vicar, Farebrother, is one who
is on the fringes of the consensus. He regrets the common view on the Bul-
strode/Lydgate affair because he likes Lydgate and, although he dislikes Bul-
strode, he does not like to see him hounded. His case is made explicit because
he is a major character and his views of the matter add to the complexity of
the whole situation. However, the reader will know that other characters will
have their own, individual views even if the precise nature of these views is
not articulated. It is an important part of the capacity of readers to compre-
hend fictional narrative that they appreciate that, when intermental thinking
takes place, significant intramental variations will always occur within it.
One example of this complex combination of intramental and intermen-
tal functioning takes place at a dinner party at the Vincey’s household. The
various members of the middle classes that are present discuss the chaplaincy.
Individual views are expressed and they are often in disagreement with each
other. People are thinking intramentally. Then: “Lydgate’s remark, however,
did not meet the sense of the company” (107). What happens here is that the
individuals who were previously expressing conflicting views coalesce and
close ranks in the presence of an outsider, as families tend to do. The presence
of a “company” with a common view is explicitly acknowledged. The party
is no longer a random collection of intramental perspectives; it becomes an
intermental unit.
The attention paid in the text of the novel to the bewildering variety of
the intricately interlocking subgroups results in the presence of a character-
istic discursive rhythm. This highly distinctive rhythm is sometimes there in
single sentences, sometimes in a group of two or three sentences, sometimes
92   Part I: Chapter 3

in a whole paragraph. Once it has been noticed, it is difficult to understand

how it could have been overlooked. The tone of this rhythm is often ironic
and even playful. The narrator regularly seems to backtrack on earlier state-
ments and qualify generalizations. The language seems to meditate on the
difficulty of pinning down precisely how these fluid and protean minds are
initially and temporarily constituted, then dissolve, reform and dissolve again
and so on. Example (1) gives a flavor of this rhythm. Other examples include
(18), (19) and (20). Note the prose rhythms contained in the following two
passages, and the careful balancing of different intermental perspectives, all
trained on a single intramental mind:

(7) However, Lydgate was installed as medical attendant on the Vincys, and
the event was a subject of general conversation in Middlemarch. Some said,
that the Vincys had behaved scandalously. . . . Others were of the opinion
that Mr Lydgate’s passing by was providential.  .  .  . Many people believed
that Lydgate’s coming to the town at all was really due to Bulstrode; and
Mrs Taft . . . had got it into her head that Mr Lydgate was a natural son of
Mr Bulstrode’s. . . . (181–82; emphasis added)

(8) Patients who had chronic diseases . . . had been at once inclined to try
him; also, many who did not like paying their doctor’s bills, thought agree-
ably of opening an account with a new doctor  .  .  .  and all persons thus
inclined to employ Lydgate held it likely that he was clever. Some consid-
ered that he might do more than others “where there was liver.”  .  .  . But
these were people of minor importance. Good Middlemarch families were
of course not going to change their doctor without reason shown. (305–6;
emphasis added)

In both (7) and (8), a view is attributed to a large group and then modi-
fied or expanded by subgroups in what might be called a “many people
thought . . . some said . . . others considered . . . ” rhythm. Example (7) is
particularly illustrative because it starts with the whole Middlemarch mind,
“general conversation in Middlemarch,” and then refers to three subgroups:
some, others, and many people. The relationship between these three groups
is unclear. Are they mutually exclusive or is there an overlap in membership?
We cannot be sure. Example (8) concerns an implicit subgroup, patients,
instead of the whole Middlemarch mind, but is otherwise similar in shape.
Again, it would be very difficult indeed to establish the precise relationship
between the various sub-subgroups of patients: those willing to change to
Lydgate for very different reasons and those who are not. Some readers of
 Palmer, “Large Intermental Units in Middlemarch”   93

this essay may be familiar with the mathematical tool of Venn diagrams, in
which circles are used to express the relationships between classes of objects.
Some of the examples in this essay could, I think, be expressed very usefully
in this diagrammatic form, but in other cases insufficient evidence is available
for their use.
The illustrated rhythm is characteristic of descriptions of intermental
thinking because it is an acknowledgment of the messiness or complexity of
this kind of mental functioning. It is invariably inaccurate and uninteresting
to claim that everybody in an intermental unit thinks in exactly the same way
for exactly the same reasons. Within the Middlemarch minds, the strength of
view on the Bulstrode/Lydgate case will vary. Some people will be convinced
of their guilt; others will be less so; some will care very much; others will
not; some will be pleased at the general view because they dislike Bulstrode
and/or Lydgate or because a loss of their status will benefit them; others will
regret it because they like one or both of them or have moral objections. The
narrator is invariably scrupulous in reflecting these fine shades of opinion.
The delicate balance between intramental and intermental thought is always
maintained.

Intermental Focalization

The points made in the previous section about the narrator reflecting fine
shades of intermental opinion can be restated in terms of the concept of focal-
ization. In what follows, I wish to propose the following three binary distinc-
tions within the umbrella term focalization that, I think, go some way to
reflecting the complexity of the passages quoted in this essay:

• intramental and intermental;

• single and multiple; and
• homogeneous and heterogeneous

The difference between intramental and intermental focalization refers to the

distinction between mental activity by one (intramental) and by more than
one (intermental) consciousness. Single focalization occurs when there is one
focalizer. The term multiple focalization refers to the presence of two or more
focalizers of the same object. These multiple focalizers may be intramental
individuals or intermental groups or a combination of the two. However, a
further distinction is required. In the case of homogeneous focalization, the
two focalizers have the same perspective, views, beliefs and so on relating to
94   Part I: Chapter 3

the object. By contrast, heterogeneous focalization reflects the fact that the
focalizers’ views differ, and their perspectives conflict one with another.
If focalization is single, then it can be either intramental (one individual)
or intermental (one single group), but it will be homogeneous and not hetero-
geneous unless an individual or group has conflicting views on an issue. One
example of single focalization is (1), where all of the italicized phrases look
superficially as though they are references to different groups, but in fact are
simply different means of naming the Middlemarch mind. Other examples
are (5) and (14). However, two points should be made. First, the majority of
the examples quoted in this essay show multiple points of view. Most display
a balance of distinct and distinctive collective views and fine shades of subtly
differing judgments. Second, a succession of single focalizations will become
multiple in a Bakhtinian effect on the reader when aggregated over the course
of a novel.
If focalization is multiple, then it can involve different individuals, or dif-
ferent groups, or a combination of both; and, completely independently, it
can be homogeneous or heterogeneous. Obviously, a fairly large number of
possible combinations can be derived from these variables. I have not con-
ducted an exhaustive analysis of the Middlemarch text to find out, but my
guess is that most combinations are contained in this novel. Of the various
examples of multiple intermental focalizations used in this essay, some are
homogeneous and some are heterogeneous. Multiple intermental heteroge-
neous focalization is featured in examples (7), (8), (11), (13) and (18). In all
these cases, the various intermental units mentioned have different views on
the object of their cognitive functioning. To be strictly accurate, examples (7)
and (11) have an intramental element as well and so are, in fact, examples of
multiple intermental and intramental heterogeneous focalization. Multiple
intermental homogeneous focalization is present in examples (2), (3), (10),
(12), (16), (19) and (22). Again, examples (12) and (22) also have an intra-
mental element.2

Individuals Inside Intermental Units

This section and the following one focus on the relationships between groups
and individuals. This one will say a little about how the leaders or spokes-
people of each of the three classes are used to present the results of the class-
based mental functioning. The next section will consider those individuals

2. For more on multiperspectivism, see Nünning (2000).

 Palmer, “Large Intermental Units in Middlemarch”   95

who are outside the social groups in the sense that they are the objects of
their intermental cognitive activity.
Both Mrs. Cadwallader and Sir James Chettam act as powerful mouth-
pieces for the upper class mind. Here is a very dramatic illustration of this
function:

(9) But Sir James was a power in a way unguessed by himself. Entering at
that moment [as Ladislaw is saying goodbye to Dorothea], he was an incor-
poration of the strongest reasons through which Will’s pride became a repel-
lent force, keeping him asunder from Dorothea. (377)

Chettam embodies or represents—or, to use the word chosen in the passage,

“incorporates”—the upper class Middlemarch mind. It is stressed that he,
thinking of himself as an individual, is not aware of this power and this may
make his role even more powerful. His mouthpiece role is also clearly evident
in example (22). Mrs. Cadwallader has a similar role. Two whole pages are
devoted to an explanation of it (39–40): “She was the diplomatist of Tipton
and Freshitt, and for anything to happen in spite of her was an offensive
irregularity” (40). When something does happen in spite of her (the refer-
ence is to Dorothea’s engagement to Casaubon instead of Chettam), “It fol-
lowed that Mrs Cadwallader must decide on another match for Sir James”
(40). This is intramental thought and action in the sense that it relates to a
single individual, but her power to take this action results from her ability to
represent the intermental consensus. Her intentionality is much more clearly
foregrounded than with the Sir James quote. “It followed” implies that it fol-
lowed for Mrs. Cadwallader in her capacity as a mouthpiece for the Middle-
march mind and, in addition, to her as an individual agent. Example (9) is
different in that Sir James does not actually do, say or even think anything.
He simply has a representative role in Ladislaw’s uneasy consciousness. At
that moment, for Ladislaw, Sir James is less an individual and more the incor-
poration of the town’s collective view.
The middle-class mind has several mouthpieces: they include at various
times Sprague, Minchin, Toller, Chicheley, and Standish. It is made explicit
that they regard “themselves as Middlemarch institutions” (126). The follow-
ing quote gives a useful insight into the dynamics or mechanics of the middle-
class Middlemarch mind:

(10) What they [Sprague and Minchin] disliked was [Lydgate’s] arrogance,
which nobody felt to be altogether deniable. They implied that he was inso-
lent, pretentious, and given to that reckless innovation for the sake of noise
96   Part I: Chapter 3

and show which was the essence of the charlatan. The word charlatan once
thrown on the air could not be let drop. (313; emphasis added)

Here we have a balance between a small intermental unit (the pair formed
by Sprague and Minchin) and the much larger middle class mind. The wider
group acquiesces in the views of the pair. The final sentence makes use of the
passive voice and presupposition to give a very accurate indication of how
views spread. People seize on an idea or a word and hang onto it. It is in this
way that the use of the term charlatan becomes attached to Lydgate. How-
ever, in keeping the intramental/intermental balance referred to above, it is
important to look out for individual characteristics. Fred’s illness “had given
to Mr Wrench’s enmity towards Lydgate more definite personal ground”
(312). Despite the fact that Mr. Wrench is a mouthpiece for a large intermen-
tal unit, his thinking here has conscious intramental shading.
Mrs. Dollop is the acknowledged leader of working class opinion. This
is a group that is based in the Tankard pub. (The middle class pub is the
Green Dragon.) As the passages describing the working classes are amongst
the weakest in the book and, to be honest, make for quite painful reading,
I will only briefly describe this topic here. Here are two passages that illus-
trate the workings of the working class mind and the leadership role of Mrs.
Dollop:

(11) This was the tone of thought chiefly sanctioned by Mrs Dollop, the spir-
ited landlady of the Tankard in Slaughter Lane, who had often to resist the
shallow pragmatism of customers disposed to think that their reports from
the outer world were of equal force with what had “come up” in her mind.
(498; emphasis added)

(12) If that was not reason, Mrs Dollop wishes to know what was; but there
was a prevalent feeling in her audience that her opinion was a bulwark, and
that if it were overthrown there would be no limits to the cutting-up of bod-
ies, as had well been seen in Burke and Hare with their pitch-plaisters—such
a hanging business as that was not wanted in Middlemarch. (305; emphasis
added)

The use of a representative voice and a supporting chorus is a notable char-

acteristic of both passages. Regarding (11), the term sanctioned is reveal-
ing of Mrs. Dollop’s power. The group-defining force of the phrase “outer
world” is also worth noting. This “outer mind” stands in clear contrast to
Middlemarch conceived as a homogeneous unit of familiarity and home-like
 Palmer, “Large Intermental Units in Middlemarch”   97

interiority. Finally, I would like to draw the reader’s attention to the occur-
rence towards the end of (12) of intermental free indirect discourse. It is clear
from some of the phrases in this sentence (“Mrs Dollop wishes to know what
was”; “as had well been seen in Burke and Hare with their pitch-plaisters”;
and “such a hanging business as that was not wanted in Middlemarch”) that
the narrator is making use of the distinctive speech and thought patterns
that are characteristic of Mrs. Dollop and her customers. I have also found
examples of this phenomenon in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies (Palmer 2004,
208–9). It seems to me that this type of free indirect thought merits further
attention.
Having examined the role of the mouthpieces of the three class-based
intermental units, I will now consider the ways in which the text presents the
judgments of units such as these on individuals who are outside of them.

Individuals Outside Intermental Units

There are a number of different ways to describe the cognitive relationships

that exist in the novel between intermental units and the individuals who
are outside them. I will refer here briefly to four. The first two (focalization,
and what I call cognitive narratives) are narratological terms; the other two
(theory of mind and attribution theory) are cognitive theories.

Focalization

As I explained above, individuals are frequently focalized through an inter-

mental mind. For example, both Dorothea’s and also Lydgate’s character and
behavior are, at various times, focalized through a variety of Middlemarch
minds. The relentlessly judgmental quality of intermental thought in the
novel remains fairly constant in relation to both of them. However, inter-
mental units can also be focalized through intramental cognitive functioning.
For example, within Lydgate’s free indirect discourse, there are references to
“Middlemarch gossip” (240) and to “the circles of Middlemarchers” (299).
Dorothea is critical of the “society around her” (23). Sometimes the two
directions are at work simultaneously. In a very good example of a reciprocal
intermental/intramental relationship, Lydgate comments that “I have made
up my mind to take Middlemarch as it comes, and shall be much obliged if
the town will take me in the same way” (112). It is clear that Lydgate talks
here of Middlemarch in the way that the narrator does in the final sentence of
98   Part I: Chapter 3

(19), as a sentient being that is capable of mental thought. In (13), the presen-
tation of power relations in the town is focalized through Lydgate:

(13) The question whether Mr Tyke should be appointed as salaried chaplain

to the hospital was an exciting topic to the Middlemarchers; and Lydgate
heard it discussed in a way that threw much light on the power exercised
in the town by Mr Bulstrode. The banker was evidently a ruler, but there
was an opposition party, and even among his supporters, there were some
who allowed it to be seen that their support was a compromise. . . . (106;
emphasis added)

Lydgate is aware that, on this question, the whole intermental mind (“Mid-
dlemarchers”) is subdivided into support for Bulstrode and opposition to him
(and perhaps those who have no strong opinion?). The support is then fur-
ther subdivided into strong and weak or “compromise” support.

Cognitive narratives

This term designates a character’s whole perceptual, cognitive, ethical and

ideological viewpoint on the storyworld of the novel. It is intended to be an
inclusive term that conveys the fact that each character’s mental functioning
is a narrative that is embedded within the whole narrative of the novel. In
“The Lydgate Storyworld” (note the title), I argued that Lydgate’s mind in
action is the Middlemarch storyworld as seen from his viewpoint. Double
cognitive narratives are versions of characters’ minds that exist in the minds
of other characters. So, one way to describe this cognitive relationship is to
say that Middlemarch minds regularly form double cognitive narratives of
individuals. Equally, double cognitive narratives can be reversed. As Lydgate’s
wish that the town take him as it finds him shows, some individuals form
their own double cognitive narratives for the Middlemarch mind.

Theory of mind

This is the term used by philosophers and psychologists to describe our

awareness of the existence of other minds, our knowledge of how to interpret
other people’s thought processes, our mind-reading abilities in the real world.
This mind reading involves readers in trying to follow characters’ attempts
 Palmer, “Large Intermental Units in Middlemarch”   99

to read other characters’ minds.3 Theory of mind is usually considered to

work in the novel on the intramental level. For example, in Persuasion, when
Wentworth is snubbed by Anne’s father and sister, Anne knows that he feels
contempt and anger; Wentworth knows that Anne knows what he feels; Anne
knows that Wentworth knows that she knows, and so on. There are other
points in the novel at which Anne and Wentworth use their theory of mind
on each other. However, it is part of the purpose of this essay to show that
groups can also use their theory of mind and, in addition, be the subject of
individuals’ theory of mind.
For example, when Lydgate takes Bulstrode out of the public meeting in
which he, Bulstrode, has been humiliated:

(14) It seemed to him [Lydgate] as if he were putting his sign-manual to that

association of himself with Bulstrode, of which he now saw the full meaning
as it must have presented itself to other minds. [And then, within Lydgate’s
free indirect discourse:] The inferences were closely linked enough: the town
knew of the loan, believed it to be a bribe, and believed that he took it as a
bribe. (504; emphasis added)

In theory of mind terms, the passage can be decoded as follows:

A Lydgate believes
B that the Middlemarch mind believes
C that Bulstrode believed
D that Lydgate was bribable
E and that Bulstrode intended to bribe him
F and that Lydgate knew of Bulstrode’s intention
G and that Lydgate did accept Bulstrode’s bribe

Note that this cognitive chain involves intermental (item B) as well as intra-
mental reasoning.

Attribution theory

An alternative approach is to use the language of attribution theory and say

that a wide range of different attributions are made by intermental minds

3. For more on theory of mind, see Palmer (2005b) and Zunshine (2006).
100   Part I: Chapter 3

regarding the supposed workings of intramental minds.4 Throughout the

novel, Middlemarch minds are focused on the construction of their views
on individuals in order to judge them and to place them. “Most of those
who saw Fred . . . thought that young Vincey was pleasure-seeking as usual”
(163). So Fred is constructed as a pleasure seeker. In example (1), Sprague is
defined as “hard-headed and dry-witted.” Attributions by large intermental
units also have a profound effect on smaller units such as marriages: “In
Middlemarch a wife could not long remain ignorant that the town held a bad
opinion of her husband” (511).
All this inter- and intramental complexity is a vital element in the develop-
ment of the various plots in the novel. The two most important examples are
the Lydgate and Bulstrode crisis and the Dorothea and Ladislaw relationship.
Example (9) shows very clearly that intermental units play a very powerful
teleological role in the plot of the novel. The point is made explicit there in
the reference to the upper class mind keeping Dorothea and Ladislaw apart,
mainly through their, and especially his, uneasy awareness of its workings.
For example:

(15) Will was in a defiant mood, his consciousness being deeply stung with
the thought that the people who looked at him probably knew a fact tanta-
mount to an accusation against him as a fellow with low designs which were
to be frustrated by a disposal of property. (417; emphasis added)

This is an example of what Bakhtin calls the word with a sideways glance:
the nervous and uneasy anticipation of the view of another. It was also appar-
ent in example (4). The end result for Dorothea and Ladislaw is that they are
kept apart for some time:

(16) His position [in Middlemarch] was threatening to divide him from her
with those barriers of habitual sentiment which are more fatal to the per-
sistence of mutual interest than all the distance between Rome and Britain.
(300; emphasis added)

The focus of intermental units on intramental thinking raises important ques-

tions regarding the construction of identity:

(17) There was a general impression, however, that Lydgate was not alto-
gether a common country doctor, and in Middlemarch at that time such an

4. For more on attribution theory, see Palmer (2007).

 Palmer, “Large Intermental Units in Middlemarch”   101

impression was significant of great things being expected from him. (96–97;
emphasis added)

Lydgate is considered to be a gentleman doctor. That is the intramental iden-

tity that is constructed by the intermental consensus. It is clear that George
Eliot was very interested in how these socially situated identities are con-
structed. For example, the narrator emphasizes in the following quote that
intermental minds tend to pay a good deal of attention to the past lives of
individuals. While a cognitive narrative is being constructed for these indi-
viduals, their origins are carefully examined for any clues relating to their
identities. Here, Bulstrode’s lack of known social origins is held to be deeply
suspicious:

(18) Hence Mr Bulstrode’s close attention was not agreeable to the publicans
and sinners in Middlemarch; it was attributed by some to his being a Phari-
see, and by others to his being Evangelical. Less superficial reasoners among
them wished to know who his father and grandfather were, observing that
five-and-twenty years ago nobody had ever heard of a Bulstrode in Middle-
march. (83; emphasis added)

Obviously, talk of a single, stable, assured social identity is misleading. All of

these groups (loud men; those persons who thought themselves worth hear-
ing; others; the publicans and sinners in Middlemarch; some; others; less
superficial reasoners among them) have their own conflicting, colliding, con-
tradictory perspectives on poor Bulstrode.
This interest in the past is even more explicit in the next example, which
is very revealing about the ways in which intermental constructions of intra-
mental cognitive narratives require individuals’ pasts to be filled out:

(19) No one in Middlemarch was likely to have such a notion of Lydgate’s

past as has here been faintly shadowed, and indeed the respectable towns-
folk there were not more given than mortals generally to any eager attempt
at exactness in the representation to themselves of what did not come under
their own senses. Not only young virgins of that town, but grey-bearded
men also, were often in haste to conjecture how a new acquaintance might
be wrought into their purposes, contented with very vague knowledge as to
the way in which life has been shaping him for that instrumentality. Middle-
march, in fact, counted on swallowing Lydgate and assimilating him very
comfortably. (105; emphasis added)
102   Part I: Chapter 3

The passage starts by saying, reasonably enough, that the Middlemarch mind
is not going to know what had actually happened to Lydgate before he arrives
in the town. But it then goes on to say that the hypothetical construction of
his cognitive narrative (in the absence of real evidence) will owe more to the
Middlemarch mind’s own needs (“wrought into their purposes”) than any
disinterested pursuit of the truth of his history. The final sentence emphasizes
the point. It will make use of Lydgate as it wishes. The need is to create a
“Middlemarch Lydgate” who can be comfortably “swallowed” and easily
assimilated. This “Lydgate” need only have a tenuous relationship with the
“real” Lydgate (whatever and whoever that is).
In example (19) above, and also in examples (20) and (22), there is a
strong emphasis on the almost mythic power of especially intermental but
also intramental minds to modify reality to their own requirements. This is
especially true, as can be seen above, of the construction of Lydgate’s cogni-
tive narrative. The intricate and messy detail of a life as actually lived by a
particular individual is smoothed and flattened out into a simple story, a nar-
rative that is molded according to the intermental desire for a simple moral
to the tale. In (20) the narrator again uses the opportunity of some complex
intermental views of an individual, this time Bulstrode, for some general mus-
ings on how intermental minds construct intramental embedded narratives:

(20) But this vague conviction of interminable guilt, which was enough to
keep up much head-shaking and biting innuendo even among substantial
professional seniors, had for the general mind all the superior power of
mystery over fact. Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was,
than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than
knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible. Even
the more definite scandal concerning Bulstrode’s earlier life was, for some
minds, melted into the mass of mystery, as so much lively metal to be poured
out in dialogue, and to take such fantastic shapes as heaven pleased. (498;
emphasis added)

This is a general assessment by the narrator of a certain type of intermental

thought. Although it is related to the workings of the Middlemarch mind,
it appears to have a wider application. The narrator seems to be suggesting
that this is how intermental systems generally work. It is heavily ironic and
rather jaundiced. It makes the obvious point that the cognitive investigations
of the Middlemarch mind are not aimed at a pure disinterested pursuit of
the objective truth. Rather, in this case, the driving force is the enjoyment of
 Palmer, “Large Intermental Units in Middlemarch”   103

mystery, as opposed to the discovery of fact. This is because fact might result
in an uninteresting narrative being constructed for the two individuals, Bul-
strode and Lydgate. Also, the resulting narrative might not suit the purposes
or interests of those people who are hostile to the two. Even the “more defi-
nite” facts are warped to fit into a more satisfying narrative. There is then a
reference to “some minds” going further “even” than the majority in modify-
ing the known facts to construct a satisfying narrative. A cognitive narrative
that fits the needs of the group is created.
In fact, in a typically explicit passage, the narrator muses on the question
of identity and warns the reader against the distortions in the construction of
intramental identity inherent in the myth-making process:

(21) For surely all must admit that a man may be puffed and belauded,
envied, ridiculed, counted upon as a tool and fallen in love with, or at least
selected as a future husband, and yet remain virtually unknown—known
merely as a cluster of signs for his neighbours’ false suppositions. (96;
emphasis added)

The myth-making process continues even after death. The following passage
occurs at the very end of the book:

(22) Sir James never ceased to regard Dorothea’s second marriage as a mis-
take; and indeed this remained the tradition concerning it in Middlemarch,
where she was spoken of to a younger generation as a fine girl who married
a sickly clergyman, old enough to be her father, and in little more than a
year after his death gave up her estate to marry his cousin—young enough to
have been his son, with no property, and not well-born. Those who had not
seen anything of Dorothea usually observed that she could not have been “a
nice woman,” else she would not have married either the one or the other.
(577; emphasis added)

Dorothea is focalized though the Middlemarch mind for ever. Her life exists
now only as a double cognitive narrative that is constructed by the Middle-
march mind. In its reductive simplicity and naivety, this narrative is com-
pletely different from the warm, sympathetic, complex one that is presented
by the narrator over the course of the novel. It is a very long way indeed from
the woman described in the final paragraph, the one whose “finely-touched
spirit had still its fine issues,” “who lived faithfully a hidden life” and who
rests in an unvisited tomb (578).
104   Part I: Chapter 3

Conclusion

I have tried in this essay to describe the various ways in which the narrator of
Middlemarch organizes the mosaic of intermentality that makes up the text
of the novel. I hope to have shown that the various intermental units are so
integral to the plot of the novel that it would be difficult for a reader to fol-
low the plot without an understanding of them. Now that the existence of
this fundamentally important aspect of the novel has been established, the
resulting lines of inquiry could go in a number of different directions. One
would be to consider in more detail the different purposes that are served
by the depictions of these units, in particular the creation of various ironic
effects. Another would be to find out how the representations of intermental
units in this novel both differ from, and are similar to, the representations in
texts written by other novelists of the same period, as well as those from dif-
ferent periods.

References

Eliot, George (1977) Middlemarch [1872]. Ed. Bert G. Hornback. New York: Norton.
Herman, David (1994) “Hypothetical Focalization.” Narrative 2.3: 230–53.
Nünning, Ansgar (2000) “On the Perspective Structure of Narrative Texts: Steps Towards
a Constructivist Narratology.” New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective. Eds. Willi
van Peer and Seymour Chatman. Albany: State University of New York Press. 219–31.
Palmer, Alan (2004) Fictional Minds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
——— (2005a) “The Lydgate Storyworld.” Narratology Beyond Literary Criticism. Ed.
Jan Christoph Meister. Berlin: de Gruyter. 151–72.
——— (2005b) “Intermental Thought in the Novel: The Middlemarch Mind.” Style 39.4:
427–39.
——— (2007) “Attribution Theory.” Contemporary Stylistics. Eds. Marina Lambrou and
Peter Stockwell. London: Continuum. 81–92.
Semino, Elena (2006) “Blending and Characters’ Mental Functioning in Virginia Woolf’s
‘Lappin and Lapinova.’” Language and Literature 15.1: 55–72.
Thomas, Bronwen (2002) “Multiparty Talk in the Novel: The Distribution of Tea and
Talk in a Scene from Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief.” Poetics Today 23.4: 657–84.
Zunshine, Lisa (2006) Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus:
The Ohio State University Press.
 Monika F ludern ik
4
Mediacy, Mediation, and Focalization
The Squaring of Terminological Circles

The issue to be discussed in this essay concerns narratological terminology,

but involves different conceptualizations of theoretical design as well. The
essay will be concerned with the relationship between Stanzel’s fundamental
defining feature of narrative, its mediacy, on the one hand, and the discus-
sions of narrative mediation or transmission (Chatman) on the other. While
Stanzel’s mediacy focuses on the mediateness of narrative, on the fact that
the story (histoire) is mediated through the narrative report (Erzählerbericht)
of a narrator figure, Chatman’s transmission and what has recently come to
be called mediation concern the process of (re)medialization of one histoire
or one version of a story into different, especially multi-medial, discourses
(e.g., film, ballet, drama, etc.). The contrasting of mediacy and mediation, as
I will explain below, thematizes different definitions of narrativity and par-
tially incompatible notions of discourse. Both models do, however, rely on a
distinction between a deep-structural histoire (story) and a surface-structural
discourse conceived in a variety of ways.
A second term of continuing prominence in narratological debates is that
of focalization. In classical models such as Mieke Bal’s, focalization is posi-
tioned as a process applying between the story and discourse levels of nar-
rative (see Chatman 1986: 22; Bal 1985: 501). Especially in Bal, focalization
does not entirely synchronize with mediation, though some media presum-
1. Bal divides her levels into fabula (≈ Chatman’s story), plot (“restructured fabula”)
and text (i.e. the words on the page). In her model, focalization mediates between the levels
of fabula and plot.

105
106   Part I: Chapter 4

ably involve the application of necessary or standard types of focalization.

While focalization and mediation can therefore be argued to have some over-
lap, focalization and mediacy seem to stand in a relationship of complemen-
tary distribution both practically and theoretically. Practically, focalization
(qua point of view) in Stanzel’s model seems unrelated to mediacy since it
does not have any direct impact on the mediating discourse of the narrator;
story is not transformed into text by means of adding a point of view. Para-
doxically, since the mediating narrator does not “see,” this opens up a “who
sees” (the reflector mode protagonist) versus “who speaks” (the narrator)
dichotomy within Stanzel’s theory. Theoretically, focalization and mediacy
clash in their role as representatives of Genette’s versus Stanzel’s models. As
the reader will remember, focalization is a term invented by Genette, whereas
Stanzel’s three narrative situations combine different types of storytelling or
narration with different types of focalization (“perspective”), and he also dis-
tinguishes between perspective and mode, both of which have affinities with
standard conceptions of point of view or focalization. Looking at the inter-
relations between focalization and mediacy in Stanzel’s model and contrast-
ing mediacy and mediation may help to bring out some underlying parallels
between a number of processes that are said to operate between the story and
discourse levels of narratives. Such an inquiry also poses the question of to
what extent a reconstruction of story from the discourse can be parallelized
with the medial transformation of stories, plots or already existing discourses
(Babes in the Wood as material, as story/plot, as a fairy tale transposed into
film, cartoon, novel, etc.).

Revisiting Story and Discourse—

No Media/cy/tion without Dichotomization

Practically all models of narrative theory repose on the story/discourse

dichotomy, and they usually approach this binary opposition as a before/after
sequence: first there is the story and then one transforms it into a discourse
by means of narration by a narrator or through a specific medium like film or
theatrical performance or ballet. The origins of the dichotomy lie in Russian
formalism and its distinction between fabula and syuzhet (Shklovsky 1965:
57; Eichenbaum 1965: 121–22; Erlich 1965: 240–1), complemented (and
muddied) by the story/plot opposition according to E. M. Forster (1990: 42;
86–87). Forster, as one remembers, contrasts story as a sequence of actions
with plot (sequence of actions plus motivation): on the one hand, The king
died. Then the queen died; on the other, The king died. Then the queen died
 Fludernik, “Mediacy, Mediation, and Focalization”   107

of grief. By contrast, the Russian formalist distinction focuses on the rhetori-

cal rearrangement of story elements in the discourse, illustrated with panache
by Shklovsky on the example text of Tristram Shandy (Shklovsky 1965). In
the later development of narratology, Forster’s distinction has been relegated
to the deep structure of narrative: plot and story are now often treated as one
level that is anterior to the narrative discourse. In fact, the journey from the
events themselves (Geschehen, cp. Schmid 2005: 241–72) to story or plot
(Geschichte), and then on to discourse has been represented in a number of
different ways as Korte (1985) and Fludernik (1993: 61–62) already out-
lined.2 In Seymour Chatman’s Story and Discourse (1978/1986), narrative
transmission in verbal and visual narrative includes focalization (1986: 158–
61). The move from the story level (focusing on existants and actions) to the
discourse level (words, images) includes not only a possible rearrangement
in the order of plot events (Genette’s anachrony in the category of tense),
but also the introduction of focalization and voice (“who sees” and “who
speaks”), the latter inflected in a medium-specific manner (see Chatman’s cin-
ematic narrator—1990: 124–38). However, the assumed inclusion of focal-
ization in narrative transmission will have to be modified in a close reading
of Story and Discourse and in consideration of Chatman’s newer distinctions
(1990: 139–60) between filter and slant (see below in the section Mediation
and Focalization).
All of these models depart from the assumption that the story is a given
and the discourse transforms it into the text as we have it before our eyes.
Such a viewpoint is generative and production-oriented, assuming that the
author creates a narrator, who then transforms the story (what happened)
into the text/discourse we read. As has been pointed out, from the reader’s
perspective the situation is entirely different since the reader reconstructs the
story from the discourse, a process that may be quite laborious in some Mod-
ernist novels like James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), William Faulkner’s Absalom,
Absalom! (1936), or even in newer fiction like Timothy Findley’s Famous
Last Words (1981) or Rudy Wiebe’s The Temptations of Big Bear (1995). All
of these narratives require heroic efforts on the part of their readers to work
out what happened in what order. What I would like to suggest, though, is
that the readerly perspective is not exclusively a reception-oriented view of
the story/discourse dichotomy, but that it also applies to the generative per-
spective. The story is always a construction and an idealized chronological
outline. On the other hand, it also needs to be noted that nonfictional narra-

2. See also the very useful summary in Wenzel (2004: 16–17), who even distinguishes
between two layers of discourse.
108   Part I: Chapter 4

tives and re-medializations clearly rely on a prior story (though not necessar-
ily referent) which they transform into discourse.
As regards authors’ compositional practices, it is now widely established
that these do not start with a story or plot and then literally choose between,
say, an omniscient or first-person narrator, between a chronological or ana-
leptic presentation of events, or between types of focalization. On the con-
trary, pronouncements by various authors on how they came to write their
stories often allow us to glimpse a character trait, a key scene, a moral prob-
lem, and so on as the germ of the later narrative, and it is from that significant
detail that decisions about presentation are developed. Specifically, many plot
details are not known to authors when they start to write, as Dickens’s out-
lines for his later novels demonstrate to perfection. Taking plot as the basic
ground on which discourse builds is therefore not very convincing from a gen-
erative perspective. The situation is, however, very different if there already
exists a prior textual source for the narrative, for instance another novel, a
fairy tale, a history book, or if the core of the story is a historical sequence of
events which has already been canonized. Under these circumstances, trans-
formations do indeed take place on a prior event sequence. Angela Carter’s
rewritings of, respectively, “Beauty and the Beast” and “Bluebeard’s Cham-
ber” in her “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” and “The Bloody Chamber” in The
Bloody Chamber (1979) obviously rely on their model reader’s familiarity
with these fairy tales; only then can he/she optimally appreciate Carter’s femi-
nist anti-patriarchal revisions of these sources. One should, however, note
that such revisions also change the plot by reintroducing different settings
and characters (the piano tuner in “The Bloody Chamber”) and therefore
actually create a new plot (and a new discourse). Since the revision of the plot
has ideological importance, it cannot be set aside as irrelevant to the creative
process.3
Historical writing is even more complicated. On the one hand, there is
no historical plot to start with, as Paul Veyne notes in his classic analysis
(1971: 13–20); on the other hand, once historians have created the “history
of the Peloponnesian War” or the “history of the rise of the gentry,” certain
key events have been selected as prominent causes and results in a sequence
whose teleological argument provides a storyline. This configuration (Ricoeur
1984–88) is then taken over by other historians, who add to the data, revise
in accordance with new sources, and summarize “the story” in their own

3. For a superb discussion of such adaptations, as she calls them, see Hutcheon (2006).
Hutcheon in particular discusses modifications of theme, character and plot as common foci
of the adaptive process (7–8), thus indicating that adaptations often tend to rewrite the story
level.
 Fludernik, “Mediacy, Mediation, and Focalization”   109

words. Historiography thus originally creates a new story, but often rewrites
it once it has been outlined; indeed, only when a completely new interpreta-
tion becomes necessary in the light of recently retrieved evidence (e.g. the
discovery and decipherment of the Linear B tablets) is a new story created.
At the same time, owing to its factual pretensions, historiography always
claims to tell a story that is prior to its narration since history is “out there”
and supposedly independent of the individual historian’s text. (Hence the
controversial status of Hayden White among historians; he seems to say that
there are no events outside the historians’ inventions of stories, though in
actual fact he merely queries our representations of those occurrences in story
form.)
The story/discourse dichotomy, and especially the priority of the story,
has recently been attacked by Richard Walsh (2001, reprinted in Walsh
2007), who also refers to a debate between Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1980)
and Seymour Chatman (1981) in Critical Inquiry. Smith’s article is a sarcastic
review of Chatman’s 1978 classic, Story and Discourse, basically from her
perspective of a speech act paradigm of speech and writing, which is Smith’s
preferred mode of approaching literature in her On the Margins of Discourse
(1978). Smith’s major point of attack is the “Platonic,” as she terms it (1980:
213), nature of story in Chatman; in her view, story, like Plato’s ideas, does
not exist in the real world. The only thing that exists is versions of stories
(specifically discourses of Cinderella), including summaries, which are also
discourses. Smith proposes that the reason that most people agree on a simi-
lar summary of a text is because they share a cultural background, have simi-
lar expectations of what a summary should look like, and deploy the same
culturally transmitted genre conventions. Chatman’s reply to Smith focuses
on the linguistic model and parallelizes story and discourse with the pho-
nological phoneme/phone dichotomy: “The phonemes are as real as their
actualizations on people’s lips; they are not some fuzzy Platonic idea but a
reality, a construct by linguists from actual utterances and attributable to the
configuration of articulational and semantic features” (1981: 804–5). Chat-
man’s more basic model is, however, Chomsky’s transformational grammar,
since the entire point of reconstructing the underlying story for Chatman is to
determine in what way the discourse differs from it (by way of anachronies,
focalization, etc.).
It makes perfect sense to contrast the messy text that one has in hand with
an idealized chronological story, which the reader needs to piece together
in order to understand the narrative. One can also sympathize with narra-
tological tendencies to logically put the story first (though not in terms of
actual production). The point of Smith’s criticism that Chatman responds
110   Part I: Chapter 4

to only vaguely and insufficiently is the one about the impossibility of find-
ing a core version of Cinderella in its many manifestations from China to
Peru. Chatman never really addresses this question. Smith, on the one hand,
clearly confuses the chronology of a hypostatized story which belongs to any
one discourse with the mythic kernel that supposedly lies beneath all Cinder-
ella retellings in three hundred and more versions of that fairy tale. Most of
the difficulties that Smith outlines actually touch on the existants (the prince
is not a prince but the captain of a ship; Cinderella is the oldest sister) or
the setting (cp. Hutcheon 2006: 7–8). The transformation of a chronological
into an anachronistic discourse, on the other hand, presupposes the posit-
ing of the same plot for both versions. Or, in other words, story/discourse
transformations only make sense for one specific story version of Cinder-
ella that is transformed into one specific verbal narrative or film or ballet.
Different discourse versions of Cinderella in different media, on the other
hand, all have their individual stories. Narrative transmission does not in fact
coincide with remedialization (the rewriting of a myth), i.e. the presumed
Ur-Cinderella responsible for the three hundred or more Cinderella tales on
this globe. Where Smith is quite correct, therefore, is in showing that a re-
medialization cannot take the original text (and its story) as a starting point
for the same kind of transformation that occurs between story and discourse
in one medium. A rewriting of fairy tales and myths such as Angela Carter’s
“The Erl-King,” “Puss in Boots” or “Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest”
produces a different discourse (and a different story).
In his brilliant “Fabula and Fictionality in Narrative Theory” (2001;
2007: 52–68), Walsh inverts the classic story before discourse dichotomy
by not only emphasizing discourse’s priority over story but by additionally
arguing that “sujet (discourse) is what we come to understand as a given (fic-
tional) narrative, and fabula (story) is how we come to understand it” (2007:
68). Rather than focusing on how we deform story to yield a rearranged
discourse, Walsh sees the construction of fabula as a means of explicating
the rhetoric of fiction: “Fabula is not so much an event chain underlying the
sujet as it is a by-product of the interpretative process by which we throw
into relief and assimilate the sujet’s rhetorical control of narrative informa-
tion” (67); rather, fabula is “an interpretative exercise in establishing repre-
sentational coherence” in order to achieve “rhetorical perceptibility” (ibid.).
The construction of fabula is needed for the interpretation of narrative (65).
Walsh here seems to first cast out story (fabula) as the rock on which narra-
tology reposes, but then ends up entrenching the distinction, yet does so from
a functionalist rather than temporal (chronology-related) or generic perspec-
tive.
 Fludernik, “Mediacy, Mediation, and Focalization”   111

To return to our problem of mediacy, mediation, and focalization. One

needs to point out that in classic narratological models, all three concepts
rely on the opposition between the two levels of story and discourse and that
the notions of mediation and focalization presuppose the priority of the deep
structural level. (I am using Chatman’s classic formulation here.) Particularly
in the case of mediation, this poses the question of whether a remediation of
one story into another in a different medium (from novel to film, from fairy
tale to Walt Disney production) actually is a remediation, or whether film
or cartoon versions do not in reality have different plots which relate to the
plots of the source narratives in a framework of family resemblances. Does
the process of selection, restructuring, and media-related refocalization create
a new story through a new discourse, or is it still the same story?
We will keep these conundra in mind. For the moment we have estab-
lished that the dichotomy between story and discourse is basic to all recent
theorizing about mediacy, mediation, and focalization. We also saw that tra-
ditional narratology in practice (though not always in theory4) saw the story
level as prior to the discourse level and conceived of the discourse as a trans-
formation of the story through the medium of narration (which then included
medial and focalizational aspects). We additionally noted that a reception-
oriented perspective would tend to emphasize the construction of story from
the discourse. A mediational focus, on the other hand, requires a stable plot
on which mediation can build and therefore seems to argue for the priority of
story. However, as I have suggested, remedialization and narrative transmis-
sion are perhaps two entirely different animals and should not be treated as
equivalent.

Mediacy versus Mediation

When Stanzel introduced the notion of mediacy in 1955, he defined it in the

following manner:

Die vorliegende Untersuchung nimmt ihren Ausgang von dem zentralen

Merkmal der Mittelbarkeit der Darstellung im Roman. Mittelbarkeit chara-
kterisiert auch die Darstellungsweise im Epos. [ . . . ] Im Roman bezeichnet

4. The de facto priority of discourse is noted by Genette when he sees the story as the
signified of the discourse. For criticism of the story/discourse relation see also Fludernik (1993:
61–63; 1994; 1996: 333–37). Wolf Schmid even has a diagram that visualizes the priority of
discourse over story by arrows pointing from narration to discourse, from discourse to plot,
and from plot to events (2005: 270).
112   Part I: Chapter 4

die Mittelbarkeit der Darstellung jenen Sachverhalt, der von den oben ange-
führten Theoretikern des Romans in der Anwesenheit eines persönlichen
Erzählers gesehen wird. [ . . . ] [D]ie Auffassung, daß echte Darstellung im
Roman nur durch die Vermittlung eines persönlichen Erzählers möglich
wäre, ist in ihrem normativen Anspruch ebenso unhaltbar wie jene besonders
von Spiegelhagen vertretene Ansicht, daß der Erzähler völlig unsichtbar zu
bleiben habe. [ . . . ] In der Regel ist die Erzählung in einem Roman jeweils
auf eine ganz bestimmte Art des Vermittlungsvorganges abgestimmt, die
dann im ganzen Roman durchgehalten wird. Sie soll hier Erzählsituation
genannt werden. Die Mittelbarkeit des Romans erhält in der Erzählsitua-
tion ihren konkreten Ausdruck: ein Autor erzählt, was er über eine Sache
in Erfahrung gebracht hat, ein anderer tritt als Herausgeber einer Hand-
schrift auf, jemand schreibt Briefe oder erzählt seine eigenen Erlebnisse, um
nur einige geläufige Einkleidungen der Erzählsituation zu nennen. Solche
Einkleidungen haben alle zum Ziel, im Leser die Illusion zu stärken, daß das
Erzählte ein Teil seiner eigenen Wirklichkeits­erfahrung sei. (1969: 4–5)

The present investigation takes as its point of departure one central feature
of the novel—its mediacy of presentation. Mediacy or indirectness also char-
acterizes the technique of presentation in the epic. [ . . . ] For these theoreti-
cians [Petsch, Hamburger, Friedemann] the novel’s mediacy of presentation
consists in the presence of a personal narrator. [ . . . ] The view that authentic
presentation in the novel is only possible through the mediation of a per-
sonal narrator is as untenable a normative criterion as the view, held notably
by Friedrich Spielhagen, that the narrator ought to remain fully invisible.
[ . . . ] As a rule, the narration in a given novel maintains a single fixed type
of mediative process throughout the work. This mediative process will be
called the narrative situation. The mediacy of the novel finds its concrete
expression in the narrative situation: one author narrates the facts he has
learned about a given subject; another appears as the editor of a manuscript;
yet another writes letters or narrates his own experiences. These are only a
few common guises of the narrative situation. Such guises all have the aim of
strengthening the reader’s illusion that the narrated material is a part of his
own experience of reality. (1971: 6–7)

In the first sentence of this passage Stanzel notes that mediation of the story
by the narrator has generally been taken for granted and was thematized by
Robert Petsch (1934), Käte Hamburger (1993), and Käte Friedemann (1965).
His contribution to these antecedents is to show that Spielhagen’s ideal
of objective, seemingly narrator-less type of narration (1883: 220) is also
 Fludernik, “Mediacy, Mediation, and Focalization”   113

mediated, and that mediation therefore manifests itself through a number of

different narrative situations.
In his 1979/1984 Theory of Narrative, the concept of mediacy is elabo-
rated differently, in relation to the opposition of narrative (epic) with drama,
a contrast that Stanzel borrows from Pfister (1977/1991):

The three narrative situations distinguished below must be understood first

and foremost as rough descriptions of basic possibilities of rendering the
mediacy of narration. It is characteristic of the first-person narrative situa-
tion that the mediacy of narration belongs totally to the fictional realm of
the characters of the novel: the mediator, that is, the first-person narrator, is
a character of this world just as the other characters are. [ . . . ] It is char-
acteristic of the authorial narrative situation that the narrator is outside the
world of the characters. [ . . . ] Here the process of transmission originates
from an external perspective, as will be explained in the chapter on “per-
spective.” Finally, in the figural narrative situation, the mediating narrator
is replaced by a reflector: a character in the novel who thinks, feels and
perceives, but does not speak to the reader like a narrator. [ . . . ] (Stanzel
1984: 4–5)

Stanzel then goes on to equate his concept of mediacy with Seymour Chat-
man’s narrative transmission (5). He proceeds to align foregrounded mediacy
with the literariness of a narrative, citing Shklovsky’s Tristram Shandy essay
as an analysis of foregrounded mediacy (6). Later in the introduction Stanzel
reduces narrative transmission (mediacy) to the narratorial function. The nar-
rator is either openly active in the telling of the tale or hides behind it:

All those narrative elements and the system of their coordination which
serve to transmit the story to the reader belong to the surface structure. The
main representative of this transmission process is the narrator, who can
either perform before the eyes of the reader and portray his own narrative
act, or can withdraw so far behind the characters of the narrative that the
reader is no longer aware of his presence. (16–17)

The main grounding of Stanzel’s mediacy thus lies in the verbal mediation
of story by means of a narrator’s act of narration. Narrative is to be distin-
guished from drama by its mediacy. Whereas the story of drama is enacted
on stage and therefore presented without mediation, im-mediately, nar-
ratives represent the events through the medium of verbal narration by a
narrator figure. Stanzel’s model therefore relies on a definition of narrative
114   Part I: Chapter 4

that excludes drama from it—a traditional German axiom that goes back
to Goethe’s genre distinction between epic, poetry, and drama as the basic
triad of available generic forms. Narrativity, in the sense of what constitutes
a narrative,5 in Stanzel therefore includes a story versus discourse distinction
and entails a mandatory narrational level figured in a narratorial persona
(who/which may, however, be laid back, covert or even seemingly non-
existent, as in reflector-mode narrative, i.e. in narratives of global internal
focalization). Such a definition does not cover nonverbal narratives or drama;
its presuppositions, especially that of the distinction between narrative, lyric,
and dramatic modes, clearly proclaim that such an extension is not desired.
Although the exclusiveness of Stanzel’s definition of mediacy, and implic-
itly of narrativity, seems restrictive today, one does well to remember that
the necessary existence of a narrator, and the privileging of the verbal act of
narration, can also be found in Gérard Genette, who has been drastically out-
spoken regarding his rejection of Banfield’s no-narrator theory:

Narrative without a narrator, the utterance without an uttering, seem to me

pure illusion [ . . . ]. I can therefore set against its devotees only this regretful
confession: “Your narrative without a narrator may perhaps exist, but for
the forty-seven years during which I have been reading narratives, I have
never met one.” Regretful is, moreover, a term of pure politeness, for if I
were to meet such a narrative, I would flee as quickly as my legs could carry
me: when I open a book, whether it is a narrative or not, I do so to have the
author speak to me. And since I am not yet either deaf or dumb, sometimes I
even happen to answer him. (Genette 1988: 101–2)

Parallelizing the reading process with narration, Genette humorously pres-

ents the activity of reading as a conversation with a person, the real author
or narrator (in the case of a fictional narrative). Genette’s model goes beyond
Stanzel’s in its focus on the level of narration, separating as it does the narra-
tor as extradiegetic communicative instance on the one hand, and the product
of his/her act of narration, the narrative discourse, on the other. It is precisely
this split in the mediacy-constituting narrational transmission between sender
and textual message that opened up the way for Seymour Chatman to include
first film and later other media under the banner of narrative transmission.
Chatman’s model allows for the existence of different “texts”—purely verbal,
filmic, dramatic. It therefore implies the hypostatizing of a narrating instance

5. In opposition to different definitions of narrativity as constructedness in Hayden White

(1981) and in opposition to narrativehood in Gerald Prince (1982, 2008).
 Fludernik, “Mediacy, Mediation, and Focalization”   115

in film, drama, and even in other visual media (see Chatman’s cinematic nar-
rator, 1990: 124–38).
Although both Stanzel and Genette anchor a narrator telling the story in
their theoretical models, for Stanzel the narrator splits into two types—on
the one hand an explicit teller in most first-person narratives and in authorial
narratives with a foregrounded narrator figure; and on the other a disguised
narrator in reflector-mode narratives, where the narrator is in abeyance,
covert, seemingly absent, and the story seems to be “told,” i.e. conveyed, by
a reflector figure (often called “narrator” by Booth, e.g. 1983: 274) or James-
ian “center of consciousness” (James 1934: xvii–xviii; 322–25). By contrast,
Genette takes the narrator as fundamental, but combines voice, mode, and
tense as inflections of the relationships between story, discourse, and narra-
tion. Although every narrative has a narrator, there is actually no real media-
tion going on since the narrator produces a discourse (the discourse being the
signified of the narration as signifier), and the discourse in turn is the signifier
of the story, its signified. This means that in Genette the one necessary thing is
a narrator, and the story emerges indirectly as the signified of the narrational
acts’ signified—it is at second remove from the story. Rather than subscrib-
ing to a story–discourse model, then, Genette’s typology actually consists
of a double dyad or triad: A. narration-B. récit [B1 discourse-B2 story]. In
fact, this dichotomy, in which one term of the binary opposition splits into a
further dichotomy, is a recurring structure in Genette’s model. His model of
focalization also works in the same way: focalization versus no focalization
(focalization zéro), with focalization divided into internal versus external.
One cannot speak of mediacy or mediation proper in Genette, but only of
signification.
Stanzel, on the other hand, entirely focuses on mediation qua mediacy,
but he exclusively means mediation through the narratorial discourse. The
point of Stanzel’s model, however, is not so much to thematize mediation—
this he really takes for granted as the constitutive feature of narrative (epic)
in contrast to drama in so far as both genres tell a story—but to propose
two types of mediacy, namely explicit and implicit or overt and covert, and
to demonstrate how the pretense of immediacy in figural narrative can be
achieved. Since the reflector character does not narrate and all narrative is
mediate, how is mediacy achieved in this type of fiction which seems to pro-
vide im-mediate access to the experience of the characters, to the story? If
immediacy were actually possible, this would militate against the axiomatic
distinction between drama and narrative, but such dramatic immediacy is
possible only rarely in dialogue novels; in figural narrative, instead, medi-
acy is camouflaged by the narrator’s sly disappearance behind the scenes,
116   Part I: Chapter 4

allowing the reflector character’s psyche to move to the foreground, supply-

ing a deictic center of orientation and evaluation. Stanzel therefore sees medi-
acy as a kind of mediation, but not in terms of different media (verbal telling
versus visual, performative narrative), but of different types of verbal narra-
tive—by means of either overt telling (first-person or authorial narrative) or
“reflecting” through the center of consciousness within a narrative discourse
that, as to its source, remains disguised, occulted, camouflaged. From the per-
spective of later Balian, Chatmanesque or Wolfian models, Stanzel’s theory is
therefore not a theory of mediation but of mediacy—in so far the translation
of Mittelbarkeit, literally “mediability,” is correct. It is a theory of the fore-
grounding or backgrounding of mediacy by the narratorial discourse, which
is the one and only medium of narrative.
Stanzel, as the quotations cited above show, alternates between a dual and
a triple manifestation of mediacy. On the one hand, the three narrative situa-
tions (first-person, authorial, and figural) are said to instantiate mediacy; on
the other hand, the modal difference between telling and showing (reflecting)
is constitutive of mediacy. This inconsistency could be related to the existence
of two levels of mediacy. At some points, as in our first quotation (1969:
4–5), Stanzel seems to focus on the generic forms of mediacy, including the
diary, the editor’s report and other frames in the various manifestations of
mediacy; at other times the emphasis is on the (missing) narrator persona and
veiled act of narration or on the foregrounding/backgrounding of narrato-
rial mediation. From that latter perspective, the triad of narrative situations
begins to slide into a dichotomy, since both first-person and authorial narra-
tives have a clear narrator persona, with the exception (in Stanzel’s model) of
the autonomous interior monologue. Cohn’s suggestion to reduce the three
axes in Stanzel’s Theory of Narrative therefore articulates the unease trig-
gered by the slide between a clear triadic and an equally obvious dual set-up
within the model (Cohn 1981).
My own model in Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology extends Stanzel’s the-
oretical edifice by revising two of his presuppositions. First, it became clear to
me that reflector-mode narrative substitutes consciousness for narration; the
medium of figural narrative is therefore less a covert narrator hiding behind
the mind of a protagonist than a different mode of cognitive conceptualizing
of characters’ experience—telling versus experiencing. This then led to my
addition of two further such frames—based on conversational narrative for-
mats posited as prototypical and therefore of cognitive salience: viewing and
reflecting (ideating) (see Fludernik 1996: 43–52). In my model there are thus
four different ways in which forms of consciousness mediate narrative expe-
rience within frames. Later in the book I also integrated readers’ immersive
 Fludernik, “Mediacy, Mediation, and Focalization”   117

projections into that model when discussing Banfield’s empty center and Stan-
zel’s reflectorization technique (his Personalisierung) in contrast with what I
called forms of figuralization (using Stanzel’s English term for his personale
Erzählsituation, i.e. the figural narrative situation).6
Because viewing and experiencing are not based on discourse or language,
this model additionally opened the way to a broader understanding of nar-
rative and narrativity, which no longer remained limited to verbal narra-
tive. Note, however, that the mediation of experientiality through cognitive
frames, i.e. mediacy, is not at all equivalent or even comparable to media-
related mediation per se—different cognitive frames may come into play in
different media. The model therefore welcomes considerations of mediation,
but without dropping the notion of mediacy as a separate category. For these
reasons, it is important to continue to distinguish between the concepts of
mediacy and mediation.

Mediation and Focalization

Whereas, as we have seen, Genette’s focalization can be added to any possible

narrative, Stanzel’s internal perspective is central to figural narrative texts,
combining with the reflector mode: grosso modo one can say that mediacy
comes either in teller or in reflector mode, and if in the latter, one has internal
focalization à la Genette. (It is not important for our argument here that Gen-
ette’s internal focalization, Stanzel’s internal perspective, Stanzel’s figural nar-
rative and his reflector mode do not all refer to precisely the same thing and
have some very jagged edges.7) Since Stanzel excludes all nonverbal narratives

6. See Fludernik (1996: 178–221).

7. Stanzel’s perspective “involves the control of the process of apperception which the
reader performs in order to obtain a concrete perceptual image of the fictional reality” (1984:
111); thus “[i]nternal perspective prevails when the point of view from which the narrated
world is perceived or represented is located in the main character or in the centre of events”
(ibid.). Reflector-mode narrative, which also covers first-person texts, is marked by “a close
correspondence between internal perspective and the mode dominated by a reflector charac-
ter” (141), while the figural narrative situation contains a dominance of internal perspective
with a prevailing reflector mode. But first-person reflector-mode narratives in Stanzel belong
to the first-person narrative situation. As for Genette’s focalization, it is defined through a
restriction of point of view within the narrative world (Genette 1972/1980: 185–6). This
internal focalization seems to correspond almost precisely with Stanzel’s internal perspective,
except that their opposites, external focalization and external perspective, differ radically.
Internal focalization in Genette contrasts with external focalization—an external view of the
fictional world which disallows insight into characters’ minds; whereas Stanzel’s external per-
spective characterizes the narrator’s all-encompassing vision on the fictional world including
“his” omniscient ability to look into the protagonists’ minds. Thus, Fielding’s depiction of his
118   Part I: Chapter 4

from consideration, the question of how to treat focalization in film does

not pose itself within his theory. Nor is there a question of where to locate
focalization. Since Stanzel only has one type of “focalization,” namely reflec-
tor mode narrative,8 which is one of two ways in which mediacy manifests
itself, focalization therefore clearly “occurs” between the story level and the
discourse level. Hence, it comes to rank with those transformations usually
positioned in this space: the rearrangement of chronology (Genette’s category
order) and the selection and compression process (Günther Müller’s Erzähl-
zeit versus erzählte Zeit [1948]).9
Once one starts to consider narrative as existing in several media, how-
ever, a long list of theoretical imponderables emerges; these have given rise
to a number of diverse solutions. The possible relations between focalization
and mediation clearly depend on which of these solutions one has espoused.
Let us start with Chatman since he is the prime exponent of the story
and discourse definition of narrative, and the inventor, or at least popular-
izer, of the cinematic narrator concept. For Chatman, “point of view” (1986:
151–61) comes in three forms: perceptual point of view, conceptual point of
view and interest point of view (1978: 152). Perceptual point of view refers
to what a character sees; conceptual point of view refers to cognition and
attitude; and interest point of view to the “passive state” (152) of being con-
cerned, of practical interest, or life-orientation. Already in Story and Dis-
course, Chatman relates point of view to the story level: “point of view is the
physical place or ideological situation or practical life-orientation to which
narrative events stand in relation” (153; my emphasis). He clearly opposes
point of view and voice: “Perception, conception, and interest points of view
are quite independent of the manner in which they are expressed. [ . . . ] Thus
point of view is in the story (which is the character’s), but voice is always out-
side, in the discourse” (154; Chatman’s emphasis). Rather than seeing point
of view constitutively as part of a transformation process, Chatman actually
locates character’s point of view in the story, and allows the narrator a sepa-
rate point of view which is separate from the action of telling, though still
part of the transformation from story into discourse, I suppose.
In Chatman’s Coming to Terms (1990), the narrator is no longer allowed
any point of view, but may have a slant, whereas characters’ point of view
characters’ consciousness would be global zero focalization (plus extradiegetic heterodiegetic
narrative), possibly with minimal pockets of internal focalization, in Genette, but external
perspective (and hence authorial narrative situation) in Stanzel.
8. In heterodiegetic narrative internal perspective coincides with the reflector mode; in
homodiegetic narrative, internal perspective is just part of the dynamics of the first-person
narrative situation.
9. In Genette, time of narration versus narrated time is subsumed under duration.
 Fludernik, “Mediacy, Mediation, and Focalization”   119

becomes a filter through which they perceive the narrative world (1990:
139–60). Chatman’s revised model foregrounds ideology,10 and it allows per-
ceptual point of view only on the level of the characters: “I propose slant to
name the narrator’s attitudes and other mental nuances appropriate to the
report function of discourse, and filter to name the much wider range of men-
tal activity experienced by characters in the story world—perceptions, cog-
nitions, attitudes, emotions, memories, fantasies, and the like” (1990: 143;
Chatman’s emphasis). Note that in Coming to Terms the point of view on
the narratorial level is now subsumed under the “function of discourse” and
not a stance superimposed on the narrational act. Focalization, perceptual
and cognitive or ideological, therefore only relates to characters—there is
no external focalization as in Genette (Chatman 1990: 145)! It has nothing
to do with the point from which events are perceived but in fact seems to
be equivalent to Stanzel’s reflector-mode: characters’ point of view is a filter
through which the characters “experience” themselves and the world around
them. Filter, in fact, “captur[es]” the “mediating function of a character’s
consciousness” (144). It therefore emerges that the model which was most
crucially responsible for entrenching the story/discourse dichotomy actu-
ally does not integrate focalization into it. In Chatman (1990) focalization
does not arise from transformations between story and discourse, despite the
explicit statement in Story and Discourse that it does: “Narrative transmis-
sion concerns the relation of time of story to the recounting of time of story
[ . . . ]: narrative voice, point of view, and the like” (1986: 22).
Let us now turn to Genette. In Genette, decisions about focalization for
a whole text (what one could call macrofocalization, to distinguish it from
Mieke Bal’s microfocalization in individual sentences), like the choice of
homo- versus heterodiegesis, most probably take their origin in the author.
(Genette rejects the construct of the implied author—Genette [1988: 136–
45]—which/who would be held responsible for it by theorists like Rimmon-
Kenan [1983] or Nünning [1989], who replaces the implied author by what
he calls level 3 of communication, N3). If focalization is rooted in authorial
decisions, it has no business with the mediational process (i.e. the transmis-
sion of story into discourse) because it would be located already at the level of
the plot. Note that this conclusion crucially depends on definitional choices.
Thus, the discourse is here taken to be the product of the narratorial process
of narration, the words on the page. As soon as one moves into a different
medium such as cartoon or film, the existence of a narrator and the descrip-

10. Interest, renamed “interest-focus” (148–9), is now linked to the audience’s attention,
wishing a character “good luck” (148).
120   Part I: Chapter 4

tion of the “text” as the utterance by that narrator become less convincing
propositions.
Once the concept of mediation is extended to media contexts, the theo-
retical problems multiply exponentially. One of these problems is to what
extent focalization happens in the mediational process (see above) or is super-
imposed by the medium. This is an important question in film. One can, for
instance, argue that, since film is a predominantly visual medium, in which
the camera serves as a focalizer, film narrative is inherently focalizing so that
there exists no zero focalization in accordance with Genette’s model (1980:
189–94; 1988: 121). Other theorists have argued that all films have external
focalization since the default shot is one in which the scene is presented in
an overview or bird’s-eye view which does not correspond to human vision.
Subjective (internal focalization) shots are rare and require some manipula-
tion: close-up shots, shot-reverse shot, eye-level shots that unnaturally cut off
objects one would usually see as part of the picture, e.g. a shot taken from
the perspective of a seated person looking at people passing by that cuts off
people’s heads, or low-angle shots for individuals who seem overpowered by
what is bearing down on them, such as children’s low-angle perspectives on
the adult world.11 For film, Mieke Bal’s focalization terminology is even more
useful than Genette’s since her distinction between focalizer and focalized
allows one to contrast those shots in which the camera serves as focalizer and
those in which a character focalizes events (Bal 1985). The latter are subjec-
tive shots. The waters become muddied, however, when the camera presents
us with a face distorted by fear. This is clearly meant to be a subjective shot
(in Bal’s terms of an invisible focalized, i.e. a character’s emotions), yet in the
filmic medium this shot has to be visible, and it may be both the camera’s pre-
sentation of a character’s mind frame and the rendering of another character’s
impressions of the fearful person. The camera’s pan from the scene as a whole
to a character’s internal focalization corresponds to a shift from authorial
narration to free indirect discourse or interior monologue; the already subjec-
tive vision of a character focusing on the emotions depicted or reflected in
another character’s face corresponds to narrated perception (the observer’s
impression of his/her interlocutor), and this impression may be objective in
the sense that the visual medium would tend to show us the face of the fearful
person as he/she really looked, but it might also be subjective (unreliable) in
portraying the deranged or biased vision of the observer character (I do not
have an example for this; but then I am no film specialist). The zoom on the

11. See Chatman (1978: 158–61). Compare also his section on slant and filter in film
(1990: 155–8).
 Fludernik, “Mediacy, Mediation, and Focalization”   121

character’s fear-distended face would clearly mark a departure from neutral

or objective camera shots, and it could be compared to an authorial or figural
handling of the lens. Yet a close-up only becomes necessary in the framework
of (authorial) wide-angle shots, since these do not allow the viewer to notice
the expression on a character’s face (too small on the screen).
It is still relatively easy to determine whether or to what extent one can
find equivalents of Genette’s three types of focalization or of Bal’s in films
or cartoons; when it comes to plays, the problems proliferate, as we will
see below. Moreover, once one starts to include other types of focalization
models, the theoretical issues multiply even further. For instance, when using
Manfred Jahn’s distinction between strict, ambient, and weak focalization
(Jahn 1999), all films would presumably lie somewhere between strict and
ambient, and some perspective camera-eye high-angle shots might even be
regarded as weak focalization.12 The problem with this is that it entirely casts
out subjectivity, which was of course the leading motive behind the introduc-
tion of focalization as a term designed to improve on the concepts of point
of view and perspective. Another question is: to what extent can linguistic
or ideological perspective, or affect, be rendered in film, and how does one
describe the combination of visual, aural, and verbal elements that might
result in similar effects? (I am here thinking of suggestive music hinting at a
protagonist’s anxiety, or at impending danger; or of voice-over for interior
monologue, usually combined with a close-up of the protagonist’s face.)
Drama poses problems of a different nature. In Stanzel’s paradigm (where
there is no category of focalization), one simply has an immediate presenta-
tion of the story, with the admittedly unrealistic convention of the soliloquy
or the aside. The audience apparently watches what is happening from their
external perspective. (This description clearly leaves out questions of selection
as well as the presence of metadramatic and narrative elements in drama.) If
one tries to apply Genettean terminology to plays, drama would seem to have
external focalization throughout (even more extensively than film), and again
there is no good explanation for soliloquy (it could not easily be categorized
as internal focalization). Drama therefore on the whole resembles early fic-
tion in which the conventions allow characters to soliloquize, i.e. utter their
thoughts out loud (rather than the narrative depicting their interiority in free
12. Jahn defines these terms as follows: F1 refers to the “burning point of an eye’s lens”
(87), F2 to the object of focalization. In strict focalization, “F2 is perceived from (or by) F1
under conditions of precise and restricted spatio-temporal coordinates” (97). Ambient focaliza-
tion, on the other hand, depicts F2 “summarily, more from one side, possibly from all sides”
and “allow[s] a mobile, summary, or communal point of view” (97). Weak focalization is weak
because it dispenses with F1, and thus with “all spatio-temporal ties”; there is “only a focused
object to F2” (97).
122   Part I: Chapter 4

indirect discourse or psycho-narration or interior monologue). Characters

cannot focalize in drama, so, within Mieke Bal’s model, one has a consistent
“narrator-focalizer” who focuses on the visible. I am not sure how she would
deal with the soliloquies, though. Experiments in twentieth-century drama
have tried to get around these genre conventions by means of a variety of
techniques. Dreams and memories, in particular, are depicted on stage and
externalize a subjective perspective of certain characters. Clues such as verbal
repetition or a change of lighting, or simple inconsistency serve to alert the
audience to a segment of memory or fantasy. (See, for instance, Tom Stop-
pard’s Travesties, Sebastian Barry’s The Steward of Christendom, and Chris-
tina Reid’s The Belle of the Belfast City.13) However, these tactics are mostly
used to present the contrast of a character’s mind rather than their focalized
perception.
The relationship between mediation and focalization is therefore fraught
with complications. The most crucial of these are the variety of models of
focalization and the dissensus among narratologists regarding where exactly
focalization “happens” (connected with the disagreement between different
narratological models). Thus, if focalization is conceived of as vision of some-
thing (as in Bal), it can become part of the plot (a character focalizing another
character); on the other hand, focalization conceived of as mind-reading (zero
focalization) vs. internal focalization à la Genette locates the source of this
technique with the author or narrator. Since the figure of a narrator does not
necessarily exist in other media (again a point of dissensus), imponderables
mushroom.
One of the ways out of this dilemma is to concentrate on the discourse in
one particular medium, and to discuss what strategies are employed to create
spatial perspective and to transmit insights into characters’ minds, or from
within characters’ minds on their surroundings. Such a pragmatic approach
will list the function of close-ups, zooms, shot-reverse shots and so on in film
to indicate interiority and subjective vision. It will also discuss dolly-shots
and pans to track spatial orientations of a neutral or subjective kind. (For
instance, a film in which we see a character enter a house and then get a shot
of the lobby and a pan up the staircase obviously represents the character’s
viewpoint on entering.) In drama, such an analysis will tend to focus on ges-
tures and soliloquy as indicators of characters’ interiority, and it will note
that there exists no psycho-narration (looking into characters’ minds from a

13. All three plays are memory plays. Travesties (1974) focuses on Henry Carr’s memories
of World War I in Zürich; The Steward of Christendom (1995) has its protagonist Thomas
Dunne re-experiencing crucial moments of his life; and in The Belle of the Belfast City (1987),
scenes from Dolly’s past help to explain attitudes and moods in the present.
 Fludernik, “Mediacy, Mediation, and Focalization”   123

quasi-extradiegetic viewpoint) in drama. (Clearly, postmodernist experiments

such as David Edgar’s Entertaining Strangers [1985], where the play sports
a narrator who psychonarrates characters’ minds in tandem with them [cp.
Fludernik 2008: 370–71], need to be taken as exceptions to this rule.) Drama
is also singularly lacking in spatial focalizing since it traditionally presents
one setting from one particular perspective. Yet, again, recent experiments in
dramaturgy and staging have discovered ways and means to get around these
restrictions. Thus, looking into more than one space at the same time (e.g. the
kitchen and Biff’s bedroom in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman [1949];
or several rooms in Tennessee Williams’s Vieux Carré [1978]) can allow the
audience an “omniscient” (spatially omnipresent) viewpoint; filmic montage
on a screen, on the other hand, may suggest a character’s subjective view of a
narrowing tunnel through which he is climbing. Nevertheless, in contrast to
experiments in temporality, plot disjunction or the dissolution of the bound-
ary between the fictional world and fantasy, such spatial manipulations are
not particularly prominent in the theater.

The No-Narrator and No-Mediation Thesis

In his book The Rhetoric of Fictionality (2007) Richard Walsh has reiterated
the controversial no-narrator thesis which had already been popularized by
Ann Banfield (1982) and has recently been revived by Sylvie Patron (2005,
2009). Walsh also proposes a no-mediation thesis, although he does not call
it that; that is, he rejects the idea that there is one story which is then medi-
ated into different manifestations in novels, films, ballets, and so on. This the-
sis takes us right back to Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1980) and her remarks
on the multiplicity of different versions of Cinderella.
I do not want to engage with the no-narrator thesis here; Walsh is apply-
ing Occam’s razor even more aggressively than Genette did to rid himself
of the implied author. Unlike radical no-narrator proponents, I myself have
always held that there is a narrator persona when one has clear linguistic
signs of a speaker’s (writer’s) “I” and “his”/“her” subjective deictic center
(cp. Fludernik 1996: 169); authorial narrative of the Tom Jonesian kind with
an intrusive narrator persona for me clearly has a narrator. Walsh’s phrasings
are perhaps too hedged to indicate clearly whether or not he regards the nar-
rator in Tom Jones as legitimate qua narrator. (I rather think he does, despite
impressions to the contrary.14) Like myself, Walsh clearly “repudiate[s] the

14. See, for instance, his remark that there may be a “local effect” narrator, who then does
124   Part I: Chapter 4

narrator as a distinct narrative agent intrinsic to the structure of fiction

[ . . . ]” (84), though perhaps for different reasons. Walsh intends to critique
the notion that fictionality in fiction resides in the figure of an invented fic-
tional speaker, the narrator, whereas I reject the obligatory narrator proposi-
tion because I need to see linguistic evidence for a speaker in the text and do
not want to hypostasize the existence of a narrator for texts in which there
are no such evidential markers.
Walsh’s no-mediation thesis proposes that, since in his model fabula is
not prior to sujet, stories in different media do not transform a common plot
(story) in different ways, but that each establishes their own fabula. He goes
on to argue that sujets (discourses) in different media are medium-dependent
(this in agreement with most narratologists) and that (in disagreement with
the narratological community) plot (fabula) is likewise medium-dependent:
“The idea of representation is not intelligible without a medium” (104–5).
Walsh links this theoretical insight to the fact that stories abound both as
objects of analysis and as tools of sense-making:

That is to say that, both across and within media, narrative representations
are intelligible in terms of other narrative representations. Narrative sense-
making always rides piggyback upon prior acts of narrative sense-making,
and at the bottom of this pile is not the solid ground of truth, but only the
pragmatic efficacy of particular stories for particular purposes in particular
contexts. (106)

The first example that Walsh adduces for his thesis is Neil Gaiman’s Sandman
cartoon, in which the reader needs to figure out that the two characters sleep-
ing together in the central area of the cartoon page are dreaming the sequence
of images on the bottom and top of the page: “The event is a product of
narrative processing, an instance of cognitive chunking in which the mind
negotiates with temporal phenomena” (111). Walsh’s second example comes
from early film. He demonstrates convincingly that early film sequences are
quite non-dramatic or plotless. His focus, however, is a film called The Coun-
tryman and the Cinematograph from R. W. Paul (1901), in which the naïve
country person encounters a movie screen showing a train rushing towards
the viewer. Since the country yokel cannot distinguish between the “space of
representation” and the “space of exhibition” (125), he runs away—to the
audience’s amusement. In this film, the frame, as Walsh claims, corresponds
to the “concept of the frame”: “[ . . . ] the frame is not a representational

not have to be presumed to exist for the rest of the text (2007: 81).
 Fludernik, “Mediacy, Mediation, and Focalization”   125

feature of the narrative transmission, but a rhetorical feature of imaginative

orientation” (126). I take it that what Walsh means to say is that what hap-
pens in that movie can only be explained in a media-related way—and hence
the “plot” is actually a function of the medium.
Personally, I do not find either of these examples convincing as support
for Walsh’s thesis. Both rely on the conventions of the media in question,
and both take the reader’s perspective to be central to the question of plot.
One will of course agree that in some media it may be difficult to grasp what
is the plot of the narrative and that certain conventions help one to do so
(clearly, the convention of the flashback requires a learning process, too); it
is also true that one will need to understand at some point that a represented
object is not the real thing—“This is not a pipe” (René Magritte; see Fou-
cault 1968/1986). But such conventions of representation apply to all types
of media (including non-narrative ones) and not to specific media in specific
ways.
Be that as it may, in the context of an essay on mediacy, mediation, and
focalization, Walsh’s insights can stimulate some interesting conclusions
regarding the conundra that we have been puzzling over. For one, the notion
of mediacy does indeed appear to be equivalent to mediation if one sees it
as a synonym for representation. The fictional world is represented, and it
is most obviously represented in different medial forms: verbal (the novel or
short story), performative (verbal or nonverbal, musical or non-musical—
theater, ballet, opera), visual and non-performative (pictures, cartoon, film).
It is now generally accepted that mediation through a storyteller occurs not
only in novels but also in plays or cartoons (see Richardson 1988, 2001;
Fludernik 2008; Nünning/Sommer 2008 and Schüwer 2009). Such media-
tion through a represented narrator persona (who is a character) is in fact a
frame, and this frame may be introduced in a medium different from that of
the inset—a character in film may be shown to read or verbally tell a story,
a novel may describe what story a picture tells to the viewer (cp. Ryan’s
category 5 of her areas of remedialization—Ryan 2004: 33). This would
suggest that narration as mediacy and narration as mediation overlap: one
either has a definite character as a narrational agent (in language or perfor-
mance or pictures or operatic music or a combination of these); or medi-
acy is not personalized. Non-personalized mediacy can be conceived of as
mediation through a medium. Representation would then appear as either
person-related and subjective (there is a teller) or as impersonal and objective
(medium-related).15
15. On a transmedial perspective that looks at narrative aspects common to several media,
though in medium-specific manifestation, see also Rajewsky (2002, 2007) and Mahne (2007).
126   Part I: Chapter 4

On the other hand, if one returns to Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology

and cognitive frames that serve as agents of mediacy, one can also regard
mediacy as medium-independent. Besides telling—a frame that calls up a
narrative agent and hence the figure of the narrator—Towards a ‘Natural’
Narratology also had the frames of viewing, experiencing, reflecting, and
action. Each of these frames can be activated in various media, though not
each one in each medium. Whereas mediacy in Stanzel or narrative transmis-
sion in Chatman is therefore constituted by mediation through a narrator
(overt or covert, personalized or dissimulated), in Towards a ‘Natural’ Nar-
ratology mediacy can, but need not, rely on the presence of a narratorial
agent whether explicit or implicit. Viewing is clearly the most basic frame for
all the visual arts, but subjective camera shots and symbolic techniques can
also invoke the experiencing frame, and some rare close-ups with voice-over
not only instantiate telling but may even call up the reflecting frame. The
fundamental viewing frame operates for the audience’s experience of wit-
nessing the fictional world on screen; however, it may also begin to overlap
with the experiencing frame, since immersion into the filmic world occurs
not only for characters’ consciousness but also for the audience’s spatial feel-
ing of being inside the fictional world. Action of course plays a crucial role as
a subsidiary element or subset to viewing, as it does in drama, painting, and
cartoon.
No-narrator theories make perfect sense for painting and ballet; though
even there one will be able to introduce the figure of a teller. The point is that
a teller is an optional element in all media where the main protagonist does
not function as the narrator. The no mediation thesis makes sense only to the
extent that one treats the medium as primary so that there is no medial choice
on the basis of a plot, resulting in a film, text, picture, etc. One must here
be especially wary of introducing arguments from remedialization into the
analysis. Remedialization can, however, point to characteristic advantages
of one medium over another. It is certainly the case that, in the interest of a
maximally effective narrative, the discourse in any medium is extremely selec-
tive in what it renders and how. This starts with length—a filming of a novel
will always have to be shorter and therefore highly selective. The veracity of
a film will focus not on reproducing the extensive dialogue from the novel
in toto but on providing the “feel” of the novel, evoking the characters, the
atmosphere, the mood of the text. It will introduce, say, sequences of land-
scape description and cloud formations in cheery or dark weather to call up
the gaiety or bleakness of the characters’ lives, and it may also do so simply
to add a visual aesthetic quality to the film which may or may not correspond
to the style of the narrative in the written version. The point of a remedializa-
 Fludernik, “Mediacy, Mediation, and Focalization”   127

tion is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between a plot element

and a rendering of it in the original novel and the later film, but an indepen-
dent play with the material of the novel, whether that material belongs to the
plot or to the discourse. A good film will make use of the specific potential of
the filmic medium for a particular scene or a particular effect which is part
of the artistic design of the film. As a result, the plot of a filmed version of a
novel will inevitably turn out to differ in part from the plot of the novel itself,
though for the film to be a reasonably reliable remedialization, these plot dif-
ferences need to be kept within bounds; after all, the film most often wants to
be recognizable as a film version of the novel.
What this suggests theoretically is that, for any narrative token in and by
itself, no mediation need be assumed; there is no separate layer of additional
effects or processes added on to a prior plot that would convert a story into
a medialized version of discourse. Mediacy—how the medium presents the
fictional world—may be conceived of as medium-independent, though it will
of course be medium-inflected in its specific manifestations. When it comes to
remedialization, however, there is a prior model that orients the new version
of the story, but very rarely is the remedialized version a faithful translation
of the original. Like all good translation, a filming of a novel or a dramati-
zation of a short story or a novelistic rewriting of a TV show need to con-
cern themselves with an individual perspective and design, taking from the
original only what allows them to fulfill their vision. Hence, the no-mediation
theory of narrative makes as much sense as does the no-narrator theory.

Conclusion

In this paper I have tried to find connections between the concepts of mediacy,
mediation, and focalization in the classic narratological paradigms. What the
comparison has underlined is, to begin with, the dependence of all of these
terms on the story/discourse dichotomy. Both Stanzel’s concept of mediacy
and the process of mediation in the sense of transforming deep-structural
plot into a medium-related surface structure rely on the idea that im-mediate
representation of story is impossible. In Stanzel’s case, this is the logical con-
sequence of his contrasting of drama and narrative; im-mediate representa-
tion supposedly exists in drama. The assumption that all narrative undergoes
a transformation into medial manifestation clearly rules out im-mediacy from
an axiomatic perspective. Yet again from Walsh’s representational perspec-
tive, all narrative is a representation of plot or of a fictional world and hence
by definition medialized. Im-mediate telling does not exist.
128   Part I: Chapter 4

A second important point that emerged from the discussion is the crucial
question of narratorial transmission in relation to mediacy and mediation.
Stanzel’s mediacy and Genette’s conception of discourse as the product of a
narrational act both place the (verbal) narrator and the process of telling the
story at the heart of their conception of narrative transmission (to use Chat-
man’s phrase). However, Stanzel allows for the illusion of im-mediacy and
can be argued to imply the existence of a variety of mediational options (by
means of telling, by means of reflecting; or by means of the three narrative
situations; by means of generic molds such as the editor, the diarist, etc.). By
contrast, Genette’s emphasis on the narrator (overt or covert—to use Chat-
man’s terminology) locates what in Stanzel’s model would be the illusion
of im-mediacy in focalizational choices in conjunction with the category of
voice (internal focalization roughly corresponding to reflector-mode narra-
tive; zero focalization to the authorial narrative situation; and the alterna-
tion of external and internal focalization typical of first-person narrative). In
Genette, therefore, focalization is clearly distinct from mediacy or mediation.
In privileging the act of narration, Genette’s narrative transmission remains a
non-medialized mediacy.
The problem of narratorial presence or absence plays an even more cru-
cial role in discussions of mediation. Film has been the prime example of a
medial narrative for narratologists. Chatman’s cinematic narrator and the
French term auteur in film studies have tended to dominate this discussion.
However, as we have seen, the hypostasizing of an obligatory narratorial
agent in film, drama, ballet or cartoons lacks any kind of logical or textual
evidence, except perhaps in some kinds of plays, where the stage directions
echo novelistic conventions of narratorial commentary (as they do in the
work of George Bernard Shaw, for instance—see Fludernik 2008). A narra-
tor figure can, as I have shown, be introduced into narratives in almost any
medium; but such instances of voice-over, stage managers or cartoon-drawers
depicted in the margins between cartoons are rare and tend to emphasize the
fact that in these media most often there are no such teller figures. This would
suggest that narratorial transmission is a specific kind of mediacy, and—as
I suggested—that the medialized renderings of a fictional world can be ana-
lyzed as deploying a variety of cognitive frames in combination, though with
one cognitive frame dominant over the others, depending on which medium
one is dealing with.
In this essay I have also proposed that one distinguish between media-
tion and remedialization, since the two are often thrown together (as in the
exchange between Herrnstein Smith and Chatman). The controversial ques-
tions all relate to mediation qua narrative transmission. Chatman’s answers
 Fludernik, “Mediacy, Mediation, and Focalization”   129

to Herrnstein Smith rely on the linguistic, in fact, Chomskyan, model and

analogize the deep structure of transformational grammar with the story
of narratives. However, this analogy is wrong. Chomsky’s deep structure is
grounded cognitively as a prototype of syntax; the transformations that result
in the surface structure of sentences explain departures from the ground figu-
ration. By contrast, where narrative is concerned, the transformational rules
are not the point of the exercise at all; what narratologists are keen to exam-
ine is, for instance, what the chronology of a story is when the discourse turns
out to be full of flashbacks and ellipses. No “rules” apply between the two
levels—it is not the case that a particular chronology always gets rearranged
in a specific manner; nor does it make sense to hypothesize the existence of
a transformational rule to explain a flashback as A → B → C transformed
into A → C → B since that very reversal of the reconstructed plot elements
B and C is what the concept “flashback” already denotes. Compare the pas-
sive transformation, in which the syntactic reshuffling results in a semantic
effect (active → passive). The theoretical existence of a deep structure and of
transformational rules makes sense from a methodological perspective where
syntax is concerned, but it does not clarify issues in the same way for narra-
tive or narratology. As in Genette’s category of voice, the deep and surface
structure model in narrative uses a metaphor in order to talk about patent
versus latent structure, for instance in relation to chronology or order.
One can take these arguments a step further by exploding the notion of
focalization as a process that occurs between the deep and surface structure.
As I demonstrated in the section on Mediation and Focalization above, even
Chatman himself vacillated on the issue and seems to have ended by adopting
a theory that locates point of view independently on the narratorial and plot
levels. While it makes sense to reconstruct a chronology in interpreting texts
that deliberately disguise that order of events, one cannot convincingly argue
that the plot inherently has no focalization. At best it could have zero or
external focalization, which might then be shifted into internal focalization
in some passages. The problem is that if one defines focalization as access to
interiority, then the deep structure of the story would simply be the bare plot
sequence without any stylistic elements and human details (The king died and
then the queen died). By adding “of grief” we already add not just the cause
of the queen’s dying but the experiential parameters of the story, and then the
discourse can only be said to elaborate (rather than add) aspects like focaliza-
tion, description, dialogue, etc. If, on the other hand, focalization is defined
as “who sees,” the plot must be a neutral version in which nobody sees and
the discourse would add who is doing some seeing. This is of course how
focalization and Stanzel’s mediacy have traditionally been understood. Yet
130   Part I: Chapter 4

the point of this seeing is not whether (factually) a character was there to see
and note an occurrence; the point is whether the narrative “sees through the
mind” of a character or whether there is evaluative slant (Chatman) on the
story world. The decision taken in narrative mimesis is therefore that from
which perspective the telling or representation is to be modulated, which
takes us right back to the question of mediacy, i.e. whether we are to be
presented the fictional world through the voice of a narrator or character (in
Walsh’s view, a narrator would be a character) or through the consciousness
or filter of one (or several) characters (in succession). In this case, focalization
and mediacy would collapse into one another, as they do in Stanzel.
One final point on this issue. All of these discussions assume that one
can indeed establish a chronology and a realistic, consistent fictional world
“out there.” Although readers will expect to find such a world, experimental
texts may deliberately foil their attempts to establish it. Nevertheless, techni-
cally innovative texts frequently do include, for instance, passages of internal
focalization. Yet, since in these texts there is no determinable deep structure
on which to apply focalizational transformations, the existence of such focal-
ized passages must then be laid at the door of the author (reader, note, this
is tongue-in-cheek!), and an analysis in terms of mediation and transmission
desisted from. We will take the foregoing argument as yet another piece of
support of the Walshian no-mediation thesis.
What we have been struggling with is the incompatibility of axiomatic
narratological assumptions. The problems discussed in this paper are perhaps
quite arcane; to raise them may—metaphorically speaking—reflect nothing
but narratologists’ inevitable critical urge to read metaphors literally, which
puts them in danger of drowning in the theoretical waves that they have
provoked.
 Fludernik, “Mediacy, Mediation, and Focalization”   131

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 II
Transdisciplinarities
 5
D avid H erman

Directions in Cognitive Narratology

Triangulating Stories, Media, and the Mind

Tools for Triangulation

Writing in 1991, on the brink of what Alan Richardson and Francis Steen
(2002) subsequently termed “the cognitive revolution” in literary research,
Mark Turner presciently argued in his book Reading Minds that English
studies needs to set itself new goals in the age of cognitive science. Specifi-
cally, Turner suggested that “[o]ur profession touches home base when it
contributes to the systematic inquiry into [ . . . ] linguistic and literary acts as
acts of the human mind” (18). To quote Turner more fully:

I propose that what the profession lacks is a concept of language and

literature as acts of the everyday human mind. If we had such a concept,
our grounding activity would be the study of language and of literature
as expressions of our conceptual apparatus. We would focus on how the
embodied human mind uses its ordinary conceptual capacities to perform
those acts of language and literature. (6)

In this groundbreaking, agenda-setting contribution to the field, Turner

draws on ideas from cognitive linguistics to triangulate literary scholarship
with the study of language and of mind. Working against the grain of what
he characterizes as default assumptions in the humanities in general and lit-
erary studies in particular, Turner suggests that practitioners should shift
from producing ever more sophisticated readings of individual works, to

137
138   Part II: Chapter 5

developing an account of the basic and general principles underlying the pro-
cess of reading itself. Cognitive linguistics, Turner argues, affords invaluable
tools when it comes to this reprioritizing of reading over readings. At issue
is a reassessment that places systematicity over nuance; common, everyday
cognitive abilities over ostensibly unique or special capacities bound up with
literary expression; and unconscious sense-making operations over what falls
within the (narrow) domain of conscious awareness. Thus Turner draws
on the work of theorists like George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) to
describe poetic scenes and figures as a skillful exploitation of generic, cog-
nitively based linguistic abilities, rather than as a special, separate form of
verbal creativity limited to literary writing. Likewise, Talmy’s (2000) account
of force dynamics (409–70)—his theory of how the semantic structures of
natural language encode a folk physics of force, movement, friction, etc.—
helps Turner build a cognitive-linguistic framework for understanding the
rhetoric of argument. Ways of understanding arguments, Turner suggests,
are grounded in embodied human experience; for example, arguments are
defined in terms of positions and counter-positions that must be resisted and
overcome, in parallel with how a swimmer must fight against the current or a
runner is buffeted by countervailing winds.
This essay revisits the project of triangulation envisioned in—and pro-
grammatically articulated by—Turner’s study more than fifteen years ago. In
one respect, the scope of my discussion will be more restricted than Turner’s,
since I am examining not literature in general but rather literary narrative in
particular, as exemplified in William Blake’s short narrative poem “A Poison
Tree.” My discussion, however, focuses on Blake’s text as a specific realiza-
tion of what might be called the narrative system. At issue is narrative viewed
as a representational system that operates across various communicative
media (Herman 2004, 2009, and 2010; Ryan 2004; Wolf 2003), including
print texts, film, face-to-face discourse, graphic novels, and so on, and that
enables people to use those media in particular ways to structure, express,
and comprehend their experiences.1 Thus the focus of the research program
1. In other studies (Herman 2009, 2010), I propose a general framework for analyzing
multimodal storytelling, or forms of narrative practice that exploit more than one semiotic
channel to represent situations, objects, and events in narrated worlds or storyworlds (see be-
low for a fuller characterization of this term). These other studies suggest the relevance of the
distinction that theorists like Kress and van Leeuwen (2001) draw between modes and media.
For such researchers, modes are semiotic channels (better, environments) that can be viewed as
a resource for designing representations within a particular type of discourse, which is in turn
embedded in a specific kind of communicative interaction. By contrast, media can be viewed as
means for disseminating or (re)producing what has been designed in a given mode. In this es-
say, though I will refer to narrative/storytelling media in my discussion of Blake’s combination
of verbal and visual designs in “A Poison Tree,” this poem and Blake’s oeuvre more generally
 Herman, “Directions in Cognitive Narratology”   139

from which the present essay derives is in another respect broader than the
one outlined by Turner. My overall research goal—a goal that indicates the
scope of cognitive narratology, broadly conceived—is to triangulate not just
literary narratives, theories of language, and research on the mind, but more
capaciously, to inquire into (1) the structure and dynamics of storytelling
practices; (2) the multiple semiotic systems in which those practices take
shape, including but not limited to verbal language; and (3) mind-relevant
dimensions of the practices themselves—as they play out in a given medium
for storytelling.
In the account sketched here, cognitive narratology can be viewed as a
subdomain of the broader enterprise of cognitive semiotics (cf. Brandt 2004;
Fastrez 2003); cognitive linguistics also belongs to this broader domain.2
Cognitive semiotics studies how the use and interpretation of sign-systems
of all sorts are grounded in the structure, capacities, and dispositions of
embodied minds. Cognitive narratology studies the design principles for nar-
ratively organized sign-systems in particular. Drawing on tools from a vari-
ety of fields, including (cognitive) linguistics, ethnography, the philosophy of
mind, and social and cognitive psychology, cognitive narratology explores the
interfaces among narrative structure, semiotic media, and humans’ cognitive
dispositions and abilities. Hence my aim here is to suggest a range of strate-
gies for triangulating narrative, media, and minds—strategies not necessar-
ily anchored in the traditions for studying verbal language that factor most
prominently in Turner’s pioneering book.
In the pages that follow, I use as a case study Blake’s “A Poison Tree,”
first published in 1794 as part of Songs of Innocence and Experience, to dis-
cuss several research foci that fall within the scope of cognitive narratology.
These foci correspond to areas of intersection among the three key concerns
of this essay, namely, storytelling practices, communicative media, and the
mind:

• Research on the cognitive processes that support inferences about the

structure and inhabitants of a narrated world, or storyworld; relatedly,
the study of what constitutes (across media) distinctively narrative ways
of worldmaking (Gerrig 1993; Goodman 1978; Herman 2009: 105–36).

• Studies of how narratives can stage discourse practices in storyworlds—

exemplify multimodal narration in the sense just indicated.

2. Hence, in contrast with Turner’s (1991, 1996) general approach, in the approach
developed here cognitive linguistics constitutes not the sole basis for triangulating narrative,
media, and mind, but only one toolkit (or group of toolkits) among others.
140   Part II: Chapter 5

where discourse is defined as the rule-based manipulation of symbols

(verbal, visual, or other) in multiparty contexts of talk. At issue is how
stories reflexively model cognitive, interactional, and other dimensions
of acts of narration along with other forms of communicative practice.
Under this heading I subsume questions about how narratives like
Blake’s present folk theories of discourse, how they mobilize emotion
discourse in particular, and how their representation of acts of discourse
positions characters and readers in various ways.

• Research on the nexus of narrative and consciousness. One pertinent

question in this connection is how stories represent the felt, conscious
awareness of narrators as well as characters—what philosophers of
mind might refer to as the “what-it’s-like” dimension of conscious expe-
riences (Nagel 1974). A second key question is the extent to which nar-
rative might afford scaffolding for conscious experience itself (Herman
2009: 137–60).

My next section provides further context for analyzing “A Poison Tree” as a

case study, situating my approach in some of the commentary that has grown
up around Blake’s work. Indeed, I have chosen Blake’s poem as a test case in
part because Blake’s own poetic practices resonate with the later frameworks
for inquiry explored here; texts like “A Poison Tree” suggest that Blake him-
self was deeply concerned with developing new ways of understanding the
relationships among modes of narration, storytelling media, and the human
mind. Then, in the remainder of my essay, I turn to the research foci just
listed, putting them into dialogue with the poem to extend the project of tri-
angulation already anticipated in Blake’s work. I conclude with some reflec-
tions on what my analysis suggests about future directions—and outstanding
challenges—for narrative inquiry today.

The Case Study

William Blake’s “A Poison Tree”

As Phillips (2000) notes, Blake invented in 1788 a method of creating and

reproducing word-image combinations that he called “Illuminated Print-
ing,” and that subsequent commentators have termed “relief etching”: “It
was composed of writing and drawing on a copper plate using an acid-resis-
tant varnish, etching the unprotected surfaces away leaving both text and
design standing in relief, and then inking and printing the relief surfaces on
 Herman, “Directions in Cognitive Narratology”   141

a printmaker’s rolling press” (15; see Essick 1985 and Viscomi 2003 for fur-
ther details about Blake’s techniques). This method, which Blake may have
adopted in part because it entailed about one-fourth of the cost of engraving
(Mitchell 1978: 42), was used to create the version of “A Poison Tree” whose
image is reproduced above.3 I also provide a verbal transcription of Blake’s
text.

3. From Copy C of Songs of Innocence and Experience. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection,

Library of Congress. Copyright (c) 2009 the William Blake Archive. Used with permission.
142   Part II: Chapter 5

I was angry with my friend;

I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe;
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I waterd it in fears, 5

Night & morning with my tears:
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,

Till it bore an apple bright. 10
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine,

And into my garden stole,

When the night had veild the pole;
In the morning glad I see: 15
My foe outstretchd beneath the tree.

It is important to stress that the version of the poem reproduced here is just
one realization of Blake’s original design. As Gleckner and Greenberg (1989)
observe, “Blake printed and individually hand colored Songs of Innocence
and Songs of Innocence and Experience from 1789 to 1818. Twenty-one cop-
ies of Innocence and twenty-eight of the combined work are known to exist.
No two are alike, Blake having altered his coloring more often than not, his
arrangement, and even certain aspects of the plates’ iconography from copy
to copy” (xii; cf. Essick 1985: 883; Viscomi 2003).4

4. For example, in the existing copies of the first issue of Songs of Experience, two dif-
ferent color schemes are used for “A Poison Tree” (Phillips 2000: 104), and in “the twenty-
eight extant copies of the combined volume, Blake offers nineteen different arrangements of
the poems” (Gleckner and Greenberg 1989: xiv; xv). Though I will not comment further on
the production methods used to create “A Poison Tree,” nor on the design considerations af-
fecting its placement among the other poems in Songs of Innocence and Experience, Blake’s
manifest concern with these issues warrants equal care when it comes to examining the inter-
play between the verbal and visual elements of his work. As Mitchell puts it, “The free inter-
penetration of pictorial and typographic form so characteristic of Blake’s books is technically
impossible in a medium which separates the work of the printer from that of the engraver
[ . . . ] In one sense, then, there is almost something perverse about discussing the ‘relations’
between the constituent parts of an art form which is so obviously unified in both conception
and execution” (1978: 15).
 Herman, “Directions in Cognitive Narratology”   143

What interpretive traditions have grown up around this poem in par-

ticular and around Blake’s multimodal poetic practices more generally? And
how can those traditions be used to underscore the relevance of “A Poison
Tree” for the project of triangulating narrative, media, and mind? For his
part, Gallagher (1977) considers whether “A Poison Tree” should be read as
a parabolic poem, in which the specific scenario presented in the poem (the
vehicle) is subordinated to the general theme or moral principle it is designed
to instantiate (the tenor). As Gallagher puts it, “in a narrative whose tenor
([the idea] that deliberate repression of anger is far more destructive than its
spontaneous expression) is a deceptively obvious cliché, it is all too easy to
dismiss the poetic vehicle (a poison tree) as merely a convenient parable con-
strued allegorically for the sake of articulating the moral which can be drawn
from it” (237). For Gallagher, however, interpreting Blake’s text as merely
a parable amounts to underreading the poem, and more specifically failing
to come to terms with “the astonishing allegation that anger can become
literally incarnate as a physical object (a poison tree can be made to material-
ize out of thin air)” (237).5 Gallagher instead construes the poem as a dark
parody of the account of the fall stemming from the Book of Genesis, with a
self-deifying narrator playing the role of an angry, punitive God in a sinister
version of the creation myth (247–48).
Furthermore, Gallagher draws attention to the final couplet of Blake’s
poem (lines 15–16), with its shift to the present tense via the verb see (“In
the morning glad I see: / My foe outstretchd beneath the tree”). Although, as
I discuss below, see could be glossed as an instance of the historical present
tense, designed to underscore the special significance of the narrator’s past act
of looking vis-à-vis the other events recounted in the poem, for Gallagher the
poet’s shift of tenses accentuates the ongoing impact of events on the narra-
tor’s mind:

Although the shift can be interpreted as necessitated by the demands of

rhyme, Blake would hardly compromise sense merely for the sake of sound.
The meaning of the poem’s concluding couplet is clear: a single past act
(the murder of the narrator’s foe) brings about an effect which has decisive

5. Here Gallagher (cf. Welch 1995: 243–44) distinguishes Blake’s poison tree from the
more properly allegorical representation of another tree in Songs of Experience, namely, the
Tree of Mystery in “The Human Abstract” (“The Gods of the earth and sea/ Sought thro’
Nature to find this Tree;/ But their search was all in vain:/ There grows one in the Human
Brain” [lines 21–24].) In contrast to this figurative usage, “Blake’s poison tree is no metaphor:
it is rather the physical instrument by which the narrator allegedly effects his enemy’s death”
(242).
144   Part II: Chapter 5

reverberations in the eternal present: in the morning—any morning, every

morning—I see my foe now dead beneath the tree. This is precisely true of
original sin, for in Adam’s mortal transgression all men have already died.
(Gallagher 1977: 248)

This interpretation emphasizes the continuing legacy of the narrator’s world-

disrupting (or world-corrupting) actions—in this case, his act of choosing
not to tell someone (who thereby became his foe) about his wrathful feelings
toward that person or his reasons for having such feelings.6 The interpreta-
tion also highlights the world-configuring power of the narrator’s remember-
ing/perceiving mind. Visually re-mediating the narrator’s verbal report of his
own act of seeing,7 the design of the text foregrounds this moment to suggest
that the most destructive of the narrator’s acts are acts of mind—including
the act of gladly seeing the death of someone whom the narrator has himself
(through yet another act of mind) transformed into a foe.
The poem thus supports Mitchell’s (1978) claim that in Blake’s images,
“[p]ictorial space does not exist as a uniform, visually perceived container of
forms, but rather as a kind of extension of the consciousness of the human
figures it contains” (38; cf. Connolly 2002: 26). Reacting against Newton’s
conception of space as a pre-existing container in which material bodies are
impinged upon by physical forces (Ault 1986: 163–69; Hagstrum 1991: 76–77;
Peterfreund 1998: 54), Blake instead emphasizes the active, form-giving opera-
tions of embodied minds as they configure spaces into scenes organized around
particular, situated perspectives. Or, as Mitchell puts it, “[t]he essential unity
of Blake’s composite art [ . . . ] lies in the convergence of each form [verbal as

6. Although Blake’s phrasing might be read as suggesting that the two persons mentioned
in the first stanza of the poem were already the narrator’s friend and his foe before he ever
discussed or refrained from discussing with them his wrathful feelings, and that these prior
relationships are thus simply a premise of the narrative, I would resist this interpretation. In-
stead, I construe the poem as developing a genealogy of the very concept of “foe,” by tracing
the destructive consequences of not engaging in open discourse with others when conflicts first
arise. In accordance with this interpretation, I read the first stanza as an instance of the trope
of hysteron proteron, in which later events are mentioned before earlier ones, and which in
this case is motivated by the poem’s sparse verbal style and the constraint imposed by its use
of end rhymes. On this reading, the narrator mentions the effects of his own past conduct—
namely, someone’s being categorized, or constituted, as a friend or a foe—before he mentions
the conduct that caused these effects—namely, engaging or not engaging in open talk with
others when a conflict arises.
7. Mitchell (1978), however, argues that “in contrast to the general practice of eigh-
teenth-century illustrators,” Blake’s method “is to provide not a plausible visualization of a
scene described in the text but rather a symbolic recreation of ideas embodied in that scene”
(18). The relationship of the image track to the verbal track in Blake is thus one of transforma-
tion rather than translation (19).
 Herman, “Directions in Cognitive Narratology”   145

well as visual] upon the goal of affirming the centrality of the human form (as
consciousness or imagination in the poetry, as body in the paintings) in the
structure of reality” (1978: 38). In the case of “A Poison Tree” consciousness
and body converge in precisely this way, with the verbal and visual informa-
tion tracks jointly foregrounding the destructiveness for self and other of a
specific way of seeing. The poem’s visual design bears out Mitchell’s diagnosis
of Blake’s pictorial style, which involves not the projection of “inner,” mental
realities onto an “outer,” material world, in proto-expressivist fashion, but
rather an emphasis on “the continuity and interplay between body and space,
as a symbol of the dialectic between consciousness and its objects” (59). Note,
for example, how the lower branches of the poison tree, i.e., the branches
constituting the lower border of the verbal text, echo the curve of the supine
figure’s ribcage and also have the same span as the dead foe’s outstretched
arms. Here the observing consciousness, from whose vantage-point on the
represented world the image can be assumed to emanate, construes the spatial
layout of that world as conditioned by the human form’s situation within it—
even as that observing mind’s representation is shaped by its own, situated per-
spective, including its position in time and space vis-à-vis the scene portrayed.
As these last remarks suggest, beyond figuring a dialectic between con-
sciousness and its objects, mind and world, Blake’s text suggests that story-
telling practices mediate between these two poles—and do so by projecting,
through various semiotic channels (and combinations of channels), worlds
inhabited by embodied minds. In what follows, I put Blake’s own narrative
practice into dialogue with recent research that suggests strategies for trian-
gulating—modeling the relations among—stories, media, and the mind. This
research can shed new light on Blake’s work; but more than this, considering
how the research bears on “A Poison Tree” can help chart new directions for
cognitive narratology as a theory-building enterprise.

Narrative Ways of Worldmaking

Tools for triangulation have been developed by theorists who describe lan-
guage use as a process of building mental models of the discourse entities
evoked by verbal cues, including those deployed by literary authors (see,
e.g., Clark 1996; Zwaan 1996). Recently, scholars of story have built on
this and related work to characterize the mental models used to parse texts,
discourses, and other kinds of representations that are narratively organized
(see, e.g., Doležel 1998; Emmott 1997; Gerrig 1993; Herman 2002, 2009;
Pavel 1986; Ryan 1991; Werth 1999).
146   Part II: Chapter 5

Classical, structuralist narratologists failed to come to terms with the

referential or world-creating properties of narrative, partly because of the
exclusion of the referent in favor of signifier and signified in the Saussurean
language theory that informed the structuralists’ approach. Yet mapping
words onto worlds is arguably a fundamental—perhaps the fundamental—
requirement for narrative sense making. The question is how readers of print
texts, interlocutors in face-to-face discourse, viewers of films, and interpret-
ers of other kinds of narratives use textual cues to build up representations
of the worlds evoked by stories, or storyworlds.8 Approaches such as deictic
shift theory (Duchan, Bruder, and Hewitt 1995), text world theory (Werth
1999), and contextual frame theory (Emmott 1997) suggest how configur-
ing narrative worlds entails mapping discourse cues onto the what, where,
and when dimensions of mentally projected narrative worlds. In the present
section I draw on this work to explore the range of cognitive processes that
support inferences about the modal status, inhabitants, and spatiotemporal
profile of storyworlds like Blake’s.
The storyworld of “A Poison Tree” features a relatively limited constel-
lation of persons, non-human entities, and states of affairs: the narrator, a
friend, and a foe; a real or imagined conflict of some kind; an iteratively
narrated passage of time which follows the conflict and during which the
narrator experiences a range of emotions (notably, fear and sadness), and
strategically adopts a variety of behaviors and dispositions (smiles but also
wiles); a garden, tree, and apple intertextually linked to their counterparts in
the story of the fall; and a final glimpse by the narrator of the foe lying out-
stretched and presumably dead beneath the tree. This stripped-down ontol-
ogy—together with the way Blake has populated it with situations, objects,
and events imported from a religious master narrative about the irruption of
sin in paradise and the resulting loss of innocence—contributes to the poem’s
parable-like quality. As already noted, Gallagher (1977) disputes any narrow
interpretation of “A Poison Tree” as a parable, in which poetic vehicle is
wholly subordinated to thematic tenor. More broadly, however, interpreta-
tion of the poem activates inferencing strategies that Turner (1996) associates
with fundamental mechanisms of human intelligence and subsumes under the
heading of parabolic projection, or the projection of a source story onto a
8. Hence, as discussed in Herman (2002: 9–22), the notion storyworld is consonant with
a range of other concepts proposed by cognitive psychologists, discourse analysts, psycholin-
guists, philosophers of language, and others concerned with how people make sense of texts or
discourses. Like storyworld, these other notions—including deictic center, mental model, situ-
ation model, discourse model, contextual frame, and possible world—are designed to explain
how interpreters rely on inferences triggered by textual cues to build up representations of the
overall situation or world evoked but not necessarily explicitly described in the discourse.
 Herman, “Directions in Cognitive Narratology”   147

target story—as when the story of someone’s death from a protracted illness
is framed as a narrative of struggle with a murderous agent. In this account,
making sense of one story in terms of another (e.g., reading “A Poison Tree”
vis-à-vis accounts of the fall) is a basic and general principle of mind that sup-
ports all forms of narrative worldmaking, rather than a processing strategy
limited to a particular literary genre.
In any case, a focus on narrative ways of worldmaking underscores the
need to consider how the what dimension of a given storyworld interacts
with the dimensions of where and when. Along these lines, deictic shift
theory seeks to illuminate the cognitive reorientation required to take up
imaginary residence in a narrative world like Blake’s. This theory holds that
a “location within the world of the narrative serves as the center from which
[sentences with deictic expressions such as here and now] are interpreted”
(Segal 1995: 15), and that to access this location readers must shift “from the
environmental situation in which the text is encountered, to a locus within a
mental model representing the world of the discourse” (15). The theory also
suggests that over longer, more sustained experiences of narrative worlds,
interpreters may need to make successive adjustments in their position rela-
tive to the situations and events being recounted—as prompted by the blue-
print for world building included in the narrative’s verbal texture. To make
sense of Blake’s poem, readers have to track these shifts in orienting vantage-
points in order to update their emergent models of the unfolding storyworld
as a whole. For example, in the poem’s verbal track there is a shift from the
speaker’s perspective on events, which dominates the account, to the foe’s
vantage-point beginning with line 11, and then a shift back to the speaker’s in
the final two lines. (Line 14 is a different case: it is not clear whose cognitive
vantage-point orients the report about the state of this storyworld “when the
night had veild the pole.”) Temporally speaking, Blake’s use of the past tense
in lines 1–14 prompts the inference that the younger, experiencing I encoun-
tered the foe, nourished the poison tree, and so forth at some time earlier
than the present moment of narration by the older, narrating I.
Yet here Blake’s management of verb tenses complicates the world-build-
ing process. Having initially used the past tense to situate the narrated events
in a time-frame earlier than the present moment of speaking, in line 15 the
narrating I switches to the present tense. Not only does this tense shift rein-
force that the glimpse of the dead foe is an especially salient event;9 what is
more, use of the present tense also creates a context in which aspects of the

9. For perspectives on the role of tense shifts in narrative, see Johnstone (1987); Schiffrin
(1981); and Wolfson (1982).
148   Part II: Chapter 5

current moment of telling can be elided with past occurrences. The morphol-
ogy of English verbs does not distinguish between the simple present and the
historical present; rather, discourse context must be used to determine which
functional interpretation of the tense marking is preferable. Blake’s narrative
exploits this feature of the language—i.e., the way English present-tense verbs
can both signify the here and now and presentify what is past—to construct
the foe’s death less as a localized incident than as complex event-structure dis-
tributed across time(s) (cf. Herman 2007: 320–21). In other words, the narra-
tor’s shift to the present tense promotes polychrony (Herman 2002: 211–61),
or the situation of events at multiple points in time, with the figurative, his-
torical-present reading of “see” locating the narrator’s perceptual act in the
past and the literal interpretation of “see” anchoring that act in the current
moment of narration—and potentially in all moments that have led up to and
will extend beyond the present. True, the first part of line 15, with its mention
of a particular morning, would seem to favor the historical-present reading of
the tense shift. But the strategic placement of “see” in the poem’s final cou-
plet, and the possibility of interpreting “the morning” as a generic reference
to any morning (Gallagher 1977), licenses an alternative reading of the narra-
tor’s perceptual act as co-occurrent with the act of narration.
Blake’s representation of this same pregnant moment in the visual design
contributes to the temporal unmooring of the foe’s demise. The represented
scene visually presides over or dominates the entire time-span covered by the
poem’s sixteen lines; the branches of the poison tree not only stretch over
the full extent of the foe’s supine body but also encompass the whole of the
text. And again, the placement of the image after the conclusion of the poem
suggests that the effects of this death, rather than being encapsulated within
the current speech event as a past moment recounted by the narrator, flows
forward, ongoingly, into the future.10 In short, in concert with its tense pat-
terning, the visual design of the poem inhibits knowledge about the position
of events along the timeline stretching from past to present to future—from
the experiencing I to the narrating I and beyond. Attempts to parse the tem-
poral logic of the text generate an unresolvable question: exactly where along
the narrative timeline can the narrator’s perception of—or affective response
to—the death of the foe be situated?
Emmott’s (1997) contextual frame theory provides other tools for char-
acterizing how Blake’s text sets into play narrative ways of worldmaking,

10. Here it is worth re-emphasizing how the verbal component of the text is intertwined
with the branches of the tree that bore the poison apple as fruit. Thus, taken as a verbal-visual
complex, the poem metaleptically suggests that the language used to recount these events is
itself the fruit of the destructive discord rooted in the storyworld.
 Herman, “Directions in Cognitive Narratology”   149

and in doing so invites exploration of the interfaces of narrative, media, and

mind. Emmott’s model is premised on the assumption that readers of narra-
tives like “A Poison Tree” use semiotic cues to bind characters into and out
of particular contexts (that is, mentally modeled environments for being and
doing), and that these contexts will be distributed spatially as well as tem-
porally over the course of a narrative. Once characters and other elements
have been integrated into contextual frames, readers of print texts can use
those frames to disambiguate pronouns that refer to different discourse enti-
ties at various points in the narration. Thus, the friend is bound out of what
Emmott would call the primed contextual frame after line 2, whereas the foe
is bound into the frame with an initial mention in line 3, and line 4 binds
in the speaker’s wrath as well. The pronoun “it” in lines 5, 7, and 9 refers
back to this entity, or rather psychological state, whereas the binding in of
the apple in line 10 allows readers to parse the same pronoun (“it”) differ-
ently when it occurs in lines 11 and 12. From this perspective, more generally,
narrative worldmaking can be analyzed as a process of mentally configuring
contexts, as well as scanning for specific textual cues that prompt readers to
engage in the binding, priming, recalling, switching, and other processing
operations that involve such contexts.
But how does the poem’s inclusion of a visual track impinge on the con-
struction of contextual frames? In a way that complements the effects of
Blake’s strategic shift to the present tense for a verb of perception in line 15,
the poem’s multimodal design raises questions about the scope and applica-
tion of contextual frames even as it triggers their use. The tense shift prompts
readers to situate the act of seeing in multiple frames, each with a different
“timestamp.” In this manner, the poem promotes what might be termed cog-
nitive flexibility, suggesting how some modes of worldmaking require oscillat-
ing between multiple frames to trace through the consequences of particularly
salient events—to understand how those events have shaped the whole his-
tory of a world. Conversely, the image of the dead foe primes, in the visual
channel, only one of the several contextual frames activated over the course
the verbal text’s unfolding. In this manner, the poem promotes what can be
called cognitive economy, inducing readers to select one frame as the point of
reference for interpreting a sequence of events that spans multiple places and
times. Here the terminal event in the sequence provides, in the visual track,
the primary frame of reference. The poem would have cued a very different
way of worldmaking if the initial event in the sequence—viz., the narrator’s
failure to engage openly and directly with the person who thereby became
his foe—had been represented visually. Equally important is how these con-
trasting and complementary methods of framing are set into play at one and
150   Part II: Chapter 5

the same time, thanks to the interaction between the text’s verbal and visual
channels.
Finally, in evoking a storyworld, the degree to which a narrative fore-
grounds a more or less marked (and thus noteworthy or tellable) disruption
of the canonical or expected order of events is one of the factors that accounts
for how readily the text or discourse can be interpreted as a narrative in the
first place. Once a world has been evoked and interpreters have relocated to
it, orienting themselves to its canonical order or “givens,” the procedures spe-
cific to narrative worldmaking require that the world be one in which those
givens are called into question, jeopardized by events that are more or less
radically noncanonical, more or less antithetic to the normal order of things
(Bruner 1990; Herman 2009: 133–36). Thus, in the storyworld associated
with “A Poison Tree,” the dissipation of anger through discourse is not tel-
lably transgressive; hence the encounter with the friend receives only a bare
report in lines 1–2. By contrast, the failure to address the cause of a dispute,
and its resultant flowering into full-blown, destructive hatred, is reportably
at odds with the world-order encapsulated in the first two lines. Hence 87.5
percent of the verbal portion of the text (lines 3–16) is devoted to an account
of the narrator’s experiences with the person who became his foe. For its
part, the entirety of the poem’s visual design is given over to representing (the
effects of) world-disrupting events, not the canonical order against which
those events stand out—in the manner of a foreground against a background.
Yet the different degrees of disruptiveness that the same sort of event
might have in various contexts suggests the impossibility of attempting to
fix in advance what makes something tellable, what constitutes a narratable
disruption in the order of a world. Literary narratives can be viewed as a
resource for exploring such threshold conditions for narrativity, and for gen-
erating counterfactual contexts in which situations and events become tel-
lable in ways they might not otherwise. To put the same point in other terms,
texts like Blake’s suggest how narrative is both a product of and a resource
for the (re)modeling of worlds.

Staging Discourse Practices in Storyworlds

In other studies, I have explored literary authors’ representations of discourse

practices—their figuring of “scenes of talk” (Herman 2006) in which char-
acters engage in communicative acts, including acts of storytelling. In this
section, shifting to a different set of tools for triangulating stories, media, and
the mind, I examine Blake’s multimodal staging of discourse practices in “A
 Herman, “Directions in Cognitive Narratology”   151

Poison Tree.” Literary narratives like Blake’s bear importantly on folk theo-
ries of discourse in general; they also reflect—and help shape—understand-
ings of discourse about emotions in particular. Further, the poem reflexively
models, through its visual as well as verbal design, how the production and
understanding of discourse requires interlocutors to position themselves with
respect to one another as well as discourse referents.

“A Poison Tree” and Folk Theories of Discourse

In contrast with the texts used in my previous work, such as the final inter-
change between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay before the “Time Passes” section
of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (Herman 2006), or the complex,
sometimes disingenuous interaction between the male character and Jig in
Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” (Herman 2010b), Blake’s poem
evokes in its first stanza a quite minimal scene of talk—or rather of talk with-
held, which is what allows the speaker’s wrath to grow and thereby nourish
the bright poison apple. But even so, the poem sketches a folk theory of dis-
course as a means to understanding, and for that matter as a remedy against
the discord and strife that define a fallen world. Specifically, in a way that
anticipates Nietzsche’s 1887 diagnosis of the causes and consequences of res-
sentiment (Nietzsche 1968) Blake’s text interlinks the emotion of anger, the
absence of talk, and the having of enemies; more precisely it characterizes the
having of an enemy in terms of the inability to dissipate anger through open
discourse. The poem’s reflexive representation of discourse thus suggests the
potentially destructive consequences, for self as well as other, of not using
talk to assemble jointly a world-picture that encompasses multiple perspec-
tives on events. At issue is the process whereby I come to imagine the world
from another’s vantage-point, and reciprocally cue the other to imagine the
world from my own situation. The storyline involving the narrator and his
enemy traces through what happens when there is no attempt to exchange
and negotiate accounts of situations and events around which conflicting
interpretations have grown up.
The poem also raises broader questions about ways in which folk theories
of discourse can be encapsulated in literary narratives like Blake’s. How does
a given text reflexively model the processes by which discourses are produced
and interpreted, as when a narrative uses an embedded storytelling scenario
to comment on the nature and possibilities of narrative in general (Prince
1992)? How does the text situate acts of discourse production in the story-
world relative to other forms of activity, e.g., nonverbal behaviors, acts of
152   Part II: Chapter 5

perception not accompanied by talk, and so on? And in narratives exploiting

more than one semiotic channel, how is the information about scenes of talk
distributed between the various channels or tracks—and with what effect? In
“A Poison Tree,” for example, the visual channel represents the effects of the
withheld talk, but information about the act of withholding is found only in
the verbal text. What would have been the consequence for readers’ engage-
ment with the text—or, to revert to the terms of the previous section, for the
world-building process—if this relationship had been inverted in the poem’s
overall design?

Emotion Discourse and Emotionology

Recent accounts of emotion talk throw further light on Blake’s staging in

words and images of discourse practices—and of the cognitive processes
that both support and are supported by such practices. For his part, Stearns
(1995) contends that there is a basic tension between naturalist and construc-
tionist approaches. Naturalists (cf. Ekman 1982) argue for the existence of
innate, biologically grounded emotions that are more or less uniform across
cultures and subcultures. By contrast, constructionists argue that emotions
are culturally specific—that “context and function determine emotional life
and that these vary” (Stearns 1995: 41). Griffiths (1997: 137–69) accuses
constructionists of engaging in straw-person argumentation with a version of
naturalism that no practicing researcher would actually endorse. Putting that
objection aside, however, work by Adolphs (2005) suggests how the natural-
ist and constructionist positions can be reconciled if emotions are viewed as
(1) shaped by evolutionary processes and implemented in the brain, but also
(2) situated in a complex network of stimuli, behavior, and other cognitive
states. Because of (2), the shared stock of emotional responses is mediated
by culturally specific learning processes. In turn, to explore the contribution
of cultural contexts to humans’ emotional life, analysts can study “[e]motion
discourse [as] an integral feature of talk about events, mental states, mind
and body, personal dispositions, and social relations” (Edwards 1997: 170).
This approach gave rise to the concept of “emotionology,” which was pro-
posed by Stearns and Stearns (1985) as a way of referring to the collective
emotional standards of a culture as opposed to the experience of emotion
itself (cf. Harré and Gillett 1994: 144–61; Edwards 1997: 170–201). The
term functions in parallel with recent usages of “ontology” to designate a
model of the entities, together with their properties and relations that exist
within a particular domain. Emotionologies are systems of emotion terms
 Herman, “Directions in Cognitive Narratology”   153

and concepts deployed by participants in discourse to ascribe emotions to

themselves as well as their cohorts.
On the one hand, the visual design of “A Poison Tree” both draws on and
contributes to a broader cultural system for understanding emotions. The
relatively large size of the image of the dead foe and the encirclement of the
text by the branches of the poison tree suggest a dominant emotionological
motif: namely, the ease with which anger grows to all-consuming and thus
poisonous proportions. Further, the branches extending upward along the
right margin of the poem, before curling over the top of the text and then
back down the left margin, are stick-like, bare of leaves, perhaps even dead.
Not only does anger or wrath, when left unexpressed (and thus unaddressed),
come to overshadow the worlds in which we act and interact; what is more,
its only fruits are a bleak, unhospitable environment, with no possibility for
renewal or regeneration.
On the other hand, the verbal design of Blake’s poem also features a richly
emotionological profile. Of its 101 words, a substantial percentage is drawn
from the lexicon of emotion: “angry,” “wrath,” “fears,” “tears,” “glad.”
The poem thereby mirrors the way, in everyday discourse more generally,
people draw on emotion terms to make sense of their own and one another’s
minds as minds. What is more, the poem recounts actions that are, in the cul-
tural, generic, and situational contexts in which Blake’s discourse is embed-
ded, pragmatically rather than lexically linked with the emotions it figures. It
suggests a complex network of cognitive and behavioral connections among
unresolved (or unexpressed) anger or resentment, fear, sadness or depression,
and schadenfreude, or the taking of satisfaction in another’s suffering. This
same underlying network of concepts—in other words, the emotionology
in which the poem is embedded and to which it contributes in turn—allows
readers to reconstitute unstated causal links among emotional states, such as
the way unexpressed anger can foster a sociointeractional environment that
breeds other life-destroying emotions. Thus, when the narrator reports that
“my foe beheld it [the apple] shine, / And he knew that it was mine” (line
11–12), the use of the possessive pronoun in a position of emphasis at the end
of line 12, together with the “mine”/”shine” rhyme, suggests that envy may
have been one of the foe’s motivating impulses for stealing into the narrator’s
garden at night—presumably, to obtain the “apple bright” (line 10). By con-
trast, when the narrator openly expresses his anger at the person who thereby
becomes his friend in lines 1–2, the possibility for envy is dissipated along
with the narrator’s own ill will.
In short, literary narratives such as Blake’s do not just recruit from
emotionologies but also contribute to their formation and reconfiguration.
154   Part II: Chapter 5

Arguably, Blake’s poem seeks to make an emotionological intervention, by

using words and images to underscore the importance of uncoupling the emo-
tion of anger from the secretive, deceitful pursuit of recompense for anger-
causing grievances and to suggest that anger or wrath, if brought out into the
open and addressed explicitly, need not eventuate in life-negating practices.

Positioning

Theories of positioning afford another strategy for investigating the reflexive

modeling of discourse practices (and their after-effects) in multimodal nar-
ratives like Blake’s. In Harré and van Langenhove’s account (1999: 1–31),
speech acts are used to assign positions to social actors. Positions, in this
account, are places along scales or continua that correspond to polarities of
character such as “strong versus weak,” “flashy versus understated,” etc.
Over time, self- and other-positioning speech productions help build over-
arching storylines in light of which people make sense of their own and oth-
ers’ doings. Reciprocally, those overarching narratives provide the means
for linking position-assignments with utterances, as when a snide or affirm-
ing remark about someone does its work thanks to the way it shores up (or
undercuts) a larger story about that person.
In “A Poison Tree,” positioning is a relevant parameter for analysis on
at least two levels: the level of the characters, and the level of the reader’s
engagement with the text, given the narrative techniques used in the poem.11
At the first level, the text suggests how the positioning of self and other as
foes translates into a particular strategy for relating to someone viewed as an
enemy. Thus, the narrator’s use of the designation of “foe” arises not during
his interaction with that other person but at a distance, during his subse-
quent taking stock of the encounter—the narrational act corresponding to
the poem itself being one method for taking stock ex post facto. By contrast,
although the poem does not mandate this interpretation,12 one possible read-
ing of the opening lines is that the narrator’s positioning of self and other
as friends translates into an “I-you” mode of encounter, with the narrator
directly informing his friend about his wrathful feelings. And conversely, the
continuing possibility of encounters of that kind is ensured by open acts of

11. See, e.g., Bamberg (1997) and Herman (2009: 55–63) for a fuller discussion of levels
of positioning.
12. As Peter Rabinowitz pointed out in his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this
essay, “the poem never says that [the narrator] told his wrath to his friend; he might have told
it to someone else and have been relieved of the burden [in that way].”
 Herman, “Directions in Cognitive Narratology”   155

telling. The poem thereby suggests how positioning practices both afford and
result from certain protocols regulating communicative encounters, which in
turn derive from ways of conceptualizing social space. Positioning someone
as an enemy at once requires and entails eliminating any genuine mutuality
of encounter—as well as any world-model that includes such mutuality as a
possible development.
At a second level, Blake’s words and images position readers vis-à-vis (the
narrator’s account of) events in the storyworld. Here again both the shift to
the present-tense verb “see” in line 15, and the image capturing the contents
of the perceptual act corresponding to this verb, play a key role. Up until line
15, actions and events are focalized through the older, narrating I; the nar-
rator thus positions himself and readers at a remove from these past occur-
rences. But on the historical-present interpretation of “see,” the shift to the
present tense can be viewed as a shift to internal focalization: the text regis-
ters how things looked to the narrator at the moment he first saw the dead foe
outstretched beneath the tree. The poem’s positioning logic likewise changes,
bringing both teller and reader into a less mediated relation to the event of
the foe’s death, whose impact at that past moment is strikingly reinforced by
the image. Meanwhile, the eternal-present reading of “see” positions readers
in yet another way, and leads to a different construal of word-image relations
in the text. In this second reading the impact of the foe’s death lives on into
the present, and is directly encountered by the narrating I rather than filtered
retrospectively through the remembered perceptions of the experiencing I.
In comparison with the historical-present interpretation of “see,” further,
the event of the foe’s death is presented in an even less mediated fashion; the
image now suggests that the ongoing perception of the dead foe dominates
and predetermines the narrator’s act of telling, even before it begins.
Blake thus combines verbal and visual designs to prompt reflection on
narrative itself as a method of positioning self and other with respect to
reported events—events whose varying degrees of accessibility to memory,
cognition, and emotion can be signaled (or created) via shifts in storytelling
style.

Narrative and Consciousness

I come now to the third and final strategy for triangulating research on nar-
rative, media, and mind to be discussed in this essay: namely, the strategy of
examining the nexus of narrative and consciousness. In one manifestation,
this triangulation strategy focuses on how stories represent the felt, conscious
156   Part II: Chapter 5

awareness of narrators as well as characters; in another manifestation, the

focus is on the extent to which narrative might afford scaffolding for con-
scious experience itself.
On both the historical-present and the eternal-present readings of “see” in
line 15, a key feature of the poem is the way it accentuates both verbally and
visually the impact of the sight of the outstretched dead foe on the narrator’s
consciousness. Blake’s emphasis on lived quality of this perceptual act sup-
ports a hypothesis about the nature of narrative itself: namely, that a distin-
guishing feature of narrative worldmaking is the way it highlights the pressure
of events on real or imagined consciousnesses affected by storyworlds-in-flux
(cf. Fludernik 1996). To put the same point otherwise, narrative is centrally
concerned with qualia, a term used by philosophers of mind to refer to the
sense of “what it is like” for someone or something to have a particular expe-
rience (Levin 1999; Levine 1983; Nagel 1974). Cutting across differences of
genre, communicative context, and storytelling media is a common focus on
the what-it’s-like dimension of consciousness; stories more or less explicitly
foreground how one or more human or human-like minds is affected by what
is going on in narrated worlds (Herman 2009: 137–60). But if it is part of the
nature of narrative to focus on the impact of events on experiencing minds,
the converse question also suggests itself: does narrative afford scaffolding
for consciousness experience? Are there grounds for making the strong claim
that narrative not only represents what it is like for experiencing minds to live
through events in storyworlds, but furthermore constitutes a basis for hav-
ing—for knowing—a mind at all, whether it is one’s own or another’s?
Relating qualia to the notion of the intrinsically first-person nature of con-
scious awareness, Searle (1997) for his part argues that consciousness cannot
be observed, since consciousness itself resides in the structure of observing.
As Searle puts it, there is “no way for us to picture subjectivity as part of
our worldview because, so to speak, the subjectivity in question is the pictur-
ing” (98). Consciousness, in this account, is equivalent to the qualia associ-
ated with observing or experiencing the world from a particular, irreducibly
subjective or first-person vantage point. But the isomorphism between the
structure of narrative and the structure of consciousness may indicate a
way beyond the paradox identified by Searle. Narratives, thanks to the way
they are anchored in a particular vantage point on the storyworlds that they
evoke, and thanks to their essentially durative or temporally extended pro-
file, do not merely convey semantic content but furthermore encode in their
very structure a way of experiencing the world. Thus, even granting Searle’s
point that we cannot picture our own or another’s subjectivity because it
is built into the process of picturing the world, it can still be argued that
 Herman, “Directions in Cognitive Narratology”   157

engaging with a narrative enables interpreters to experience the subjectivity

that it manifests (cf. Zahavi 2007). On this reading, Blake’s tense shift in line
15 does not just provide information about but moreover enacts the tempo-
rally unlocatable impact of the foe’s death on the narrator, or rather its mul-
tiple locations along the (the narrator’s experience of the) timeline connecting
past and present. What is more, multimodal narratives like Blake’s afford
especially rich possibilities for representing what it is like to experience events
in storyworlds. For example, aspects of the narrator’s subjective experience,
or the what-it’s-like dimension of his encounter with the dead foe, are encap-
sulated in the perspective structure of the image: the onlooker is situated near
the head of the body (hence the comparatively small size of the legs and feet),
and appears to be looking at the body not from a full standing position, but
almost as if he is crouching down—or perhaps has been brought to his knees
by the sight of the outstretched foe. To put the same point another way, it
would be inconsistent with the perspective structure of the image to suggest
that the narrator-observer experienced the sight of the dead foe from high
above, say in the uppermost branches of the poison tree, or from a situation
closer to the feet than the head of the body. And the narrator’s conscious
experiences are re-experienced by readers who use the perspective structure
of the image as scaffolding for knowing what it was like (or, given the fictivity
of this scenario, what it would be like) to encounter this body in this specific
way in this particular storyworld.
In sum, unlike other modes of representation such as deductive argu-
ments, stress equations, or the periodic table of the elements, narrative is
uniquely suited to capturing what the world is like from the situated perspec-
tive of an experiencing mind. More than just representing minds, stories emu-
late through their temporal and perspectival configuration the what-it’s-like
dimension of conscious awareness itself. And if narrative in general provides
a discourse environment optimally suited for the world-picturing process,
another broad project of triangulation would involve studying how specific
modes and media of storytelling can be used to emulate the structure of con-
scious experience.13

13. Although it cuts against the grain of aspects of Hamburger’s (1993 [1957]) account,
and in particular her claim that the worlds created through first-person versus third-person
narration have a different ontological status, from another perspective the line of argument
being sketched here can be viewed as an extension of Hamburger’s model. Not only fictional
narrative but narrative more generally, the argument suggests, can be used to evoke or emu-
late the experiencing consciousness of another (cf. Fludernik 2007: 265–66). Meanwhile, for
a wide-ranging discussion of types of empathy facilitated by such narrative emulations of
consciousness (among other techniques used in novels), see Keen (2007).
158   Part II: Chapter 5

Postscript
New Challenges for Postclassical Narratology

In this essay, I have used Blake’s multimodal text to argue that cognitive nar-
ratology can be productively characterized as a triangulation project, that
is, a framework for inquiry that explores the interfaces among narrative,
media, and the mind. In making this argument, I have implicitly suggested
the advantages of weaving together two strands of postclassical narratology
that have for the most part been pursued separately up to now, namely, trans-
medial narratology (Herman 2004; Ryan 2004; Wolf 2003) and cognitive
narratology.
Unlike classical, structuralist narratology, transmedial narratology dis-
putes the notion that the fabula or story level of a narrative remains wholly
invariant across shifts of medium. However, it also assumes that stories do
have “gists” that can be remediated more or less fully and recognizably—
depending in part on the semiotic properties of the source and target media.14
Transmedial narratology is thus premised on the assumption that, although
narrative practices in different media share common features insofar as they
are all instances of the narrative text type, stories are nonetheless inflected by
the constraints and affordances associated with a given medium. Meanwhile,
theorists developing cognitive approaches to narrative have worked to enrich
the original base of structuralist concepts with ideas about human intelli-
gence either ignored by or inaccessible to earlier story analysts, thereby build-
ing new foundations for the study of cognitive processes vis-à-vis various
dimensions of narrative structure. And here the cognitive and transmedial
approaches overlap. As already suggested, the target of cognitive-narratologi-
cal research is the nexus of narrative and mind not just in print texts but also

14. For example, cinematic adapations of print texts reveal the story-configuring, and
not just story-transmitting, properties of the media at issue. Thus, if voice-over narration is
used to remediate in a film extended passages of free indirect discourse or thought report in
the print-text source, the particular voice chosen to deliver the narration can affect film view-
ers’ assessments of the situations and events being represented. In John Huston’s 1987 film
adaptation of James Joyce’s “The Dead,” the use in the final scene of a voice-over by Donal
McCann, the actor who plays Gabriel Conroy, cues the inference that the images of a snowy
Ireland are subworlds glimpsed by Gabriel’s mind’s eye. By contrast, in the opening sequence
of Todd Field’s 2006 film Little Children, an adaptation of the novel by Tom Perrotta, the
third-person narration is recast in the form of a voice-over delivered by Will Lyman, whose
deep, authoritative voice American viewers will associate with the news magazine Frontline,
produced by the Public Broadcasting Service. In this case the particular voice chosen provides a
kind of hyper-authentication of the events being shown on screen—and creates an incongruity
that Fields exploits to comic effect. Examples of this sort suggest how narrative remediation
can impinge on judgments about the modality status of events being recounted and hence on
the configuration of storyworlds. 
 Herman, “Directions in Cognitive Narratology”   159

in face-to-face interaction, cinema, radio news broadcasts, computer-medi-

ated virtual environments, and other storytelling media. In turn, “mind-rele-
vance” can be studied vis-à-vis the multiple factors associated with the design
and interpretation of narratives across media, including the story-producing
activities of writers, the processes by means of which interpreters make sense
of storyworlds evoked by multimodal as well as monomodal narrative arti-
facts, and the cognitive states and dispositions of characters in those vari-
ously configured storyworlds. In addition, the mind-narrative nexus can be
studied along two other dimensions, insofar as stories function not only as
a target of interpretation but also as a means for making sense of experience
in their own right. The integrative framework outlined here thus underscores
the pertinence of new questions for postclassical narratology: what sense-
making possibilities do multimodal storytelling practices afford that are not
afforded by monomodal or single-channel narrative practices, and vice versa?
Do multimodal narratives that exploit different semiotic channels (e.g., words
and images vs. utterances and gestures) draw on, and support, different ways
of navigating the world (cf. Herman 2010a)? And what investigative probes
might be developed to explore these sorts of issues?
To extrapolate: if postclassical narratology in a first phase involves incor-
porating ideas that fall outside the domain of structuralist theory, in order
to reassess the possibilities as well as the limitations of classical models,
new challenges emerge in a second phase. What is now required is to bring
into closer dialogue the full variety of postclassical approaches—feminist,
transmedial, cognitive, corpus-narratological, and other. By juxtaposing the
descriptions of narrative phenomena (narration, perspective, character, etc.)
made possible by these approaches, testing for overlap among the descrip-
tions, and then exploring the degree to which the descriptions’ non-overlap-
ping aspects might complement one another, theorists can begin to engage in
a more coordinated effort to accomplish what remains the overarching goal
of narrative inquiry: coming to a better understanding of what stories are and
how they work.15

15. A different version of portions of this essay will be published as “Stories, Media, and
the Mind: Narrative Worldmaking through Word and Image,” in a special issue of the Chinese
journal Foreign Literature Studies. Coedited by Shang Biwu and James Phelan, the issue is
devoted to “Postclassical Narratology: Western Approaches.” I am grateful to Jan Alber, Shang
Biwu, Monika Fludernik, Jim Phelan, Peter Rabinowitz, Les Tannenbaum, Jim Zeigler, and
Lars Franssen for their invaluable comments on earlier drafts of the analysis presented here. I
am also grateful for the Arts and Humanities Seed Grant from Ohio State University and the
fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies that have supported this research.
160   Part II: Chapter 5

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 6
Jan Alber

Hypothetical Intentionalism
Cinematic Narration Reconsidered

Cinematic narration figures prominently in the work of several narratolo-

gists. Basically, three schools of thought exist. The first, represented by David
Bordwell, argues that film has narration but no narrator (1985: 61). Accord-
ing to Bordwell, cinematic narration is created by the viewer, who uses cogni-
tive schemata to transform the film’s visual images and sounds into a series
of perceptible configurations, which he or she then interprets as a story.1 In
contrast to Bordwell’s approach, the second school, represented by Seymour
Chatman, argues that films are narrated by a cinematic narrator. Chatman
defines this narrator in terms of “the organizational and sending agency”
(1990: 127) behind the film. In his view, films “are always presented—mostly
and often exclusively shown, but sometimes partially told—by a narrator
or narrators.” The overall agent that does the showing is “the ‘cinematic
narrator’” (133–34).2 The third school, represented by theoreticians such

1. See also Bordwell (1989), Fleishman (1992: 13; 19), Bordwell and Thompson (2003:
86–87), and Grodal (2005: 169).
2. Other terms for the same concept are “image-maker” (Kozloff 1988: 44), “grand
Imagier” (Gaudreault 1999: 107; 2000: 56), “narrateur filmique” (Burgoyne 1991: 272), “ex-
ternal narrator” (Stam et al. 1992: 103), “perceptual enabler” (Levinson 1996a: 252), “film
narrator” (Lothe 2000: 30), and “implied narrator” (Laass 2008: 22). Diehl argues that he is
“a firm defender of the conceptual claim that any narrative of necessity requires a narrator”
and puts the matter as follows: “Regardless of the medium in which a narrative is presented,
I claim that we are prescribed to imagine a fictional narrator for a narrative work N if and
only if we are prescribed to imagine de re of the text of N that it occurs within the world of
the fiction generated by N” (2009: 23, 15).

163
164   Part II: Chapter 6

as George Wilson (1986: 135), Michaela Bach (1999: 245–46), and Berys
Gaut (2004: 248) argues that it is the implied filmmaker who mediates the
film as a whole, guides us through it, and directs our attention to impor-
tant issues. Similarly, Katherine Thomson-Jones argues that “the narrator
guide is sometimes just the filmmaker as manifest in the film” (2007: 82),
while Manfred Jahn de-anthropomorphizes the source of the discourse and
speaks of a “filmic composition device (FCD),” which he defines as “the theo-
retical agency behind a film’s organization and arrangement.” According to
Jahn, the FCD “need not be associated with any concrete person or character,
particularly neither the director nor a filmic narrator” (Jahn 2003: F4.1.2–
F4.1.3).
Up until now, the discussion has been dominated by analyses that focus
on the conceptual foundations of film narration, rather than on how con-
cepts of cinematic narration might be developed in ways that are produc-
tive for the business of interpreting films. For instance, some theoreticians
try to verify their claims concerning the cinematic narrator on the basis of
the so-called A Priori Argument (“narration without narrator does not exist
because the former is conceptually dependent on the other”)3 or the so-called
Argument for Means of Access (“only the fictional persona of the narrator
can give us access to the fictional world of a narrative”),4 while others—such
as Currie (1995: 266), Gaut (2004: 235–37), and Thomson-Jones (2007:
82–89)—attempt to refute these arguments on logical grounds.5 Although
these attempts to develop a “philosophy of the movies” (Gaut 2004: 230)
constitute a valuable and important contribution to the understanding of
movies, my focus is elsewhere. The most pressing question for me is whether
the concept of a cinematic narrator helps us come up with better readings or
interpretations of movies.
To address this practical, interpretive issue, I begin by exploring the way
viewers rely on folk psychology6 to make sense of films. In doing so, I will try
to both synthesize and transcend the three approaches mentioned above. Sec-
ond, I want to reconsider analytical tools such as the implied filmmaker and
3. Chatman argues that both “a communication with no communicator” and “a creation
with no creator” (1990: 127) are impossible, and hence, cinematic narratives need to have a
narrator.
4. For Levinson, “the presenter in a film [ . . . ] gives perceptual access to the story’s sights
and sounds; the presenter in a film is thus, in part, a sort of perceptual enabler. Such perceptual
enabling is what we must implicitly posit to explain how it is we are, even imaginarily, perceiv-
ing what we are perceiving of the story [ . . . ]”(1996: 252).
5. Also, theoreticians exist who try to refute the prior refutations of others. See, for
example, Diehl (2009: 16, 19).
6. The term “folk psychology” denotes “our standard, everyday, unthinking, ‘common-
sense’ assumptions about how our minds and the minds of others work” (Palmer 2004: 244).
 Alber, “Hypothetical Intentionalism”   165

the cinematic narrator from the perspective of their usefulness for actual film
analysis and cinematic criticism. Third, I develop a new model of cinematic
narration and I show that this model may serve as a frame of reading that
helps us to make strange and incomprehensible experimental films such as
David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) more readable.

Hypothetical Intentionalism and

the Reading of Films

In our everyday interaction, we try to understand others by attributing men-

tal states and dispositions to them. Alan Palmer argues that “consciousness
allows us to adapt intelligently to our environment” (2004: 89). Similarly,
Lisa Zunshine points out that we continuously engage in processes of mind-
reading and try “to explain people’s behavior in terms of their thoughts,
beliefs, and desires” (2006: 6). If we did not speculate about or try to inter-
pret the intentions of our fellow human beings, most, if not all, types of inter-
action (such as human communication) would become impossible.
Numerous critics have argued that the way in which we try to make sense
of other people is similar to the way in which we attempt to make sense
of fictional narratives (Palmer 2004, Zunshine 2006, and Herman 2007). I
would like to propose that when viewing a film, most viewers try to find out
what the film means or “is trying to say.”7 Indeed, Daniel O. Nathan argues
that “interpretation is in general and essentially a matter of asking ‘why,’ of
seeking an explanation of whatever it is that we have before us” (1992: 196).
Films are directed by individuals such as Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley
Kubrick, Fritz Lang, or David Lynch, and they are typically very influential
with regard to the end product that we as viewers get to see. However, it is
of course ultimately impossible to determine the filmmaker’s intentions. To
begin with, in film analysis it does not even make sense to speak of a single
author or filmmaker. While writing a novel is typically something done by
an individual, a film is usually so expensive and technically so complicated
that it can only be realized through a complex production process in which
many professionals work together: the author of the script, the producer, the
director, the editor, actors and actresses, photographers, sound directors, etc.
(Lothe 2000: 31).8 For these reasons, it is impossible for us to know whether

7. This is obviously not true of films that were designed for “pure” entertainment such
as action movies or porn films.
8. At the same time, it is worth noting that the producer and the director typically exer-
cise more power over the final product than all the others.
166   Part II: Chapter 6

our interpretations reveal the intentions of this multitude of professionals

who produced the film. Arguably, however, it would be equally impossible if
there were only one professional such as the director.9
Some critics speak of an “implied author” (Booth 2002) or an “implied
filmmaker” (Gaut 2004: 248) rather than the real filmmaker. However, I
would also like to avoid these terms because they suggest that certain critics
are able to transcend the mere forming of hypotheses about a narrative’s pur-
pose or “point,” and that they are somehow right about the intentions that
a narrative evokes. For example, according to Wayne C. Booth, the implied
author is the real author’s “second self,” and as such satisfies “the reader’s
need to know where, in the world of values, he stands, that is, to know where
the author wants him to stand” (1983: 73). Booth believes that analyses
along the lines of the concept of the implied author enable us “to come as
close as possible to sitting in the author’s chair and making this text, becom-
ing able to remake it, employing the author’s ‘reason-of-art’” (1982: 21).
Since we can never be sure that we have formed correct hypotheses about
the implied author or filmmaker’s intentions, I want to follow instead David
Herman’s slightly more modest proposal to move beyond the “compartmen-
talized intentionality” of the implied author or filmmaker—that is, beyond
an approach that is grounded in a view of intentions as inner, mental objects
(cf. Hutto 2000)—and toward “an approach of narrative understanding
that more fully and more openly grounds stories in intentional systems, that
acknowledges the extent to which the process of interpretation hinges on
making defeasible (= possibly wrong) inferences about communicative inten-
tions” (2008: 244). This proposal closely correlates with the idea that inten-
tions are not located in one particular and/or fixed area (such as the real
or implied filmmaker). Rather, they are distributed across the inventers and
interpreters of narratives, narrative designs, and the communicative context
in which narratives are produced and interpreted (Herman 2006).
More specifically, I propose to look at the way in which we make sense
of films from the perspective of hypothetical intentionalism, a cognitive
approach in which “a narrative’s meaning is established by hypothesizing
intentions authors might have had, given the context of creation, rather than
relying on, or trying to seek out, the author’s subjective intentions” (Gibbs
2005: 248; my italics; see also Kindt and Müller 2006: 170–76). More to the
point, I use what Daniel C. Dennett calls “the intentional stance” (1996: 27)
and Alan Palmer’s “continuing-consciousness frame” (2004: 175) to shed

9. On the intentional fallacy in literary studies, see Wimsatt and Beardsley (2001) and
Barthes (2002).
 Alber, “Hypothetical Intentionalism”   167

new light on cinematic narration. My basic assumption is that we all attri-

bute intentions and motivations to films in order to find out what they might
mean. Dennett defines the intentional stance as “the strategy of interpreting
the behavior of an entity (person, animal, artifact, whatever) by treating it as
if it were a rational agent who governed its ‘choice’ of ‘action’ by a ‘consid-
eration’ of its ‘beliefs’ and ‘desires’” (1996: 27). Similarly, according to Alan
Palmer, “the working hypothesis that visibly coherent behavior is caused by a
directing consciousness in the actual world is used by extension in the appli-
cation of the continuing-consciousness frame to the storyworld” (2004: 178).
When we view a film, we treat it as “a rational agent who governed its
‘choice’ of ‘action’ by a ‘consideration’ of its ‘beliefs’ and ‘desires’” (Den-
nett 1996: 27). We do not merely engage in processes of mind-reading to
understand the minds of the characters; rather, we also apply the continuing-
consciousness frame to the film as a whole and construct some kind of mind
or consciousness behind the film. In a second step, we then form hypoth-
eses about this mind’s intentions or what one might call the film’s potential
“point.” However, since we can never be sure that we have interpreted a film
correctly, it does not make sense to ascribe our hypotheses about the inten-
tions and motivations behind the film to the real or implied filmmaker.
Jerrold Levinson, one of the major supporters of hypothetical intention-
alism, in reconsidering Booth’s concept of the implied author, argues that
“instead of speaking of beliefs and attitudes that would be reasonably attrib-
uted to the actual author on the basis of the work contextually grasped, we
can speak of the beliefs or attitudes that just straightforwardly belong to the
implied author—he or she is being a construction tailor-made to bear them”
(Levinson 1996b: 229). While Booth thinks that the concept of the implied
author ultimately enables us to “employ [ . . . ] the author’s ‘reason-of-art’”
(1982: 21), Levinson redefines the implied author as a more or less fictional
construct created in the reader’s mind on the basis of signals or cues in the
narrative text. Since, as Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller point out, the
term “implied author” has been used so differently in the past, one might
want to dispense with the implied author: “it would hardly be sensible to
continue using the old name to refer to the new, refined concept” (2006:
176).10
Hence, with regard to the medium film, I propose to ascribe our hypoth-
eses about the intentions underlying a movie to what I would like to call the
“hypothetical filmmaker,” a term which denotes the single entity to which

10. To put this slightly differently, the term “implied author” has by now acquired so
much baggage that it makes sense to use new terminology.
168   Part II: Chapter 6

the viewer ascribes conscious or unconscious motivations that actuated the

professionals who were responsible for the making of the film in question.11
In this model, the intentions and motivations that played a role in the produc-
tion of a film are distributed across the film’s inventers, the film’s interpret-
ers, and the film’s narrative designs (which viewers use as the basis of their
hypotheses).

The Cinematic Narrator Reconsidered

Let us for a second assume that films are narrated by a cinematic narrator in
Chatman’s sense (1990: 127). Would it, then, somehow be possible to discern
the presence of this narrator or to get a sense of how the film narrator medi-
ates a film as a whole? At first glance, one might feel that in film, no deictic
or expressive markers exist that would warrant the existence of a film narra-
tor. In particular, in films that follow the classical paradigm of transparency
(such as Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once [1937]) and avoid intertitles, non-
diegetic inserts, non-diegetic music,12 and so forth, nothing really suggests the
presence of a cinematic narrator; indeed, we have a sense of the immediacy
of presentation: the film seems to merely show a fictional world without any
narratorial inflection or commentary. Hence, one may feel that it is unnec-
essary to introduce a narrator for film and that what we are observing in
theorists needing such a persona is an illicit transfer of real-world frames of
storytelling onto the (much more complex) communicational process of cine-
matic narration. In films using non-diegetic music or sound effects, intertitles,
captions, non-diegetic inserts, voice-over- or character-narrators, however,
some sort of mediacy does indeed make itself felt. This is also true of such
filmic peculiarities as slow-motion sequences or speed-ups, garish colors, sur-
prising cuts, and wipes.
If we posit the existence of a cinematic narrator, it is clear that this “over-
all agent that does the showing” (Chatman 1990: 134) has to be both extradi-
egetic and heterodiegetic. Furthermore, the film narrator is typically covert
and only occasionally slightly more overt, though never as overt as the first-
person or authorial narrator of a novel. Hence, David A. Black (2001: 301)
argues that the cinematic narrator differs from the prototypical narrators

11. Similarly, Nathan argues that “given the weaknesses of ordinary intentionalism, appeal
to a hypothetical author is the only adequate response” (1992: 200) to the demands of literary
interpretation.
12. Non-diegetic inserts and sound effects are not part of the fictional world and cannot
be seen or heard by the characters in the film.
 Alber, “Hypothetical Intentionalism”   169

of novels or short stories. Indeed, the film narrator is typically covert like the
narrative medium in reflector-mode narratives (such as Virginia Woolf’s novel
Mrs. Dalloway [1925]) or third-person narratives of external focalization
(such as Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Killers” [1927]).
According to Seymour Chatman, it is of utmost importance to discrimi-
nate between “the inventor” of a film (what he calls the implied filmmaker)
on the one hand, and its “presenter” (what he calls the cinematic narrator)
on the other (1990: 133). However, from the perspective of actual film criti-
cism, this distinction does not really matter because the functions of these
two entities or constructs clearly converge. Interestingly, the functions that
critics ascribe to the cinematic narrator are virtually identical with the func-
tions that others attribute to what they call the implied filmmaker: both are
rather neutral or covert shower or arranger functions.13
Since everything for which the cinematic narrator is said to be responsible
(the mediating, presenting, showing, arranging, or organizing of the film)
can in fact be attributed to what I call the hypothetical filmmaker, we can do
away with the concept of the film narrator.14 From the perspective of hypo-
thetical intentionalism, the only really important thing is that we formulate
hypotheses about the intentions and motivations that played a role in the
production of the film. I would therefore like to redefine cinematic narration
as the interaction between the film’s inventers, its viewers, and the film’s nar-
rative designs. As I see it, cinematic narration correlates with the idea that the
viewer uses Dennett’s intentional stance and Palmer’s continuing-conscious-
ness frame to speculate about the film’s intentions. And I want to argue that
he or she formulates these hypotheses on the basis of the narrative designs
used in the film.

13. For instance, Seymour Chatman uses the term “cinematic narrator” to denote “the
organizational and sending agency” (1990: 127) behind the film; Jerrold Levinson speaks of a
“perceptual enabler” who “gives perceptual access to the story’s sights and sounds” (1996a:
252); Jakob Lothe defines the “film narrator” as “the superordinate ‘instance’ that presents all
the means of communication that film has at its disposal” (2000: 30); and Kozloff speaks of an
“image-maker” who is responsible for “all the selecting, organizing, shading, and even passive
recording processes that go into the creation of a narrative sequence of images and sounds”
(1988: 44). Similarly, Booth defines the “implied author” of films as “a creative voice uniting
all the choices” (2002: 125); Manfred Jahn (2003: F4.1) speaks of a “filmic composition device
(FCD)” which denotes “the theoretical agency behind a film’s organization and arrangement”;
and Gaut simply argues that “the implied filmmaker” mediates the film as a whole (2004: 248).
14. Similarly, Richard Walsh suggests eradicating extra- and heterodiegetic narrators in
narrative fiction: “Extradiegetic heterodiegetic narrators (that is, ‘impersonal’ and ‘authorial’
narrators), who cannot be represented without thereby being rendered homodiegetic or intradi-
egetic, are in no way distinguishable from authors.” He therefore concludes that “the narrator
is always either a character who narrates, or the author” (2007: 84; 78).
170   Part II: Chapter 6

The Hypothetical Filmmaker as

the Film’s Highest Authority

The concept of the hypothetical filmmaker (seen as the “agent” projected by

the viewer) offers us an organizational hierarchy that helps us describe the
functioning of film narratives. From the perspective of hypothetical inten-
tionalism, it makes sense to attribute the totality of a film’s stimuli (including
non-diegetic music or sound, garish colors, non-diegetic inserts, surprising
cuts, as well as paratextual elements, i.e. intertitles, captions, and the film’s
opening and final credits) to some kind of agency and to then ponder their
potential “point.” Some viewers will (not without reason) maintain that such
choices ultimately issue from the director of the film. However, since we can
never be entirely sure of the director’s true intentions (and since his or her
intentions are not the only ones that play a role), I suggest attributing these
choices and the motivations behind them to the hypothetical filmmaker or, in
a different manner of speaking, simply to the film as a whole. From my per-
spective, the only important thing here is that we speculate about the poten-
tial purpose of the movie, scene, or shot under discussion; it does not matter
whether we attribute these choices to the filmmaker or to the film as a whole.
Let me present a couple of examples that illustrate how viewers typically
impute intentions to cinematic stimuli.
For instance, by continuously juxtaposing Alex’s (Malcolm McDowell)
violent outbursts with (non-diegetic) Beethoven music, the film A Clockwork
Orange (1971) proposes a connection between violence and art. Indeed, Sob-
chack argues that in the film, “art and violence spring from the same source;
they are both expressions of the individual, egotistic, vital, and non-institu-
tionalized man” (1981: 98). Furthermore, the garish red screen during the
opening credits may be a visual hint at the extreme emotions (related to sex
and violence) that are at work in A Clockwork Orange. Similarly, the film
Fury (1936) presents us with a surprising cut from gossiping housewives to a
(non-diegetic) shot of clucking hens, and thus urges us to look for similarities
between these two entities. More specifically, we are invited to (metaphori-
cally) see the women as hens (Bordwell and Thompson 2003: 336). Likewise,
the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) suddenly cuts from a bone employed
by a primitive ape-man and then thrown up in the air to a spacecraft of the
future. This juxtaposition may suggest that the same primitive motives and
instincts that drove the ape-man to construct a weapon out of a bone also
drive us to manufacture space-age hardware (Whittock 1990: 51–52).15

15. Both cuts urge us to see one entity as a different one and thus involve cinematic meta-
 Alber, “Hypothetical Intentionalism”   171

For their part, the films Metropolis (1926) and The Bourne Identity
(2002) use intertitles or captions to inform the audience about the story’s
temporal and spatial whereabouts. In this context, it is worth noting that the
choices concerning the color and the typographical presentation of the letters
do not only convey narrative information but additionally set a particular
tone.16 For example, The Bourne Identity, a film about a non-conformist CIA
agent called Jason Bourne (Matt Damon), who suffers from amnesia after
the CIA has tried to kill him, presents us with white captions that look as if
they could have come from a report written on a computer. The film thus sug-
gests objectivity and aloofness—a tone that highlights the cool and merciless
way in which the CIA tries to eradicate Bourne, and simultaneously contrasts
sharply with the strong emotional attachment we develop for the major pro-
tagonist as he desperately tries to find out who he is.
Furthermore, films may occasionally supply voice-over narrators who
comment on what we see on the screen or character-narrators who tell stories
to other characters. For instance, the film A Clockwork Orange confronts
us with a homodiegetic voice-over narrator (Alex) who comments on the
action on the screen, while the movie The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
uses a character-narrator (Francis) who tells another inmate how he ended
up in the lunatic asylum. Since the images continue on the screen regardless
of whether such verbal narrators speak (and also regardless of whether non-
diegetic sounds, captions, or intertitles are present), the theoretical construct
of the hypothetical filmmaker has to be seen as the film’s highest authority:
all information is a consequence of its mediation, choice, organization, and
arrangement. In other words, voice-over narrators, character-narrators, non-
diegetic sounds, and intertitles are all components of the hypothetical film-
maker’s options; they are some of the various devices that can be used in film.
Films sometimes also present us with unreliable character-narrators, and
the concept of the hypothetical filmmaker helps us explain and conceptualize
cinematic unreliability. In cases of unreliable narration in film, it is always the
case that the film as a whole (or, in a different manner of speaking, the hypo-
thetical filmmaker) draws our attention to and simultaneously counteracts a
character-narrator’s norms, values, tastes, judgments, or moral sense (Prince
1987: 101), and sometimes even the character-narrator’s “actual and overt
misinterpretation or distortion of story facts” (Chatman 1990: 225, n. 21).

phor. For more on film metaphors, see Whittock (1990) and Alber (forthcoming). Generally
speaking, I would attribute cinematic metaphors to choices made by the hypothetical film-
maker.
16. Also, Metropolis is a silent film and therefore required intertitles above and beyond
“intent.”
172   Part II: Chapter 6

Thus, it makes sense to discriminate between cinematic forms of normative

unreliability on the one hand, and cinematic forms of factual unreliability on
the other (see also Laass 2008: 30–32). In both cases, we are invited to see
that the character-narrator’s norms differ significantly from the norms of the
film, and our hypotheses about intentions and motivations obviously play a
crucial role.
A well-known example of cinematic unreliability is Hitchcock’s Stage
Fright (1950). In this film, Jonathan Cooper (Richard Todd) tells Eve Gill
(Jane Wyman) that he and Charlotte Inwood (Marlene Dietrich) are secret
lovers and that he is wanted by the police for killing Charlotte’s husband.
Jonathan (or “Johnny”) also tells Eve that Charlotte committed the crime.
According to his story, he only helped her to get rid of her blood-stained dress
but was seen leaving the scene. The camera enacts Jonathan’s story, which
Eve and we as viewers assume to be true. “Only retrospectively, after Johnny
admits to Eve his criminal tendency and a previous murder, do we realize that
the camera has conspired with Johnny to deceive us, that Johnny’s flashback
was a lie” (Chatman 1990: 131).
Another example of cinematic unreliability can be found in the film The
Usual Suspects (1995), in which Roger “Verbal” Kint (Kevin Spacey), appar-
ently a disabled low-profile criminal, tries to get immunity for his involve-
ment in a drug deal by testifying to US Customs Special Agent Dave Kujan
(Chazz Palminteri). As in Stage Fright, the camera enacts Kint’s story, which
Kujan and we as viewers assume to be true. However, as we learn at the end
of the film, Kint only made up this story in order to mislead Kujan about his
true identity. That is to say, the images we saw only conformed to Kint’s fab-
ricated story but not to what actually happened.17 Toward the end of the film,
Kint receives his immunity and leaves the investigation room, while Kujan
realizes that important details and names from Kint’s story are actually words
appearing on objects in the room, and that Kint is actually Keyser Söze, the
criminal mastermind Kujan had been looking for.
I agree with Volker Ferenz’s argument that all unreliable narration in film
emerges from an unreliable character-narrator (like Jonathan Cooper in Stage
Fright or Kint in The Usual Suspects).

17. One might argue that in such cases, a film narrator translates the narration visually to
the audience and that this cinematic narrator is unreliable. However, I would argue that since
what we see is identical with what we hear, most viewers attribute both the spoken words and
the resulting images to the character-narrator. From my perspective, there is no need for the
concept of the film narrator in these cases either. The character-narrator is unreliable and this
is clearly what we are supposed to realize.
 Alber, “Hypothetical Intentionalism”   173

In film, only in the case of [ . . . ] the character-narrator who “takes over,”

and thus appears to be the driving seat of, the narration, [ . . . ] do we deal
with narrators whom we treat like “real persons” and “new acquaintances”
and whom we can hold “responsible” for being unreliable about the facts
of the fictional world. Only then do we have a clearly identifiable fictional
scapegoat with sufficient “authority” over the narrative as a whole whom
we can blame for textual contradictions and referential difficulties. (Ferenz
2005: 135)18

At first glance, one might feel that a film like A Beautiful Mind (2001) also
presents us with a form of unreliable narration because it uses a lying cam-
era as well (Helbig 2005, Lahde 2006, Laass 2008: 28). However, upon
closer inspection we realize that in this case, the camera presents us with the
deranged perception of John Forbes Nash (Russell Crowe), a mathematical
genius, who begins to endure delusional and paranoid episodes, and Nash
does not relate his life through a narrative; rather, he is a focalizer who simply
misperceives the world. For example, at one point in the film, Nash begins to
work for a secret Defense Department facility in the Pentagon, and it takes us
quite some time to realize that he has never done so and that we have shared
Nash’s deranged perception all along. Toward the end of the film, we learn
that the people from the Defense Department (such as William Parcher [Ed
Harris]) do not exist outside Nash’s mind (even though we see him interact-
ing and dealing with them). According to Ferenz, focalizers like Nash cannot
be unreliable: they “cannot be held accountable for distorting the fictional
world simply because they do not narrate it” (2005: 140). Nash cannot mis-
represent the world of A Beautiful Mind because he does not even try to nar-
rate or represent it; rather, he inhabits it.19

18. Greta Olson argues along the same lines, when she claims that “the less personalized
the narrative voice is, [ . . . ] the more inappropriate it is to infer unreliability” (2003: 106,
n14). To put this slightly differently, the more personalized the narrative voice is, the more
appropriate it is to infer unreliability.
19. Similarly, it would also be odd to speak of the unreliability of Septimus Warren-Smith
in Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Septimus is a reflector-character who suffers
from schizophrenia following World War I. For instance, he frequently sees Evans, his com-
manding officer during the war, who is dead: “There was his hand; there the dead. White things
were assembling behind the railings opposite. But he dared not look. Evans was behind the
railings!” (2000: 21). Since Septimus misperceives the world but does not try to convince us of
his deranged worldview, it does not really make sense to speak of unreliability here. Eva Laass
mentions a number of films such as The Sixth Sense (1999), Memento (2000), Donnie Darko
(2001), A Beautiful Mind (2001), and Mulholland Drive (2001), which, in her view, “encour-
age the attribution of unreliable narration [ . . . ] in spite of their non-personalised narrative
mediation” (2008: 28). She sees these cases as forms of unreliable narration because for her,
they are presented by the cinematic narrator (whom she rechristens as “the implied narrator”
174   Part II: Chapter 6

Inferences about intention also come into play in connection with other
forms of focalization. Generally speaking, films can use images that are inter-
nally focalized (such as point-of-view shots or memory sequences) or images
that are externally focalized. In the latter case (which is far more common
in film), the perspective “corresponds to that place where a hypothetical
observer of the scene, present at the scene, would have to stand in order to
give us the space as pictured” (Branigan 1984: 6). Numerous recent films
confront us with images that seem to be externally focalized but then turn out
to represent a character’s worldview or misperception. For instance, Christine
Edzard’s two-part film adaptation of Charles Dickens’s novel Little Dorrit
(1855–57) (Nobody’s Fault and Little Dorrit’s Story [1987]) presents us with
sequences in which the images of Amy Dorrit (Sarah Pickering) and Arthur
Clennam (Derek Jacobi) are shaped by their respective worldviews. Nobody’s
Fault confronts us with the worldview of Arthur, while Little Dorrit’s Story
focuses on Amy’s worldview. For instance, the room at the Marshalsea debt-
ors’ prison in Little Dorrit’s Story is bigger and brighter than the room we
see in Nobody’s Fault. According to March, “the walls of the set have been
bodily moved out by several feet; the set has been repainted, redressed in
slightly brighter colors; potted plants blossom [ . . . ]; Dorrit’s bare chair
grows a cover, and his dressing gown sprouts tendrils of embroidery” (1993:
255). These two perspectives on the prison and William Dorrit (Alec Gui-
ness) reflect Arthur’s and Amy’s perception. While Arthur has a pessimistic
worldview and feels oppressed in the room, Amy has become accustomed
to the prison and has a more optimistic worldview. The “point” of this tech-
nique is presumably to suggest that both Amy and Arthur live in their own
worlds, and that it is difficult (or impossible) for one to understand the other
(Alber 2007: 48). Since no narrator misleads us in this case, and since the
filmic images here clearly relate to focalization, i.e. a character’s worldview,
rather than narration, I think that such scenarios cannot be described as cin-
ematic forms of unreliable narration. I would like to argue that they are bet-
ter understood as forms of internal focalization.20
To summarize: it makes sense to attribute a film’s various stimuli to
an agent like the hypothetical filmmaker because their presence follows a

[ibid.: 22]). Since I have done away with this concept, I would suggest categorizing all of these
cases as forms of internal focalization: in each case the images we see are dominated by the
distorted worldview of one of the characters, and they are focalizers who do not represent (or
even try to represent) what we see.
20. Most of the alleged examples of cinematic unreliability discussed by Jörg Helbig also
involve internal focalization, i.e., reflector-characters (or focalizers) that perceive but do not
narrate (2005: 134–36; 140). The only exception is Fight Club (1999), where we can attribute
unreliability to Jack (Edward Norton), the film’s voice-over narrator (ibid.: 136–39).
 Alber, “Hypothetical Intentionalism”   175

particular purpose. In other words, they are interpretive clues and we are
invited to ponder their implications. The concept of the hypothetical film-
maker allows us to speculate about the “point” of the film’s various stimuli
and its overall design without suggesting that we can definitely know the real
or implied filmmaker’s intentions. It is also worth noting that we assume that
the hypothetical filmmaker follows the Gricean Cooperative Principle. That is
to say, we approach the filmic data on the assumption of encountering a well-
informed composition guided by the Gricean maxims of quality, quantity,
relevance, and manner (1989: 22–40). Indeed, Marie-Louise Pratt has shown
that no matter how odd the textual structure of a narrative is, we will always
try to read it as a purposeful and meaningful communicative act by utilizing
the Gricean Cooperative Principle (Pratt 1977: 170–71). And, as I will show
in what follows, we can use this (very basic) assumption to make filmic oddi-
ties more readable.

The Hypothetical Filmmaker

as a Frame of Reading: The Strange Case of Lost Highway

In this section, I show that the concept of the hypothetical filmmaker may
serve as a frame of interpretation that helps us to make strange and incom-
prehensible experimental films such as David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997)
more readable. Lost Highway is a particularly strange and disconcerting film
because it is full of unnatural, i.e., physically and logically impossible, sce-
narios or events (Alber 2009a: 80, 2009b). In this film, some of the characters
are inexplicably transformed into other characters. Also, characters exist who
can be at two different locations at the same time.21 In the words of Mur-
ray Smith, “appearance and reality are dislocated; motivations are obscure,
cognitive dissonance disturbs the very foundations of narrative coherence;
temporal and causal sequences become paradoxical” (2003: 159). As I show
in what follows, the application of Alan Palmer’s continuing-consciousness
frame to the characters but also to the film as a whole helps us to (at least
partly) explain this odd narrative.
Lost Highway opens with a sequence in which we see Fred Madison
(Bill Pullman) in his house. Somebody rings the bell and, through the inter-
com, delivers the (apparently meaningless) message that “Dick Laurent is
dead.” The film then introduces us to the tense atmosphere in the marriage

21. Inexplicable transformations of characters are physically impossible, while violations

of the principle of non-contradiction are logically impossible (see also Doležel 1998: 165).
176   Part II: Chapter 6

between Fred, who works as a saxophone player, and his wife, Renée (Patri-
cia Arquette). Among other things, she does not want to go to his concert
at the Luna Lounge. After the concert, he tries to call her but she does not
answer the phone (either because she does not want to or because she is not
there). In another scene, they have sex but he is obviously unable to satisfy
her. Fred’s and Renée’s body language and their conversations (which are full
of long and awkward pauses) also give us a clear sense of their alienation.
“Renée’s desire is a source of unbearable agony for Fred, precisely because
he has no idea what she wants, let alone how to give it to her” (McGowan
2000: 54). The film underlines this feeling of discomfort by using a minimal-
ist décor, low-key illumination,22 and non-diegetic lugubrious string sounds.
At one point, we witness a flashback in which Fred remembers that Renée
left another concert by Fred together with a character called Andy (Michael
Massee). When Fred then asks her how she got to know Andy, she remains
extremely vague and tells him that Andy has offered her an unspecified “job.”
Fred suspects Renée of having an affair, and he becomes so jealous that he
eventually kills her.
In his prison cell, Fred is mysteriously transformed into the car mechanic
Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty) who has an affair with Alice Wakefield. Inter-
estingly, Alice is played by Patricia Arquette, the actress who also plays
Renée. One way of explaining Fred’s transformation and the existence of
Pete’s parallel universe would be to argue that Fred re-experiences the tragedy
of his marriage with Renée from a different perspective, and in his fantasy
assumes the identity of Pete, who is in many senses diametrically opposed to
him: Fred is a melancholy and lonely musician who does not seem to have
any friends. Pete, on the other hand, is a promiscuous car mechanic (and
also a small-time criminal) who has numerous buddies. Also, Pete goes out
with Sheila (Natasha Gregson Wagner) and at the same time, he begins an
affair with Alice who seems to be the fantasy version of Renée since both are
played by the same actress, Patricia Arquette. In the second part of the film,
Fred tries to achieve something he did not achieve in the first part, namely to
gain power and control over (or solve the mystery of) Renée (who is “reincar-
nated” as Alice).
The hypothetical filmmaker presents us with various clues that corrobo-
rate my hypothesis that the second part of the film enacts Fred’s fantasies.
First of all, before the transformation, we see an opening curtain which con-
veys the idea that we are about to witness something staged, theatrical, or

22. “Low-key” illumination primarily correlates with a lack of lighting and is frequently
used in horror films to create suspense (see Bordwell/Thompson 2003: 196).
 Alber, “Hypothetical Intentionalism”   177

invented. Second, it is worth noting that the curtain opens to a shot of an

exploding hut in the desert that runs backward: we see the exploding hut
turning into a complete one. By using this backward-running shot, the film
seems to tell us that we will learn how the hut came to explode, i.e., how the
marriage between Fred and Renée came to be so unworkable that Fred finally
killed his wife. Third, although the film contrasts the worlds of Fred and
Pete through the use of lighting, colors, depth,23 and music,24 it remains very
clear to us that the two worlds are related; the film establishes a connection
between these worlds by having Patricia Arquette play both Renée and Alice,
and by having Pete and Alice often speak the same dialogs as Fred and Renée.
Fourth, when Fred realizes that, even in his role as Pete, he cannot under-
stand, “have,” or control Renée/Alice, the fantasy world begins to crumble
and we return to the primary level of the film, i.e. Fred’s world.25 We can
make sense of the film by applying Alan Palmer’s continuing-consciousness
frame to the characters Fred/Pete and Renée/Alice (Pete and Alice are fantasy
versions of Fred and Renée created in Fred’s mind), and we can also assume a
continuing consciousness (the frame of the hypothetical filmmaker) that tries
to communicate a meaningful message behind the film as a whole.
At this point, one may wonder about the differences between the con-
cept of the implied filmmaker and the concept of the hypothetical filmmaker.
I think the advantage of my concept is an ethical or moral one, namely a
higher degree of honesty, modesty, and cautiousness. In contrast to Booth, I
do not know for sure whether my reading correlates with the place “where
the author wants [me] to stand” (1983: 73) and I do not know whether I have
approximated the position of the authorial audience. I would like to suggest
my reading as a hypothesis or speculation, and (as in everyday interaction) I
want to allow for the possibility that I might be wrong. Nevertheless, I wish

23. “The first part (reality deprived of fantasy) is ‘depthless,’ dark, almost surreal, strange-
ly abstract, colorless, lacking substantial density, and as enigmatic as a Magritte painting, with
the actors acting almost as in a Beckett or Ionesco play, moving around as alienated automata.
Paradoxically, it is in the second part, the staged fantasy, that we get a much stronger and fuller
‘sense of reality,’ of depth of sounds and smells, of people moving around in a ‘real world’”
(Žižek 2000: 21).
24. According to Smith, “the first half is dominated by a mixture of ‘dark ambient’ or
‘illbient’ atmospheres, and ‘industrial’ music—recalling the soundtracks of Eraserhead and
The Elephant Man. The second half shifts the emphasis to, on the one hand, a kind of lite jazz
(best exemplified by Antonio Carlos Jobim’s bossa nova composition ‘Insensatez’), and on the
other hand those gaudy cousins, ‘black’ metal, ‘death’ metal, and shock rock (in the form of
tracks by Rammstein and Marilyn Manson)” (2003: 160).
25. Since a seemingly supernatural event (Fred’s transformation into Pete) gets explained
as a dream or fantasy, Lost Highway bears certain structural similarities to what Todorov calls
“the uncanny” (1973: 41).
178   Part II: Chapter 6

to stress that the process of interpretation closely correlates with speculations

about intentions.
I would now like to speculate about the potential purpose or “point”
of the parallel universe that Lost Highway projects. First of all, it is worth
noting that in Fred’s fantasy world, Fred’s alter ego Pete has an affair with
Alice. Alice, some kind of femme fatale, is the girlfriend of Mr. Eddy (Robert
Loggia), a pornographer, and she also plays roles in his porn films. At one
point, Alice tells Pete that Andy offered her a “job,” which consisted of tak-
ing her clothes off in front of Mr. Eddy while one of his gangsters put a gun
to her head. Pete asks her why she did not decline and speculates that she
actually “liked it.” Since we witnessed exactly the same dialog between Fred
and Renée earlier on, the film here informs us that in its primary world, it
was actually Fred’s wife Renée who accepted Andy’s job offer. Indeed, toward
the end of the film, when we return to Fred’s world, we learn that Renée had
an affair with the pornographer Dick Laurent, the equivalent of Mr. Eddy in
Fred’s world (also played by Robert Loggia), and starred in his porn films.
More specifically, we see Renée having sex with Dick Laurent in a room at
the so-called Lost Highway hotel. Once Renée has left the hotel, Fred over-
powers Dick Laurent, throws him into the boot of his car, and then shoots
him in the desert. This scene is followed by a sequence in which Fred rings the
bell of his own house to speak the sentence “Dick Laurent is dead” into the
intercom. That is to say, at the beginning of the film, Fred must have (at least
unconsciously) known that “Dick Laurent is dead” because he had already
killed him. I think that one can explain this logically impossibly scenario (in
which Fred tells himself through the intercom that “Dick Laurent is dead”) as
the visualization of an unconscious process. In other words, the images tell us
that Fred knows that he killed Dick Laurent but represses this knowledge so
that he is no longer consciously aware of it.
As Fred begins to realize that, even in his role as Pete, he cannot “have”
or control Renée/Alice,26 the fantasy world gradually dissolves. All the char-
acters disappear or are retransformed. At first, Pete’s girlfriend Sheila disap-
pears, and she is followed by Pete’s parents. Later on, when Pete and Alice
have sexual intercourse in the desert, he tells her, “I want you, I want you,”
to which she coldly responds, “You’ll never have me.” It is notably at this

26. As I have shown in Alber (forthcoming), Pete’s obsession with Alice borders on self-
destruction. At one point, she tells him that she will not be able to see him. Pete is full of
despair, and the film cuts from a close-up of Pete’s face to a shot of moths inside a ceiling light,
where they die in their attempt to fly into a light bulb. This juxtaposition involves cinematic
metaphor and allows us to see Alice as the light and Pete as a moth in so far as he destroys
himself in his desperate attempts to reach or possess her.
 Alber, “Hypothetical Intentionalism”   179

point that Pete turns into Fred again. Fred’s second attempt to gain control
over Renée did not work either, and as a consequence Pete is retransformed
into Fred. Alice, on the other hand, walks into the hut and disappears like
all the other characters. Lost Highway thus seems to argue that Fred should
learn to let go and to accept things as they are because he will not be able to
control Renée anyway. One potential message of the film might be that our
desperate attempts to control others by understanding every aspect of them
will not work out, and that we should thus refrain from trying to do so.
There are two final aspects of this film that I would like to discuss in the
context of my attempt to develop an interpretation of the film using the idea
of hypothetical intentionalism, namely the identity of the spooky and devil-
like “Mystery Man” (Robert Blake) and the videotapes that Fred and Renée
find on the stairs to their house. Both seem to be closely related to the prob-
lems that exist between Fred and Renée. To begin with, it is worth noting that
the pasty-faced Mystery Man enters the world of the film through Renée, or,
more specifically, through Fred’s vision of Renée. We first see this old man
when Fred wakes up during the night, looks at his wife but instead of her face
sees the face of the Mystery Man.27
Later on, Fred talks to the Mystery Man at Andy’s party. The Mys-
tery Man tells Fred that he is in Fred’s house, and offers to call him there.
Strangely enough, the Mystery Man, who stands before Fred, answers the
phone in Fred’s house. When Fred asks him how this is possible, the old man
replies, “You invited me. It is not my custom to go where I am not wanted.”
The Mystery Man thus seems to embody Fred’s desire to be at two places at
the same time to be able to gain absolute control over Renée (for instance,
when he phones her after the concert and she does not answer the phone). In
what follows, the movie (or the hypothetical filmmaker) establishes a close
link between Fred and the Mystery Man. For example, both can be at two
different locations at the same time: the Mystery Man can simultaneously
stand before Fred at Andy’s party and answer the phone in Fred’s house.
Similarly, at the end of the film, we see Fred telling himself through the inter-
com that “Dick Laurent is dead.” Also, the Mystery Man notably helps Fred
to kill Dick Laurent. One way of explaining the existence of the Mystery
Man would thus be to argue that he exists in Fred’s mind and constitutes
some kind of materialization or embodiment of Fred’s desire to understand
and control the split within Renée, i.e., her hidden desires and drives. In other

27. This superimposition involves cinematic metaphor and invites us to see Renée as the
Mystery Man with the consequence that the beautiful woman becomes threatening, scary, and
ugly. And, indeed, Renée is in a sense quite threatening for Fred: he cannot have a “normal”
relationship with her because of her mysterious desires (Alber, forthcoming).
180   Part II: Chapter 6

words, we can explain the Mystery Man by attributing his existence to Fred’s
unconsciousness. Anne Jerslev, on the other hand, reads the Mystery Man
as “a personified, perverse visual principle” (2004: 161). This reading also
makes sense if one extends this principle to all the men in the film. Interest-
ingly, both Fred/Pete and Mr. Eddy/Dick Laurent follow the desire to master
the riddle of femininity through voyeuristic surveillance but ultimately fail.
In the first part of the film, Fred and Renée find three different videotapes
on the steps to their house. The first one depicts the exterior of their house;
the second one presents a strange shot in which somebody walks into their
bedroom and films them as they sleep; the third one shows Fred next to the
mutilated corpse of his wife. These videotapes are disconcerting because we
never learn where they come from. The most obvious answer is the Mystery
Man, who, however, only exists in Fred’s mind. I would therefore like to
argue that, like the Mystery Man, the videotapes are actually materializations
of the problems that exist between Fred and Renée. And it is worth noting
that their problems have got to do with both videotapes and the idea of sur-
veillance. Renée plays roles in Dick Laurent’s porn films, and this is arguably
a severe problem for Fred.28 Fred, on the other hand, would like to observe
every move that his wife makes in order to gain complete control over her.
In other words, the film Lost Highway depicts psychological processes
and problems as existing in the outside world where they can be filmed.
Many shots in this film seem to convey the idea that internal processes can
have very drastic consequences in the outside world, and that we should pay
attention to them. Also, by confronting us with entities such as the Mystery
Man and the videotapes, both of which cut across the distinction between
“internal” and ”external,” the hypothetical filmmaker illustrates that it can
be difficult to clearly separate illusion and reality. And this is particularly
true of extreme emotional states like jealousy. One might argue that the film
is ultimately about Fred’s feelings of jealousy and his desperate attempts to
come to terms with them (through a fantasy of omniscience). The Mystery
Man and the videotapes highlight that in extreme emotional states like jeal-
ousy, reality and illusion often become indistinguishable. As a matter of fact,
the film puts us into a position that is similar to that of a jealous person: we
frequently do not know what to believe or which images to trust. And this
is another effect that I would like to attribute to the hypothetical filmmaker.
The ultimate message of the film might be that like Fred, we should not fol-
low the human urge to create significance; we should rather learn to let go.

28. Colin Odell and Michelle Le Blanc also argue that the connection between these tapes
and Pete’s world is “via video” (2007: 99).
 Alber, “Hypothetical Intentionalism”   181

But it is worth noting that if we had not tried to impute intentions, we would
not have arrived at this conclusion.

Conclusion

In this paper, I have looked at the process of cinematic narration from the per-
spective of hypothetical intentionalism. More specifically, I have redefined the
process of cinematic narration as a complex process that involves the film’s
inventers, the viewer, and the narrative designs used in the film. I argue that
viewers try to make sense of films by applying Dennett’s intentional stance or
Palmer’s continuing-consciousness frame to characters but also to films as a
whole. This redefinition of cinematic narration has the following advantages.
First, it does justice to the folk-psychological reasoning viewers typically use
to make sense of films. Second, we can avoid the odd suggestion that we can
determine the real or implied filmmaker’s intentions and motivations; in con-
trast to the implied author or filmmaker (Booth 1982: 21; Phelan 2005: 45),
the hypothetical filmmaker is an emergent product of the interaction between
narrative designs and processes of production and interpretation. Third, the
concept of the hypothetical filmmaker can be used to replace the cinematic
narrator, and it offers us a hierarchy that makes it possible for us to describe
the complex functioning of cinematic narrative (including the phenomenon of
cinematic unreliability). Fourth, the hypothetical filmmaker helps us to make
experimental films such as David Lynch’s Lost Highway more readable. This
particular film might argue that it makes no sense to try to control others,
and that we should learn to let go. I would like to hypothesize that these ideas
played a role in the production of the film, and attribute them to what I call
the hypothetical filmmaker.29

29. I wish to thank Johannes Fehrle, Monika Fludernik, Per Krogh Hansen, David Her-
man, Tilmann Köppe, Jim Phelan, Peter Rabinowitz, and the anonymous reader of the manu-
script for their extremely helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay.
182   Part II: Chapter 6

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 7
S usan S . Lanser

Sapphic Dialogics
Historical Narratology and the Sexuality of Form

Literary critics have long acknowledged that form is (a kind of) content
and, as such, socially meaningful. Even scholars whose focus is hermeneu-
tic rather than poetic cannot wholly escape attending to the formal ele-
ments that shape—and arguably are—the text. It would seem, then, that
narratologists and interpreters of narrative would acknowledge consider-
able common ground. Yet the relationship between narratology and studies
of the novel—to take one example—still remains something of a standoff,
and nowhere more vividly than on the turf of history. As Monika Fludernik
observes, narratologists have demonstrated “comparatively little interest on
a theoretical level in the history of narrative forms and functions” (2003:
331). Conversely, scholars invested in the history of the novel tend to evince
little more than passing interest in the novel’s changing formal practices. As
Marjorie Levinson observes, the “historical turn” in literary studies, with
its emphasis on texts as “documents” rather than “monuments” (to bor-
row René Wellek’s famous terms), has been accompanied by a rather widely
acknowledged “eclipse” of form (Levinson 2007: 559, 566). Thus it would
seem that, as Brian McHale willfully overstates it, “historicism represses nar-
ratology, just as [ . . . ] narratology represses history” (2005: 65). It is safe to
speculate that typically, though of course not universally, the more histori-
cized a narrative project, the less likely it is to be narratological, and that the
more narratological a project, the less likely it is to be historical.
And yet some of the most important contributions to narrative stud-
ies are rich amalgams of poetics and history. I think of Erich Auerbach’s

186
 Lanser, “Sapphic Dialogics”   187

inimitable Mimesis, which offers a history of techniques by which narrative

has changed under the pressure of imitative representation. Or Ian Watt’s
groundbreaking Rise of the Novel, which provides a brilliant delineation
of “formal realism” as “the sum of literary techniques [ . . . ] whereby the
novel embodies [a] circumstantial view of life” by providing “such details
of the story as the individuality of the actors concerned, [and] the particu-
lars of the times and places of their actions” (Watt 1957: 31–32). Or the
concept of homology between the formal structures of literary texts and
the economic conditions of society that we owe to such theorists as Georg
Lukács and Lucien Goldmann. And I think of course of Bakhtin, whose
explorations of the “dialogic imagination” are at once historicized and for-
malized, and of Fredric Jameson, whose Political Unconscious: Narrative as
a Socially Symbolic Act (1981) arguably relies almost as much on Greimas
as on Marx.
Ansgar Nünning would seem to be right, then, in predicting that “the
more narratological literary and cultural history becomes and the more his-
torically and culturally oriented narratology becomes, the better for both”
(2000: 345). One recent model of just such a serious narratological inquiry
that is also a serious literary history is Hilary Dannenberg’s Coincidence and
Counterfactuality: Plotting Time and Space in Narrative Fiction (2008). My
essay offers a more modest contribution to that aim by studying narrative
form as sexual content in the context of lesbian—or what I prefer to call sap-
phic—literary history.1 I am of course far from the first to marry the study
of lesbian representation with the study of narrative form: Marilyn Farwell’s
Heterosexual Plots & Lesbian Narratives (1996) asks what counts as “les-
bian narrative” and explores lesbian subjectivity as it is constituted in a range
of modern and postmodern incursions against a heterosexual masterplot;
Judith Roof’s Come As You Are: Sexuality & Narrative (1996) investigates
the reciprocal relationship of narrative and sexuality in twentieth-century
Western discourse to ask what textual locations homosexualities can occupy;
and a fruitful “Sexuality and Narrative” issue of Modern Fiction Studies
(1995) likewise explored this imbrication. But these several works discuss
twentieth-century texts almost exclusively and, like most studies of sapphic
representations in the novel (Lisa Moore’s Dangerous Intimacies [1997] and
George Haggerty’s Unnatural Affections [1999] for eighteenth-century Eng-
lish texts, and Sharon Marcus’s Between Women [2007] for Victorian narra-

1. Terms such as “lesbian” and “sapphic” are equally problematic for exploring a histori-
cal sweep. I prefer “sapphic” in part for its emergence in the eighteenth century, the period that
will constitute the central focus of this essay, and in part simply for its Verfremdungseffekt: it
reminds us that sexuality, like narrative, is historically contingent.
188   Part II: Chapter 7

tives), focus primarily on plot and character. My own much briefer work on
“Queering Narratology” (1996) does attempt to sharpen awareness of the
significant place gender and sexuality might occupy in narration itself, but
like these other studies, it remains essentially a project of synchrony.2
My purpose here, in contrast, is both diachronic and formalist: to sketch
the ways in which a particular cultural topos—in this case, female same-sex
desire—may be linked with historically variable narrative practices. By look-
ing at the changing ways in which the sapphic operates narratively, I hope to
suggest that we have something to learn about the history of sexuality from
studying narrative form; conversely, by looking at the ways in which narra-
tive—and in particular narration—operates sapphically, I hope to suggest
that we have something to learn about narrative tout court from its sapphic
inscriptions. And in tracing the rudiments of an arc from the sixteenth to the
nineteenth century of one such structure, I will suggest that the intersections
of narrative history with the history of sexuality make the case for both a
more consciously historicized narratology and a more consciously narrato-
logical history of sexuality.3
More specifically, I will explore a form of narrative intersubjectivity that
I call the “sapphic dialogic,” in which erotic content is filtered through a
(usually intradiegetic) female pairing of narrator and narratee. Attending to
narration rather than only to narrated events allows me to argue that female
same-sex desire underwrites both early pornography and, in more muted
and unexpected ways, the courtship novel of the eighteenth century. Such
a claim might well seem counterintuitive, for as many scholars have persua-
sively argued, the “rise” of the novel is swept up in the constitution of sexual
difference and the consolidation of a heterosexual subject. And if, as Nancy
Armstrong has famously argued, the “modern individual is first and foremost
a woman” (1987: 4), certainly that woman—Pamela, Elizabeth Bennet, Jane
Eyre—is defined by her place in a social order that is heterosexual as well as
class-stratified. But reading narrative form as sexual content brings a more
complex textual story—both in and of the novel—to light. Put differently,
I am suggesting that what Michael McKeon has called the “secret history
of domesticity” carries the deeper secret of domesticity’s dependence on the
structural deployment of female same-sex desire.

2. A somewhat lengthier version of this essay appears in Lanser (1998).

3. Lisa Moore’s Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel
(1997) nods to the potential for the sapphic to inflect the “rise” of the novel but does not take
up this challenge more than in passing and not through an analysis of narrative form.
 Lanser, “Sapphic Dialogics”   189

Pornography and Sapphic Form

Mikhail Bakhtin has famously argued that “the speaking person and his [sic]
discourse” (1981: 332) constitute the novel’s primary distinctiveness, and it is
a commonplace that homodiegetic voice “rose” with the novel itself. It is also
a commonplace that female voice characterizes many an eighteenth-century
novel. But the prehistory of the novel’s homodiegetic practices turns out to be
quite differently gendered. If we can trace the genesis of a work like Robinson
Crusoe to such seventeenth-century genres as the spiritual autobiography and
the traveler’s tale, it is worth noting that these forms relied almost exclusively
on male voices.4 One of the few places where early modern literature does
deploy female homodiegesis is in the formal dialogue, a genre that experi-
enced a dramatic resurgence in early modernity. While the preponderance of
Renaissance dialogues remained true to the Platonic tradition of male inter-
locutors, female voices were put to two primary purposes, both of which
entail transgressions of “woman’s place”: protofeminist discourses about
the status of women and erotic conversations about sexuality. Both practices
can trace their roots to Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans of the second
century c.e., to my knowledge the only classical instance that relies almost
exclusively on the voices of women. Indeed, it is fair to say that the genres
both of the querelle des femmes and of early modern pornography were born
in female voice. Christine de Pisan’s Cité des dames (1405), which launched
the querelle, relies entirely on the voices of “Christine” and her allegorical
but explicitly female guides to the utopian women’s “city” to make its case
for women’s contributions to history. Later instances of the querelle are more
prone to relying on male voices, although Moderata Fonte’s Il merito delle
donne (1600) breaks new ground by creating conversations among seven
women friends who undertake a scathing critique of patriarchy, marriage,
and men’s treatment of women.
It is in the more clearly narrative of these two genres, however, that we
find the most direct antecedent of female voice in the novel. In the final
dialogue of Pietro Aretino’s Ragionamenti (1534), arguably Europe’s first
post-classical pornographic fiction and one structured entirely as a series of
conversations between women, a midwife/procuress describes to a wetnurse
an illicit encounter that she has arranged between a married lady and her
lover. But in an act of dialogic imagination, the midwife adds a sapphic nar-
rative layer to this heterosexual story by telling another woman what the

4. As Felicity Nussbaum argues in The Autobiographical Subject, women also produced

spiritual autobiographies, but these were available only privately. Among others, Nussbaum
mentions works by Elizabeth Bury, Mary Mollineux, Alice Thornton, and Elizabeth West.
190   Part II: Chapter 7

sight of a third woman—the adulterous wife who is undressing for her male
lover—does to her. Re-presenting the view from her hiding place, and in effect
occupying a focalizing position that aligns her with the man as he examines
his paramour “carefully, in every nook and cranny,” the midwife rhapsodizes:

I saw her strip herself stark naked [  .  .  .  ] for he examined her carefully
[  .  .  .  ]. My God, her neck! And her breasts, Nurse, those two tits would
have corrupted virgins and made martyrs unfrock themselves. I lost my wits
when I saw that lovely body with its navel like a jewel at its center, and I
lost myself in the beauty of that particular thing, thanks to which men do so
many crazy deeds [ . . . ]. The front parts of her body drove me wild, but the
wonder and marvel which really drove me wild were due to her shoulders,
her loins, and her other charms. I swear to you [ . . . ] that as I looked at her,
I put my hand on my you-know-what and rubbed it just the way a man does
when he hasn’t place to put it. (Aretino 2005: 341–42)5

In this moment, a heterosexual story produces, in effect, a second and quite

sapphic narrative. And this stimulation of one woman’s desire when watch-
ing another is multiplied yet again when the midwife’s interlocutor, the nurse,
is herself stimulated by listening to the midwife: “I feel, as you tell me all this,
that sweet delight which you feel when dreaming that your lover is doing it to
you and then awake just as you come” (Aretino 2005: 342). The arousal of
women by women that happens on the level of narration thus depends on a
heterosexual story, while the heterosexual story depends on the sapphic struc-
ture of its narration. The effect is dialogic not only in the formal but in the
Bakhtinian sense: the heterosexual story becomes heteroglossic; it is capable
of being turned into a homoerotic text, and the renowned “male gaze” is ren-
dered simultaneously female.
It is fair to say that formally speaking, early modern pornography was
born in this woman-to-woman narrative structure, and that what I call “sap-
phic dialogic” thus warrants recognition both in the history of sexuality and
the history of narrative. I do not, of course, mean that actual lesbians by
5. For reference to this scene I am indebted to Denise A. Walen (2000). Aretino’s Italian
original reads as follows: “la vidi spogliare ignuda [ . . . ] perchè egli la contemplò in ogni parte
[ . . . ]. Un collo Iddio! Un petto balia! E due poccie da far corrompere i vergini, et da sfratare
i martiri; io mi smarrii nel vedere il corpo con la sua gioia per elico in mezzo, e mi perdei ne la
vaghezza di quella cosa, bontà de la quale si fanno tante pazie, tante nimicizie, tante spese, e
tante parole; ma le coscie, le gambe, i piedi, le mani, e le braccia lodino per me chi sa lodarle.
E non solo le parti dinanzi; lo stupore che mi cavò fuor del sentimento, uscì da le spalle, da
le reni, e da l’altre sue galanterie. Io ti giuro per lo mio mobile, e lo do a sacco, al fuoco, e ai
ladri, e ai birri, se non mi posi nel vederlo la mano a la cotale, menandomela non altrimenti
che si menino i cotali da chi non ha dove intignergli” (Aretino 1979: 275).
 Lanser, “Sapphic Dialogics”   191

whatever name had anything to do with the construction of Aretino’s dia-

logues, which are doubtless written for the titillation of men and which also
use transgressive women to expose a range of social and intellectual hypoc-
risies. But it is not insignificant that pornography takes this turn, for I will
argue that the dialogic structuring of a heterosexual story through female
same-sex narration becomes a significant practice not only overtly in seven-
teenth-century erotica, but covertly in eighteenth-century courtship narra-
tives. Aretino’s sapphic structure is thus a foundational practice in the history
of European narrative as it edges toward the genre recognizable as the novel.
We can readily see the more overtly erotic and the more conventionally chaste
(and historically sequential) versions of this dynamic in two of the most pop-
ular erotic fictions of the 1680s, and again, if more chastely, in such novels
by women writers as Eliza Haywood’s The Masqueraders; or, Fatal Curios-
ity (1724), Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni’s Lettres de Milady Juliette Catesby à
Milady Henriette Campley, son amie (1759), Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs
of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761), and Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy, or The Ruin on
the Rock (1796), and perhaps most tortuously in the two most famous nov-
els of the eighteenth century, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–48) and
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1762). That we can
also mark a relative endpoint to this practice of sapphic narration is equally
significant.
While the stories that Aretino’s midwife tells the nurse are not dependent
on—but only back-inflected by—their sapphic narration, two erotic fictions
of the 1680s, Nicolas Chorier’s L’Académie des dames ou la Philosophie dans
le boudoir du Grand Siècle (c. 1680) and Jean Barrin’s Vénus dans le cloître,
ou, La religieuse en chemise: entretiens curieux (1683), and several other
texts to a lesser degree take sapphic narration beyond the imbrication of
two temporalities to a “here-and-now” dynamic in which sapphic dialogue
not only revises but constitutes the plot.6 That these texts are invested in the
formal realism and especially the “chronotope” that characterizes modern
fiction aligns what are otherwise loosely-plotted erotic encounters with the
novel that will “rise” in their wake. L’Académie des dames consists of seven
dialogues between the newly betrothed Octavie and her more experienced,

6. Texts with erotic content that use female-female narration during the same period
include the anonymous L’école des filles, ou la philosophie des dames, printed multiple times
from 1655 on and set forth in an English version as The School of Venus (1680); Ferrante
Pallavicino’s La Retorica delle Puttane (1642 and 1671); the anonymous English contribution
based upon Pallavicino, The Whores Rhetorick: Calculated to the Meridian of London; and
conformed to the Rules of Art (1683); and, in a somewhat different vein, Bernard Mandeville’s
The Virgin Unmask’d: or, Female Dialogues Betwixt an Elderly Maiden Lady and her Niece
(1724).
192   Part II: Chapter 7

married cousin Tullie, who has come to teach her the sexual ways of the
world. Vénus dans le cloître uses a similar structure to enact five dialogues
between the innocent Soeur Agnes and the sexually experienced Soeur Angé-
lique. Both works circulated widely throughout Europe in their original lan-
guages and in translation; both discuss, describe and enact sex acts in the
context of philosophically wide-ranging conversations; both texts deploy nar-
rative strategies that keep same-sex intimacy in motion throughout the text,
even when heterosexual acts are being recounted or enacted; and both also
resist closure by promising further sapphic encounters or by insisting that
they live on in memory.
These narratives take sapphic structure beyond Aretino’s retrospective
and voyeuristic form; here the interlocutors are also the actors, and the tex-
tual events become inseparable from their narration. The narrator-characters
effectively perform sex acts through speech acts: they discuss sex, report sex,
and enact sex, mostly between one another and sometimes with men in one
another’s presence, in a discourse that joins narration and action in a single
chronotope. This is no external view such as the one through the peephole
that allows Aretino’s midwife to participate in a man’s seduction of a woman;
here both narrators and readers are located in effect within the sexual events.
The merging of Erzählzeit (narrating time) and erzählte Zeit (narrated time),
marked both by the “ahs” and “ohs” of sexual pleasure and by ellipses that
signal ecstasy beyond language, sustains a sense that the represented acts are
proceeding at something like the pace in which they would actually occur, cre-
ating a stimulating synchrony that makes sex available to readers as an expe-
rience and makes time “in effect, palpable and visible” (Bakhtin 1981: 250)
in a way that the novel will come to depend on. Even heterosexual encoun-
ters are filtered through sapphic narration, effectively “queering” these fic-
tions’ ostensibly phallocentric plots. In effect, all sex becomes sapphic sex,
and heteroerotic pleasure—for both characters and readers—is dependent on
the sapphic word and gaze. Without denying that these fictions are man-made
fantasies produced primarily for men’s pleasure, they nonetheless constitute a
formal innovation in the gendering—and sexing—of narrative voice.

Sapphic Domesticity
The Eroticism of Confidence

Libertine fictions continue to proliferate, of course, in the eighteenth cen-

tury. Diderot’s La Religieuse (circulated in manuscript in 1760 but not pub-
lished until 1796) is easily read as an implicit revision of Vénus dans le cloître
 Lanser, “Sapphic Dialogics”   193

(though with a single female narrator addressing a male narratee) and Sade’s
Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795) as an explicit revision of L’Académie
des dames (though with male as well as female dialogic voices). It is espe-
cially worth noting that England’s best-known indigenous libertine novel,
John Cleland’s Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749), is
structured as a sexual confidence between women: each volume begins with a
salutation to an anonymous “Madam” whose “desires” Fanny considers “as
indispensable orders” to provide the “stark naked truth” (39) even though
she wishes her narratee would be “cloyed and tired” with the “repetition of
near the same images, the same figures, the same expressions” in recounting
the “joys, ardours, transports, ecstasies” in a narrative of which “the practice
of pleasure [ . . . ] professedly composes the whole basis” (129). Clearly, this
“practice of pleasure” constitutes on the level of narration the very relation-
ship between narrator and narratee.
In terms of manifest content, these libertine fictions are rather distant
from the domestic novels that dominate the eighteenth century. Yet Bakhtin
reminds us that the novel is in a sense pornographic at its core: it is essentially
the practice of prurience, “of snooping about, of overhearing ‘how others
live’” (1981: 123). If, as the novel gets domesticated, it foregoes its most
overtly pornographic “snooping,” then it seems to me all the more signifi-
cant that the structure of narration underlying so many libertine writings
also sustains a major strand of the domestic novel. For I will argue that the
convention of sapphic interlocutors set in motion by libertine fiction finds a
muted counterpart in one of the most common narrative devices of the court-
ship novel: the device of confidantes whose letters, journals, or conversa-
tions place two women in a structurally erotic relationship in which same-sex
secrets become the narrative vehicle for cross-sex desires. The sexual history
of narrative form thus argues for a line of continuity between the libertine
dialogues and the more decorous novels of desire that appear to affirm and
even to celebrate a firmly heterosexual trajectory. In this way, the sapphic is
not simply propelled by the novel but propels it, holding an originary place in
the new narrative order from which the novel springs.
We find a cautionary version of this structure in Eliza Haywood’s The
Masqueraders or, Fatal Curiosity (1724). In a fiction that I would situate mid-
way between the libertine and the domestic, the rake Dorimenus seduces a
willing widow named Dalinda to the apparent bliss of both. Yet for Dalinda,
sex requires the supplement of its telling:

Whatever Company she happen’d to be in, she always found some pretence
to make [Dorimenus] the Theme of her Discourse, and even among those
194   Part II: Chapter 7

who were the greatest Strangers to him, would invent some way to introduce
his Name—But all this fell short of the Satisfaction she wanted:—Her Soul,
full of his Charms, wild ’twixt Desire and Transport, could not contain the
vast Excess.—She long’d to impart the mighty Bliss. (13)

Here Haywood in effect sets up the primacy of narration over story as a sex-
ual practice. When Dalinda “pour[s] out the overwhelming Transport” (7) to
her friend Philecta, her own narration of her sexual encounters is not merely
mentioned but transcribed, and it occupies far more textual space than the
heterodiegetic narrator’s initial account of those acts. Moreover, the narra-
tion is explicitly represented as an erotic experience: while Dalinda “related
to [Philecta] the particulars of her Happiness,” she

[  .  .  .  ] felt in the delicious Representation, a Pleasure, perhaps, not much

inferiour to that which the Reality afforded [  .  .  .  ]. She no sooner parted
from [Dorimenus’s] Embraces, than she flew to her fair Friend, gave her the
whole History of what had pass’d between them—repeated every tender
Word he spoke—not the least fond Endearment was forgot—describ’d his
Looks—his melting Pressures—his Ardours!—his Impatiences!—his Exta-
sies!—his Languishments!—and endeavour’d to make her sensible how
different he was from other Lovers!—how much beyond his Sex!—with
what a God-like Sublimity of Passion he ador’d her!—and what was more
prodigious than the rest, assur’d her, that each Enjoyment but encreased
Desire. (14)

Here we have a sapphic supplement that turns the heterosexual event, struc-
turally speaking, into sex “between women,” so that the narrative becomes
the story of the pleasure both of (hetero)sexual act and (homo)sexual dis-
course. But if Dalinda needs narration to supplement story, the supposedly
dependable but, it turns out, envious confidante needs story to supplement
narration: she uses what Dalinda has told her in order to lure Dorimenus to
herself, her “fatal curiosity” thereby turning narration back into plot. Philec-
ta’s ruin is likewise doubly an effect of story and narration; after she becomes
pregnant, it is less the pregnancy than Dalinda’s exposure of Philecta’s
betrayal that ultimately destroys Philecta: “The Affair shall be no Secret—I
will, at least, have the satisfaction of Revenge” (40). The tragic outcome of
this particular structure of narration takes us far from the collusive eroticism
of the libertine fictions I have discussed above; indeed, one could argue that
Haywood’s representation serves as a cautionary tale locating female inter-
locutors as rivals for men rather than erotic partners. That the sapphic struc-
 Lanser, “Sapphic Dialogics”   195

ture is enclosed within a heterodiegetic narrative both fosters and symbolizes

the unreliability of female confidence.
More domesticated and subtler deployments of same-sex narrative con-
fidence structure two midcentury novels by women: Marie-Jeanne Ricco-
boni’s Lettres de Milady Juliette Catesby à Milady Henriette Campley, son
amie (1759) and Francis Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761).
Riccoboni’s epistolary novel is effectively a one-way correspondence from
Juliette to her confidante Henriette, narrating Juliette’s flight from Lord Oss-
ery, to whom she had been secretly engaged but who had abandoned her to
marry another. Ossery’s wife has died, and he is now pursuing Juliette in an
effort to explain himself; it turns out that he did not love his wife but mar-
ried her as the honorable response to a peccadillo. After Juliette yields to her
own desire and marries him, it is Ossery who writes the news to Henriette,
appropriating Juliette’s pen and effectively silencing her to tell Henriette that
there is no longer a “Lady Catesby,” but “if in place of this friend so dear
to your heart you’ll accept a new one, then Lady Ossery is ready to receive
your warm congratulations” (172–73; translation mine). Ossery is emphatic:
Juliette is now “mine, forever mine. No more Lady Catesby; she’s my wife,
my friend, my mistress” (173). But Juliette recovers her pen from Ossery to
suggest that she is not simply “forever his”: the novel’s last avowal of love is
for the confidante: “We await you impatiently here: no parties, no balls, with-
out my dear Henriette; I would say no pleasures, if the person who is follow-
ing my pen with his eyes were not already a little jealous of my tender amitié”
(39).7 In the final narration, in contradistinction to the apparent plot, it is
the husband who gets abandoned and the female friendship that gets the last
word. Juliette Catesby thus participates in the extensive revisionist project
which I have discussed elsewhere (Lanser 1998–99), that gives to friendship
between women the primacy that classical and early modern writers from
Aristotle to Montaigne accorded friendship between men.
The same-sex intimacy sustained by narration more vividly overtakes the
cross-sex intimacy that dominates the plot of Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs of
Miss Sidney Bidulph. Constructed as journal written for Cecilia, for whose
“embrace” Sidney “longs” and to whom, in conventional fashion, “she
revealed all the secrets of her heart,” Sidney Bidulph is built upon blatant
trade-offs in the object of desire. Just as Cecilia leaves to go abroad, Sidney’s
brother returns from abroad with Faulkland, the man with whom Sidney will
fall in love. One might argue that the unacknowledged task of this novel,

7. In a fuller analysis of this novel in Fictions of Authority (1992: Ch. 2), I discuss the
ways in which Ossery’s own narration undermines itself even before Juliette regains the pen.
196   Part II: Chapter 7

like the task that Freud assigns to female development and the task that the
story of Iphis and Ianthe assigns to the gods, is to turn a woman’s intimacy
with another woman into a socially mandated union with a man. If so, how-
ever, Sidney Bidulph demonstrates not the ease but the difficulties of such a
transformation, for Faulkland will become Sidney’s husband only after a first
marriage that turns tumultuous and ends tragically and a series of tribula-
tions that thwart her happiness with Faulklaud both before and after their
(legally questionable) union. The novel’s maidenly title, Memoirs of Miss Sid-
ney Bidulph, provides a telling counterpoint to Sidney’s marriages.
It is thus also significant that Sidney Bidulph retains its sapphic narrative
structure to the end. In a reversal of the opening drama, Cecilia returns from
the continent just after Faulkland again leaves for it. Although newly married
at last to the man she has loved for so many years, Sidney still writes to Ceci-
lia that she “shall not be sorry if I am detained from Mr. Faulkland till I have
the happiness of first embracing you, as our separation may be afterwards of
a long continuance” (455). As it turns out, the separation of long—indeed
permanent—continuance will be from Faulkland, as it is Cecilia who narrates
Faulkland’s death, having “immediately on [her] arrival in London [  .  .  .  ]
fl[own] to the dear friend of [her] heart” and “found the dear Sidney alone, in
her bed-chamber [ . . . ] prepared to receive me” (459). It is as if Faulkland’s
death enables a new kind of marriage effected through the novel’s structure
and affirmed by the fact that after this bedroom scene Cecilia takes over as
narrator and completes Sidney’s text. In yet another exchange of narration
and story, then, heterosexual marriage is replaced by a same-sex narrative
union on the level of form.
If it is possible to read the narrative structure of Juliette Catesby or Sidney
Bidulph as attenuated and sanitized sapphic dialogue, then arguably the novel
of domesticated heterosexuality has its narrational roots in the intimacy of
sexual knowledge shared between women. These examples render marriage
far from the simple “tomb of friendship” (24) that the fictional Eliza Whar-
ton of Hannah Foster’s The Coquette proclaims it—or that the historical
Elizabeth Carter avowed when she lamented that “people when they marry
are dead and buried to all former attachments” (I, 56–57). Indeed, in Sidney
Bidulph, it is heterosexuality itself that ends up “dead and buried.” Such is
also the case with Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy (1796), which uses the structure
of confidence to create a more openly erotic intimacy between Caroline, the
text’s primary narrator, and Sibella, its primary character, within a convoluted
plot of multiple desires: Sibella’s for the libertine Clement, the sensitive Arthur
Murden’s for Sibella, Caroline’s for Murden. Through it all, the relation-
ship between Caroline and Sibella is manifestly eroticized through Caroline’s
 Lanser, “Sapphic Dialogics”   197

overtly physical rhapsodies over Sibella and reciprocated in Sibella’s emo-

tional dependence on Caroline, in whose arms Sibella finally dies after bearing
a stillborn child conceived with Clement.8 Narratively speaking, the sapphic
is arguably the ultimate open secret in Secresy; the intimacy between Caroline
and Sibella coexists uneasily enough with the triangulated plot for Caroline
to report that others have noticed it. Fittingly, the novel’s last words conjoin
the intimacy of narration with the intimacy of story, as Caroline grieves both
Sibella and Murden: “I loved them both as I never loved man nor woman
beside” (359).
As novels like The Masqueraders and Secresy make clear, however, the
distinction between (sapphic) narration and (heterosexual) story with which I
have been working here does not entirely hold up. That is, the “events” that
constitute the narration—i.e., the interactions between narrators and nar-
ratees that are in theory separable from the events of the story—are, in most
of these instances, implicated in the turns of the plot. In a few cases—for
example, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure and Juliette Catesby—the inti-
macy between women enacted through narration is little more than an over-
lay upon—rather than an altering factor in—a manifestly heterosexual story.
But narration has a stronger connection to the plot of Sidney Bidulph and
Secresy, and The Masqueraders, like L’Académie des dames and Vénus dans
le cloître before it, is entirely dependent on the workings of same-sex confi-
dence. These variations suggest that the relationship between the dynamic of
narration and the dynamic of plot in any given text is itself a variable worth
further narratological scrutiny.

Sapphic Resurrection and the Tragic Turn

The trajectory in which sapphic narration ends up complicating a heterosex-

ual plot also characterizes, in ways too often overlooked, what are arguably
the eighteenth-century’s two most important and popular domestic fictions,
Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–48) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie,
ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1762). Each of these epistolary novels structured
through multiple intradiegetic voices features a female confidante (Anna
Howe for Clarissa, Claire for Julie) who is herself resistant to marriage and
professes an excess of love for the heroine. At the end of both novels, the
confidante attempts to reclaim the heroine’s dead body for herself in a bed-

8. I discuss this novel in passing, along with Clarissa and La Nouvelle Héloïse, in “Be-
feriending the Body” (1998).
198   Part II: Chapter 7

room scene with profound if differing implications for the novel’s inability to
sustain a marriage plot. That the erotic relationships between Anna and Cla-
rissa and between Julie and Claire are under-attended by critics seems to me
symptomatic of the ways in which scholars both of sexuality and of the novel
have given short shrift to narrative form as textual content.
Anna Howe’s pledges of love for Clarissa are threaded throughout Rich-
ardson’s long text: “I love thee as never woman loved another,” Anna pro-
fesses repeatedly. But Clarissa does not run off to, or off with, Anna nor does
Anna come to Clarissa’s rescue (and the novel’s structure of letter-writing
requires, of course, that the confidantes remain apart). In this way, Clarissa
effectively renders the implications of Anna’s love insignificant on the level of
story while requiring that love as a central feature of narration. Thus sepa-
rated from Clarissa for 1400 pages, Anna Howe turns up to make good on
her loverly pledges only when Clarissa is a corpse. With heaving bosom, in
what she herself calls a “wild frenzy,” Anna repeatedly kisses Clarissa’s lips,
attempting “by her warm breath” to bring Clarissa back to life (1402–3).
When Anna twice asks “is this all [ . . . ] of my Clarissa’s story!” (1402), she
suggests that this is not all, that the female intimacy that has structured the
narration cannot be killed off by the closure that Clarissa’s death implies.
Julie’s cousin Claire is likewise set up early on as an intimate, in a desire
that triangulates the relationships of Claire, Julie, and Julie’s lover Saint-
Preux and that culminates in Claire’s excess of grief when Julie contracts a
fatal illness after rushing into cold waters to save her child. Rousseau makes
the eroticism of the death scene even more explicit than does Richardson
when Claire shares the dying Julie’s bed after exiling both the husband and
the chambermaids. In a language that could be describing sex as readily as
dying, unexplained “comings and goings” precede the “moans” that draw
Julie’s husband, Monsieur de Wolmar, to the chamber, where he sees “the
two friends motionless, locked in each other’s embrace; the one in a faint, and
the other expiring.” Claire has to be dragged away and locked up to stop her
from continuing to “thr[ow] herself upon [Julie’s] body, warm it with hers,
endeavor to revive it, press it, cl[ing] to it in a sort of rage, call it loudly by a
thousand passionate names” (602) and from literally going mad with grief.
Both Anna and Claire attempt in the narration of their devastating loss
to create a kind of sapphic after-plot: in the novel’s last letter, Claire insists
that Julie lives on, that “her coffin does not contain all of her . . . it awaits the
rest of its prey . . . it will not wait for long” (612; ellipses in original). And
Anna Howe imagines that she and Clarissa may “meet and rejoice together
where no villainous Lovelaces, no hard-harted relations, will ever shock our
innocence, or ruffle our felicity” (1403). Thus two of the eighteenth-century’s
 Lanser, “Sapphic Dialogics”   199

most widely read and now canonical novels embed a sapphic structure in
which narration writes beyond the plot’s ostensible closure to turn death into
a kind of same-sex marriage.
With the exception of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure and Juliette
Catesby, in neither of which the confidante plays a substantive role in the nar-
rated events, all of the novels I have described as bearing a sapphic narrative
structure end tragically. In this respect they differ both from the libertine fic-
tions of the seventeenth century, in which sapphic and heterosexual elements
coexist quite cheerfully, and from a number of homoerotically-inflected eigh-
teenth-century novels with comic plots. Richardson’s Pamela and Sir Charles
Grandison, Edgeworth’s Belinda, and Diderot’s La Religieuse, for example,
all feature characters marked implicitly or explicitly as sapphic, and all of
these novels require the forcible exclusion of the sapphic character through
exile or alteration: Pamela’s leering Mrs. Jewkes turns innocuous; Grandi-
son’s mannish lover of women, Miss Barnevelt, is dropped from the narra-
tive; Belinda’s duelling feminist Mrs. Freke is symbolically castrated after she
is caught in a “man-trap”; and the advances of the lesbian mother superior in
La Religieuse become the last straw—implicitly worse than the cruel physical
and psychological punishments of Suzanne’s previous abbess—that impels
Suzanne’s narratee finally to intervene in order to get her out of the convent.
None of these novels displays the sapphic structure of narration that I have
discussed here; conversely, none of the eighteenth-century novels with sap-
phic narration, arguably excepting the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, fea-
tures any character who is overtly marked, let alone mocked, as lesbian.9 The
more covertly homoerotic courtship fictions that I have been discussing here
seem less able to put their sapphic strains to rest. To be sure, the comic irony
of Juliette Catesby’s final demurral has less operative force than the tragic
irony of Anna Howe’s final reunion with Clarissa, and the difference between
these endings may be related not only to major distinctions between comic
and tragic fiction but to very different degrees of narrative agency: Henriette
is but a silent receiver; Anna a major textual voice. Yet the divergent reso-
lutions of Juliette Catesby and Clarissa both locate the eighteenth-century
domestic novel within an erotic nexus that is far from straightforward, and
the fact that scholars so often pass over the sapphic potential of these endings
9. The character Phoebe in Cleland’s novel is marked by a queer pleasure in sexual en-
counters with women (as is the young Fanny herself before having heterosexual intercourse),
but Fanny goes to some length to reassure her narratee that Phoebe “really” prefers male part-
ners even as she undermines that claim: “Not that she hated men or did not even prefer them
to her own sex; but when she met with such occasions as this was, a satiety of enjoyments in
the common road, perhaps to a secret bias, inclined her to make the most of pleasure wherever
she could find it, without distinction of sexes” (1985: 49–50).
200   Part II: Chapter 7

may remind us of the shared investment in heteronormativity that character-

izes our own century and that we may be too stringently reading back into
the eighteenth century. For the story of the heterosexual subject, which the
eighteenth-century novel has seemed bent on consolidating, is also the story
of the incompleteness or sometimes even the failure of that consolidation, an
incompleteness arguably produced not only by blatant moves against queer
subjects such as Miss Barnevelt but also by structures in which the narration
of erotic pleasure and erotic danger is filtered through the intimacy between a
female narrator and her female narratee.

Heterodiegesis and Heterosexual Plotting

In linking the erotically muted courtship novel with the blatantly sapphic
dialogues of early pornography, I am not claiming any direct lineage, though
the possibility of influence cannot be wholly ruled out. Rather, I am suggest-
ing that the sapphic gets put in motion as an early modern problem that is
intimately tied both to the project of the novel and to the broader cultural
challenge of regulating the regimes of gender and sexuality to which the novel
is indentured. That Clarissa, Julie, and Sibella must be killed off, Dalinda
and Philecta done in and Sidney Bidulph widowed, sometimes in ways that
give female confidantes an entry point into the plot, suggests that as the eigh-
teenth-century continues, the discursive project of regulating sexual subjectiv-
ity through the novel might be growing not simpler but more complex.
No wonder, then, that the nineteenth-century novel expunges the dialogic
structure of female confidence, as if heterosexual subjectivity requires a wall-
ing off of same-sex narration even more complete than of same-sex event. It
may be no accident, for example, that the heterodiegetic narrator’s strongest
affirmations of sisterly intimacy in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and
Pride and Prejudice occur at the end of these novels, after the sisters are safely
married off. More pointedly, it is worth remembering that Elinor Dashwood
says almost nothing to Marianne of her feelings for Edward and that even the
ebullient Marianne speaks only what and when she must about her relation-
ship with Willoughby. Elizabeth Bennet likewise holds back so much of her
belated desire for Darcy that her ostensible confidante Jane is as surprised as
Mr. and Mrs. Bennet when Elizabeth agrees to marry him. What in light of the
novel’s history amounts to a wary withholding of female intimacy on the level
of narration becomes all but completed in a novel like Jane Eyre, in which the
confidante is an anonymous and voiceless reader and Jane’s beloved friend
Helen Burns has been killed off (perhaps so that Jane herself may live, since
 Lanser, “Sapphic Dialogics”   201

as Jane puts it, “I was no Helen Burns” [59]). While I would agree with Lisa
Sternlieb that in Jane Eyre “the reader is repeatedly pitted against Rochester
for Jane’s affections” and that “she woos her reader as Rochester has wooed
her” (475), these qualities make the genderlessness of Jane’s “dear reader” all
the more significant.10 It is only a step from Jane’s anonymous narratee to the
“you” that is “merely dead paper” to which the narrator of Charlotte Perkins
Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892) addresses her words, or for that
matter to the narrative form of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’ Diary (1996),
whose narrator does not explicitly address even a paper narratee even though
some kind of narratee is, of course, implied.
These examples suggest that the arc of what I am calling the sapphic
dialogic reaches its most explicit form in the seventeenth century, becomes
sexually muted in the eighteenth, and all but disappears by the nineteenth
century. I am not arguing, of course, that the sapphic itself disappears with it.
Sharon Marcus is right to say that the Victorian novel does not negate bonds
between women, though I would not quite agree that “almost every Victorian
novel that ends in marriage has first supplied its heroine with an intimate
female friend” (76). I read the coexistence of female friendship with the mar-
riage plot as a sign of the consolidation of heterosexuality, all the more as it
is the shared desire for a specific man that sometimes most unites the women
(Middlemarch, as Marcus shows us, is a case in point). I suggest, however,
that because these female intimacies are rendered in extradiegetic and often
also heterodiegetic narration, they are better able to remain instrumental
rather than to offer resistance to the heterosexual marriage plot. By contrast,
in both the libertine fictions and domestic novels I have been discussing, at
least one of the female interlocutors is assigned or enacts a protofeminist cri-
tique of men and/or marriage. Anna, Claire, Juliette, Philecta, and Caroline
all make clear their resistance to some domestic or patriarchal status quo.
It is also worth recognizing that this textual pattern of same-sex dialog-
ics, while produced by male as well as female writers, is gendered female:
the male-male homoerotic dialogue or structure of intersubjective confidence
does not take root in the novel in the same way. One could argue, of course,
that the dialogue form enacted between two or more male interlocutors lies
firmly at the heart of the “Western tradition,” given its primacy as Plato’s
great structuring technique and its subsequent use in myriad dialogues across
literary history. And, as Robert Sturges points out, male-male dialogue struc-
tures several important discourses on male friendship, from Cicero’s to that

10. I discuss the narrative strategies of Jane Eyre more fully in Fictions of Authority (1992:
176–93).
202   Part II: Chapter 7

of the twelfth-century cleric Aelred to the seventeenth-century pederastic dia-

logue of Rocco’s L’Alcibiade fanciullo a scola (1651), in which, says Sturges,
the dialogue mode once again becomes “a form of seduction” as it was in
Plato’s Lysis (138). The dialogic mode continues without much erotic con-
tent in Diderot’s philosophical fictions (Le Rêve d’Alembert, Le Neveu de
Rameau), but it is otherwise a rare phenomenon among novels of the eigh-
teenth century. It is uncommon even in men’s works for a male narrator to
address a male narratee to recount erotic desires or deeds, though one might
consider the (ultimately competitive) ways in which Clarissa functions as a
love object in the correspondence between Lovelace and Belford, and one
must also, of course, recognize those rarer novels from Aphra Behn’s Love
Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1688) to Pierre Choderlos de
Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses (1784) in which sexual secrets are the stuff
of male-female confidence.
On the whole, then, it is not through intradiegetic narration that the
novel engages male-male desire, with the slight exception of Goethe’s Die
Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774), at least until Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(1817), in which men (the creature, Victor) talk to men (Victor, Walton) and
in which the first-level narrator Walton, while writing to his (silent) sister,
speaks passionately of his desire for intimacy with a man. Those eighteenth-
century narratives in which men recount erotic experience are more likely to
be directed to extradiegetic narratees who stand in for the public reader. Such
a difference in gendered narrative patterns is plausible given the fact that men
are culturally more authorized to speak to a “public” both in general and
about the erotic in particular.
This by no means signifies an absence of male homoeroticism in the
eighteenth-century novel; such a claim would be patently false, as numer-
ous scholars have shown.11 Rather, I am claiming a more limited and less
frequently erotic presence of male-male narrative interlocutors during the
period in which the novel “rose.” In short, it is safe to say that the male-
male dialogic has a quite different trajectory from the sapphic structure that I
have been discussing. This difference reminds us not only that the eighteenth-
century novel genders both the structures of desire and the mechanisms of its
narration, but that, as I have argued elsewhere and often, narration itself has
gendered properties.12
In arguing for sapphic form as an underpinning of the eighteenth-century
novel’s domestic agenda, I also hope to have shown that narrative form can

11. See, for example, MacFarlane and Haggerty.

12. I make this argument in several essays, most recently in “Sexing the Narrative” (1995)
and “Queering Narratology” (1996).
 Lanser, “Sapphic Dialogics”   203

function as novelistic content and that the novel’s history of sexuality thus
needs to encompass a history of form. Nor should narration be considered
the only element—though I believe it remains a central and underexplored
one—in which form arguably embeds what manifest content seems to be
overlooking or even contradicting. The ways in which several of the novels
I have been discussing write “beyond the ending,” to take a phrase from
Rachel Blau DuPlessis, suggests, for example, that the formal qualities of plot
embodied in narrative order and narrative time might also be fruitful loca-
tions for a history of the novel and its sexualities. Years after Helen’s death,
Jane Eyre has the word Resurgam—“I shall rise again”—engraved on her
friend’s tomb. This textual detail gives the story of Jane and Helen a kind
of afterlife metaphorically related to that accorded female intimacy through
its reappearance after the resolution of the marriage plots in several of the
novels I have been discussing. In this spirit, we might speculate that what nar-
rative content “killeth” may likewise find a Resurgam in narrative form. It is
my hope that such prospects will challenge historicism no longer to repress
but rather to welcome narratology, and narratology likewise to welcome his-
tory. Both fields have little to lose and much to gain from such a new dialogic
relationship.

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Bakhtin, M. M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and
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Dannenberg, Hilary (2008) Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting Time and Space
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eth-Century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Farwell, Marilyn (1996) Heterosexual Plots & Lesbian Narratives. New York: New York
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Haywood, Eliza (1724) The Masqueraders or, Fatal Curiosity. London: Printed for J. Rob-
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Lanser, Susan S. (1998–99) “Befriending the Body: Female Intimacies as Class Acts.”
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——— (1995) “Sexing the Narrative: Propriety, Desire, and the Engendering of Narratol-
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——— (1996) “Queering Narratology.” Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and
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——— (1998) “Sexing Narratology: Toward a Gendered Poetics of Narrative Voice.”
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 8
Amit Marcus

Narrators, Narratees, and Mimetic Desire

Girard’s thesis of mimetic desire (also called “triangular” or “metaphysical”

desire)1 has aroused much theoretical interest among literary scholars, who
have expanded and expounded his theory, while at the same time criticiz-
ing its universal pretensions and its blurring of differences between different
types of desire (e.g., male vs. female, heterosexual vs. homosexual).2 Literary
interpretations that apply Girard’s ideas from his work Deceit, Desire, and
the Novel (1965) to fictional narratives focus on the dynamics of mimetic
desire and rivalry between two (or more) characters on the story level: the
desiring subject, the mediator (or rival), and the desired object.
In this essay, I wish to examine the relations between story and narra-
tion3 in connection with the triangular structure of desire and to demonstrate
how mimetic rivalry can function between narrators and narratees. I claim
that narration may affect mimetic desire in contradictory ways: on the one
hand, narration may reinforce and perpetuate mimetic desire, both through

1. The terms “mimetic desire” and “triangular desire” are clearly equivalents, since the
structure of mimetic desire—desiring subject-mediator-desired object—is triangular. The term
“metaphysical desire” originates in Girard’s claim that “[a]s the role of the metaphysical grows
greater in desire, that of the physical diminishes in importance. As the mediator grows nearer,
passion becomes more intense and the object is emptied of its concrete value” (1965: 85).
2. See, for instance, Dee (1999), Klarer (1991), Kofman (1980), Moi (1982), Morón
Arroyo (1978), Sedgwick (1985).
3. My distinction between “story” and “narration” is based on Rimmon-Kenan, made
“in the spirit of Genette’s distinction between ‘histoire,’ ‘récit’ and ‘narration’ (1972: 71–6)”
(2001: 3).

206
 Marcus, “Narrators, Narratees, and Mimetic Desire”   207

the re-experiencing of past events and through the mimicry of the media-
tor while relating the story; on the other hand, narration may clash with
mimetic desire. In this case, the relations between narrator and narratee rep-
resent a possible world in which mimetic desire no longer exists. I conclude
with remarks on the possible contribution of Girard’s notion of metaphysi-
cal desire to narratology, specifically to the analysis of the interconnections
between autodiegetic narrators, their narratees, and the main character(s) in
their story.
Two qualifications for the argument are required at this preliminary stage:
first, since mimetic desire can obtain only between subjects or characters that
are structured as subjects, it can operate on the level of narration only if both
the narrator and the narratee are personalized. In other words, my line of
reasoning is applicable only for narratives in which the narrator and the nar-
ratee are also characters in the story or, at the very least, have some human
properties such as gender, social status, or a system of beliefs. Thus the type
of narratee under consideration differs significantly from the theoretical con-
struct that Gerald Prince terms “a degree-zero narratee,” which has neither
personality nor any particular experience of the world (1973: 181–82, 1985;
see also Piwowarczyk 1976).
Secondly, mimetic desire can exist on the level of narration insofar as there
is a story at that level or mimetic desire motivates the narration and the nar-
rator’s appeal to a narratee (this point will be clarified in my interpretations
of specific narratives). In such stories, there are significant similarities and
contrasts between the theme of mimetic desire in the story and the narrator-
narratee relation (see Chatman 1978: 259). Hence in discussing narration, I
do not refer to the minimal function of any narrator to recount events and
situations, which Genette names “the properly narrative function” (1980:
255). Instead, mimetic desire on the level of narration is closely related to
another function of the narrator, which Genette calls “the function of com-
munication” (256) and which echoes Jakobson’s phatic and conative func-
tions (1960: 357). In the narratives that I shall discuss, “the absent presence
of the receiver becomes the dominant (obsessive) element of the discourse”
(Genette 1980: 256).

Girard’s Notion of Mimetic Desire

Girard sharply distinguishes between his notion of mimetic desire and the
notion of desire in the romantic literary tradition. The romantic conception
presents desire as spontaneous, that is, as a direct, linear connection between
208   Part II: Chapter 8

the desiring subject and the desired object (1965: 16–17, 29–39, 269). By
contrast, according to Girard’s triadic model, the subject does not desire the
object in and for itself, but the desire is mediated by another subject who
possesses, or pursues, this object. This other subject, the mediator, is at the
same time admired by the desiring subject as a model, in extreme cases even
as a human God (61), and despised as an obstacle in achieving the object.
The desiring subject fallaciously presents his4 own desire as both logically and
chronologically original and the desire of the mediator as derivative, i.e., as
emanating from the desiring subject’s desire.
Girard believes that metaphysical desire is in principle insatiable: each
time the desiring subject succeeds in achieving the desired object, he becomes
disappointed and frustrated because he realizes that it is not really what he
has coveted. The reason for this constant disappointment is that the sub-
ject cannot overcome his initial loss of self-respect and self-assurance caused
by the painful recognition that he is not divine, namely, that he is not self-
sufficient. In his attempt to compensate for this lack, the subject believes that
he can achieve self-sufficiency if he is able to have the objects that his media-
tor possesses. The obsession of the desiring subject with obtaining objects
turns him into a slave of his unrealizable desire.
The most crucial distinction within the category of metaphysical desire is
between external and internal mediation. External mediators are spiritually,
socially, and intellectually distant from the subject who imitates them and
desires the same objects to such an extent that they do not inhabit the same
world and therefore cannot engage in rivalry. For instance, Amadís de Gaula
is the external mediator of Don Quixote, since the real knight and his zeal-
ous follower inhabit separate worlds and are spiritually and socially distant
from each other.5 By contrast, the desiring subject and his internal mediator
in Dostoevsky’s novels inhabit the same world, are closely related spiritually
and are often members of the same family.6 The great spiritual distance that

4. I avoid using “he or she” when referring to the desiring subject and his rival for two
reasons. First, although Girard’s theory purports to be universal and valid for both sexes, the
great majority of the examples of mimetic desire that he provides are novels written by male
authors and featuring male rivals and a woman as the “desired object.” Second, the novels
discussed in this essay comprise, even more so than those chosen by Girard, almost exclusively
male characters. Yet unlike Girard and like most of his feminist critics, I do not assume that
male and female desire necessarily fit into the same structure.
5. Amadís de Gaula was, according to the four-volume narrative written by Garci Ro-
dríguez de Montalvo, the illegitimate child of King Perión of Gaul and Elisena of England and
was raised by the knight Gandales. Unlike Amadís, Don Quixote, originally named Alonso
Quixano, was a country gentleman who lived in an unnamed section of La Mancha with his
niece and a housekeeper.
6. For instance, Andrei Versilov and his illegitimate son Arkadi Dolgoruky (the narrator)
 Marcus, “Narrators, Narratees, and Mimetic Desire”   209

characterizes external mediation tallies with an emotional distance, hence

external mediation does not produce rivalry. By contrast, internal media-
tion generates rivalry between the desiring subject and his mediator, which
becomes more passionate and destructive as the distance between them is
reduced (8–9, 85–88). Another significant difference between external and
internal mediation is that the subject of the first type openly admits his desire,
whereas the subject of the second type makes great attempts to conceal it,
since he believes that if his mediator knows what his desire is, the mediator
will prevent him from achieving it.
Girard further claims that all great novels7 show the futility of mimetic
desire by transcending the obsession from which it has sprung (Girard 1965:
300). This final phase of moral recognition, which resembles anagnorisis in
tragedies, provides novels with a sense of closure that liberates both the hero
and his creator from the agony of delusions: “When he renounces the decep-
tive divinity of pride, the hero frees himself from slavery and finally grasps
the truth about his unhappiness. There is no distinction between this renun-
ciation and the creative renunciation. It is a victory over metaphysical desire
that transforms a romantic writer into a true novelist” (307).
Narration as the perpetuation of triangular desire challenges Girard’s
claim that every great novel ends with the surmounting of desire, that is,
with the conversion of the desiring subject, who recognizes that his desire
is destructive.8 Conversion is a historical convention that was prominent in
nineteenth-century novels, which constitute the hard core of Girard’s analy-
sis; this convention was increasingly subverted by novels from the twentieth
century. In the novels and novellas that will be analyzed in this essay—Günter
Grass’s Cat and Mouse (Katz und Maus), Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal
(Journal du voleur), and Albert Camus’ The Fall (La chute)—there is either
no conversion at all or only a partial conversion (in the case of La chute, it is
misleadingly presented as a complete conversion).
The issue of conversion is only one manifestation of the way in which
Girard’s choice to focus on a specific corpus of novels rather than another
has affected his theoretical insights. Most of the novels that he discusses,
written by Cervantes, Flaubert, Stendhal, Proust, and Dostoevsky, feature an
external (extra-heterodiegetic) narrator who does not participate in the story
in Dostoevsky’s A Raw Youth both fall in love with Katerina Nikolaevna Akhmatova, the
widow of an army officer. It turns out that Arkadi’s love for Akhmatova is an imitation of his
father’s, whom he at the same time venerates and detests.
7. Girard has been justly criticized for confusing descriptive and normative categories
(see Moi 1982: 23).
8. Girard never defines the term “conversion,” but its religious undertones are clear (see
1965: esp. 293–94).
210   Part II: Chapter 8

and is not personally involved in the events. This non-personalized narrator is

detached from the mimetic desire that dominates fictional characters. Proust’s
A la recherche du temps perdu is of course an exception, but even in this case,
Girard does not distinguish between story and narration when discussing
mimetic desire. In other words, he does not distinguish between the internal
focalization of Marcel as character and the external, retrospective, and self-
reflexive focalization of Marcel as narrator. By contrast, I wish to concentrate
on narratives in which the narrator is both the main character (or one of the
two main characters) in the story and the “desiring subject.” These narratives
foreground several ways in which narration can be associated with triangular
desire.
Not many novels answer the three criteria which govern my inquiry: hav-
ing a personalized narrator, a personalized narratee, and a story on the level
of narration (or a relationship between a narrator and a narratee that directly
addresses the issue of desire). The three fictional narratives that will be dis-
cussed in what follows were chosen because they dramatize the ambivalent
relations between the narrator and the narratee—admiration and hostility,
attraction and repulsion—which are inherent in mimetic desire. Each of these
narratives manifests a specific type of mediation and desire on the level of
narration, which is intricately connected to the level of the story.
Although Girard’s Deceit, Desire, and the Novel is a well-known work, it
has not received as much attention from literary scholars as have other theo-
ries of desire, in particular that of Jacques Lacan. Girard’s Catholicism, his
partly unjustified reputation as a political reactionary, and what is perceived
by some as the reductiveness of his theory—which is accused of boiling down
all cultural and historical phenomena into one underlying structure—have
stood in the way of a more precise examination of his ideas (see Golsan 1993:
111–24). This essay is an opportunity to promote interest in Girard’s insights
and their great explanatory power.
I wish to emphasize at the outset the strengths of a Girardian analysis in
comparison with an analysis based on Lacan’s theory of desire. According to
Lacan, desire emerges from the primary splitting of the ego and the inevitable
failure of the subject to return to a fictive originary state—signified by the
Real—of undisturbed unity with the (m)other (see Fryer 2004: 92–94). Gen-
et’s narrative is especially amenable to this type of explanation owing to the
salient motif of the absent mother (e.g. 21–22), which a Girardian reading
does not account for, but the other two narratives can at the most generate
speculations about the infantile source of lack and desire. Girard’s argument
that desire necessarily fails because there is always another rival whose being
cannot be completely appropriated proves more productive in these cases.
 Marcus, “Narrators, Narratees, and Mimetic Desire”   211

Moreover, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s interpretation of Girard (1985: esp.

21–25), which emphasizes the concealed homosocial relations between the
desiring subject and his rival in Girard’s structure of triangular desire, is par-
ticularly illuminating for narratives that highlight the ambivalent relations
of admiration and hostility between male characters.9

Cat and Mouse

The mimetic rivalry between Pilenz—the narrating character10—and Mahlke

is the major theme of Günter Grass’s novella Cat and Mouse (1961). Pilenz
belongs to a group of adolescents who mimic each other in an uncompli-
cated way. Their social interaction never develops into real competition or
rivalry and helps to retain the unity of their small community. When Mahlke,
Pilenz’s idiosyncratic schoolmate (on the story level) and his narratee on the
level of narration, joins the group, his unique appearance and conduct at the
same time attract and repel Pilenz. Mahlke seems to belong to the group in
certain respects but transgresses its borders in others; this feels threatening
to Pilenz, because it signifies instability and undermines his ostensibly secure
world.11 Pilenz admires Mahlke for his apparent self-sufficiency as well as

9. A thorough examination of the points of convergence and divergence between the

Lacanian and the Girardian conceptions of desire is far beyond the scope of this essay. This
territory has been covered in part by Meloni (2002). Nonetheless, I wish to raise some ideas
about this issue. Lacan’s theoretical assumptions are based on Freud’s, whereas Girard, though
influenced by Freud, is critical of psychoanalysis. However, both Lacan and Girard have ana-
lyzed desire as insatiable, marking a lack in being that can never be filled. Accordingly, each
of them concludes that the subject will never achieve complete satisfaction (Braunstein [2003];
Ragland-Sullivan [1995]). Lacan’s model of desire, like Girard’s, is based on intersubjectivity,
that is, on a triadic structure (Meloni [2002]; Grigg [1991: 110]). Yet Girard takes a negative
view of metaphysical desire and argues that it should be surmounted, whereas for Lacan desire
is a necessary condition for the creation of the imaginary and the symbolic registers, hence
also for the generation of representation and meaning and for the structuration of the subject
(Sullivan [1995]).
10. In using the term “narrating character,” I presuppose that there is at least a minimal
psychological continuity between the autodiegetic narrator as narrator and as character, even
if this continuity is replete with ruptures, splits, and fissures. Although classical narratologists
such as Genette and Rimmon-Kenan supposed that their distinctions and classifications are
devoid of psychological assumptions, it seems that they too presuppose such continuity in the
very terms “homodiegetic” and “autodiegetic” narrators (see Genette [1980: 245]; Rimmon-
Kenan [2001: 96–97]).
11. For a more detailed study of narratives featuring an individual whose idiosyncrasy and
refusal to conform subverts the norms of the group, see Marcus (2008). However, whereas the
essay in question focuses on the discursive aspects of such narratives, Mahlke challenges Pilenz
and his friends by his behavior and his disproportioned body rather than by an exceptional
discourse.
212   Part II: Chapter 8

for his charisma, resoluteness, and unconventional behavior (Grass 1961:

24–26).12
Although Mahlke participates in certain communal activities, he remains
an outsider whose inability or unwillingness to conform seems to challenge
the norms of the group, its solidarity, and cohesiveness. For example, he does
not take part in the communal sexual intercourse with Tulla, Pilenz’s cousin,
when the other boys vie with one another in order to prove their masculin-
ity to themselves and to the other members of the group. It transpires that
this abstinence is caused neither by Mahlke’s impotence nor by his putative
homosexuality, but stems from his self-assured virility that does not require
proof (32–35).
Mahlke’s extraordinary spiritual qualities are supplemented by his excep-
tional physical traits, above all his huge Adam’s apple and his enormous
penis, whose size presumably—so the text implies—corresponds to its fertility
(33–34). The homosexual undertones of Pilenz’s description of Mahlke turn
him into an implicit source of libidinal desire that is rejected and denied.13 As
a typical case of mimetic rivalry, this admiration is mingled with hostility,14
which is demonstrated not only in Pilenz’s responsibility for Mahlke’s prob-
able death, but in other deeds as well. For instance, there is the repeated
symbolic erasing of Mahlke’s name and image: first, Pilenz erases the gro-
tesque image of Mahlke-as-Christ, which was drawn on the blackboard by
a classmate (38), and some years later, Pilenz with an ax destroys the words
“Stabat Mater dolorosa” that Mahlke engraved on a board of the latrine of
the Nazi Labor Service camp, thereby erasing Mahlke’s name as well (109).
Another deed that presumably manifests Pilenz’s hostility towards Mahlke is
the story of the cat and the mouse that is incessantly repeated throughout the
novella in a number of variations and gives it its title: the cat is a real cat (but
also, symbolically, the predator that chases Mahlke), whereas the “mouse”
is Mahlke’s exceptionally huge Adam’s apple (and symbolically, Mahlke as
prey). The most significant question of the plot, which remains undecided, is
whether Pilenz alone enticed the cat to jump on the “mouse” when Mahlke
12. All references to specific pages in this essay refer to the original edition, unless other-
wise indicated.
13. Girard believes that homosexuality is derived from heterosexuality: “Proustian ho-
mosexuality, for example, can be defined as a gradual transferring of erotic value which in
‘normal’ Don Juanism remains attached to the object itself” (1965: 47). See also Golsan (1993:
26); Moi (1982: esp. 28–30); Sedgwick (1989: 16–17, 21–25). Although Pilenz denies being
sexually attracted to Mahlke, his fascination with Mahlke’s genitalia certainly suggests that
his adoration is not purely spiritual.
14. Ryan (1977) claims that Pilenz’s ambivalent relationship with Mahlke is politically
significant, as implied by the narrating character: Pilenz collaborates with the Nazi regime,
whereas Mahlke shows signs of resistance (but also of resignation).
 Marcus, “Narrators, Narratees, and Mimetic Desire”   213

was lying asleep on the grass, whether one of his friends did this, or whether
the cat jumped on the “mouse” of its own free will.
Pilenz’s use of “wir” (“we”) when narrating the story excludes Mahlke
from the group to which Pilenz belongs, thereby increasing the distance
between them while at the same time portraying Mahlke as a manifestation
of das Unheimliche (the uncanny), whose idiosyncrasies prevent him from
becoming an integral part of any human community.15 This exclusion is one
way in which the narrating character conceals his metaphysical desire not
only from others, but also from himself, in order to pacify his conscience
and deny his guilt (see Girard 1965: 10, 153–61). In other words, the use of
the first-person plural is a camouflage which Pilenz uses to create the impres-
sion that his interest in Mahlke did not exceed the interest of his friends and
that he was not solely responsible for Mahlke’s end—an impression which
is incompatible with the details of his story. Mahlke’s mimetic rivalry with
Pilenz illustrates Girard’s claim about “the inverse relationship between the
strength of desire and the importance of the object” (86): metaphysical desire
which focuses on the mediator increases at the expense of the significance of
the physical object that he possesses. Girard argues that the final stage in this
evolution is the complete disappearance of the object. In Cat and Mouse, the
objects of the mediator play a significant role, but they constantly replace
one another, thereby revealing that none of them has a noteworthy intrinsic
value.16 The pompoms, the screwdriver, the military medal are all treated by
Pilenz as sanctified objects not because of their essential properties, but sim-
ply because they are associated with the mediator:

Wenn Mahlke gesagt hätte: “Mach das und das!,” ich hätte das und noch
mehr gemacht. Mahlke sagte aber nichts  .  .  .  und als er die Puscheln als

15. The idiosyncrasy of Mahlke’s character and Pilenz’s responsibility for his probable
death make Grass’s novella relevant to a later major book by Girard, Violence and the Sa-
cred (1977). In this work, Girard describes sacrificial violence as the remedy for unrestrained
violence and total chaos in civil society: instead of fighting among themselves, mimetic rivals
channel their hostility to an exceptionally vulnerable individual (or group), an outcast in their
community. The sacrificial process can succeed only if the violence is in fact (or is at least
presented as) unanimous, that is, if the whole community participates in the persecution, or at
least accepts it passively (see also Golsan [1993: 29–84]). Like any scapegoat, Mahlke bears
victimary signs which differentiate him from the rest of his community. However, unlike the
typical sacrificial process described by Girard, Pilenz has exclusive responsibility for Mahlke’s
death and attempts either to repudiate his responsibility or to lay the blame on his classmates
while at the same time confessing the deed.
16. Hilliard (2001: 425–30) contends that the objects used by Mahlke could be arranged
in accordance with Roman Jakobson’s definition of the poetic function as the projection of the
principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination.
214   Part II: Chapter 8

Mode einführte, war ich der erste, der die Mode mitmachte und Puscheln am
Hals trug. Trug auch eine Zeitlang, aber nur zu Hause, einen Schraubenzie-
her am Schnürsenkel. . . . Und hätte Mahlke nach der Rede des U-Boot-Kom-
mandanten zu mir gesagt: “Pilenz, klau ihm das Ding mit dem Drussel!,” ich
hätte das Ding mit dem schwarzweißroten Band vom Haken gelangt und für
Dich aufgehoben. (1963: 81)

If Mahlke had said: “Do this and that,” I would have done this and that and
then some. But Mahlke said nothing. . . . When he introduced the pompom
vogue, I was the first to take it up and wear pompoms on my neck. For a
while, though only at home, I even wore a screwdriver on a shoelace . . . and
if after the submarine captain’s speech Mahlke had said to me: “Pilenz. Go
swipe that business on the ribbon,” I would have taken medal and ribbon off
the hook and kept it for you. (1964: 74)

There is more than one way for the desiring subject to possess the desired
object. When he wishes to conceal his desire from his rival and from oth-
ers (perhaps also from himself), or when he is too much of a coward to face
his rival directly and not shrewd enough to manipulate him, he may com-
promise the achievement of his desire by continually observing the desired
object, which becomes sanctified in his view, regardless of its intrinsic value.
This is a compromise, because while the object is not completely under his
control, it nonetheless feeds his desire and gives him the illusion of gain-
ing full control at some point in the future. Pilenz’s desire for Mahlke is a
case in point. Although he mimics Mahlke’s behavior, Pilenz (perhaps uncon-
sciously) knows that wearing a screwdriver on his neck is too transparent an
impersonation. His solution is to fix his gaze on the screwdriver, possessing it
merely with his eyes, and to wear it on his neck only when he is at home and
nobody sees him. Similarly, Pilenz asks Mahlke if he (Pilenz) could touch the
medal that the latter has stolen from a former pupil who had won it during
the war (82), but when later Mahlke wins such a medal as a mark of distinc-
tion for his feats and asks Pilenz to keep it while he stays in his hiding place
in the minesweeper, Pilenz refuses to take the desired object (136). His refusal
demonstrates his wish to conceal his desire from himself and from others
(he would not like to be viewed as someone who overtly mimics Mahlke)
and indicates the transfer of his desire from the object to the rival/mediator
(Pilenz does not deem the medal so important).
According to Girard, in the most intense and violent cases of internal
mediation “the object is only a means of reaching the mediator. The desire
 Marcus, “Narrators, Narratees, and Mimetic Desire”   215

is aimed at the mediator’s being” (1965: 53).17 The desiring subject deludes
himself that if he succeeds in absorbing the being of the mediator, he will con-
sequently become self-sufficient. Since these attempts are doomed to failure,
the desiring subject must seek another solution to his feeling of existential
worthlessness. One radical solution is to murder the mediator (or to cause
his death indirectly). The desiring subject believes that if his rival—now the
obstacle that thwarts his desire—no longer exists, he will be able to restore
his self-assurance and self-fulfillment (85). The subject’s mistake is that he
ascribes the cause of, and the responsibility for, his feelings of inferiority to
the other rather than to himself. An inverse solution is committing suicide,
thus renouncing desire once and for all: “Desiring one’s own nothingness is
desiring oneself at the weakest point of his humanity, desiring to be mortal,
desiring to be dead” (275). As the most extreme manifestations of the exis-
tential states of sadism and masochism (176–92, 287–92), the desperate acts
of murder and suicide are “dialectical reverses” that arise from the same psy-
chological source (184).
In Katz und Maus, murder—or at least causing the mediator’s death—
happens on the level of the story (Pilenz persuades Mahlke to hide in a
sunken barge and deceptively steals the can opener from him, thus leaving
him inside the barge without any food), while committing suicide is symboli-
cally enacted on the level of the narration. Indeed, a compulsion of repetition
that prevents the teller from continuing with his life is an exemplary mani-
festation of the death principle.18 Paradoxically, this masochistic longing for

17. Girard distinguishes between two forms of internal mediation: “exogamic,” or ex-
trafamilial, and “endogamic,” or intrafamilial (1961: 42). In exogamic internal mediation,
metaphysical desire dominates the relations of subjects who inhabit the same world and are
relatively close to each other spiritually and socially, but it does not penetrate the most intimate
circle of the family. By contrast, in endogamic internal mediation, metaphysical desire takes
over the relations between members of the same family and is hence more emotionally intense
and more prone to becoming dangerously violent. Cat and Mouse demonstrates that endo-
gamic metaphysical desire is not in all cases the more violent of the two. Familial relations are
almost absent from Grass’s novella: Pilenz lives with his family, but he is completely absorbed
by his relations with his classmates; his parents do not interest him at all, and the death of his
brother at war is briefly mentioned as an event that had no emotional effect on him at the time
(122, 137). I suggest replacing Girard’s categories of “exogamic” versus “endogamic” media-
tion with softer categories that avoid dichotomies and can give a better account for cultural
differences, such as the significance of family relations for the desiring subject.
18. See Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1961), esp. 30–32, and also Rimmon-
Kenan (1987: 177–78). Rimmon-Kenan interprets Pilenz’s narration not as suicide, but as
killing Mahlke yet again. Both interpretations (mine and Rimmon-Kenan’s) presuppose that
Pilenz is indeed responsible for killing, or at least attempting to kill, Mahlke. This assump-
tion is challenged by Hilliard, who claims that Pilenz as narrator attempts “to give himself an
importance that he did not in fact have, as a character at the time” by confessing crimes that
216   Part II: Chapter 8

one’s own (symbolic) death is achieved through the narration by the amplifi-
cation of metaphysical desire and the accentuation of the prominent role of
the mediator as an obstacle. The deceased Mahlke thwarts Pilenz’s desire as
he persists in haunting Pilenz after his death: guilt best preserves metaphysical
desire and does not allow the perpetrator of the crime to forget his rival. This
persistence of desire is also signaled by Pilenz’s appeal to Mahlke in his role
of narratee in at least 23 paragraphs and sentences, especially at the begin-
ning and the end of some chapters (e.g., the beginning of chapter two and
the end of chapter three). This strategy draws attention to Mahlke’s role as
mediator of Pilenz’s metaphysical desire. The narrating character knows well
that Mahlke cannot respond to his call, yet he insists on attempting to com-
municate with Mahlke as if the latter could reappear through the power of
words. These hopeless attempts merely perpetuate Pilenz’s confession of his
guilt and prevent him from achieving contrition and atoning for his sin.
Pilenz feels compelled to tell the story in order to repudiate his guilt (7,
84), but the repetitive scene of the cat and the mouse and the lack of closure
at the end of the narrative19 attest to the failure of this attempt. Furthermore,
the narrating character intends to tell only Mahlke’s story (21, 99), but as the
narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that this story is inseparable from Pilenz’s,
that is, that the life and death of his rival and of himself have become inter-
mingled. Pilenz feels that Mahlke dominates his emotions and dictates his
actions to such an extent that it is no longer clear who writes the story (98).
Not only did the mediator’s death fail to restore the subject’s self-assurance;
the atrocious deed has made this goal forever unachievable.
Thus narration can reinforce and perpetuate mimetic desire through re-
experiencing and re-enacting. However, narration can also be mimetic desire,
in the sense that it is motivated by the will to mimic the mediator and his
desires. The conception of narration as mimetic desire contributes to Girard’s
argument against the romantic idea of spontaneous, unmediated desire: the
desire to tell one’s own story is—or can be—mediated, not only by exter-
nal mediators from whom the desiring subject is socially and spiritually dis-
tanced, but also by internal mediators, indeed the same ones who inhabit the
story-world.
he has not really committed (2001: 432).
19. In her analysis of the normative and functional aspects of the mediation gap between
the author and reader in literary communication, Yacobi (1987) distinguishes between the
perspectives of the narrator and reader on the lack of closure in Cat and Mouse. From Pilenz’s
perspective, “the uncertainty that surrounds the end is existential and in keeping with the open-
ness and chaos of reality”; by contrast, the reader, who considers the text as a fictional creation
of Grass, views this lack of closure as “one option out of many, chosen for a purpose of his
own, and fictionally motivated (realized, justified, camouflaged) by reference to the narrator’s
‘constraints of reality’” (362).
 Marcus, “Narrators, Narratees, and Mimetic Desire”   217

Grass’s novella obliquely and intricately displays triangular desire as the

motivation for narration through an analogy between swimming and nar-
rating.20 After Mahlke learns to swim and to dive, these activities become his
favorite habits. On one occasion, Pilenz swims after Mahlke in a manner that
is presented not only as aimed at reaching a goal, but also—and more signifi-
cantly—as mimicking his rival. These events are intertwined with the act of
the narration, which is of course posterior to them, and the two acts—swim-
ming and narration—are portrayed as analogous:

Während ich schwamm und während ich schreibe, versuchte und versuche
ich an Tulla Pokriefke zu denken, denn ich wollte und will nicht immer an
Mahlke denken. Deswegen schwamm ich in Rückenlage, deswegen schreibe
ich: Schwamm in Rückenlage  .  .  .  war aber, als ich die zweite Sandbank
hinter mir hatte, weggewischt, kein Punkt Splitter Loch mehr  .  .  .  [Ich]
schwamm Mahlke entgegen, schreibe in Deine Richtung: Ich schwamm in
Brustlage und beeilte mich nicht. (1963: 79)

As I swam and as I write, I tried and I try to think of Tulla Pokriefke, for
I didn’t and still don’t want to think of Mahlke. That’s why I swam back
stroke . . . but when I had the second sandbank behind me, she was gone,
thorn and dimple had passed the vanishing point  .  .  .  [I was] swimming
toward Mahlke, and it is toward you that I write: I swam breast stroke and
I didn’t hurry. (1964: 72)

This paragraph not only metaleptically blends past and present, story and
narration, but also indirectly applies mimetic desire to narration: if Pilenz
mimics Mahlke by swimming after him, and if swimming is like narrating,
then it makes sense that narrating is another form of mimicry. Once again,
not only does Mahlke come back to life in Pilenz’s memory: Pilenz writes
through Mahlke, in the sense that their story lives have become irrevocably
enmeshed.
I wish to end this section with a short discussion of two paragraphs from
the novel that highlight the connection between the appeal to the mediator

20. Frye (1993) draws an interesting analogy between Pilenz’s narration and the functions
of Mahlke’s body, particularly his digestive system. For the analogies between the process of
narration and the events of the story, see also Hilliard (2001) and Rimmon-Kenan (1987). My
use of “motivation” in interpretations of fictional narratives should be distinguished from its
use by Russian Formalists as a literary device that could be given a compositional, a realistic,
or an artistic raison d’être. My own employment of the term is based on its use in psychology
and the philosophy of psychology as the reason and the initiation for a particular behavior as
well as the direction, intensity and persistence of such behavior (see, e.g., Mook [1996: 4]).
218   Part II: Chapter 8

(i.e., Mahlke) as narratee and the perpetuation of mimetic desire. The first
paragraph relates directly to the analogy between swimming and narrating:

Ich schwimme langsam in Brustlage, sehe weg, zu, vorbei  .  .  .  sehe, bevor
meine Hände den Rost fassen, Dich, seit gut fünfzehn Jahren: Dich!
Schwimme, fasse den Rost, sehe Dich: der Große Mahlke hockt unbewegt
im Schatten, die Schallplatte im Keller hängt und ist in immer dieselbe Stelle
verliebt, leiert aus, Möwen streichen ab; und Du hast den Artikel mit dem
Band am Hals. (1963: 82)

I swim slowly, breast stroke, look away, look beyond  .  .  .  and before my
hands grip the rust, I see you, as I’ve been seeing you for a good fifteen years:
You! I swim, I grip the rust, I see You: the Great Mahlke sits impassive in the
shadow, the phonograph record in the cellar catches, in love with a certain
passage which it repeats till its breath fails; the gulls fly off; and there you are
with the ribbon and it on your neck. (1964: 74)

The text blurs the difference between seeing as a physical act that presup-
poses the presence of the seen object (in this case, Mahlke’s body swimming)
and “seeing” metaphorically, that is, the re-presentation of the once seen
object in imagination. Pilenz’s external gaze during the actual swimming
turns inwards, as his memory evokes the moments in which he mimicked the
movements of his rival; his direct appeal to Mahlke as narratee accords with
this blurring of differences between past and present, presence and absence,
since the desiring subject (i.e., Pilenz) considers these differences insignificant
as long as his desire persists. Just like Mahlke, Pilenz repeats the same record;
unlike Mahlke, however, his repetition does not bring him any happiness.
The second paragraph displays the repetition compulsion of the narrating
character in a completely different context:

Laß uns noch einmal zu dritt und immer wieder das Sakrament feiern: Du
kniest, ich stehe hinter trockener Haut. Dein Schweiß erweitert Poren. Auf
belegter Zunge lädt Hochwürden die Hostie ab. Eben noch reimten wir uns
alle drei auf dasselbe Wort, da läßt ein Mechanismus Deine Zunge einfahren.
(1963: 126)

Let us all three celebrate the sacrament, once more and forever: You kneel, I
stand behind dry skin. Sweat distends your pores. The reverend father depos-
its the host on your coated tongue. All three of us have just ended on the same
syllable, whereupon a mechanism pulls your tongue back in. (1964: 114)
 Marcus, “Narrators, Narratees, and Mimetic Desire”   219

The quoted lines describe Mahlke, Pilenz, and Father Guzevsky during com-
munion; Pilenz addresses Mahlke and asks him to re-experience this Christian
ceremony. Narration in general, and the direct appeal to Mahlke as narratee
in particular, serve here once more to revive the dead. A peculiar analogy
is created between transubstantiation, that is, the change of the substance
of bread into Christ’s body occurring during communion, and the “necro-
mancy” of Mahlke by means of Pilenz’s story. Pilenz will never let his adored
rival go.

The Thief’s Journal

Unlike the symmetrical relations between admiration and hostility towards

the mediator in Grass’s novel, Genet’s autobiographical narrative The Thief’s
Journal (1949) represents the relations between these two aspects of mimetic
desire as asymmetrical: the autodiegetic narrator’s adoration of the media-
tors—male criminals, outcasts, thieves, and beggars whose body and spirit
he desires—outstrips his antagonistic emotions towards them: Genet main-
tains that he has never felt any hate for his lovers (284).21 His hostility and
contempt, but also his feeling of inferiority and his wish to compensate for
the life he could not have had—or have chosen to avoid—are directed at his
anonymous readers, whom he chooses to address as the narratees of his story
and whose anonymity serves well his goal to project on them his radical,
although confused, criticism of the mainstream society of his period.
Genet adores the penises of his lovers like a pious Catholic adores the
relic of a saint. The penis both embodies and symbolizes everything that he
covets: masculinity, power, prowess, domination, and self-sufficiency (e.g.,
24, 144). The greater the obstacle the lover poses to Genet, the more Genet
comes to worship and is attracted to this lover. The lovers’ self-admiration,
indifference to other people’s agony and pain, and ostentatious desire for
their own body mark them as tough personalities who will not easily give
other people access to their body and soul. Armand, Genet’s most admired
lover, demonstrates these qualities and is therefore idolized (194). His narcis-
sistic desire for his own body is contagious, and his adoration by other men
attracts Genet and poses a challenge to him (see Girard [1965: 96–99]).
Contrasting with these expressions of adoration, and at the same time
inseparable from them, are Genet’s manifestations of rivalry with his media-

21. Morón Arroyo justly criticizes Girard for having “a reductionist conception of the ob-
ject of desire” (1978: 84) and proposes that mimetic desire may promote cooperation between
subjects who desire the same object.
220   Part II: Chapter 8

tors: treason and envy. Treason, like Girard’s “murderous hostility,” expresses
the wish of the desiring subject to dispose of the mediator, thereby proving to
him, and most of all to oneself, one’s self-sufficiency. The narrating character
contends that the willingness to act cruelly towards one’s beloved, to violate
his trust, and to break the bonds of love is the most lofty and beautiful act of
eroticism (89–90, 181, 257–58). Envy is described by the narrating character
as a form of eroticism that may lead to the worst treason—murder. Genet
plans to murder both Stilitano and Robert, when the friendship between the
two men, whom he loves, distances him from them (151–52).
Like many characters (and subjects) whose conduct is motivated by pow-
erful metaphysical desire, Genet holds a romantic view that conceives of the
self as separate from the world and attributes the source of all his desires to
himself (see Girard 1965: 11). Although Genet is aware that his search for a
Nietzschean moral solitude and self-assured pride is mediated by his models
of masculinity, he believes that he can dispose of those models once he has
attained his goal. However, moral solitude does not actually break the ties
of eroticism; defying the beloved simultaneously reassures and reinforces his
influence as a model. The following lines demonstrate this blind spot and
draw an ironic light on the ideal of self-sufficiency:

C’est peut-être leur solitude morale—à quoi j’aspire—qui me fait admirer les
traîtres et les aimer. Ce goût de la solitude étant le signe de mon orgueil, et
l’orgueil la manifestation de ma force, son usage, et la preuve de cette force.
Car j’aurai brisé les liens les plus solides du monde: les liens de l’amour. Et
quel amour ne me faut-il pas où je puiserai assez de vigueur pour le détruire!
(1949: 48)

It is perhaps their moral solitude—to which I aspire—that makes me admire

traitors and love them—this taste for solitude being the sign of my pride, and
pride the manifestation of my strength, the employment and proof of this
strength. For I shall have broken the stoutest of bonds, the bonds of love.
And I so need love from which to draw vigor enough to destroy it! (1967: 36)

Genet’s autobiography is replete with paragraphs that seem to indicate

that his worldview has been molded by the mimicry of and identification
with his fellow thieves to such an extent that he completely rejects the values
of normative society. Genet constantly associates morally negative concepts,
such as evil (le mal), cruelty (la cruauté), and treason (la trahison) with mor-
ally positive concepts, such as moral perfection (la perfection morale), as
well as with aesthetic and religious terms (especially poetry and sainthood).
 Marcus, “Narrators, Narratees, and Mimetic Desire”   221

The shocking conceit with which the narrative opens, in which Genet points
out the close similarity between the fragility and the delicacy of flowers and
the brutal insensitivity of convicts, acutely represents his goal to undermine
moral and aesthetic dichotomies and to dissent from hegemonic values.22
Yet Genet also expresses his inability or unwillingness to detach himself
entirely from the norms that he despises. He avoids committing a murder
because he understands that murderers are unable to detach themselves from
the murdered, whose specter forever haunts them. Thus Genet admits that an
unreserved detachment from the prevalent moral norms—the replacement of
the worship of God with the worship of Satan—is an unattainable fantasy
(113, 224–25).
A similar oscillation can be detected in the inconsistency of the narrating
character concerning his motivation for narration. From some paragraphs,
one may conclude that he does not desire to communicate with the reader,
since he claims that only in solitude can erotic love and devotion be sustained,
and his narrative is this erotic song of solitude (106–7, 116). In Genet’s dic-
tum “Ce livre ‘Journal du Voleur’: poursuite de l’Impossible Nullité” (1949:
100) (“This book, The Thief’s Journal, pursuit of the Impossible Nothing-
ness,” 1967: 77), I interpret impossible nothingness as poetic self-sufficiency.
The journal attempts to achieve this nothingness (i.e., complete detachment
from the ordinary world) by comprehending and justifying this regulative
ideal, but it can be achieved only by an act of communication, which inher-
ently thwarts the goal whose attainment it was intended to promote.
However, in another paragraph Genet says he wishes to use his past tribu-
lations in order to teach the reader who he is at the time of the narration (75).
In a more ambiguous passage, he claims that he would like to use his narra-
tive for virtuous purposes (“à des fins de vertus,” 65). This virtuous purpose
is perhaps self-perfection, but it can also be a didactic aim of educating his
readers to become better people by contributing to their understanding of
society’s outcasts, whom they rarely have the opportunity to know person-
ally.
Genet’s ambivalence concerning the norms of hegemonic society and
the purpose of his narration is reflected in his address to his narratee—“the
reader.” Genet’s portrayal of his readers is far from Prince’s “degree-zero
narratee”: they do not have specific physical traits, but they certainly share
a particular mentality in representing a conservative bourgeois, a thought-
less adherent to the conventional system of values. Needless to say, the

22. For Genet’s imperative “to establish a contingent relationship between flowers and
criminals” and to enforce his belief “in the dialectical reconciliation of opposites,” see Reed
(2005: 79–84).
222   Part II: Chapter 8

actual reader may have nothing in common with “the reader,” with Genet’s
anonymous narratee, and may repudiate the worldview attributed to him or
her. Most addresses to the narratee throughout this narrative highlight the
unbridgeable distance between the narrating character’s moral values and
emotional world on the one hand, and those of the narratee on the other. The
criminal must be endowed with fervent creativity, courage, and determina-
tion in order to surmount the difficulties of being divorced from the norma-
tive world; it is implied that the narratee lacks all of these precious qualities:
“Niant les vertus de votre monde, les criminels désespérément acceptent
d’organiser un univers interdit. Ils acceptent d’y vivre. L’air y est nauséa-
bond: ils savent le respirer. Mais—les criminels sont loin de vous—comme
dans l’amour ils s’écartent et m’écartent du monde et de ses lois” (1949: 10).
“Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to orga-
nize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating:
they can breathe it. But—criminals are remote from you—as in love, they
turn away and turn me away from the world and its laws” (1967: 5). In his
separate world, the criminal reminds the narratee of the suffering and the
pain that the latter marginalizes and ignores (57–58).
By contrast, in other paragraphs the narrating character conveys his wish
to be accepted and even revered by the conformist narratee, from whom he
seems to be unable to detach himself (285). The act of narration itself (in
all written narratives) reveals, and is motivated by, the wish to communi-
cate with the narratee. A precondition for such communication is a minimal
degree of comprehension, since the articulation of disputes and disagreements
is meaningless unless it can be at least partly understood by the other party.
In order to win the narratee’s recognition, the narrator is willing to com-
bine conventional forms of beauty (i.e., rhetorical devices of narration) with
unconventional forms, which risk being incomprehensible or unacceptable
(108). However, understanding cannot be achieved unless the horizons of the
reader-narratee fuse with those of the narrating character: “  .  .  .  j’utiliserai
les mots non afin qu’ils dépeignent mieux un événement ou son héros mais
qu’ils vous instruisent sur moi-même. Pour me comprendre une complicité
du lecteur sera nécessaire. Toutefois je l’avertirai dès que me fera mon lyrisme
perdre pied” (1949: 17). “I shall not make use of words the better to depict
an event or its hero, but so that they may tell you something about myself.
In order to understand me, the reader’s complicity will be necessary. Never-
theless, I shall warn him whenever my lyricism makes me lose my footing”
(1967: 11).
The act of communication between a narrating character and a reader-
narratee both reinforces and weakens Genet’s triangular desire. On the one
 Marcus, “Narrators, Narratees, and Mimetic Desire”   223

hand, the act of narration reproduces this desire by making him re-experi-
ence and reinterpret his passionate stories of love and rivalry, admiration
and hostility; moreover, as previously noted, Genet often identifies the beauty
of poetic creation with the world of treason, evil, and repudiation of moral
norms. His narration praises the alternative world of counter-norms; it justi-
fies and intensifies triangular desire by providing eroticism with a suitable
poetic form. On the other hand, the narratee’s world, which lacks the vehe-
ment contradictory emotions that characterize the world of evil and crime,
puts an end to triangular desire.
The contradictory addresses of the narrating character to the narratee
could therefore indicate his ambivalence about the possibility that desire
might be annihilated. The imagined secure and serene world of the narratee
can offer Genet salvation from extreme emotion, suffering, and pain, but at
the same time, this world is dreary and devoid of the challenges and excite-
ments that only a world based on mimetic desire can supply.23
I have already stressed that internal mimetic desire is characterized by the
craving of the desiring subject to eliminate the distance between himself and
the mediator by becoming the other or by subordinating the subject’s will
to his mediator’s or vice versa. Conversely, in addressing the reader, Genet
does not attempt to dissolve the reader’s otherness. The distance between him
and his narratee remains. Accordingly, Genet constantly employs the second-
person—“votre monde,” “vos moeurs” (“your world,” “your morals”)24—
rather than the first-person plural.
Like Pilenz in Grass’s novella, the narrating character in Genet’s narrative
(who identifies himself as the author)25 derives his motivation for narration
from mimetic desire. In the paragraph quoted below, he blurs the difference
between writing a story (or being engaged in any other type of creative activ-
ity) and living (or experiencing) it: an author who writes about evil should
experience it as a necessary part of his creation by mimicking the desires and

23. Reed (2005: 107–8) points out a similar ambivalence concerning Genet’s relationship
with Lucien, one of his lovers in non-fictional reality and one of the characters in The Thief’s
Journal.
24. Genet’s address to the reader can be interpreted as directed either to a single reader
or to readers in general. Both interpretations underscore the spiritual distance between the
narrating character and his reader(s), the first by the formality of the address (“vous” versus
“tu”), and the second by contrasting the individualist, outcast narrator with the conformist,
homogeneous community of readers.
25. Although the narrating character of The Thief’s Journal is named after the author,
Genet’s work does not accord unproblematically with Philippe Lejeune’s “autobiographical
pact” (see Lejeune (1989)), since Genet constantly reminds the reader that his creation is
fictional and that it is therefore futile to separate the true from the false in his narrative. See
Spear (1996) and Ubersfeld (1996).
224   Part II: Chapter 8

the crimes of his heroes. Hence the criminals are his mediators not only in
“the real world,” but also in his creative activity. The story cannot be told
unless it is an authentic dramatization of a (mediated) eroticized life:

Créer n’est pas un jeu quelque pas frivole. Le créateur s’est engagé dans une
aventure effrayante qui est d’assumer soi-même jusqu’au bout les périls ris-
qués par ses créatures. On ne peut supposer une création n’ayant l’amour à
l’origine. Comment mettre en face de soi aussi fort que soi, ce qu’on devra
mépriser ou haïr.  .  .  . “Prendre le poids du péché du monde” signifie très
exactement: éprouver en puissance et en effets tous les péchés; avoir souscrit
au mal. Tout créateur doit ainsi endosser—le mot serait faible—faire sien au
point de le savoir être sa substance, circuler dans ses artères—le mal donné
par lui, que librement choisissent les héros. (1949: 220–21)

Creating is not a somewhat frivolous game. The creator has committed

himself to the fearful adventure of taking upon himself, to the very end, the
perils risked by his creatures. We cannot suppose a creation that does not
spring from love. How can a man place before himself something strong as
himself which he will have to scorn or hate? . . . “Taking upon himself the
sins of the world” means exactly this: experiencing potentially and in their
effects all sins; it means having subscribed to evil. Every creator must thus
shoulder—the expression seems feeble—must make his own, to the point of
knowing it to be his substance, circulating in his arteries, the evil given by
him, which his heroes choose freely. (1967: 172–73)

Metaphysical desire, according to Genet’s “credo,” is a productive force,

since it constitutes all types of valuable creation (religious as well as poetic),
therefore it should be endorsed and encouraged rather than renounced.

The Fall

Metaphysical desire is not as explicitly present in Albert Camus’ The Fall

(1956) as it is in the other two narratives that I have analyzed. It is not clear
whether the narrating character who introduces himself under the pseud-
onym Jean-Baptiste Clamence and his anonymous addressee are mimetic
rivals. Yet the story is centered on the loss of existential self-sufficiency, which
Girard points out as the source of mimetic desire, and on the futile search for
others who may compensate the unstable self for this loss. It is not in vain
 Marcus, “Narrators, Narratees, and Mimetic Desire”   225

that Girard briefly refers to Camus’ novella in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel
as an “admirable and liberating work,” which suggests that “a whole new
career was probably opening up before him [Camus]” (1965: 271–72).
In a later essay, “Camus’ Stranger Retried” (1978), Girard argues that
Camus’ The Fall “goes higher and deeper” (33) than his previous novel
L’Etran­ger (The Stranger) and demonstrates Camus’ transition from the pre-
liminary romantic phase of his career, characterized by bad faith, to a mature
phase, in which he espouses a more complex worldview. In Girard’s words,
“[t]he confession of Clamence does not lead to a new ‘interpretation’ of
L’Etranger but to an act of transcendence; the perspective of this first novel is
rejected” (21). Surprisingly, in this essay Girard does not interpret The Fall in
relation to his theory of mimetic desire.
The central event of the narrative (both in importance and in its loca-
tion in the text) is the fall of an unknown woman into the Seine. Clamence
avoids jumping into the water to save the woman and does not even inform
anybody of this incident (81–83). At the time of the fall, Clamence believes
he has already arrived at the peak of his achievement, a perfect man both
intellectually and morally: “je me trouvais un peu surhomme” (36). After
some years of repression and denial, he re-experiences this fall as a traumatic
event. From this point onward, his irreversible fall begins. His deceitful self-
image collapses like a pack of cards. He reckons that his only rescue from
a complete mental breakdown is to share his guilt with the rest of human-
ity. To achieve this end, he repeatedly tells his story to people previously
unknown to him, and in the course of his narration he manipulates them into
a position in which they will be compelled to admit that they are Clamence’s
accomplices.
At the outset, it seems that the narrator wishes to establish close contact
with his interlocutor thanks to the latter’s particularly interesting, sympa-
thetic, or otherwise appealing character. However, this first impression turns
out to be an affectation, a ruse intended to draw the narratee’s attention.
Clamence clarifies that his privileged interest in the narratee is temporary and
that it stems not from any of the latter’s unique qualities, but from the narra-
tive situation. He views the narratee as a kind of object that is interchange-
able with any other narratee who has similar traits (160–65). At the end of
the account Clamence will proceed to court another narratee, whereas this
one is to become another member, unimportant in himself, of humanity.
The narratees whom the narrating character addresses function as his
mediators: in his attempt to restore his previous image, the narrator pre-
tends at first to be as self-assured as he assumes his interlocutor to be, in
226   Part II: Chapter 8

order finally to demonstrate that belief in one’s own perfection is spurious.

Clamence’s infinite repetition of his narration to replaceable addressees is
the most extreme case of the process that Girard describes as the breaking
up of the unity of the mediator into multiplicity (1965: 91). The closer the
internal mediator is to the subject in his social status and intellectual faculties,
the briefer is his reign. Hence the mediator loses any enduring significance
conferred to him in particular: “Beginning with Proust, the mediator may be
literally anyone at all and he may pop up anywhere” (92).
In Clamence’s narration, both the mediator and the desire are almost
devoid of any concrete content. The mediator is an abstract and reticent
double, or a mirror image, of the desiring subject, who desires, not any
material object that his mediator possesses, but rather his spirit—his pride,
self-confidence, and self-respect. Therefore mimetic rivalry in Camus’ work
lacks dramatic passion and overt violence. In other words, it does not pro-
duce the intense ambiguity of high admiration and murderous hostility typi-
cal of metaphysical desire. Instead, aggression appears in the narrative in the
much more palatable form of rhetorical devices, such as the formulation of
highly provocative and disputable statements as rhetorical questions (e.g.
80, 140). The suspicion and hostility of the narrating character towards
his narratee is expressed by his hardly perceptible transformations from the
first-person singular (je) to the first-person plural (nous). To be sure, the aim
of this rhetorical ruse is not to display fraternity, but to render his personal
life-story—above all his guilt and his chastisement—inseparable from the
life-story of the narratee (e.g. 54–55, 90–91, 134–35).26 Yet although the
“desiring subject” Clamence craves to dominate his “mediator,” he is well
aware that the narrative situation renders him entirely dependent on the
willingness of the narratee to listen to him and to follow him wherever he
goes.
Unlike Grass’s novella, Camus’ represents a compulsive and insatiable
impulse to dispose of the mediator once he has been efficiently used, even
more so than in Genet’s narrative. Yet both Cat and Mouse and The Fall per-
petuate mimetic desire and represent a structure of infinite mediation, which
promises only further agony and guilt in a recurring act of narration and
deprives the desiring subject of any prospects for a calmer and more stable
future.27

26. For a thorough treatment of the narrator’s rhetorical devices, see Brochier (1979),
Marcus (2006), and Quillard (1991).
27. Infinite repetitious mimetic desire in Camus’ narrative, like in Grass’s, represents a
form of suicide, namely, a cessation of lived experience. See also Solomon (2006: 200).
 Marcus, “Narrators, Narratees, and Mimetic Desire”   227

Intra- and Extra-Subjective Narratees as

Mediators of Mimetic Desire

Rimmon-Kenan defines the narratee as “the agent which is at the very

least implicitly addressed by the narrator. (A narratee of this kind is always
implied, even when the narrator becomes his own narratee)” (2001: 90). I
wish to extend Rimmon-Kenan’s contention and claim that a personalized,
autodiegetic, and self-conscious narrator is prone to address him- or her-
self, at least implicitly, in the narrative. This type of narratee—whom I name
intra-subjective narratee—tends to be the past self of the narrator, that is,
the narrator as he used to be as a character during the time of the narrated
events. The split between oneself as narrator and oneself as character and
narratee is implied by autodiegetic self-conscious narration, since writing or
telling a story about oneself creates a temporal and logical gap between the
narrating self and the experiencing self and presupposes a narratee (see Mar-
cus [2006: 87, note 15]).
The second type of narratee in these narratives is the extra-subjective
narratee,28 discussed elaborately in this essay, whose identity is (or at least
seems to be) separate from the narrator’s (e.g., Mahlke in Katz und Maus
and the silent narratee in Camus’ La Chute). The extra-subjective narratee
in these narratives may be, to a lesser or greater degree, a projection of the
intra-subjective narratee, that is, of the image of the (past) self of the narra-
tor. Hence the labels “intra-subjective” and “extra-subjective” are employed
with regards to the narrator, as the addressor on the level of narration. In the
three narratives discussed in this essay, the intra-subjective narratee is never
directly addressed, but only implicitly, first and foremost through the rela-
tions of similarity and contrast between the extra-subjective narratee and the
narrator-as-character.
The concept of the intra-subjective narratee is extremely relevant for
Girard’s conception of metaphysical desire. As previously noted, Girard
emphasizes that the greater the similarity between the subject and his media-
tor, the more severe the rivalry between them. Along this line of argument, it
seems plausible to claim that the greatest rivalry takes place between oneself
and oneself-as-another, i.e., between the autodiegetic narrator and his past
self as a character.
For instance, Pilenz’s greatest rival is perhaps not Mahlke, but his past
self, which is closely similar to his self-as-narrator, yet not identical with it.

28. I thank Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan for suggesting the terms “intra-subjective” and
“extra-subjective” narratees.
228   Part II: Chapter 8

The narrating character, which is “the subject” in the external level of mim­
etic desire, splits into two in the internal level: he remains in the position of
“the desiring subject” as narrator (in his present self), whereas as character
(in his past self) he takes the position of “the mediator” or “the rival”: Pilenz-
as-narrator continues to desire everything that belongs to Mahlke and by
doing this, he imitates the desire of himself as character; this desire is inher-
ently insatiable, since Mahlke most probably no longer exists.
Pilenz as character is or becomes Mahlke, in the sense that his life is grad-
ually reduced to the observation of Mahlke’s life and the mimicry of his acts,
and this prevents him from becoming an autonomous subject. At the same
time, Pilenz is not Mahlke, in the sense that his imitation cannot be but par-
tial and inauthentic. Hence there are both similarities and differences between
Mahlke as the external narratee of the narrative and Pilenz-as-character, its
intra-subjective narratee. Pilenz’s wish in the story to annihilate Mahlke
(falsely believing that he will become self-sufficient as soon as Mahlke dis-
appears) becomes, on the level of narration, a wish to annihilate himself as
character: for what is the aspiration to dispose of his guilt through writing his
story (84) if not an impossible wish to detach his present self from his past?
Pilenz’s story is indeed “von Mahlke oder von Mahlke und mir, aber immer
im Hinblick auf Mahlke,” (21) (“about Mahlke, or Mahlke and me, but
always with the emphasis on Mahlke,” 1964: 21), since Pilenz actually lacks
a separate self. Pilenz as narrator imitates the desire of his past self to possess
Mahlke, but he can satisfy this desire only through the endless repetitions of
his story.
The analogy between the extra-subjective narratee and the intra-subjec-
tive narratee as two types of rivals/mediators on the level of narration is even
more emphatic and explicit in the case of La Chute. Clamence’s narcissism
may make the readers wonder whether the narratee exists as a real character
or only as a projection of the narrator, “in which case the supposed dialogue
collapses into a ceaseless self-engendering monologue” (Ellison 2007: 183).
Certain characteristics of the narratee differentiate him from the narrator
and make it difficult to psychologically identify the narratee with the narra-
tor. Especially prominent is the silent refusal of the narratee to confess to the
narrator, despite the latter’s efforts to manipulate the narratee to do so (51,
70–71, 159). In this way the role-playing persists throughout the novella: the
narrator narrates (and occasionally verifies the narratee’s attention), and the
narratee’s reactions are mentioned by the narrator as part of their dialogue:
he sometimes interrogates, responds, smiles, or protests, but never tells his
own story. In this respect, the narratee can be identified not with Clamence
as narrator but with Clamence’s former self as character. Like the narratee,
 Marcus, “Narrators, Narratees, and Mimetic Desire”   229

Clamence as character is a Parisian, apparently self-assured, educated male

lawyer; like the narratee, Clamence as character is incapable of self-reflection
and does not feel the need to narrate his story, probably because both of
them deem themselves complete, immaculate, and self-sufficient. Thus, unlike
Mahlke, who cannot be identified with Pilenz-as-character, there is no way
to differentiate Clamence’s narratee from his past self. Clamence as narrator
envies and despises both for their self-assured existence, which turns out to
be spurious and instable.
By contrast, Genet’s extra-subjective narratee (the reader), characterized
as bourgeois and unadventurous, seems to have nothing in common with the
nonconforming, impertinent intra-subjective narratee—Genet as character.
The extra-subjective narratee suggests the possibility of eradicating meta-
physical desire, whereas the intra-subjective narratee—in his fervent desire
for the penis of his lovers—revives this desire. Genet’s unwillingness to con-
form as narrator is demonstrated in his conscious efforts to efface himself as
character and recreate himself constantly from his current position as narra-
tor (75–76, 126), hence to possess and control his most intimate rival—his
past self. Paradoxically, in his retrospective writing he cannot avoid the con-
struction of an image of his past while destroying this image time after time.
Unlike the romantic conception of desire resisted by Girard, my model
does not suppose a whole, unified, and coherent subject of desire, but rather
splits this subject into two: the self is at the same time the self-as-another.
Hence one can also be one’s own rival, and both types of rivals (the intra-
subjective and the extra-subjective narratees) can reflect each other and differ
from one another to a lesser or greater degree.

Conclusion
Girard’s Notion of Mimetic Desire and Narratology

Girard’s Deceit, Desire, and the Novel is not a work of structural narratol-
ogy, but an attempt to identify and define a thematic construction shared by
all (great) novels, which differentiates them from the romantic way of think-
ing. Girard is often accused by his critics of reducing the narrative text to
its extralinguistic references, because he insists that the language of the text
signifies (but also distorts and conceals) human relationships in the actual
world.29 Nevertheless, the classical narratological distinction between story
and narration, or more precisely, the implications of this distinction for the

29. See Golsan (1993: 111).

230   Part II: Chapter 8

narrative transaction, contribute to the qualification and elaboration of

Girard’s thesis.
The relations between the narrator and the narratee in Günter Grass’s
novella Cat and Mouse both reflect and amplify the relations of mimetic
desire between the two as characters in the story. As opposed to the straight
analogy between metaphysical desire on the levels of story and narration in
Grass’s novella, the relations between the narrator and the narratees in Gen-
et’s autobiographical novel The Thief’s Journal represent a possible world
in which mimetic desire no longer exists. Hence Genet’s narrative is more
amenable than Grass’s to the Girardian conception of conversion as a resolu-
tion of mimetic desire, although the possibility of conversion is negated as
soon as it is suggested. Like Cat and Mouse and unlike The Thief’s Journal,
Albert Camus’ The Fall demonstrates the perpetuation of mimetic desire by
the endless repetition of the act of narration. While in the two other narra-
tives mimetic desire only motivates the narration and the narrator’s appeal to
a narratee, without a story on that level, The Fall presents a story on the level
of narration, which is woven into the story of the past life of the narrator.
Girard’s argument that heroes of novels experience a conversion towards
the end of the plot (as do the authors of those novels; see Golsan [1993:
111]) is influenced by his worldview, according to which one can pave the
way to a balanced and stable integration of the self and the other only by
resigning metaphysical desire: “To triumph over self-centeredness is to get
away from oneself and make contact with others but in another sense it also
implies a greater intimacy with oneself and a withdrawal from others” (298).
However, this argument also stems from his inattentiveness to the act of com-
munication within narratives between the narrator and the narratee, which
in some cases reproduces and augments triangular desire. Modernist autodi-
egetic narration is particularly prone to exhibiting this type of enduring self-
centeredness.
Not only does narratology illuminate and challenge Girard’s thesis of
metaphysical desire; conversely Girard’s thesis—when it is extended to the
level of narration—can contribute to narratology by helping to demonstrate
some patterns of relations between the narrator and the narratee and by elu-
cidating possible connections between story and narration.
In Story and Situation (1984: esp. 50–69), Ross Chambers argues that the
relations of power and authority between the narrator and the narratee are
motivated by the narrator’s wish to control the conveyance of information on
the one hand, and by the narratee’s willingness to offer attention in exchange
for information on the other hand. The essay highlights these relations in
a different manner: if metaphysical desire is the basis of this relation, then
 Marcus, “Narrators, Narratees, and Mimetic Desire”   231

narratorial authority is motivated by the anxiety that the loss of the narratee
will cause unbearable pain to the narrator, whose mediator and rival will no
longer provide him with the (fragile) existential security that he needs. The
narrator’s concealment, duplicity, and deception, emphasized in Chambers’s
argument as means of seducing the narratee and reinforcing the authority of
the narrator, are intensified in the analyzed narratives, in which they function
as a feature of internal mimetic desire.
Mimetic desire in autodiegetic narratives that have two (or more) types of
narratees offers a complex network of possible analogies between the partici-
pants in the act of communication on the level of the narration (i.e., narrators
and narratees) and the participants on the level of the story (i.e., charac-
ters, particularly narrators-as-characters). One should, however, beware of a
reductive conclusion: not every narrative of this kind presents metaphysical
desire between the narrator and the narratee. Although there are certain types
of correlations between the structure of a narrative and its themes, such cor-
relations are never necessary connections.30

30. I would like to thank Jan Alber, Monika Fludernik, and Jonathan Stavsky for their
comments on earlier versions of this essay, and Moshe Ron for his preliminary comments on
the subject.
232   Part II: Chapter 8

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 9
Jarmila Mildorf

Narratology and the Social Sciences

Social science disciplines such as sociology, psychology, anthropology, educa-

tion, and so on have long had an interest in narrative as a human cognitive
and discursive device for sense-making and for ordering one’s life experi-
ences. The underlying assumption is that narratives are “social products
produced by people within the context of specific social, historical and cul-
tural locations. They are related to the experience that people have of their
lives, but they are not transparent carriers of that experience. Rather, they
are interpretive devices, through which people represent themselves, both to
themselves and to others” (Lawler 2002: 242; emphasis in original). These
disciplines have consequently developed their own specific methodological
tools for analyzing narrative, which can be broadly separated into thematic
analysis, structural analysis, dialogic/performance analysis and visual anal-
ysis (Riessman 2008). Even though thematic analysis is only one of four
possibilities according to Riessman’s outline, it is my impression that much
narrative research in the social sciences is still limited to an investigation into
what is told, while the how (that is, the process of constructing and convey-
ing what is told) is discussed in fairly general terms. Despite their focus on
narrative, many social scientists seem to be largely unaware of (and per-
haps not interested in?) what (literary) narratology has to offer. The question
arises to what extent “classical” narratological concepts that have hitherto
been mainly applied to literary narratives can also be successfully exported
to other disciplines which have an interest in narrative. Fludernik (1996)
contends in her book on “natural narratology” that narratology can learn

234
 Mildorf, “Narratology and the Social Sciences”   235

from oral narratives and discourse analysis: “It will be argued that oral nar-
ratives (more precisely: narratives of spontaneous conversational storytelling)
cognitively correlate with perceptual parameters of human experience and
that these parameters remain in force even in more sophisticated written nar-
ratives, although the textual make-up of these stories changes drastically over
time” (12). Conversely, one could ask whether studies of oral narratives may
likewise benefit from the discussions conducted in narratology.
I seek to answer this question by exploring ways of combining sociolin-
guistic narrative analysis with narratological terms and concepts. My aim
is to demonstrate that narratology can, if suitably adapted to social science
requirements, add further insights into the particularly “narrative” features
of oral narratives. First I provide an outline of various narrative approaches
in the social sciences, drawing upon Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach, and Zilber’s
(1998) distinction between holistic-content, holistic-form, categorical-content
and categorical-form modes of reading narrative. This outline suggests that
narrative research can vary significantly in its theoretical depth and meth-
odological rigor, ranging from detailed turn-by-turn linguistic analyses (e.g.
in discursive psychology) to more thematic or topic-oriented approaches. I
then analyze two oral narratives from the Database of Personal Experience of
Health and Illness (DIPEx, now: healthtalkonline.org) with a view to identi-
fying possible points of convergence between narratology and social science
brands of narrative research. More specifically, I borrow narratological terms
such as experiencing/narrating I, focalization or slant and filter, and double
deixis in you-narratives for my analysis, and I contend that frequently evoked
concepts in the social science literature such as social positioning, identity
(Giddens 1991), and the marking of in-group and out-group relations (Tajfel
1974) can be further illuminated if reconsidered through a narratological lens.

Narrative and Social Science Research Methods

An Overview

Research methods in the social sciences can be located along a continuum

ranging from “quantitative” to “qualitative” approaches. Quantitative
research methods are normally applied if one’s aim is to deal with a large
amount of data, and if the main interest lies in measuring these data, com-
paring figures and percentages, and calculating the relations between vari-
ables. The question one asks is “How many?” rather than “In what way?” or
“Why?” The instruments for this type of research are standardized so that,
ideally, every test subject is given the same input and tests are repeatable.
236   Part II: Chapter 9

The aim is to reach valid and reliable results. Typical methods include large-
scale surveys and statistical measurements. By contrast, qualitative methods
are used when questions of motivation, attitudes, or opinions are concerned.
With qualitative methods, one can generate data on people’s interactions
and their relationships and functional positions in social organizations, insti-
tutions and systems, or, more generally, one can obtain data on cognitive,
affective and behavioral aspects of people in given social contexts, e.g. their
beliefs, attitudes, feelings, opinions and real vs. reported, planned or remem-
bered actions. Today, multi-method approaches, which combine both quanti-
tative and qualitative methodologies such as surveys and interviews, are very
common in social science research and, more specifically, in health research
(McDonald and Daly 1992; McKie 1996).
Narrative research is one of a number of methods in the qualitative meth-
ods camp. One key tool is narrative interviewing. In narrative interviews
open-ended questions are used to elicit stories from the interviewee. This type
of interview is common, for example, in life history research. Narrative inter-
views can have a topical focus, i.e. they concentrate on specific events and on
what happened when and why, but more often they are cultural interviews in
the sense that they try to unravel norms, values and beliefs of a certain group
or society (Rubin and Rubin 2005: 9–10). While the narrative interview is a
method to elicit answers from respondents, the data thus generated can be
analyzed from different vantage points, as explained below.
Oral narratives pose a series of questions in terms of possible analytical
approaches but these questions can be summarized, by and large, in the fol-
lowing questions identified by Riessman (1993: 25):

1. How is talk transformed into a written text and how are narrative seg-
ments determined?
2. What aspects of the narrative constitute the basis for interpretation?
3. Who determines what the narrative means and are alternative readings
possible?

Question one touches upon issues surrounding the transcription of interview

material and the selection of narrative data. The second part of this ques-
tion borders on considerations of form: what, in structural terms, constitutes
a narrative? Narrativity plays a central role here. Questions two and three
refer to the interpretation process: what is of interest in a narrative, i.e. what
in particular does a researcher wish to investigate? And, finally, what is the
analyst’s role and to what extent does his or her interpretive focus influence
research findings?
 Mildorf, “Narratology and the Social Sciences”   237

The answers to these questions depend largely on the conceptual frame

one works in and are therefore also influenced by the specific discipline within
which a researcher undertakes narrative analysis. However, it is possible to
sketch a general outline of the types of narrative analysis currently available
to scholars. Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach and Zilber (1998: 12–14) propose the
following model for the classification and organization of the narrative analy-
sis of life stories, which is based on four cornerstones:

Holistic-Content Holistic-Form
Categorical-Content Categorical-Form

Even though this matrix was devised for life history research, the catego-
ries of content vs. form on the one hand and categorical vs. holistic on the
other are applicable to any type of narrative analysis. The holistic-content
approach, as its name suggests, looks at the content of a life story in its
entirety. Even if only parts of the narrative are focused upon, e.g. the begin-
ning or the ending, they are always interpreted holistically with regard to
the entire narrative. The reconstruction of a life story can also involve using
archival data and visual material. In the holistic-form approach, broad struc-
tural categories come under closer scrutiny. Thus one can look at genre allo-
cations of life stories: for instance, does a story develop as a tragedy or as a
comedy, or can one analyze in more detail how the plot develops throughout
the life course? Are there turning points, for example, or a climax? On the
holistic-form side, social science research has brought forth sociolinguistic
narrative analysis in the Labovian tradition, which delineates the overall
shape of oral narratives in terms of Labov’s diamond diagram with abstract,
orientation, turning point, complicating action, and coda (Labov and
Waletzky 1967; Labov 1982). Another key concept is “evaluation,” which
explains why a narrative is told in the first place, for example because the
related events are particularly exciting, important, dangerous, funny or, more
generally, worth telling. Structurally, evaluation is marked through deviance
from the overall “narrative syntax.” This can be seen, for example, in a shift
of tenses, modality, etc.
Since sociolinguistic narrative analysis also attends to features of narrative
syntax one can also place it within the categorical-form area. The categorical-
form mode focuses on a more detailed linguistic analysis of narratives, com-
ments, utterances, etc. Analysts might look at metaphors used by the speaker
or at the distribution of active/passive constructions, and the like. One
type of research that is clearly located in the categorical-form axiom is the
238   Part II: Chapter 9

conversation-analytic approach practiced in discursive psychology, for exam-

ple, where data are carefully transcribed including phonetic detail and pro-
sodic features such as intonation patterns and pauses. These data are then
analyzed on a turn-by-turn basis in order to trace the locally determined
unfolding of the conversation. Discursive strategies and markers, such as
backchannels, repairs, hedges, boosters, interruptions, tag questions, etc.,
come under closer scrutiny in this line of research. The categorical-content
approach, by contrast, is equated with what is otherwise known as “content
analysis,” i.e. the extraction, classification and collection of separate utter-
ances under the heading of predefined categories (Grbich 1999). Categories
can be fairly broad or narrow, depending on one’s research angle and detail
of analysis. Data are coded for larger thematic features. The analysis can
range from quasi-statistical forms where the frequency and length of discus-
sion of recurring themes is measured, to more qualitative accounts marked by
careful reading and the contextualization of data.
As Rentz (1999) demonstrates in her survey of case studies conducted
in the area of professional communication, social science studies themselves
often take a narrative form by presenting either the research activities or the
explored phenomena, or both, as stories. Case studies frequently make use
of narrative methods since narrative “is particularly critical to the making
of experiential knowledge” (Rentz 1999: 54). Thus case studies invite the
interpretations of readers and allow them to read the data against their own
“folk knowledge” and life experiences. However, pieces of narrative research
can vary significantly in their theoretical depth and methodological rigor, as
we saw. I must add the caveat here that I consider it perfectly legitimate that
researchers resort to different types of narrative analysis, depending on the
data at hand and on the purpose and aim of the research. To adopt an argu-
ment used by social science researchers, the research questions ultimately
determine the methods one uses (Frankfort-Nachmias and Nachmias 2008;
May 2001; Silverman and Marvasti 2008). Further aspects to bear in mind
in this context are disciplinary traditions as well as the audience the research
is targeted at. For example, it may be counterproductive to present a detailed
conversation-analytical account of doctor-patient interaction to medical prac-
titioners as they may be uncomfortable with the linguistic terminology and
may therefore not consider the analysis helpful for their own practical pur-
poses. However, I think that discussions of narrative materials could some-
times benefit from closer linguistic and especially narratological analyses.
Over the last few decades narratology, by definition the prime discipline
of narrative analysis, has branched out into a wide array of “post-classical”
narratologies (Heinen and Sommer 2009; Herman 1999a; Nünning and Nün-
 Mildorf, “Narratology and the Social Sciences”   239

ning 2002) that have borrowed concepts from psychology, sociology, anthro-
pology, history, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, discourse linguistics,
and other fields. In the past, attempts have also been made to build bridges
between narratology and social science disciplines. Herman’s (1999b) concept
of “socionarratology,” for example, takes into account narrative features,
contextual factors, and the cognitive dimension in narrative production. Tan-
nen (1989, 1997) demonstrates that spoken discourse is by no means less lin-
guistically complex than literary discourse and that in fact oral narratives can
display more effective strategies for creating involvement. Some scholars have
also attempted to apply narratological concepts to non-literary narratives.
For example, a recent collection of essays looks at the roles and functions of
narrative in real-life contexts such as journalism, medicine, natural sciences,
psychology, law, religion, economics, politics, and so on (Klein and Martínez
2009).1 Potter (1996), a discursive psychologist, dedicates a section of his
book on the discursive construction of reality to focalization in conversa-
tional narratives (163–65), arguing that focalization assigns to the listener the
role of perceiver and endows the speaker with the authority of a “witness”
(see also Atkinson 1990). Potter concludes his excursion into narratology by
saying that “a more systematic study of the kinds of focalization that occur in
everyday talk and news interview talk could be particularly revealing” (173).
Another feature that is generally considered to be mainly “literary” is free
indirect discourse. However, scholars like Polanyi (1984), Fludernik (1993),
and Tommola (2003) have pointed out that certain forms of free indirect
discourse can also occur in spoken language. Despite such efforts to encour-
age interdisciplinary approaches, however, a more consistent and systematic
exploration of potential areas of cross-fertilization between narratology and
other narrative approaches is still missing in the field. It is time to begin to
close the gap. Before I move on to my analyses, let me provide some informa-
tion concerning the narratives presented in this essay.

Data

The two narratives were selected from the Database of Personal Experience
of Health and Illness (DIPEx), which has changed its name to healthtalkon-
line.org and can be accessed online. DIPEx is a registered charity, whose aim

1. One point in this volume I criticize is the fact that, even though it addresses narratives
in real life (“Wirklichkeitserzählungen”), none of the contributions attends to spontaneous
conversational storytelling, which, to my mind, can be considered the most typical kind of
storytelling in comparison to the ones presented in the book.
240   Part II: Chapter 9

is to make people’s experiences with over one hundred common illnesses

available to other patients but also to function as a teaching resource for
health care professionals. The database contains excerpts from interviews
conducted with patients as well as general information about a wide range of
conditions. The first website was launched as a pilot site in 2001, and DIPEx
has been expanding its online information base ever since. The team behind
DIPEx consists of medical practitioners and social scientists working in the
area of health and illness. The data for the website are generated in in-depth
interviews conducted with patients in their homes or in other locations if they
prefer not to be interviewed at home. All interviews are fully transcribed and
coded for general themes and topics. Prior to publication on the website, the
respondents read the transcripts and decide whether they wish some of the
material to be excluded from publication. Copyright is then passed on to the
DIPEx team.
While I was not able to access complete transcripts of the interviews
because of financial limitations, I was kindly permitted to use the materi-
als that are available on the actual DIPEx website. A few words are there-
fore in order concerning the narratives I use. First of all, the narratives are
presented out of context in that only parts of the interview in which they
emerged are available online. Second, the narratives have already been pre-
selected according to the thematic criteria applied by the DIPEx research
team. In other words, a certain bias may have been introduced by arrang-
ing the narrative materials in specific ways, and since I am not part of the
research team I may be less aware of such a bias. Third, the materials on the
website are tidied up in the sense that transcripts have been made more read-
able for a larger readership. Hence, one does not find a close phonetic tran-
scription of the interviews. However, a minimum of description of the oral
nature of these data is maintained in the notation of pauses and breaks in
speech, for example. Unlike with other transcripts, the transformation from
the oral to the written medium was not an issue for my analysis, since the
DIPEx website also makes recordings of the presented excerpts available. In
other words, prosodic features and other phonetic particularities can be and
were double checked. My use of line breaks in the narratives follows Labov
and Waletzky’s (1967) typology of narrative clauses. I have not added tran-
scription conventions other than the ones already used by the DIPEx team to
ensure readability. Furthermore, I would like to add that, for my purposes, a
holistic rather than a turn-by-turn presentation of the narratives is perfectly
sufficient. While a conversation-analytic approach would require a more fully
elaborated transcript with both speakers’ (that is, the respondent’s and inter-
viewer’s) turns, the sociolinguistic narrative approach coupled with narrato-
 Mildorf, “Narratology and the Social Sciences”   241

logical considerations does not necessarily require such detail. The narratives
selected must be considered case studies, and I do not claim general appli-
cability or validity for the results I present. The purpose of this paper is to
open vistas to what, in my view, is a promising new line of research along the
boundaries of narratology and the social sciences.

Family Stories and Personal Identity

In an earlier article on focalization and double deixis in oral narratives (Mil-

dorf 2006), I concentrate especially on the formation of professional identity
in contrast to personal identity in the narrative discourse of general practitio-
ners. However, society contains a great variety of groups one can belong to.
Besides professional groups, friends and family also play a significant role in
our lives and determine our identity. Sarangi (2006) maintains that “[f]amily
is conceptualized as a social institution that mediates the individual and the
social, with identifiable structures, functions, and hierarchies” (403). Family
structures in turn are largely based on narratives, as Langellier and Peter-
son (2004) argue, and these narratives establish members’ in-group and out-
group status and thus define who belongs to a family and who does not:
“What we commonly call ‘the family’ is not a single, naturally occurring
phenomenon but variations in small group cultures produced in embodied,
situated, and material performances such as family storytelling. Family sto-
rytelling is a multileveled strategic discourse carried out in diverse situations
by multiple participants who order personal and group identities as family”
(113). A problem arises when personal stories potentially threaten family
unity because of a discrepancy between feelings of loyalty on the one hand
and misgivings about other members of the group on the other. Let us have a
closer look at the following interview narrative related by a 52-year-old man
suffering from epilepsy. The narrative recounts his second seizure and the
reaction of his family.

Narrative 1

1. When the second time it came round,

2. when I had the second fit which wasn’t very long afterwards,
3. and they decided that “yeah you’ve got epilepsy,”
4. my grandmother, my grandparents, my grandmother particularly was
really distraught, sobbing.
242   Part II: Chapter 9

5. And basically my parents were supportive

6. but um, they kept the,
7. it’s like they kept the lid on things.
8. Um, yeah they didn’t want,
9. there was a degree of shame if you like,
10. not, I don’t mean that unkindly on them,
11. I think they meant well
12. and they were very supportive to me.
13. But they didn’t want to go round saying “Excuse me but my son’s an
epileptic,”
14. and they would much rather I suppose naturally talk about success
rather than what was certainly perceived as a failure.

This narrative can be divided into two larger parts: the actual narrative rang-
ing from lines 1 to 7, and a lengthy evaluation from line 8 onwards, which
resumes and elaborates the key point of the narrative, namely that the family
were not willing to discuss the narrator’s illness openly (“they kept the lid
on things,” line 7). The narrative begins by anchoring the story world tem-
porally in lines 1 and 2: “When the second time it came round, when I had
the second fit which wasn’t very long afterwards.” While the first line gives
a rather vague image of the incident because of the replacement of “the fit”
with the third-person pronoun “it” and the somewhat unusual verb phrase
“came round,” the second line specifies what happened by explicitly men-
tioning “the fit” and by tying the incident back to the narrator’s first seizure
alluded to in the relative clause “which wasn’t very long afterwards.” The
following narrative clause in line 3, which entails the complicating action of
the story, depicts a crucial point in the illness narrative: the labeling of the ill-
ness as “epilepsy.” Labeling plays an important role in medical consultations
since giving a label to a physical condition turns this condition into a definite
disease or problem and thus establishes it as a fact (Maynard 1988).
What is also noteworthy here is the use of direct speech or what Tannen
(1989) calls “constructed dialogue,” i.e. a seemingly verbatim rendition of a
speech situation which, however, cannot be taken to be an accurate reflec-
tion of the original speech situation but is rather a version (re)constructed
in the current conversational context: “‘yeah, you’ve got epilepsy?’” As in
literary narrative, direct speech is used to enliven a scene and to create in the
listener a sense of vicinity to the characters in the scene. In this particular
example, the use of direct speech gives additional weight to the labeling of
the narrator’s disease, which is also reinforced by the affirmative interjec-
tion “yeah.” The revelation of the diagnosis is dramatized and the charac-
 Mildorf, “Narratology and the Social Sciences”   243

ters in this “drama” come to life, as it were. More importantly, however,

the direct speech here also assumes a distancing function that works in two
ways. On the one hand, the narrator as experiencing self distances himself
from the doctors who passed the diagnosis by making them stand out as
distinct characters or actors in his illness narrative (“they decided that . . .”).
On the other hand, the narrator also distances himself from his ill persona
and refuses identification with the label of “epilepsy” by reconstructing the
diagnosis in direct speech and by thus presenting himself as second-person
“you” rather than “I.” The address form implies that the label was imposed
on the experiencing self from the outside and has not been fully incorpo-
rated yet (compare with “and they decided that I had epilepsy” or even “and
they decided that I’ve got epilepsy”). A similar strategy is used in line 13,
where the identification, and hence acknowledgment, of the illness through
labeling is again presented in direct speech: “‘Excuse me but my son’s an
epileptic.’” This time, however, labeling the disease is precisely what does
not happen, what the narrator’s family “didn’t want to go round saying.”
The constructed speech in this context thus has an almost sarcastic quality,
especially since it contains the apologetic phrase “excuse me” and the generic
category “an epileptic.”
Criticism of the family’s attitude towards the narrator’s problem is the
central topic of the narrative, and the family’s behavior constitutes large parts
of the plot. What is interesting, however, is the fact that the narrator repeat-
edly tries to tone down his criticism and that he uses a number of linguis-
tic strategies in order not to come across as someone who is unjustifiably
disappointed with his family. To use Tannen’s (2006) term, the narrative is
“rekeyed” in the sense that the overall tenor changes. In line 4 the narrator
depicts the distress felt by his grandparents and especially his grandmother
(see the self-correction from “my grandparents” to “my grandmother”) and
emphasizes this through the adverb “really” as well as the additional action
verb “sobbing.” The continuous form of the verb implies that this expression
of the grandmother’s distress must have been lengthy and ongoing. Line 5
focuses on the parents and describes them as “supportive.” The adverb “basi-
cally,” however, already anticipates some contrasting action, which is then
introduced through the coordinator “but” in the following line: “but um,
they kept the, it’s like they kept the lid on things” (lines 6–7). The container
metaphor evoked in the expression “they kept the lid on things” suggests
that the parents regarded the narrator’s illness as something that must be
contained or suppressed. More precisely, the metaphor expresses what the
narrator as experiencing self thought his parents did and felt. The hesitation
marker “um” used at this point (lines 6 and 8), the speech cut-off in line 6,
244   Part II: Chapter 9

and the use of the modifier “it’s like” in line 7 after “they kept the” before
the phrase “they kept the lid on things” is completed—these all indicate a
high level of self-monitoring and point towards the interaction work the nar-
rator is doing as the narrating self, i.e. from his present-day perspective. In
Jahn’s (1996, 1999) terminology we could say that the narrator occupies
focus-1, i.e. he offers the “lens” through which the story world is perceived.
In his model of vision, Jahn distinguishes between two types of focus which
he then applies to the concept of focalization: focus-1 is “the burning point
of an eye’s lens, usually located in a person’s head,” while focus-2 is “the
area of attention which the eye focuses on to obtain maximum sharpness”
(Jahn 1999: 88). In the narrative at hand, the speaker can be said to occupy
focus-1 in the sense explained above, as well as focus-2 since he focuses on
himself in relationship to his parents in his narrative. What I wish to suggest
here is that even in oral storytelling one ought not to presuppose a simple
co-referentiality between the storyteller and the person expressed in the first-
person pronoun “I.” Instead, it can be useful to differentiate between various
narrative personae and functional roles a narrator may assume.
Rather than presenting the behavior of his parents straightaway as an
absolute fact, the narrator reformulates it in terms of his own retrospective
perception or focalizer position (“it’s like”) and thus mitigates the potentially
critical stance conveyed in the metaphoric phrase. This mitigating strategy is
repeated in another clause cut off in line 8 (“Um, yeah they didn’t want”),
which is then resumed in line 13 (“But they didn’t want to go round say-
ing . . .”) with a range of excuses and justifications of the parents’ behavior
placed in between (lines 11–12: “I think they meant well and they were very
supportive”). Furthermore, hedges are employed to deflect the impression of
the narrator as unduly critical: “I don’t mean that unkindly on them” (line
10); “a degree of shame” (line 9). The conditional clause “if you like” (line 9)
indirectly negotiates the word choice of the noun “shame” and has the addi-
tional phatic function of establishing rapport between storyteller and listener
(in the sense of “I am lacking a better word at this point but you know what
I mean”).
Chatman’s (1986) distinction between filter and slant can also be useful
for the analysis of this narrative. While the events at the time of the diagnosis
and the family’s reaction are “filtered through” the narrator’s eyes both on
the level of the experiencing and the narrating self, the critical judgment that
is implicitly passed can be reframed as the “slant” the narrator takes on the
events in retrospect. This slant, however, becomes more ambivalent through
the excusatory tone introduced because of the interview situation. When talk-
ing to the interviewer the narrator feels obliged to maintain face as the under-
 Mildorf, “Narratology and the Social Sciences”   245

standing son of the family despite his probable disappointment about the
reaction of his parents. The division of the narrator’s position into slant and
filter can be further observed in the final line of the narrative, in which the
narrator speculates on reasons why his parents did not want to discuss his
illness openly: “and they would much rather I suppose naturally talk about
success rather than what was certainly perceived as a failure” (line 14). The
most striking aspect here is the free indirect discourse (FID) in “they would
much rather . . . talk about success,” which blends the narrator’s voice with
the alleged thoughts/motives of his parents. One might object here that the
clause is in fact an example of direct discourse, which is immediately depen-
dent on the inquit formula “I suppose.” I would reject such a reading because
of the parenthetical insertion of “I suppose,” which marks the putative verb
phrase phonetically and thus lifts it out of the surrounding syntactical con-
struction, no longer warranting its function as a real inquit formula. Typical
features of FID in this example include the omission of the reporting clause
(“they thought” or “they said” or “they felt”), the change from first-person
to third-person pronoun use (“we would rather” to ” “they would rather”),
tense backshift of the modal verb “would,” and the use of features of spoken
language such as the combination of the quantifier “much” with the adverb
“rather” (see also Leech and Short 1981: 325ff.). Since the verb is a modal
verb, the backshift is not evident from the linguistic form alone as modals
typically do not change when they are in past tense. However, the context
with past tense in the preceding and following clause strongly suggests that
the modal must also be set in the past here. It is important to bear in mind
that the narrative does not represent what the parents actually said or thought
but what their son assumes they may have said or thought. In other words,
the clause containing FID is used to convey hypothetical thought or speech.
FID is said to be limited to literary narrative because it enables the narra-
tor to access the minds of characters in the story world, a phenomenon that
is supposed to be impossible in real life. In this narrative we see that even
conversational storytellers can make use of FID if they present the thoughts,
feelings, or motives of other people. That this form of access to other people’s
minds is unusual and hence needs to be explained or justified in oral narra-
tives (while it is a perfectly legitimate form in literary narrative), can be seen
in the insertion of the above-mentioned verb phrase “I suppose,” which iden-
tifies the speaker’s statement as his conjecture rather than an observable and
verifiable fact. The parents’ reasoning, which could easily come under attack
if understood as a sign of lack of courage and acceptance of the son’s pre-
dicament, is thus again mitigated and presented in a defensive manner. This
verbal defense of the parents culminates in the passive construction used at
246   Part II: Chapter 9

the end of the narrative: “what was certainly perceived as a failure” (line 14).
The adverb “certainly” again frames the presented feelings in terms of what
the narrator “believes to be true” rather than what “is true” (what Leech
[1987: 107–110] calls “theoretical meaning”). More importantly, however,
the “experiencers” or “originators” of these feelings are completely blotted
out. In other words, the perception of the narrator’s illness as “failure” is
not explicitly attributed to anyone. One could interpret the relative clause
as referring to the perception of others (“what other people perceived as a
failure”), in which case the parents’ behavior would imply shame and lack of
courage. One could also read the clause as indicating the parents’ own per-
ception (“what they perceived as a failure”), which would even magnify their
sense of shame. Both interpretations are problematic in the context of family
storytelling as they suggest criticism of one’s parents and thus pose a potential
threat to family unity.
Tajfel (1978) demonstrates that denigration of members of the out-group
is necessary for the definition and demarcation of one’s in-group. If family
members are criticized, they are indirectly placed on a par with out-group
members and the boundaries between groups become blurred. For this rea-
son, criticism needs to be toned down by means of a defensive slant on the
narrative expressed in numerous linguistic and narrative strategies. Chat-
man’s distinction between filter and slant proves useful as it helps explain a
discrepancy in this oral narrative: while the slant the narrator offers on the
story world is defensive of the narrator’s parents and ostensibly presents them
in a positive light, the narrator’s function as filter grants the listener an insight
into the minds of the parents, which implicitly conveys a sense of disappoint-
ment and criticism. On a more global narrative level, the switch between the
experiencing self and narrating self positions, which entails a switch from the
filter to the slant function of the narrator, mark a shift in the narrator’s posi-
tioning. He moves from the position of son who confirms his membership in
the family group to the position of ill person who feels excluded and stigma-
tized by people who do not inhabit the same domain of illness (in the sense of
Donald’s [1998: 23] “wellness-illness divide”).

Illness, Identity, and Deictic Transfers

Let us now turn to another narratological concept that can be used for the
study of oral narratives, double deixis (Herman 1994). The following narra-
tive is a personal narrative of a 60-year old woman suffering from depression
who recounts the way in which she managed to go back to a “normal” life
 Mildorf, “Narratology and the Social Sciences”   247

by taking on a secretarial post. The narrative is particularly interesting for its

use of double deixis. Herman (1994) lists five possible functions of second-
person pronoun “you”: generalized you, fictional reference, fictionalized (=
horizontal) address, apostrophic (= vertical) address, and doubly deictic you.
One can speak of double deixis when the relationship between the morpho-
syntactic form of you and its textual functions is not entirely clear-cut and
when you assumes more than one of the above-mentioned first four functions
at the same time.

Narrative 2

1. One day she (my social worker) knocked on the door

2. and said, “We’re going to start a MIND group, a sort of MIND group,
would you be interested in joining us?”
3. So I got into that
4. and because of my secretarial skills I was immediately taken on as a
secretary of the working group.
5. And, and that’s how it went.
6. And again because you’re . . . becoming friendly with the professionals
as it were, [pause]
7. and [pause] at a point where you, you were starting to give something
back, starting to help other people.
8. And that made me realize how important it was to help other people.
9. And I think that gives you an uplift doesn’t it.
10. And that’s really what happened,
11. that’s, that’s how I got back into normality.

The narrative begins with a kind of mini-dramatization including constructed

dialogue in line 2 and the metonymic image “knocked on the door” (line 1),
which can be understood literally as the social worker knocking on the nar-
rator’s door and also figuratively as an image for the social worker’s request.
The complicating action from line 3 to 7 relates how the narrator became
a secretary of the working group. This part of the plot then culminates in
the resolution of the narrative (lines 8–11), the main point of which is the
narrator’s recognition of how important the job was for her well-being. In
other words, the narrative describes a turning point in the narrator’s life. As
Rimmon-Kenan (2002) argues, the turning point structure in illness narra-
tives “counteracts disruption” (18) and thus offers a sense of coherence to the
ill person. However, this structure can also constitute a kind of “entrapment”
248   Part II: Chapter 9

in the sense that it suppresses the experience of chaos and can thus lead to a
meaningless recycling of a culturally expected narrative type.
In narrative 2 the turning point in the narrator’s life is presented in posi-
tive terms and thus matches the cultural expectation of the “getting better”
plot line. Interestingly enough, the narrator switches from first-person to
second-person narrative when she describes which aspects of her new job
brought about the change in her life: “And again because you’re . . . becom-
ing friendly with the professionals as it were, [pause] and [pause] at a point
where you, you were starting to give something back, starting to help other
people” (lines 6–7). While the first instance of you still bears marks of gener-
alized you since it is accompanied by the present tense (present progressive),
the second you clearly indicates a replacement of the first-person pronoun
with you which, however, still refers to the narrator as experiencing self. It
is the narrator herself who started to help other people. The use of you-nar-
rative creates a peculiar sense of self-distancing, as though the narrator were
looking at herself from the outside of the narrated story world. One could
also interpret the you-narrative in more positive terms as an inclusive move
that enables the sick person to enter a dialogue with herself. At the same
time, since the narrative was related in an interview, one can assume that
there is also a residue of the vertical address function of “you” left. Put dif-
ferently, the “you” can also be read as including the interviewer and thus it
assumes the dialogic function of creating involvement by suggesting that, had
the interviewer been in a similar situation, she may also have had a similar
experience. The vertical address element is only minimal, however, since the
recounted story is very specific and a distinct part of the narrator’s life. In line
9, generalized you becomes more dominant again: “and I think that gives
you an uplift doesn’t it.” While it was the narrator in particular who felt an
uplift because of her changed situation, anyone in such a context may experi-
ence the same feeling. The simple present, which generalizes the statement,
and the tag question, which has the phatic function of securing the listener’s
agreement with the statement made, support this interpretation. Only in line
8 does the narrator return to the first-person pronoun when she relates the
point of her realizing what was important in her life, which also happens to
be the turning point in her illness narrative.
What possible functions does the you-narrative in this particular story
have? The fact that the narrative at this point is also marked by pauses
points towards the narrator’s thinking about how her job affected her life
and thinking about how to frame this process in the interview. In a way,
the narrator mentally (and then verbally) resumes her life, and the distance
 Mildorf, “Narratology and the Social Sciences”   249

between the experiencing self in the past and the narrating self in the pres-
ent is captured in the distancing you. As I said, it is almost as if the narra-
tor entered a dialogue with herself at this point, thereby also supporting
the memory work she is accomplishing in the interview. At the same time,
you clearly lacks a sense of full identification if compared to I. One could
therefore argue that the use of you-narrative here enacts the process of de-
centering or the narrator’s shift of focus from herself as the ill person to oth-
ers who also needed help. This reading is corroborated by another comment
the narrator makes later in the interview: “And I do think that the idea that
it was benefiting somebody else as well, that it wasn’t just ‘self.’ Which is
a good thing because you do turn in on yourself. And it made one sort of
stop being focused on just oneself.” This statement is highly interesting as
it contains a deictic shift not only to second-person you but also to generic
one, and moves the whole experience even further away from the narrator. It
foregrounds the almost universal and indeed generic aspect of such turning
point structures in illness narratives.
This example shows how deictic transfers in narratives can help elicit
the dynamics of identity formation. In this narrative a move away from self-
awareness typically expressed through the first-person pronoun “I” (Giddens
1991: 53) correlates with the narrator-protagonist’s removal of focus from
her sick persona to others on the intradiegetic level. This de-focusing is con-
structed as a beneficial process and as the prerequisite for change. The nar-
rator’s affirmative resolution, where she talks about “uplift” (line 9), “that’s
what really happened” (line 10), and “that’s how I got back into normality”
(line 11), underlines the positive tenor of the narrative. On the extradiegetic
level the you-narrative places the listener in the peculiar position of someone
who overhears the dialogue of the narrator with herself and at the same time
in the position of an addressee who is invited to feel included in the narrated
events. What we observe here is the kind of narrative work that forms the
basis of our self-identities: “A person with a reasonably stable sense of self-
identity has a feeling of biographical continuity which she is able to grasp
reflexively and, to a greater or lesser degree, communicate to other people”
(Giddens 1991: 54). Illness disrupts continuity but the turning point struc-
ture remedies this disruption by providing a new sense of continuity that
centers on a “before” and “after.” Ironically, then, the narrative strategy of
deictic transfer that normally destabilizes a sense of narrative identity is used
here to accomplish and to convey an even greater sense of identity lost and
found. This stands in contrast to the first narrative in which the narrative
strategies of focalization and FID compete with and subtly undermine some
250   Part II: Chapter 9

of the narrative’s more explicit messages, which ultimately conveys a sense of

ambivalence.

Conclusion

As we can see from these examples, further layers of complexity can be

revealed in seemingly simple oral narratives by means of narratological anal-
ysis. While discourse linguistics has already made a significant contribution
to a more systematic investigation of oral narratives, I argue that narratology
can help elicit the particularly narrative features of oral narratives, which may
lead to more finely-grained distinctions. Let us briefly reconsider the concepts
I set out to investigate: identity, social positioning, in-group and out-group
relations. Research on identity no longer assumes identity to be a mono-
lithic conglomerate of essential features but rather a dynamic concept that
is constantly and contextually (re)negotiated among interactants (de Fina,
Schiffrin and Bamberg 2006).2 If identities are partially negotiated through
narratives, the question arises in what ways narratives can offer scope for
identity formation. Social positioning as one facet of identity formation is
a case in point. Hollway (1984), for example, states that “discourses make
available positions for subjects to take up. These positions are in relation
to other people” (236). Yet how do subjects “take up” positions? In narra-
tive, positions can be made available through the characters that people the
story world and also through the position of the narrator vis-à-vis the story
world. One of the fallacies of narrative research in the social sciences to date,
I would argue, is to assume that the storyteller equals the narrator and, if he
or she is telling a personal story in the first person, also equals the charac-
ter presented in the story. As my discussion has shown, narrators in and of
oral stories can assume more complex positions, which can be captured if
one adopts narratological terms such as experiencing and narrating self or
slant and filter. Likewise, identities and group relations emerge in a process in
which storytellers set themselves off from, identify with or in some other way
relate to themselves as characters and to other characters in their storyworlds.
Georgakopoulou (2005) demonstrates in her research on young Greek female
adolescents’ talk how, for example, stylization, i.e. the enactment of other
people’s (in this case, men’s) voices in narratives, contributes to the constitu-
tion of her informants’ “own gendered selves” (180). While the use of other
characters’ speech has been widely studied in discourse linguistics, the notion

2. Compare the contribution of Löschnigg in this volume.

 Mildorf, “Narratology and the Social Sciences”   251

that other people’s “voices” may stand in for covert presentations of third-
person consciousness has not featured prominently in the literature, one rea-
son certainly being that this narrative phenomenon is not deemed possible in
oral narratives.3 And yet, such subtle phenomena do occur. The only problem
is that very fine-tuned narratological sensors are required to discover them.
A lot more work needs to be done. First of all it would be desirable to
analyze a large sample of oral narratives from a wide range of contexts to see
if any common patterns emerge. For example, can certain narrative strate-
gies be correlated with socio-demographic factors such as gender, age, social
status, or professional group? To what extent can narrative strategies such
as focalization, double deixis, or FID be linked to more general conversa-
tional strategies employed to establish rapport, to convince or persuade, to
signal convergence or divergence, and so on? What these questions certainly
demonstrate, however, is that scholars from various disciplines interested in
narrative ought to collaborate more closely in order to arrive at more holis-
tic approaches. After all, “the exploratory and experimental options of nar-
rative are inextricably fused with our fleeting reality itself,” as Brockmeier
and Harré (2001) contend, and for this reason “one motive—perhaps even
a leitmotif—of the study of narrative realities should be to investigate this
opening-up quality of the discursive mind and to uncover the multifaceted
forms of cultural discourse in which it takes place” (56).

3. It is nonetheless true that pragmatics is one linguistic area that has traditionally also
considered the attribution of speaker meaning. More recent work that is particularly of interest
here is relevance theory as put forward by Sperber and Wilson (see Wilson 2000: 419ff. for an
overview). See also Mildorf (2008).
252   Part II: Chapter 9

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 10
Martin LÖschn igg

Postclassical Narratology and the

Theory of Autobiography

A self is probably the most impressive work of art we ever produce, surely
the most intricate. (Bruner 2003: 14)

(0) Introduction

In the theory of autobiography, theoretical developments in literary studies

are clearly reflected. From an earlier mimetic understanding of the genre as
the representation of an autonomous and homogeneous self the pendulum
swung to the deconstructionist view, dominant in the late 1970s and early
1980s. According to deconstructionist tenets, there can be no representa-
tion of self in language, but only an illusion of “self” generated by a purely
textual subject. It was at this point that theorists like Michael Sprinker even
went as far as to proclaim the “end of autobiography” (Sprinker 1980). Since
the late 1980s, however, the pendulum seems to have come to a standstill at
the center between the mimetic and deconstructionist extremes of amplitude,
settled in a framework of constructivist (narrativist) theories of autobiogra-
phy. Paul John Eakin (1992), Jerome Bruner (1991; 2003), and others have
emphasized the role of narrative in the formation and maintenance of a sense
of identity. They foreground, on the one hand, the creative (as opposed to the
mimetic) function of autobiography with regard to individual identity, while,
on the other hand, reviving the concept of autobiographical reference. At the
same time, the framing of human experience in the form of narrative(s) has
become the focus of interest in a range of disciplines beyond those immedi-
ately concerned with life-writing, and narratology has branched out to inves-
tigate the role of narrative in a variety of different fields.

255
256   Part II: Chapter 10

In the following, I propose to show which models and categories of con-

temporary narratology may be relevant for a narratologically grounded dis-
cussion of autobiographical discourse. The aim of my essay is therefore not
to add to the already vast body of narrative theory (including the theory of
autobiography), but to bring to focus some recent theoretical developments
which bear on autobiographical narrative(s). In particular, I shall point to
the interfaces which exist between narrativist theories of autobiography and
cognitive narratology and demonstrate how an analysis of autobiographical
discourse may benefit from the synthesis of these disciplines. In my essay, I
shall concentrate (1) on the discursive representation of the experiential in
autobiography; (2) on narrativity and the self, i.e. the role of narrative in the
formation of identity; (3) on the role of frames and scripts in the textual rep-
resentation of memory; and, finally (4) on the fictionality of autobiography.
The question of the fictionality of autobiography requires some eluci-
dation because in both fields, postclassical narratology and the theory of
autobiography, the role of the fictional in (autobiographical) narrative has
recently been redefined. In autobiographical theory in particular, the distinc-
tion between fact and fiction no longer seems to be the overriding concern
that it was until relatively recently. This relaxation of the borders between
truth and fiction is due not so much to the undermining of “facticity” in
life-writing caused by the general post-structuralist mistrust of “truth” and
“authenticity.” Rather, the noted shift in perspective seems to correlate with
an emphasis on narrativity as a vital factor in the construction of identity, i.e.
a view that autobiography, in narrative terms, stages the drama of creating
the autobiographer’s identity. In this drama, as I shall explain under (4), fic-
tion plays an important role. As regards postclassical narratology, narratolo-
gists like Monika Fludernik (1996) have suggested ways out of the fact/fiction
divide by aligning narrativity with fictionality (cf. 4). Such a shift away from
an emphasis on the referential clearly has its advantages, since it enables one
to accommodate the variety of forms which has been characteristic of auto-
biographical writing especially since the second half of the twentieth century.1

(1) Writing the Experiential

In all forms of autobiographical discourse, the narrative rendering of indi-

vidual experience and of a sense of identity is inextricably linked with basic

1. For the autobiographical in various media and cultural approaches to the autobio-
graphical, see the essays in Kadar et al. (2005).
 Löschnigg, “Postclassical Narratology and Autobiography”   257

structural patterns. These emanate from what classical narratology has

described as the dual aspect of the (fictional) autobiographer as experiencer
and narrator. This duality has until now been investigated primarily with
regard to plotlines and genres, to forms of focalization and to the problem of
unreliable narration. I want to argue that, if one conceives of autobiography
as a psychological activity which creates, rather than merely depicts, identity,
retrospection and the double aspect of the self involve the construction not
only of the experiencing, but also of the narrating self. These should therefore
be viewed not in terms of the dichotomy sometimes suggested by structuralist
accounts, but within larger frames of rendering the experiential.
On the textual level of autobiography, the continuity between experience
and narrative is manifested in what Genette has termed homodiegesis, i.e. the
rootedness of the narrative voice in the world of the narrative. In the case of
factual autobiography, this rootedness rests on actual embodiment, and the
ensuing “materiality” provides a criterion which in principle distinguishes
it from other (especially fictional) forms of writing (cf. Smith/Watson 2005).
Classical narratology has investigated homodiegesis primarily with regard
to fictional narratives. It distinguishes between two aspects of the narrative
instance, as it were, the self as character and the self as narrator, variously
referred to as the “narrated” or “experiencing” self, on the one hand, and the
“narrating self” or “narrating I,” on the other. Valid as this distinction may
be for the structural analysis of literary narratives, its application to autobi-
ography seems problematic as it is prone to introduce a dichotomy which
detracts from the continuity of (remembered) experience as emphasized by
narrative psychology and recent theories of life-writing. Such continuity even
applies to narratives of conversion. These are a common type of autobiogra-
phy that seems to give absolute priority to the narrating self by establishing a
superior standpoint in the present, namely that of a reformed wrongdoer who
has gained an insight into some “higher” truth about himself. Yet even in
conversion narratives a clear-cut division between narrator and experiencer
cannot always be upheld, as emerges clearly, for instance, from the following
passage in John Bunyan’s spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding to the
Chief of Sinners (1666):

In these days, the thoughts of religion were very grievous to me; I could
neither endure it my self, nor that any other should; so that, when I have
seen some read in those books that concerned Christian piety, it would be as
it were a prison to me. Then I said unto God, Depart from me, for I desire
not the knowledge of thy ways, Job. 21.14, 15. I was now void of all good
consideration; Heaven and Hell were both out of sight and minde; and as for
258   Part II: Chapter 10

Saving and Damning, they were least in my thoughts. O Lord, thou knowest
my life, and my ways were not hid from thee.
Yet this I well remember, that though I could my self sin with the great-
est delight and ease, and also take pleasure in the vileness of my compan-
ions; yet even then, if I have at any time seen wicked things by those who
professed goodness, it would make my spirit tremble. As once above all the
rest, when I was in my height of vanity, yet hearing one to swear that was
reckoned for a religious man, it had so great a stroke upon my spirit, that
it made my heart to ake. (Bunyan 1962: 7; Bunyan’s emphasis in italics; my
emphasis in bold)

Here the super-ordinate perspective of the present, reformed narrator at first

appears to be the only vantage point which enables the creation of meaning.
Yet the reverberations of actual experience are emphasized in the narrative,
e.g. by underlining the vividness of memories and by the use of proximal
deictics (“now”), while the insertion (and identification) of the biblical quota-
tions indicates an attempt at authenticating as well as re-living experience in
the light of ulterior established authority. Rather than implying a dichotomy
between “then” and “now,” therefore, the temporal levels of narrator and
experiencer in this passage are really made to interact, the result being a con-
tinuity of experience.
According to traditional views of the genre, the “I” in autobiography
represents subject and object, viz. the past and present selves, and the privi-
leged position of the present narrator is confirmed exactly because the past
self is different from the present self. The autobiographer thus recounts not
only what has happened to him/her at an earlier time, but above all how he/
she has become himself/herself from the “other” which he/she was. The dif-
ference produced by autobiographical reflection is therefore twofold, com-
prising a difference in time as well as in identity. According to such views,
the personal reference (“I”) is ambivalent, since the narrator was a differ-
ent person in the past from what he/she is now.2 As we have seen from the
above-cited example, however, a continuity of experience and of a sense of
self applies even when the discourse seems at first to confer upon the autobi-
ographer’s self a sense of “otherness.”
I should emphasize here that I am concerned with the conception of a
structural aspect of homodiegetic narration and with its theoretical implica-
tions. As conceived in the terms of classical (structuralist) narratology, these

2. Cf. Laura Marcus: “Autobiography imports alterity into the self by the act of objec-
tification which engenders it” (1994: 203).
 Löschnigg, “Postclassical Narratology and Autobiography”   259

implications would in fact amount to a division between narrator and experi-

ence on epistemological and ontological grounds, whereas I would argue for
re-conceiving this structural aspect in terms of a continuum and of “writing
the experiential.” What I am not concerned with here is the extent to which
autobiographies may explicitly reflect on differences between the writer’s
“then” and “now” on a meta-textual level.
Instead of emphasizing the duality of narrator and experiencer, it might
be more appropriate to regard the autobiographical act as an experiential
site, as a re-living of experience rather than as an attempt by a detached sub-
ject to interpret itself as object. This is because autobiography, as has been
indicated at the beginning, may no longer be viewed in terms of a retrospec-
tive rendering of an already formed self, but should best be regarded as an act
of identity-construction. Such identity-construction is decisively shaped by
present motivations, desires and anxieties. Indeed, the actual writing of auto-
biography is a re-enactment of the (sub)conscious construction processes that
have preceded it. The experiential in the sense of a psychological re-living
and cognitive re-construction of experience is therefore really an element of
the autobiographical act itself. Autobiographical narrative may therefore be
conceived of in terms of the frames of experiencing and reflection provided
by models of cognitive narratology.
One such model has been proposed by Monika Fludernik in her ground-
breaking Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (1996). Fludernik’s categories are
derived from her analysis of spontaneous oral narrative, which she regards
as prototypical of the narrative rendering of specifically human (or at least
anthropomorphic) experience. The “natural” form of such a rendering is the
first-person: “[In the oral mode] [ . . . ] the experientiality of story-experience
[ . . . ] is aligned primarily with the first-person frame” (315). The concept
of experientiality is basic to Fludernik’s understanding of narrative. Roughly
speaking, experientiality refers to an individualized rendering of experience
as reflected in human consciousness. The continuity of experience and nar-
ration, which is also emphasized in recent theories of autobiography, is thus
central to Fludernik’s narratological model. One of her aims in Towards a
‘Natural’ Narratology is to radically revise conventional notions of narrativ-
ity. As opposed to traditional definitions of narrativity, which are based on
plot, Fludernik rejects plot as a necessary component of narrativity. Instead
she grounds narrativity in experientiality, emphasizing the presence of a
“human (anthropomorphic) experiencer” as an indispensable precondition
of experientiality (13). Human consciousness and its representation are of
supreme importance in her model: “[Consciousness] both mediates narrativ-
ity and constitutes one of its signifiers” (374). Because of its emphasis on the
260   Part II: Chapter 10

“consciousness factor,” Fludernik’s model appears to be more suitable to the

description of autobiographical narrative; it is able to reflect to the focus on
the inner life of the subject typical of most autobiographies better than are
traditional, event-centered concepts of narrativity. It is not only this fore-
grounding of consciousness, however, that makes Fludernik’s model an ideal
descriptor of autobiographies, but also the fact that autobiographies fre-
quently focus on the specificity of the represented experience, which, accord-
ing to Fludernik, is another criterion in defining narrativity (cf. 29).
Fludernik regards narrativity as resulting from the reader’s integration of
a text into the framework of real-life experience, a script that also includes
frames of narrative mediation and of narrative genres (cf. also Fludernik
2003). In particular, she distinguishes between five cognitive frames which
“relate to basic perspectives on human experience and its narrative media-
tion” (2003: 246) and which therefore become functional in narrative dis-
course: action, telling, experiencing, viewing, and reflecting. In the case of
autobiography, frames of telling, experiencing, and reflecting are of special
importance, and the distinction made in classical (structuralist) narratol-
ogy between the narrating and experiencing selves of autodiegetic narrators
can now very easily be re-formulated in these terms. I have shown elsewhere
(Löschnigg 2006a: 84–86; 2006b) how an emphasis on either one or the
other of these frames will determine the narrative profile of a text, and how
fictional autobiographies (i.e. novels in the form of autobiography) in par-
ticular have tended to concentrate on rendering the experiential substance
rather than the reflective process. In any case, a flexible model such as Flud-
ernik’s seems to be more adequate for a description of autobiographical nar-
rative than the division implied by the teller vs. experiencer model of classical
narratology. Moreover, Fludernik’s experiential model of narrative connects
with those approaches to autobiography which regard life-writing as the con-
struction of individual identity in the medium of narrative, since both high-
light the significance of individual experience and its reflective processing (or
re-enactment) in the narrating consciousness.

(2) Narrativity and the Self

Different concepts of narrative and narrativity notwithstanding, it is generally

agreed that autobiography is a “narrative” genre. If one looks at the histori-
cal range of autobiographical texts, however, one perceives a remarkable dif-
ference between, for instance, St. Augustine’s narrative realism, on the one
hand, and (post-)modernist texts such as Beckett’s, on the other. The latter
 Löschnigg, “Postclassical Narratology and Autobiography”   261

seem to reject narrative as a form reflecting an inherent order in life, and to

suggest that the narrative form is really a liability from which the “I” has to
free itself. Considering the protean nature of contemporary life-writing, and
especially the tendency towards fragmentation and experiment in many twen-
tieth-century autobiographies, one may start to wonder, as Paul John Eakin
does, whether “narrative as a structure of reference [is] to be understood as
a period-specific phenomenon, an outmoded literary convention that is to be
identified as a vestige of a nineteenth-century historicist model of the sub-
ject?” (Eakin 1988b: 34). While Eakin still maintains that narrative is essen-
tial to the genre, other theoreticians have questioned this view. For instance,
James Olney regards “autobiography [not as] a definition of the writer’s self
in the past, at the time of action, but in the present, at the time of writing”
(1972: 44). Narrative, Olney seems to imply, is only of secondary importance,
serving just as a vehicle for expressing the insights gained by the subject into
his/her own existence.3 Both Eakin and Olney use a definition of narrative
that is based on plot or event-structure.
No doubt, some of the skepticism about the role of narrative in autobiog-
raphy may ultimately be attributed to a questioning of traditional assumptions
about the mimetic functions of life-writing. As has already been stated, recent
theoretical positions on autobiography hold that the “I” which emerges from
autobiographical discourse is not the faithful rendering of an autonomous
and homogeneous self, but rather a self which has been construed in the nar-
rative act. (In this respect, I find Olney’s term “definition” in the passage cited
above somewhat problematic, too.) Autobiography is a poietic rather than a
mimetic genre, which also includes an element of the imaginary in the emerg-
ing “portrait” of the subject. The narrative act, it needs to be emphasized,
acquires a vital role in the construction of a sense of identity. Indeed, the view
that the narrative rendering of lived experience engenders such a sense of
identity seems to be supported by psychological studies, which indicate that
dysnarrativia, i.e. the inability to construct or understand stories, seriously
impairs a sense of selfhood (cf. Bruner 2003: 86).
“Narrativized” understandings of identity focus on lived experience rather
than on some quality which essentially “defines” a person, and on the capac-
ity of narrative to impose order and coherence on what is otherwise a jum-
ble of disconnected fragments of experiences and memories (see Mink 1978;
Ricœur 1984–1988; Bruner 1991). The epistemological aspect of narrative,
i.e. its functioning as a “cognitive instrument,” is emphasized in particular by

3. Some theorists, e.g. Michel Beaujour, have distinguished between “autobiography”

and the “autoportrait,” the latter being characterized by its lack of a coherent narrative (1980:
348).
262   Part II: Chapter 10

Bruner and Mink, while Ricœur leans towards an ontological understanding,

according to which narrative discourse reflects a narrative order of experience
as such. The assumption that our experience and memories are organized in
the form of narratives, however, is common to all the theorists mentioned,
and is inseparably linked in their thinking with the heuristic function of nar-
rative when it comes to creating a sense of identity. Peter Brooks, referring to
Rousseau’s The Confessions, keeps insisting that narrative provides the only
means by which the autobiographer has access to his/her identity:

The question of identity [ . . . ] can be thought only in narrative terms, in the

effort to tell a whole life, to plot its meaning by going back over it to record
its perpetual flight forward, its slippage from the fixity of definition, [ . . . ]
the contradictions encountered in the attempt to understand and present the
self in all its truth provide a powerful narrative machine. Any time one goes
over a moment of the past the machine can be relied on to produce more
narrative—not only differing stories of the past, but future scenarios and
narratives of writing itself. (1984: 33)

The narrative construction of self, it must be pointed out, is a continuous

process which is pragmatic in the sense that it meets the needs of the situation
encountered. In the theory of autobiography, the recognition of the pragmatic
function of autobiographical narrative has given rise to approaches which
regard autobiography as a “mode of cognition and perception” (Nalbantian
1994: 36) rather than as a literary genre. They see the writing of one’s life
as the re-enactment of a process of creating, rather than finding, a sense of
identity, “not merely as the passive, transparent record of an already com-
pleted self but rather as an integral and often decisive phase of the drama of
self-definition” (Eakin 1988a: 226). Since this process unfolds along narrative
lines, particular emphasis has been placed upon narrative’s capacity to cre-
ate order: “[N]arrative plays a central, structuring [!] role in the formation
and maintenance of our sense of identity” (Eakin 1999: 123). By structuring
contingent experience, narrative enables us to grasp identity as the telos of a
coherent story: “We achieve our personal identities and self-concept through
the use of the narrative configuration, and make our existence into a whole by
understanding it as an expression of a single unfolding and developing story”
(Polkinghorne 1988: 150). The contiguity of experience is thus structured
by language (and especially by narratives) into a series of verbalized events;
according to Bruner, selfhood is a “kind of meta-event that gives coherence
and continuity to the scramble of experience” (Bruner 2003: 73). Even if
the narrative construction of the self is “more constrained by memory than
 Löschnigg, “Postclassical Narratology and Autobiography”   263

fiction,” it is indeed “uneasily constrained” (Bruner 2003: 65), the process

fusing memory and the imagination. Seen in this light, the referential “truth-
claim” of autobiography emerges as the result of a transferring of cognitive
parameters onto an ontological plane.
The advent of postclassical narratology has undoubtedly helped to
strengthen those views in the theory of autobiography which have empha-
sized the importance of narrative and of “narrativity” for the genre. Focusing
as it does on the “question of how the human mind picks up patterns and
enriches them with schematic information (from expectations and memories)
into meaningful units” (Bamberg 2005: 218), cognitive narratology in par-
ticular should prove fruitful for the study of autobiographical discourse, as I
shall try to show in the following section of this essay.

(3) Memory, Scripts, and Schemata

The “cognitive turn in narratology” (Ibsch 1990) has yielded valuable

insights into the workings of narratives as a readily available tool-kit in the
“domain of human interaction” (Bruner 2003: 4). Cognitive narratology has
become an interdisciplinary project in itself, drawing from and combining
disciplines such as cognitive psychology, frame theory, linguistics, and the
study of artificial intelligence (cf. Herman 2003a; Hogan 2004). In particular,
the specific conditions of memory and their importance for the constitution
of identity have become one of the central fields of cognitive and especially
of narrative psychology. Humans retell memories according to pre-conceived
notions about their functioning and the way in which they reach into the
past.4 In this process, as in the cognitive processing of immediate experience,
narrative structures and schemata play a vital role: “[A]ll forms of memory
are explicitly or implicitly based on retrospective narratives that seek to cross
the unbridgeable gap between the time of narrating and the time of the events
that will be narrated” (Müller-Funk 2003: 207). The significance of narra-
tive for the content as well as the relevance of our memories underlines once
more the importance of narrative as a means of creating meaning or a sense
of identity. In this connection, it should be emphasized that one needs to
consider the remembered past as being just as “real” as the autobiographer’s
present consciousness, since the contents of memory are determined by pres-
ent motivations, desires, and anxieties (and also by internalized social, ethi-
cal, and moral norms or “frames”).

4. See Rubin (1986); Thompson et al. (1996); Schacter (1996).

264   Part II: Chapter 10

In his classic psychological study Remembering: A Study in Experimental

and Social Psychology, Frederick Bartlett describes the workings of memory
as the organizing of past experience into anticipatory patterns for dealing
with the present (cf. 1932: 201–14). In order to cope with present experience,
memory thus references a considerable number of experiential repertories. It
engenders dynamic “scripts” as well as static “schemata,” to use well-known
terms from cognitive psychology.5 Narrative shows a particular affinity to
these processes, since its specific temporal structure is ideally suited to con-
veying the interaction of past and present consciousness underlying Bartlett’s
model of memory. The rendering of past events includes a consciousness,
in the present, of their eventual outcome, which is why “[t]elling narratives
is a certain way of reconciling emergent with prior knowledge” (Herman
1997: 1048). This insight seems to be particularly valid for autobiographi-
cal narration, since retrospection always includes a consciousness of what
was not known at the time of the events referred to. The temporal structure
of life-writing is therefore really a threefold one, comprising the autobiogra-
pher’s past and present, and also that which is now the past, but what from
an earlier point of view was the future,6 i.e. that which the autobiographer
could not have known at the time: “If subjects come into being through their
relationship with narratives, then narratives are formed in time; [ . . . ] but the
form of narrative time [ . . . ] does not flow in only one direction” (Williams
1995: 126).
This may be illustrated by passages such as the following. My example is
taken from the chapter in John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography (1873), in which
he reviews his companionship with his future wife, Harriet Taylor, and the
influence she was to prove on his life:

At the present period, however, this influence was only one among many
which were helping to shape the character of my future development: and
even after it became, I may truly say, the presiding principle of my mental
progress, it did not alter the path, but only made me move forward more
boldly and at the same time more cautiously in the same course. The only
actual revolution which has ever taken place in my modes of thinking, was
already complete. My new tendencies had to be confirmed in some respects,

5. Dennis Mercadal defines “script” as “[a] description of how a sequence of events

is expected to unfold [ . . . ] Scripts represent a sequence of events that take place in a time
sequence” (1990: 255). “Schema” is defined as “[a] term used in psychology literature which
refers to memory patterns that humans use to interpret current experiences” (ibid. 254). The
term is used more or less synonymously in cognitive psychology with “cognitive frames.”
6. See Ricœur (1984, ch. I, 1) on Book 11 of St. Augustine’s Confessions.
 Löschnigg, “Postclassical Narratology and Autobiography”   265

moderated in others: but the only substantial changes that were yet to come,
related to politics [ . . . ]. (1969: 114–15)

As can be seen, the narrative moves backwards in time from a super-ordinate

vantage-point in the autobiographer’s present to a “present period” in the
past, continuing as a subtly graded alternation of anticipation and retrospec-
tion which oscillates between these two temporal levels. However, if autobio-
graphical discourse is frequently characterized by chronological complexity,
narrative provides the organizational strategies which ensure that this com-
plexity can be dealt with by writers and readers. This is because narrative,
as David Herman has shown, supports cognition by “enabl[ing] tellers and
interpreters to establish spatiotemporal links between regions of experience
and between objects contained in those regions” (2003: 169). It does so, first
of all, through what Herman calls its “power [ . . . ] to chunk phenomenal
reality into classifiable, knowable, and operable units” (174). Along the same
lines, Charlotte Linde (1993) has emphasized that a life story is the result
of segmenting operations which structure the continuity of experience into
cognitively manageable blocks. Mill’s Autobiography, with its clear-cut divi-
sions between his childhood and youth subjected to a rationalist education,
the sudden awakening to feeling, and his achievement of a balance between
the two, which Mill claims to have accomplished in later life, may serve as a
case in point.
Narrative further helps cognition, as Herman (2003) reminds us, by estab-
lishing causal connections and by providing a framework which enables the
specific to be integrated into the typical and actual occurrences into expecta-
tions. The latter function has also been stressed by Jerome Bruner, for whom
“narrative in all its forms is a dialectic between what was expected and what
came to pass” (Bruner 2003: 15), and for whom “the ‘suggestiveness’ of a
story lies [ . . . ] in the emblematic nature of its particulars, its relevance to a
more inclusive narrative type” (1991: 7). As becomes evident from the exam-
ple of Mill, much nineteenth-century autobiography is modeled on a Bildungs-
roman type of narrative, on the underlying belief that individual identity can
be grasped in terms of organic development. Another such type, which has
been of central importance in the history of autobiography, is the conver-
sion narrative, while narratives of estrangement and fragmentation seem to
have become the dominant pattern in contemporary autobiography (with the
exception, of course, of the plethora of celebrity lives). This means that auto-
biography has come to be dominated by self-referential and literary modes
of writing, a process which has raised anew the debate about the fictionality
of the genre. In the following, I want to show how recent developments in
266   Part II: Chapter 10

narratology and in the theory of autobiography may shed new light on the
referential and pragmatic aspects which have been in the center of that debate.

(4) The Fictionality of Autobiography

Even before the post-structuralist demise of the autonomous subject, the

reception of autobiography had been characterized by some complexity.
On the one hand, readers expected autobiographers to provide “truthful”
accounts of their lives, at least in the sense that the narrative was based on
an effort to remember as accurately as possible what had happened. In other
words: readers expected an account that was free from deliberate distortions
and from too much self-fashioning. According to conventional understand-
ing, autobiography rendered an intimate portrait of a person who signaled,
by the very act of writing his/her life story, that this life was worth the read-
er’s notice. Autobiographers such as Rousseau asserted the “honesty” of their
narratives and the fact that they had consciously neither concealed nor added
anything of importance. This frankness contributed much to the attraction
autobiographies held for readers. On the other hand, such declarations of
honesty could awaken a dormant skepticism on the reader’s part. After all,
autobiographies were written not least with an intention of impressing the
reader, and declarations of “honesty” might serve to distract, as likely as
not, from some hidden motive. In the case of Rousseau, this becomes evident
when one realizes what amazing self-centeredness is unwittingly revealed in
his Confessions (1781–89). As Rousseau insists on the accuracy of his recol-
lections, he at the same time frankly admits to the gaps in his memory and
indicates that some of these may actually have been filled by his imagina-
tion. For instance, this is how he writes about the happy times with Mme de
Warens (“maman”) at Les Charmettes:

Nothing that happened to me during that delightful time, nothing that I did,
said or thought all the while it lasted, has slipped from my memory. The
period preceding it and following it recur to me at intervals; I recall them
irregularly and confusedly; but I recall that time in its entirety, as if it existed
still. My imagination, which in my youth always looked forward but now
looks back, compensates me with these sweet memories for the hope I have
lost forever. I no longer see anything in the future to attract me; only a return
into the past can please me, and these vivid and precise returns into the peri-
ods of which I am speaking often give me moments of happiness in spite of
my misfortunes. (1953: 215–16)
 Löschnigg, “Postclassical Narratology and Autobiography”   267

The suspicions aroused by this passage that Rousseau may project an unduly
idyllic version of Les Charmettes are confirmed by the sequel, where it
becomes evident that this pastoral serves to relieve, by means of contrast,
the writer’s present predicament, i.e. the conspiracy against him which he felt
was brewing among those around him. As the result of several such passages,
readers’ attitudes towards the Confessions will typically fluctuate between
trust and skepticism,7 and this may well hold for autobiography in general.
However, the genre’s central paradigm, for most of its history, has neverthe-
less been that of the authenticity of the life and the authority of the autobi-
ographer as the source of the narrative. Postmodern autobiography, on the
other hand, relies on the tenets of post-structuralist theory which have elimi-
nated the category of authorial intention from textual analysis. On the side
of readers, the blend of skepticism and trust which shaped the reception of a
text such as the Confessions has given way to a general mistrust of autobiog-
raphy as a genre and to a rapprochement of “autobiography” and “fiction.”
The question of fictionality, including the fictional element in autobiogra-
phy, has been discussed extensively, and it would transcend the spatial limits
of this essay to recapitulate this discussion here (for some key contributions
to this discussion, cf. note 8). Suffice it to say that a pragmatic definition is
now widely accepted which regards fiction as a specific form of communica-
tion that is subject to aesthetic norms rather than those which govern non-fic-
tion texts, and by different contextual conventions, and which can therefore
not be contested in the way non-fiction texts can. However, this understand-
ing of fictionality does not allow for a clear-cut distinction between “factual”
and “fictional” autobiography, especially if one considers that it is really the
representation of inner states which is at the core of the genre. Neither does
it provide guidelines for distinguishing “genuine” from “fake” autobiogra-
phies, since “fiction” does not equal “lying.”8
While classical narratology concentrated almost exclusively on the anal-
ysis of literary narratives, recent narratological approaches have begun to
investigate, in a systematic manner, the non-fictional domain, too. It may
well be assumed that this extension of narratology’s sphere of interest will
benefit the study of autobiography, a genre which has increasingly come

7. It would thus be interesting to investigate the Confessions with a view to the dynam-
ics of the primacy and recency effects as explained by the cognitive sciences: readers tend to
cling to their intial interpretations of a given text (in this case, an interpretation determined by
Rousseau’s explicit declarations of honesty), until confronted with substantial textual evidence
which contradicts this interpretation. It is at that point that the primacy effect will be overlaid
by the recency effect, and textual data are integrated into a revised interpretive framework (cf.
Zerweck 2002: 222–23).
8. On this issue, see Henrik Skov Nielsen’s essay in the present volume.
268   Part II: Chapter 10

to be situated along the borderlines of the factual and the fictiona1.9 The
many examples of contemporary autobiography which actually investigate
these borderlines, and which through formal experiment attempt to render
a sense of estrangement and fragmentation on the part of the writer, have
clearly called for a different reception than did straightforwardly chrono-
logical accounts such as Mill’s. Theoretical approaches to autobiography
should therefore focus on the text as a manifestation of the writer’s present
concerns rather than on abstract notions of “authenticity.” Inconsistencies
in life-stories should be analysed with a view to their function and signifi-
cance for the subject rather than as violations of the “truth.” In other words,
one should distinguish perhaps not so much between “fiction” and “real-
ity” as between different kinds of “reality”: the lived and the narrated. This
applies to a diachronic investigation of autobiography, too, in particular to
an analysis of the correspondences between factual autobiography and the
Bildungsroman. This relationship has been a complex one, since the novel
has explored the domain of autobiography while at the same time fictional
life-writing seems to have exerted a profound influence on its factual model.
As Michael McKeon claimed, “authenticity began by being mimicked in the
novel before being recuperated and interiorized by the autobiographers. The
autobiographer could only become himself by imitating people who imagined
what it was to be an autobiographer” (1987: 47). The question then is how
genres such as the novel and autobiography combine to create traditions,
or even world-pictures, and to negotiate frames of “self” and “other.” To
answer this question, one may want to refer to a central tenet of cognitive
narratology, namely the tendency towards “naturalization” on the part of
readers, i.e. their integration of texts into real-life frames or familiar generic
frames. In the case of autobiographical narratives, the generic frame is that of
the life-story, and the reception of autobiographical writing will therefore be
determined ultimately by those cultural factors which shape prevailing views
on narrative and the transparency (or opacity) of language with regard to the
rendering of a life as lived.
Regarding autobiography neither as the mimetic depiction of a personal-
ity already formed, nor as a genre which conveys merely an illusion of the

9. The amphibious nature of autobiography was already highlighted by scholars such

as Northrop Frye, for whom autobiography and the novel merged in a “series of insensible
gradations” (1957: 307), and by Paul Ricœur, for whom autobiography is characterized by
the encroisement of two primary modes of narrative, history and fiction (cf. Ricœur 1984–88).
Similarly, Smith and Watson (2005) have pleaded for treating autobiography as a special case
in that it presents a specific combination of factual and fictional narrative, while theorists
such as e.g. Philippe Lejeune (1989) and Elizabeth Bruss (1976) have staunchly defended the
distinction between autobiography and the novel.
 Löschnigg, “Postclassical Narratology and Autobiography”   269

self, but as the textual manifestation of a continuous process of identity-con-

struction, suggests a way out of the impasse of “fact” versus “fiction.” This
is the case because reception may then focus not on the ‘authenticity’ of the
life as narrated, but on the presence of the autobiographer and on the narra-
tive construction, rather than re-construction, of the self.10 The structuring
of contingent experience which is an essential part of this process has been
variously referred to as relying on “fictions” (Eakin 1988a) and “metaphor”
(Olney 1972). As employed by Olney, the term metaphor denotes “all the
world views and world pictures, models and hypotheses, myths and cosmolo-
gies” which humans use in order to give structure to the reality of existence,
including their understanding and representation of self. And more often
than not, one should add, these metaphors come in the form of narratives. If
metaphors, according to Olney, “are that by which the lonely subjective con-
sciousness gives order not only to itself but to as much of objective reality as
it is capable of formalizing and controlling” (1972: 30), then it is narratives
that constitute the basis which underlies this process.11 If the narrativizing
of experience in autobiography is thus enmeshed in other narratives, the fic-
tional and the referential in autobiography no longer appear to be mutually
exclusive. Underlining “the essential narrativity of human experience” (Eakin
1992: 87), Eakin and others have argued for re-introducing “reference” into
the theory of autobiography. Yet this referent of autobiographical discourse,
the subject, after its deconstructionist demise is no longer a pre-existing self,
as these critics have shown themselves, but human experience as such. Expe-
rience, that is, may be conceived in narrative categories, which makes the text
of an autobiography appear as a duplicate narrative structure, i.e. a narrative
re-configuration of what has already been encoded, in narrative terms, at a
first level. Similarly, in narratology, Fludernik’s experientially-based model of
narrative has aligned fictionality and narrativity, playing down the relevance
of a distinction between fictional and non-fictional narratives. Fictionality is
inherent in her definition of narrativity, since, as she claims, “the experience
portrayed in narrative is typically non-historical (non-documentary, non-
argumentational)” (1996: 39).
Emphasizing the narrativity of autobiography and the narrative construc-
tion of our sense of identity enables one to regard the fictional element in
10. In some ways, this has been anticipated by an understanding of autobiography which
has emphasized consistency and the logics of development, regarding autobiographical “au-
thenticity” as the result of coherence and “inner truth” rather than some kind of “referential
truth” (cf. e.g. Pascal 1960).
11. The function of metaphor in Olney’s theory of autobiography is thus similar to that
of the emplotment of contingent events in historiography, as outlined by Hayden White and
others (see White 1973; Mink 1978).
270   Part II: Chapter 10

autobiography in a new light. Fictionality can now be seen as an integral

element in the formation of identity. It does not need to be set in opposition
to autobiographical “truth,” as was proposed by early studies of autobiog-
raphy, nor does it constitute the hallmark of all attempts at life-writing, as
was claimed by the deconstructionists. Due to the selectivity of memory and
the impact of psychological factors pertaining to the autobiographer’s pres-
ent, the “I” of an autobiography will always comprise a fictional element.
Acknowledging this fictional element will free autobiography from the con-
straints of the confessional paradigm which has traditionally dominated the
genre. The demands of telling the “truth” and of making this truth subject to
verification contributed towards a reductive view of autobiography that relies
on simplifying distinctions between the true” and the “false,” the “authentic”
and the “invented.” In addition, since standards of authenticity are shaped
by the cultural context, the confessional paradigm has tended to favor con-
cepts of “self” which are based on dominant male and middle class norms,
while at the same time undermining the truth-claim of autobiographies by
marginalized groups, including women. Small wonder, therefore, that recent
autobiographical writing, especially by women or members of ethno-cultural
minorities, has avoided these generic constraints by rejecting the “autobio-
graphical contract” which guarantees the non-fictional status of autobiogra-
phy (cf. Lejeune 1989). These autobiographies resort to innovative strategies
such as the explicit inclusion of fictional elements in order to express the
uneasy cultural position of their subjects.

(5) Conclusion

According to Michael Sheringham, different positions on autobiography have

usually depended on “prevailing views of narrative”: “Any moves towards
a rehabilitation of narrative’s mimetic, heuristic or pragmatic functions are
likely to support comparable shifts in the way autobiography is regarded”
(1993: 23). Proceeding upon the assumption of a privileged relationship
between autobiographical narrative and the investigation of mental pro-
cesses, this article has tried to show which areas of analysis may profit from
a synthesis of new developments in narratology, especially cognitive narratol-
ogy, and recent theories of autobiography. The benefits of such a combined
approach for describing central aspects of autobiographical discourse con-
cern the rendering of experience, the importance of narrative in the creation
of a sense of identity, and the significance of cognitive frames for the temporal
structure of memory-based narration. As to the rendering of experience, I
 Löschnigg, “Postclassical Narratology and Autobiography”   271

have argued that a new frame-oriented model of narrative will provide crite-
ria for describing a life as (re-)lived upon a different and more flexible basis
than that offered by the binary narrator-experiencer model of classical narra-
tology. It also allows one to emphasize the continuity of narration and experi-
ence. With regard to the importance of narrative, I have tried to show how
“narrativity” is a determinant of autobiography, independent of the actual
textual shape of an individual work. In the third section of my essay I pointed
out how cognitive narratology can help us grasp hold of the genre’s temporal
complexity. Discussing the structure of autobiography, I was able to identify
two types of processes which come into play in memory-based narratives:
processes of segmentation and processes of creating coherence. Finally, as I
have tried to show in the last section of my essay, the question of fictionality
in autobiography may now be approached in a more differentiated manner.
If narratology cannot provide criteria to distinguish between “fact” and “fic-
tion” in autobiographical writing, provided such a distinction can be made at
all, it can provide the theoretical basis for describing the fictional as an inte-
gral element of life-writing. After all, to quote Graham Swift’s novel Water-
land (Swift 1983: 53), man is “the story-telling animal” and the fictional
element which is inherent in this definition applies first and foremost to our
own life-stories, too.

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 11
H enrik S kov Nielsen

Natural Authors, Unnatural Narration1

Introduction

Hardly anything is more familiar to literary scholars than fictional narrative.

Yet this simple term contains a slight tension between the invention associ-
ated with fiction, from its root in the Latin fictio, and the knowing associated
with narration and its root in the Latin gnarus. How can you invent what
you know or know what you invent? In all standard models of narratol-
ogy, the answer to this question has been to split the tasks and distinguish
between the narrator who knows and the author who invents, and this is the
case particularly in the framework of Gérard Genette.2
The present essay discusses whether this narratological model of the rela-
tionship between narrator and author has served to naturalize the under-
standing of fictional narratives and of fictionality in the sense that they are
understood along the lines of everyday reports.3 In its attempt to understand

1. I wish to thank Stefan Iversen and Rolf Reitan for their considerable contributions to
this essay. Stefan Iversen’s theses on the concept of experientiality and other topics, and Rolf
Reitan’s work on Genette’s and Hamburger’s concepts of narrators and narratives have both
served as rich sources of inspiration.
2. See Walsh (2007: 72–74) and Genette (1980: 214).
3. An important context for the present article is the work of a research group formed by
Brian Richardson, Jan Alber, Stefan Iversen, Rolf Reitan, Maria Mäkela, myself, and several
others on what we call “unnatural narratology” (see www.unnaturalnarratology.com). The
work of the group includes Brian Richardson’s Unnatural Voices as well as five panels on un-
natural narratology at the ISSN conferences in 2008, 2009, and 2010. A joint article by Alber,

275
276   Part II: Chapter 11

fiction as a form of communication from a narrator,4 narratology has rarely

devoted much attention to the author. Although paratextually grounded
approaches make important and necessary contributions to our understand-
ing of fiction, they face problems when encountering works that are framed
by ambiguous paratexts. This essay raises the question of the relationship
between author and text by addressing some of these difficulties. It asks what
such paratexts imply for the narrator-author distinction which supposedly
exists in fiction and is absent in nonfiction. The texts used in this essay range
from fictional to nonfictional writing, though I will focus particularly on
James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003). The essay will discuss in detail
what may be gained by giving more attention to the rhetorical resources of
the actual author. As signaled by the title, the aim is to demonstrate that
the real author has the ability to transcend communicational models and to
employ techniques of fictionalization, regardless of whether the narrative is
presented as fiction or not. It is argued that such techniques can more help-
fully be explained by distinguishing between fiction and fictionality as well as
between narration and communication than by assuming the existence of a
narrator distinct from the author.
In classical structuralist narratology, the relationship between author and
narrator was central for the distinction between fictional and nonfictional
narratives. In fictional narratives there is a narrator who is not the same
person as the author. In nonfictional narratives like autobiographies, on the
other hand, there is no narrator other than the author.5 This distinction is
conventional and indispensable. It explains, for instance, why we must not
arrest Bret Easton Ellis, assuming he is identical with the first-person narrator
of American Psycho (1991), who is a serial killer.
However, the distinction between author and narrator is also problem-

Iversen, Nielsen, and Richardson, “Unnatural Narratives—Unnatural Narratology: Beyond

Mimetic Models?” has just been published, and two anthologies on unnatural narratology
are in progress. In the group we are concerned with radically anti-mimetic texts but also with
unnatural features in conventionalized genres and forms like the realist novel. These features
comprise narrative “omniscience,” paralepsis, and what James Phelan refers to as redundant
telling. We also deal with storyworlds that contain physical or logical impossibilities (Alber
2009). For my own part, I take a special interest in unnatural acts of narration by which I
understand physically, logically, mnemonically, or psychologically impossible enunciations.
4. Ann Banfield also argues that “there have been numerous attempts to submit narra-
tive to the communication paradigm by positing a narrator addressing a reader for every text”
(1982: 10, 8–18).
5. See Genette (1993: 68–84), Lejeune (1975: 16ff), and Cohn (1999: 30 and 59). Herna-
di probably puts it most concisely: “Fictional narratives demand, historical narratives preclude
a distinction between the narrator and the implied author” (Hernadi, in Cohn 1999: 124).
 Nielsen, “Natural Authors, Unnatural Narration”   277

atic. First, it tends, at least implicitly, to place an absolute barrier between

fictional and nonfictional narratives, that is, between narratives with, and
narratives without, a narrator other than the author. Second, it encounters
difficulties when facing a range of limit cases where the question of fiction
remains difficult to decide. These problems notwithstanding, the distinction is
fundamental to most classical as well as postclassical narratologies: in nonfic-
tional written narratives the communication is taken to proceed from author
to reader, in fictional ones (also) from a narrator to a narratee.
These ideas have led narratologists to consider literary fictions as acts of
communication and “reports” by narrators, and have resulted in a prevailing
lack of interest in the author (Walsh 2007: 69). It almost seems as if Barthes’s
1967 statement about the birth of the reader (at the cost of the death of the
author) also holds true for the birth of narratology, baptized two years later
by Todorov. Near the beginning of his essay, Barthes writes:

As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on real-

ity but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than
that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection appears, the
voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins.
(Barthes 2004: 125)

Accordingly, and perhaps even necessarily, when analyzing narrated facts in

a novel, narratological analysis seems to have confirmed this disconnection
between fictional text and real-world author.6 Postclassical narratology has
considered narratives in the light of a wide range of different contexts. It has
invoked the reader, the importance of historical periods, gender issues, ques-
tions of ethics, ideology, and, perhaps more than anything, the workings of
the human mind. But only rarely has it considered the author to be a relevant
topic for narratology. It is a telling fact that The Cambridge Companion to
Narrative (Herman 2007) has no chapter on the author. Additionally, the
word “author” does not even appear in its glossary. Even in the comprehen-
sive index, the entry “author” points the reader to “rhetorical approaches.” I
will follow this advice and approach the problem of the author by consider-
ing the tradition of rhetoric in narratology. I will first turn to James Phelan
and then to Richard Walsh.

6. For a few concise and precise remarks about the role of the author in narratology, see
Fludernik (2006: 23–25).
278   Part II: Chapter 11

Rhetorical Approaches

James Phelan has written a number of books on rhetoric and narration. In

Living to Tell about It (2005), Phelan defines narrative as follows: “First,
narrative itself can be fruitfully understood as a rhetorical act: somebody tell-
ing somebody else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something
happened” (Phelan 2005: 18).7 By implication: if nothing happened, or no
one told it, there would be no narrative. A great strength of Phelan’s book is
the way in which he simultaneously approaches the standard cases, the excep-
tions to the rule, and the potential problems they create for his theory. Large
parts of his book are devoted to problematic cases, and to cases that seem
to contradict his definition. In his introduction, Phelan mentions a series of
text examples in which the narrator narrates either what the narratee already
knows (“My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning and “Barbie-Q” by Sandra
Cisneros), or what the narrator himself could not know (Angela’s Ashes by
Frank McCourt and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, where some-
thing is narrated in great detail from an episode where the narrator himself
was absent).8 Phelan also mentions texts in which the narrator seems not to
know a fact although the reader must infer that he actually knows it since at
the time of narration he has come to the end of his story (“My Old Man” by
Ernest Hemingway, e.g., is not permeated by the disillusionment experienced
by the narrator at the end).9 Phelan quotes several other examples, all of
which seem to contradict his definition of narrative as a report from narrator
to narratee.10 He provides a brilliant analysis of these narratives and explains
many of the peculiarities mentioned by “the author’s need” (12) and the use
of “disclosure functions”:

The motivation for redundant telling resides in the author’s need to commu-
nicate information to the audience, and so we might use the longer phrase
redundant telling, necessary disclosure to describe it. [ . . . ] communication
in character narration occurs along at least two tracks—the narrator-narra-
tee track, and the narrator-authorial audience track. Along the narrator-nar-
ratee track, the narrator acts as a reporter, interpreter and evaluator of the
narrated for the narratee, and those actions are constrained by the narrative
situation (a character narrator, for example, cannot enter the consciousness
of another character); let us call these actions “narrator functions.” Along

7. For variations of the same definition, see Phelan (1996: 8) and Phelan (2007: 3).
8. See also Phelan (1996: 106).
9. See also Phelan (1996: 103).
10. See also the excellent examples in Phelan (1996: chapter 5).
 Nielsen, “Natural Authors, Unnatural Narration”   279

the narrator-authorial audience track, the narrator unwittingly reports infor-

mation of all kinds to the authorial audience (the narrator does not know
that an authorial audience exists); let us call this reporting “disclosure func-
tions.” (Phelan 2005: 12; my emphasis)

Phelan’s explanations show why the above-mentioned example texts should

not be considered as “mistakes” by their authors (as in fact they seldom are
by readers), and why—although probably unreliable in other respects—the
texts appear in the mentioned passages to present the story in an authorita-
tive way even when it clashes with the knowledge of the narrator. A potential
problem, however, to be discussed in the following, is that—while serving
the author’s need—the words are still described as “reports” from “the nar-
rator.” If all narration is report and communication (I use the two words
synonymously, as Phelan seems to do)—then there must be a reporter. This
explains why the author has come to stand outside the focus of narratology.
In fictional narratives, the author does not tell the reader that something hap-
pened; the author invents the events. So in order to be able to view fictional
narratives as reports, we must take an interest in the narrator instead. How-
ever, as soon as it becomes evident that the narrator is not reporting (when,
for instance, he cannot know what is being recounted), the need for the
author returns. Phelan responds to this problem by saying that the (implied)
author has the narrator narrate to audiences and for purposes the narrator
is unaware of. The general logic—one which is not specific to Phelan but
common to all narratological models that equate communication and narra-
tion—is that if it is not the author who is reporting, then the narrator is doing
it. And, conversely, if it is not the narrator who is reporting, then it must be
the author.
In what follows, I will suggest that there is a simpler and less circular way
of approaching the problem. My suggestion is that one does not have to con-
sider all forms of narration as report and communication. Many narratolo-
gists have described narration—fictional and nonfictional, conversational and
literary—under the umbrella of a unified theory, most often one based on oral
storytelling. I am skeptical of this attempt and my skepticism boils down to
the assumption that there is a crucial difference between narration and com-
munication. Much, but not all, narration is communication. I will call that
part of narration that is not communication “unnatural narration” because it
deviates from the paradigm of natural, i.e., oral narratives.
After these remarks on narration vs. communication, I will briefly place
the question of fiction vs. fictionality in the context of the ongoing discus-
sion about fiction vs. nonfiction. At opposite corners of the debate, we find
280   Part II: Chapter 11

a separatist position associated with Dorrit Cohn and (especially the early)
Philippe Lejeune, and a panfictionalist position often associated with Hayden
White and more broadly with postmodernism and deconstruction.11 The first
position deals in tell-tale signposts of fictionality that will reveal to a reader
whether a text is fiction or nonfiction. By contrast, I follow Walsh and Phelan
(see below) and think of such signposts rather as techniques of fictionalization
that can also be used in nonfictional texts. As opposed to the dominant belief
of the second position that everything can be read as fiction and according to
the same rules of interpretation, I believe that the reader is often guided in his
or her interpretation by a number of features that invite different readings.
Furthermore, I claim that readers do, in fact, react very differently depending
on whether they think they are reading fiction or not. Phelan puts this idea as
follows:

The one theoretical generalization I would offer is that there is no one-to-

one correspondence between any specific formal feature of a narrative and
any effect, including the placement of a narrative along the fiction/nonfiction
spectrum. [ . . . ] I do not believe [ . . . ] that we can make the distinction on
the basis of techniques that are either sure markers of fiction or nonfiction
or that appear exclusively in one. As soon as such techniques get identified,
some narrative artists will use them for unanticipated effects. (Phelan 2005:
68)

Similarly, in the fortieth anniversary edition of Scholes and Kellogg’s The

Nature of Narrative, Phelan points out four “unresolved instabilities” in nar-
rative theory. The first one concerns the study of unnatural narrative and
refers to Brian Richardson.12 The second concerns digital narratives and the
fourth a paradigm shift to questions of space and time. Interestingly, the third
unresolved instability is about the question of fiction vs. nonfiction:

In my rhetorical view, preserving the borders [between fiction and nonfic-

tion] has the major advantage of helping us account for the differences in the
ways we respond to particular narratives, even as the debate calls attention
to various kinds of border-crossing—of technique, of character, of place, and
so on. (Phelan, Scholes and Kellogg 2006: 335)

11. For a good, short survey of the position from its roots in Saussurian linguistics to
theorists like Eagleton, Hillis Miller and Norris, see Ryan (1997: 173ff).
12. In Unnatural Voices, Brian Richardson demonstrates through careful readings of an
impressive range of narratives how postmodern (as well as many earlier) narratives prove
resistant to mimetic approaches. This paper was partly inspired by Richardson’s arguments
about misguided mimetic generalizations.
 Nielsen, “Natural Authors, Unnatural Narration”   281

To put it bluntly, the advantage is that the borderline works, the disadvantage
is that it does not exist—a slightly paradoxical description, but one I would
actually subscribe to myself.
In The Rhetoric of Fictionality, Richard Walsh also addresses this prob-
lem and offers the following solution:

By speaking of the quality of fictionality, I am framing the argument at one

remove from the generic distinction between fiction and nonfiction per se,
but fictionality is certainly an attribute of all fictions in that sense since it is
applicable to all narratives deemed fictional (as distinct from false). [ . . . ] Of
course it is the case that most fictions do in fact exhibit characteristics indic-
ative of their fictional status [ . . . ] but these are neither necessary nor suf-
ficient conditions of fictionality. [ . . . ] Even within the terms of the familiar,
modern fictional contract, though, fictionality has no determinate relation
to features of the text itself. [ . . . ] Fictionality is the product of a narra-
tive’s frame of presentation, of the various possible elements of what Gérard
Genette has described as the paratext (1997). [ . . . ] And the distinction is
categorical [ . . . ] because the interpretative operations applicable to a narra-
tive text are globally transformed, one way or the other, by the extrinsic mat-
ter of the contextual frame within which it is received. (Walsh 2007: 44–45)

Taking his point of departure from a position close to Phelan’s, Walsh argues
that fictionality cannot be determined by text-internal evidence, and I agree
with this argument.13 However, while Walsh stresses the globally transform-
ing power of the frame, I would like to add that fictionality may also be
local. In fact, in other places, especially in his introduction, Walsh seems to
acknowledge this fact, since it must be the reason why fictionality as a rhe-
torical strategy is sometimes also apparent in nonfictional narratives:

Not that fictionality should be equated simply with “fiction,” as a category

or genre of narrative: it is a communicative strategy, and as such it is appar-
ent on some scale within many nonfictional narratives, in forms ranging
from something like an ironic aside, through various forms of conjecture
or imaginative supplementation, to full-blown counterfactual narrative
examples. (Walsh 2007: 7)

In the useful distinction between fiction and fictionality, the global and the
local seem to me equally important. Frame and paratext may produce a form

13. See also Löschnigg (1999) and Fludernik (2001).

282   Part II: Chapter 11

of fictionality that invites certain interpretative operations towards the nar-

rative as a whole. Using any of a range of techniques of fictionality (includ-
ing omniscience, free indirect discourse, simultaneous narration, imaginative
supplementation, and counterfactual narrative) will locally produce fiction-
ality that similarly invites certain interpretative operations at least towards
parts of the narrative—without necessarily turning the whole narrative into
a fictional text. I will argue this in detail below in the context of the case of
James Frey.
So far I have argued that there can be fictionality without fiction and nar-
ration without communication. Ann Banfield’s book Unspeakable Sentences
(1982) has greatly influenced my thinking about fictional narratives. I will
just briefly indicate a few differences between us regarding some points on
which she and I seem to agree. We both reject the assumption of much com-
munication theory that every sentence has a speaker and every text a narra-
tor (Banfield 1982: 11). However, Banfield holds “represented speech and
thought” (free indirect discourse) to be an “exclusively literary style” (68), a
view few would agree with today. For Banfield, narration (in a narrow sense
as a translation of Benveniste’s histoire and Hamburger’s fiktionales Erzählen
[142]) has no addressee (171), and is globally made up of sentences of non-
communication (242). In contrast to her, I stress that non-communication
does not only appear in narrative fiction and, conversely, that not all narra-
tive fiction is non-communicative.
The following sections pursue some of the questions raised when paratex-
tual information makes it difficult to determine which interpretative opera-
tions a narrative invites.

Determining Fiction

In “Postmodernism and the Doctrine of Panfictionality,” Marie-Laure Ryan

mentions a crisis regarding the distinction between fiction and nonfiction
(1997: 165). She argues against the theory of panfictionality, understood in
the sense of the fictionality of all discourse (177). Opposing views that regard
fiction and nonfiction as indistinguishable, Ryan proposes that “[t]he pos-
sibility of hybridization does not necessarily mean that the two categories
are inherently indeterminate: the many shades of gray on the spectrum from
black to white do not turn black and white into the same color (165).” In
describing features of fictional text, Ryan takes her point of departure in a
view that is very similar to Phelan’s:
 Nielsen, “Natural Authors, Unnatural Narration”   283

According to a widely accepted model, which I endorse in its broad lines,

fictional communication presupposes a layered situation, in which an author
addresses a real or “authorial” audience through a narrator addressing an
imaginary or narratorial audience. [ . . . ] It [fictional communication] makes
no claim to external truth, but rather, guarantees its own truth. (167)14

Ryan then presents some dominant panfictionalist positions (175–79), and

convincingly counters them with arguments like the following: “But even
if one concedes the unavoidable artificiality of representation, the thesis of
universal fictionality rests on a faulty syllogism: all fictions are artifices. All
representations are artifices. Hence, all representations are fictions (180).”
In place of panfictionality, Ryan offers a model and a taxonomy that draw
different conclusions from the acknowledged lack of clear borderlines:

If we maintain the distinction, what, then, is the literary-theoretical sig-

nificance of the current destabilization of the borderline between fiction and
nonfiction? I would suggest that the contribution of postmodern writing
practice to the system of genres is not to have merged fiction and nonfiction
into one category, but on the contrary to have introduced a third species in
the taxonomy. The system now comprises: (1) Those texts that overtly say
“I am true,” asking the reader to accept this claim as a criterion of validity.
(Biographies, historiography, traditional journalism, scientific discourse.) (2)
Those texts that send a mixed message: I am not true but I pretend that I am.
(Prototypes: Madame Bovary, War and Peace, Jane Eyre, Buddenbrooks).
(3) Texts that say “I am not true” through overt makers, and inhibit par-
ticipation in a textual world. ([ . . . ] The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The
Unnamable etc.). (181)

While I am completely sympathetic to Ryan in her case against panfiction-

ality, I think that this triad tends to overemphasize the importance of or
challenge posed by metafiction, or what Ryan here refers to as postmodern
writing practice. To me, there is a clear distinction in the taxonomy between
nonfiction (category 1) and fiction (whether metafictive or not [categories 2
and 3]). Although I see Ryan’s point, I am skeptical about the description of
the second category. In my opinion, the books mentioned can all be placed
on either side of the border because they do not really send a mixed message.
It is simply not possible for a text to send the message “I am not true but I
14. For an even more elaborate account of the truth value of fiction and possible worlds,
see Ryan (1991: 13–47).
284   Part II: Chapter 11

pretend that I am,” insofar as true texts do not normally send the message
that they are not true.15 Therefore, any text that sends the message that it is
not true does not pretend to be true. For the same reason, no one would mis-
takenly take any of the examples mentioned in category 2 to belong to any of
the genres mentioned in category 1.
Based on Ryan’s refutation of panfictionalism and her article in general, I
want to argue in the following that a more profound challenge to the distinc-
tion between fiction and nonfiction comes from texts that present themselves
as neither fiction nor nonfiction (I will call these texts “underdetermined”)
and from texts that present themselves—in some cases at different times, in
others at the same time—as both fiction and nonfiction (and hence can be
called “overdetermined”). This leads me to modify Ryan’s taxonomy into one
of my own invention:

(1) Fictional texts (prototypes: Madame Bovary, War and Peace, The
French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Unnamable, etc.).
(2) Underdetermined texts (prototypes: Les Mots by Sartre, A Million Little
Pieces by Frey, etc.). For other examples like Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, see
Cohn (1999: 34).
(3) Overdetermined texts (prototypes: Fils, Lunar Park, etc.).
(4) Nonfictional texts (biographies, historiography, traditional journalism,
scientific discourse)

In my view, the majority of written narratives can easily be characterized as

either fictional or nonfictional because paratexts, styles, techniques, and so
forth, all point in the same direction. A minority of sometimes highly interest-
ing and controversial texts, however, display ambiguous, deceptive, missing,
or self-contradictory paratexts. This can happen in a multitude of ways, and
it is not my intention here to make an inventory of these. Instead, I will sim-
plify the matter and differentiate between only two categories of problematic
cases. The first category (“underdetermined”) contains texts with paratexts
that send no clear message (A Million Little Pieces by James Frey will be
the main example in this category). The second category (“overdetermined”)
contains texts with paratexts that send mixed or mutually exclusive messages.
It is tempting to insert a fifth category in the middle, to include fiction
disguised as nonfiction and vice versa. This category would then include texts
that are wholly or partly true, but present themselves as fiction, and texts
that are wholly or partly fiction, but attest to the opposite, and possibly also
15. Ryan seems to acknowledge this herself when she writes a little earlier: “But novels
rarely read like the nonfictional genres they are supposed to imitate” (169).
 Nielsen, “Natural Authors, Unnatural Narration”   285

pseudo-autobiography and pseudo-history. However, it would not be easy to

come up with examples because all fiction makes some reference to the real
world, and since non-accurate parts in nonfiction normally compromise their
veracity instead of turning it into fiction (Walsh 2007: 45). In the following
discussion of the famous controversy about James Frey, questions like these
will also be raised. I do not think of the four categories as separate boxes,
but rather as forming a continuum with many shades of gray, to reuse Ryan’s
expression. Far from turning fiction into nonfiction or vice versa, texts in
categories 2 and 3 are placed in a middle region, drawing on resources from
both categories 1 and 4. Likewise, I think that any attempt to place absolute
boundaries between the categories is doomed to failure. Even underdeter-
mined and overdetermined narratives are not always as different as could be
expected. In fact, an underdetermined text may occasionally change its status
to an overdetermined text if new paratextual information is added.16
In the following, I will inquire into the question of what problematic
paratexts do to the narrator-author distinction supposedly present in fiction
and absent in nonfiction.

James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces

as an Underdetermined Text 17

To represent the possible cases of underdetermined and overdetermined texts,

I have chosen A Million Little Pieces (2003) by James Frey and Lunar Park

16. Underdetermined texts can become overdetermined when text-external contradictory

contracts are signed—for example, in interviews at different times or by the publisher. Scandals
are more likely to occur in cases of underdetermination than overdetermination, especially
when an underdetermined text is first read as nonfiction and then as fiction, like Frey’s, but also
when a text about, say, incest, is first read as fiction, then as nonfiction. Some underdetermined
texts will easily lend themselves to being read according to more than one contract established
outside the text.
17. I do not devote attention to Frey’s book and the discussions that followed it because
the book is especially complex or transgressive or because it is a perfect example of an under-
determined work. My interest has to do with the fact that the case is very instructive; also, the
book can be read as fiction, nonfiction, or both at the same time. The settlement in the case
even puts an exact date on the change, January 26, 2006, when Frey admitted inaccuracies and
Oprah Winfrey withdrew her support for the book. Only readers who had bought the book
before that date were eligible for refunds. There is no denying that the book tried to pass as
nonfiction—I will say more about that later—and that it could be called a hoax. At a purely
paratextual level, however, the first editions of the book were designed and published in ways
that allowed it to be read, first as nonfiction, then as fiction. And although it is very clear that
the book cannot unambiguously be described as nonfiction, it is equally clear that it is not
“pure” fiction. On a paratextual level, the book was underdetermined, and on a descriptive
level it remains difficult to clearly determine it as belonging to one or the other category.
286   Part II: Chapter 11

(2005) by Bret Easton Ellis. The two works mirror each other: the former
was published as nonfiction, but turned out to be a rather inaccurate repre-
sentation of the experiences of its author; the latter was published as fiction,
but is in many (though definitely not all) respects accurate in its facts and
information about the author. In Lunar Park, then, the real author seems to
be too much a part of the story for it to be clearly fictional, and in A Million
Little Pieces the real author seems not sufficiently to be a part of the story for
it to be clearly nonfictional. Whereas Lunar Park did not provoke any con-
troversy, discussions of A Million Little Pieces were heated, to put it mildly.
Since Frey’s book, as well as the discussions surrounding it, are illuminating
for arguments about narrators and authors, I will first concentrate on Frey’s
case. Lunar Park will be discussed by way of comparison.
A Million Little Pieces is about a very heavy substance abuser and how
he overcomes his addiction. In September 2005, it was promoted by Oprah
Winfrey on her talk show and was her book of the month. It was also at the
top of the New York Times nonfiction paperback bestseller list for many
weeks. Then, in the beginning of 2006, it was “exposed” as fraud by the
website The Smoking Gun, which renamed it “A Million Little Lies.” Frey
appeared on several talk shows, including Larry King’s; at the end of this
show Oprah Winfrey called in to reconfirm her support for him. Later on,
he was a guest on Oprah’s show again, on which occasion she withdrew her
support and accused him of betrayal. Many other readers also reacted to the
exposure with outrage.18 A poll at abebooks.com revealed that a significant
“67.3% [said they] felt betrayed by Frey, and that a memoir should not con-
tain fictional information”19 (emphasis in the original). Here are a few telling
quotes:

I was under the impression this was a real life experience. I’ve read more
than half of this book and don’t know if I want to even finish it now. I want
to know what is real in this book.

A memoir should be accurate. What’s the point of reading a non-fiction

book if it’s fiction? (ibid.)

These statements clearly suggest that the difference between fiction and non-
fiction matters to real readers. Most readers seem to have different rules and
expectations for fictional narratives than they do for nonfictional narratives.

18. See Lanser (2005: 209) for similar famous incidents causing outrage.
19. See http://www.abebooks.com/docs/Community/Featured/james-frey-poll.shtml.
 Nielsen, “Natural Authors, Unnatural Narration”   287

Hence, lawsuits were filed, and Frey’s publisher finally made the following
offer:

NEW YORK (Reuters)—Random House is offering refunds to readers who

bought James Frey’s drug and alcohol memoir “A Million Little Pieces”
directly from the publisher, following accusations the author exaggerated his
story.20

Navigating between fiction and truth, Reuters uses the word “exaggerated.”
On the one hand, this lexeme only makes sense with reference to what really
happened in Frey’s life. On the other hand, the word highlights the fact that
this is not exactly the truth but an exaggerated version of it. As incidental
as the usage of this word may seem, it is significant that The Smoking Gun
investigates the case from the same basic assumption of reference with a dif-
ference. In every instance in which The Smoking Gun wants to prove that
Frey deviates from reality in his representation of different incidents, it starts
by showing how many details are true, in order to show that they are investi-
gating the right incident:

However, based on Frey’s own statements in a TSG interview, there can be

little, if any, doubt that the incident described in the Granville police report
is the same one fictionalized in Frey’s book.21

The controversy and the lawsuit surrounding A Million Little Pieces raises
problems of central importance to our issue here, i.e., the question of the
importance of deceptive or problematic paratextual information concerning
the fiction/nonfiction distinction and the narrator/author distinction. At least
two very basic questions can be asked: is A Million Little Pieces paratextually
determined as either fiction or nonfiction? And if so, what does this determi-
nation entail, and by what rules is it governed? Turning to the first, seemingly
easy, question, let me quote from the final settlement:

A.  Factual and Procedural Background

This action arises out of the publication and marketing of the book A
Million Little Pieces by James Frey (the “Book”). The Book, which was
published by defendant Random House, Inc. in 2003, is based on Frey’s
experiences during a stay at a drug rehabilitation center and his subsequent

20. See http://www.harrisonfordweb.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5388.

21. See http://www.thesmokinggun.com/jamesfrey/0104061jamesfrey4.html.
288   Part II: Chapter 11

recovery from drug addiction. After its publication, the Book gained critical
success, and in the Fall of 2005, it was chosen as a featured selection of the
Oprah Winfrey Book Club. The back cover classified the Book as “memoir/
literature.”22

Whereas the later Anchor Books edition is tagged as claimed here, neither the
first nor the following paperback edition used that label. It is doubtful that
the book was “classified” at all when first published. The first edition bears
no generic markers on the front cover. On the back cover it has no statements
by the publisher or author, but instead two blurbs by Bret Easton Ellis and
Pat Conroy. Ellis calls it “a heartbreaking memoir” but also mentions, curi-
ously, its “poetic honesty.” Conroy makes no generic reference, but instead
compares it to a major work of fiction: “James Frey has written the War and
Peace of addiction.” Although the design and front and back cover have all
been changed for the paperback edition, this still carries no generic markers.
The settlement goes on to refer to the lawsuits:

All of these lawsuits focus on (1) the author’s alleged embellishments in the
Book; (2) the labeling of the Book as a “memoir”; and (3) various other
ways in which the Book was advertised, publicized, and marketed.23

Point (3) seems to touch on something essential: although not exactly labeled
as such, the book was distributed, advertised and sold in the guise of a mem-
oir. The paratext is not restricted to the book cover. James Frey sticks to a
double defense strategy not completely unlike Freud’s kettle argument. He
claims, first, that a memoir is not unambiguously nonfiction, and, second,
that, even if regarded as nonfiction, it does not necessarily have to be entirely
accurate. This is apparent from his comments on Larry King’s talk show. Frey
comments on the ambiguous fictional status of memoirs as follows:

[ . . . ] the genre of memoir is one that’s very new and the boundaries of it
had not been established yet. [ . . . ]
Yes. Again, I don’t think it’s fair to classify this “Million Little Pieces” as
fiction at all. It’s a memoir. A very small portion is in dispute. [ . . . ]
I couldn’t have written it if I hadn’t been through a lot of the things I
talk about. You know, it’s a memoir. [ . . . ] I don’t think it should be held up
and scrutinized the way a perfect non-fiction document would be or a news-
paper article.24

22. See http://www.amlpsettlement.com/pdfs/Final_Approval_of_Settlement.pdf.

23. See http://www.amlpsettlement.com/pdfs/Final_Approval_of_Settlement.pdf.
24. See http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0601/11/lk1.01.html.
 Nielsen, “Natural Authors, Unnatural Narration”   289

Frey argues that his book is neither completely fictional nor completely non-
fictional. His publisher, Nan Talese, backs him up on this point on Oprah
Winfrey’s show:

A novel is something different than a memoir. And a memoir is different

from an autobiography. A memoir is an author’s remembrance of a certain
period in his life. Now, the responsibility, as far as I am concerned, is does
it strike me as valid? Does it strike me as authentic? I mean, I’m sent things
all the time and I think they’re not real. I don’t think they’re authentic. I
don’t think they’re good. I don’t believe them. In this instance, I absolutely
believed what I read.25

Nan Talese thus places memoirs in the overlap between fictional novels and
nonfictional autobiographies. In his interview with King, Frey comments on
the accuracy of a memoir if regarded as nonfiction as follows:

KING: But it is supposed to be factual events. The memoir is a form of biog-

raphy.
FREY: Yes. Memoir is within the genre of non-fiction. I don’t think it’s nec-
essarily appropriate to say I’ve conned anyone. The book is 432 pages
long. The total page count of disputed events is 18, which is less than
five percent of the total book. You know, that falls comfortably within
the realm of what’s appropriate for a memoir. [ . . . ]
KING: But you will agree, if you went into a bookstore and it said memoirs,
you would think non-fiction?
FREY: Yes. I mean, it’s a classification of non-fiction. Some people think it’s
creative non-fiction. It’s generally recognized that the writer of a memoir
is retailing a subjective story. That it’s one person’s event. I mean, I still
stand by the essential truths of the book.26

I am not the one to decide whether memoirs must be nonfictional or whether

it is appropriate for certain forms of nonfiction to be slightly, somewhat,
considerably, or even necessarily incorrect. What is clear is that A Million
Little Pieces was read as nonfiction, and that many readers found its inaccu-
racies (regarding a train accident, a prison sentence, and several other central
issues) highly disturbing. More interesting still is the fact that in the many
discussions surrounding the controversy surprisingly little attention was given

25. See http://www.oprah.com/tows/slide/200601/20060126/slide_20060126_350_115.

jhtml.
26. See http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0601/11/lk1.01.html.
290   Part II: Chapter 11

to the actual wordings in the book. It can be argued—and was argued—that

the paratext of Frey’s book did not determine the fictional status of the nar-
rative. Irrespective of whether we think of the paratext as underdetermined
or deceptive, the narrative techniques used by Frey are frequently fictionaliza-
tion techniques. Frey himself gives one obvious example:

[ . . . ] One of the things I think is interesting is there are 200 pages of recre-
ated conversations in the book, but people haven’t been questioning those
because, in that area, it’s understood that it’s a memoir, it’s a recreation, it’s
my subjective recreation of my own life.27

It is very easy to realize that the represented events differ from what actually
happened: the book does nothing to disguise this. Despite the narrator’s sup-
posedly imperfect memory, the book is made up of page- and chapter-long
dialogues and exact renderings of speech. Even more significantly, the whole
book is narrated in the present tense. The present tense here is clearly not the
historical present or simply an interior monologue, but rather corresponds to
what Cohn calls the “fictional present” (1999: 106), a form Cohn limits to
fictional narratives.
In chapter 6 of The Distinction of Fiction, Cohn describes a “mounting
trend in modernist first-person fiction to cast a distinctively narrative (not
monologic) discourse in the present tense from first to last” (1999: 97). Cohn
rejects both the historical present and the interior monologue as satisfactory
explanations for the phenomenon, and takes as her main example a passage
from Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), containing the words that
form the title of her chapter 6, “I doze and wake.” Cohn comments on this as
follows:

But the introspective instance that most strongly resists the interior mono-
logue reading is no doubt the one that reads: “I doze and wake, drifting
from one formless dream to another.” Here semantic incongruence combines
with the formal feature that most forcefully counteracts the impression of
an unrolling mental quotation in this passage as a whole: the pace of its dis-
course is not consistently synchronized with the pace of the events it conveys
[ . . . ]. (103)

A Million Little Pieces contains numerous passages that could not be said,
written, or even thought while the depicted events happened. There are

27. See http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0601/11/lk1.01.html.

 Nielsen, “Natural Authors, Unnatural Narration”   291

descriptions in the present tense of being alone, sometimes overwhelmingly

consumed by “the fury” (Frey 2003: 203 et passim). There are also passages
that report how the narrator is falling asleep:

[ . . . ] I climb into bed [ . . . ] I haven’t slept in forty hours. I’m still smiling
[ . . . ]. My hand drops. Still. Eyes close. Smiling. (169) [ . . . ]
The two men on the couches next to me are both sound asleep. [ . . . ] I
fade in and out. The TV is narcotic. In and out. In. Out. In. Out. (286)

It is obvious that everything Cohn said about “I doze and wake” and the
use of the present tense in first-person fiction also applies here. Insofar as
“out” describes a state of mind, of not being conscious, it cannot possibly be
reported at the same time. The techniques used in the extract dissociate the
words from the narrator’s account. The words of the narrative in A Million
Little Pieces are unnatural, in the sense that they are not modeled on natu-
ral narrative, i.e., everyday conversational storytelling. The book uses many
techniques of fictionalization, but, as Frey mentioned, readers did not realize
them. This was probably due to the fact that the text only uses techniques
that have already been conventionalized in first-person narration.
Let us now contrast the case of Frey’s (underdetermined) A Million Little
Pieces with that of Bret Easton Ellis’s (overdetermined) Lunar Park. After this
comparison, I will consider the possible consequences of non-communicative
narration.

Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park

as an Overdetermined Text

Lunar Park is an example of autofiction in the sense of Serge Doubrovsky:

it is a novel labeled as fiction whose protagonist has the same name as the
author.28 Furthermore, there is no doubt that much of what is said about
the first-person narrator, who is called Bret Easton Ellis, holds true for the
author as well. The book begins with a description of Ellis’s career as a writer,
blended with short analyses of his prose and the opening lines of his earlier

28. Coined by Doubrovsky (1977: back cover et passim), “autofiction” designates books
specifically defined as novels, with the protagonist, author, and narrator sharing the same
name. Later on, Genette (without even mentioning Doubrovsky) expands the term to denote
any long or short fictional narrative in which the author and one of the characters have the
same name (Genette 1993: 68–84). For more on metalepsis and fictionality see McHale (1987)
and several articles in Pier and Schaeffer (2005).
292   Part II: Chapter 11

works, such as Less than Zero (1985) and The Rules of Attraction (1987). In
the first chapter, Ellis also talks about his promotion tours, his relationship to
his publisher, the scandal following American Psycho, his friendship with Jay
McInerney, and so forth (2005: 3–40). All of this is well known to readers
who have followed Ellis’s career and read his books.
However, there are also numerous elements that are not in accordance
with the biography of the real author. In the book, Ellis has spent years at
Camden College (a college many fictional characters from earlier Ellis books
went to), and he is married to one Jayne Dennis (a fictional character who
nonetheless has her own website29). Moreover, the events gradually turn into
a Hamlet-gone-Stephen King-plot. Among other things, we are confronted
with a haunted house that changes its appearance, ghosts, a living bird doll,
and unexplained disappearances. At one point, Ellis and his son Robby are
almost swallowed by a monster (316). Also, the fictional character Patrick
Bateman from American Psycho, who reappears in Ellis’s novel Glamorama,
turns up in Lunar Park, too, and begins (maybe as a copycat-killer incarna-
tion) to copy the murders from American Psycho. And Terby, the bird doll,
a rather uncanny and disturbing element, gradually turns into a murderous
creature (376). Interestingly, spelled backward, the name of the doll contains
a question that might be addressed to the book’s narrator and/or its author:
“TERBY”—“YBRET”—“Why, Bret?” (344).
Lunar Park blends reality and fiction in a rather fascinating way. Since the
fictional parts are so obviously fictional, the novel is clearly not an example
of embellished nonfiction. However, it is worth noting that it also contains
true information about the author’s life. It therefore seems reductive to see
the book as pure fiction. Overdetermined autofictions urge readers to read
them as fictional and nonfictional at the same time.30

29. See http://www.jaynedennis.com/home.html. Interestingly, the book has a website, too:

http://www.randomhouse.com/kvpa/eastonellis/.
30. See the remarks on Lanser below and my forthcoming article “What’s in a Name?
Double Exposures in Lunar Park.” In the article, I argue that autofictions bear numerous
structural resemblances to double exposures in the visual medium. The photographic technique
of “double exposure” merges temporally or spatially distinct figures. Similarly, autofictions
superimpose an image of the real author over an image of characters in a fictional world. In
the textual form of double exposure, the reader’s knowledge about the author (from interviews,
biographies, the media, and so on) contributes to his or her view of the author in the literary
work and vice versa: exaggerations, fictional inventions, and narrative fantasies in the work
contribute to rumors and imaginations about the author. In any autofiction, then, the reader
sees the sum of two pictures or two narratives superimposed over each other and haunting
each other. Because Lunar Park demands to be read as both fiction and nonfiction, the novel
can be viewed as a form of double exposure: the (nonfictional) story about the author is su-
perimposed on the (fictional) story about the character. The effect is formally quite different
 Nielsen, “Natural Authors, Unnatural Narration”   293

Natural Authors

In the contractual language of Lejeune’s Le pacte autobiographique, Lunar

Park signs two mutually exclusive contracts. The two contracts give the
reader two contradictory messages: (1) “you must read this with Interes-
selosigkeit in the Kantian sense” (or, alternatively, “you won’t be able to find
out what actually happened”) and (2) “you cannot read this with Interesselo-
sigkeit” (or, alternatively, “you must try to find out what really happened”).
Frey claimed to have signed neither of the two contracts, the contract for
fictional narratives or the one for nonfictional narratives. To my mind, con-
tractual thinking urges readers to make a choice between regarding A Mil-
lion Little Pieces as narrated by a lying author, or, alternatively, regarding it
as narrated by a reliable narrator. In an illuminating article on the ways in
which we link texts and authors, Susan Lanser argues that readers do not
always react as instructed by theory. Lanser begins by stating that “[a]s the
history of literary reception has made dramatically evident, there is simply no
way to resolve these questions [of fictionality and truthfulness] from the text
itself” (Lanser 2005: 206). Her opening example is a piece by Ann Beattie
in The New Yorker, which remains equivocally attached to its author. The
reader will hesitate between attaching the “I” of the prose text to the author
and attaching it to a narrator distinct from the author. Beattie’s text is exem-
plary of the way literary discourse works rather than an exception to it: “The
‘I’ that characterizes literary discourse, in other words, is always potentially
severed from and potentially tethered to the author’s ‘I’” (210–211). Lanser
argues that readers make connections between the author and the “I” of a
narrative—even if the “I” is a fictional character—and that these connections
are much stronger than narrative theory has hitherto claimed. Lanser is inter-
ested in both ambiguously and clearly fictional narratives. She argues that
“[ . . . ] readers routinely ‘vacillate’ and ‘oscillate’ and even double the speak-
ing voice against the logic of both structure and stricture” (207; emphasis in
the original). Later on, she says the following about fiction: “yet readers may
ignore the technical boundaries of fictional voice, in effect doubling the ‘I’ so
that the narrator’s words sometimes belong to the author as well as to the
narrating character and sometimes do not” (216). In both cases, Lanser uses
the word “double/doubling” for the activity of the reader. In narratives des-
ignated as fiction this is something the reader tends to do—“against theory,”
as it were.

from the reference to real historical events or places in fictional works where the principle of
minimal departure applies.
294   Part II: Chapter 11

When Walsh addresses the relationship between fictive and nonfictive dis-
course in The Rhetoric of Fictionality, he also connects it to questions about
narrators and authors. Rather than drawing ontological boundary lines,
Walsh draws on the relevance theory of Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson. He
points out that this paradigm has a very useful feature:

[ . . . ] a pragmatic theory of fictionality does not require detachment of fic-

tive discourse from real-world context. [ . . . ] Fictionality is neither a bound-
ary between worlds, nor a frame dissociating the author from the discourse,
but a contextual assumption by the reader [ . . . ]. (36)

Discussing the consequences of a pragmatic approach for the concept of the

narrator, Walsh writes that “[ . . . ] the narrator [ . . . ] functions primarily to
establish a representational frame within which the narrative discourse may
be read as report rather than invention” (69). Following this insight, I would
like to dissociate report and invention to highlight that invention is also a
resource of fictionality available to the actual author. This strategy will typi-
cally (but not always) result in a work of fiction. This insight sheds new light
on some of the questions that texts like A Million Little Pieces pose to narra-
tive theory. Due to its ambiguous generic affiliation, A Million Little Pieces
can serve as a triple test case:
(1) If it is read as fiction, it will come across as authoritative, because it
looks like many other fictional first-person narratives, using simultaneous
narration and other techniques of fictionalization. It does not break any con-
temporary norms, and it does not mark the “narrator” as unreliable accord-
ing to current conventions for fictional first-person narratives. It is also worth
noting that readers are used to fictional first-person narratives that reliably
recount information which exceeds what a real person can remember. How-
ever, in Frey’s case, the author does nothing to pretend that a narrator is
speaking to someone. As a person in the narrative, “the narrator” makes
referential statements in his interactions with other characters, but the text
never suggests that the narrator is—during or after the events—narrating
the narrative to an addressee. The narrative is obviously the creation of the
author, rather than something the character says, thinks, or even knows. If we
read this text as fiction, we assume that the author has created a world that
we should trust. In this case, the act of communication takes place between
the author and the reader.
(2) On the other hand, if the narrative is read as nonfiction, we may ques-
tion the accuracy of the narrative, and perhaps even investigate the facts, as
did The Smoking Gun. There is, then, no narrator other than the author him-
 Nielsen, “Natural Authors, Unnatural Narration”   295

self. We might argue that James Frey is the narrator in the sense of Lejeune’s
formula: “narrator = author.” The author then clearly uses techniques of
fictionalization to get his story across, but this need not change the readers’
view that what they are reading is essentially a true, an exaggerated or pos-
sibly even untrue story about the life of the author. In this case, the act of
communication takes place between the author and the reader as well.
(3) Whereas overdetermined narratives arguably urge readers to read
them as both fictional and nonfictional, underdetermined narratives seem to
invite different readings at different times. Notwithstanding, in Frey as well
as in Ellis, a third reading with a double vision—as proposed by Lanser—is
possible. In fact, any reading that sees the book as being purely referential
or purely non-referential will miss something. A reading of Lunar Park as
pure fiction will have to play down some of its most essential messages about
addiction and how to overcome it, not to mention the many striking similari-
ties between character and author, including the name. Similarly, a reading
of A Million Little Pieces that does not take into account its techniques of
fictionalization and its (re)invention of dialogues and events will miss some
of the premises that are actually visible in the narrative itself. If the reader
assumes that there is an equivocal attachment between the textual “I” and
the real author, then the narrative is read as true communication from author
to reader about the author’s life (maybe telling important things about this
life even as it occasionally deviates from biographical truth) as well as a form
of fictional communication from author to reader about the life of a heavy
substance abuser. The author shares the name and the first-person pronoun
with this abuser, but not all of his experiences.
It is important to note that the differences between the three reading
strategies one could adopt towards A Million Little Pieces do not include
differences as to whether a concept of a narrator is needed to describe the
narrative. In each case, the communication is from author to reader. One
could decide to read the narrative as fiction and a posteriori assume the
existence of a narrator, but it is not possible to verify the existence of a nar-
rator by means of intratextual features and to then determine the status of
the narrative as fiction. Whether we read the book as fiction or not, and
whether we assume the existence of a narrator or not, we cannot find realis-
tic explanations for the passages describing things of which the character is
unaware. Nor will we be able to explain the conversations and renderings of
dialogues that no narrator, character, or author could possibly remember. In
short: deciding pro or contra fiction or pro or contra narrator will not really
prove helpful in explaining the techniques and style used in the bulk of the
book.
296   Part II: Chapter 11

Unnatural Narration

I have argued that underdetermined and overdetermined narratives pose a

problem to any theory that acknowledges distinctions between fiction and
nonfiction but grounds the decision in paratextual information. I also pointed
to the potential problems in explaining the narration of something a nar-
rator could not know or need not tell. Third, I tried to demonstrate that
the concepts of author and narrator have been used to mutually explain an
absence of communication in the other and therefore to avoid the problem of
narration without communication. The lesson from A Million Little Pieces is
threefold: first, the narrative is openly fictionalized; second, this fact does not
automatically turn the book into pure fiction; and, third, the fictionalization
cannot helpfully be explained by assuming the existence of a narrator other
than the author. In fact, any rhetorical approach that takes narration to be
report will—among other problems—encounter a major difficulty in A Mil-
lion Little Pieces. The narrative cannot be communication from the author,
since he is not now experiencing what is narrated; nor can it be communica-
tion from a narrator, since he is not now narrating what is experienced. I will
conclude by suggesting that there is a way of approaching these problems
that is more helpful than trying to decide the text’s fictional status, or assum-
ing a narrator between the author and the narrative. This suggestion is simply
that not all narration is report and communication.
As a beginning, let us note that relevance theory, as put forward by Walsh,
is compatible with Lanser’s idea of double vision and equivocal attachment.
Some narratives will prompt assumptions of fictionality and nonfiction alike.
Such a narrative was designed—whether intentionally or not—by the author.
Let us then reconsider Phelan’s suggestion that narrative “can be fruitfully
understood as a rhetorical act: somebody telling somebody else on some
occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened” (2005: 18). It
is reasonable to argue that a negation of any segment on the right side of
the equation may not lead to a negation of narrative, but more precisely to
a negation of communication. In my opinion, Phelan’s formula is accurate—
necessary as well as sufficient—as a definition of (conscious human) commu-
nication, but it is not a definition of narrative. What he really defines is not
narrative, but conscious human communication. I want to argue instead that
non-communication is a resource of fictionality available to the real author.
Frey, like any other author, can opt for or against any technique of fictional-
ity—one of these being non-communicational narration.
If we maintain the difference between fiction and fictionality, we find that
invention and non-communication can be described as resources of fictional-
 Nielsen, “Natural Authors, Unnatural Narration”   297

ity, even though they do not belong exclusively to fiction. As argued above,
fictionality is also a local quality of a narrative. Not all nonfiction refrains
from techniques of fictionality, and not all fiction employs such techniques.
This being said, it seems to me that to describe non-communication (in the
very inclusive form of all sorts of narration that transcend Phelan’s formula
of somebody telling somebody else that something happened) as a resource of
fictionality available to the author is an economical way of describing a very
distinctive feature in much fiction.
Let me return briefly to the example of falling asleep: “I fade in and out.
The TV is narcotic. In and out. In. Out. In. Out” (Frey 2003: 286). Irrespec-
tive of the global status of the narrative as fiction, this is not communica-
tion.31 The reasons include the fact that there is no one to tell, and no one
with a conscious mind able to do the telling. In fictionalized narrative neither
of the two parties necessary for communication (sender and receiver) needs to
be present. It can be argued that some form of communication may also exist
between, say, neurons or bacteria, and obviously between animals, without
it necessarily entailing a “purpose” or a report “that something happened.”
However, I have never encountered a definition of communication that did
not include two parties in the form of a sender and a receiver. To what extent
they need a shared cognitive environment, a channel, a message, a purpose,
and so forth is beside the point I am making here: if nothing happened or no
one recounted it, or if it is not told to anyone, there could still be narration
but not communication.32
While the narrative in texts of this nature can globally be considered a
form of communication from author to reader, this global narrative may
include local non-communication rather than a report from an unwitting nar-
rator. It may, for example, include narration that is unnatural, in the simple
sense that it transcends the norms of everyday conversation and communica-
tion, and in the sense that it is without sender or receiver, without narrator
or narratee. While much attention has been given to oral language as a pro-
totype for literary and written narrative (Fludernik 1996), it should be noted
that written narrative lends itself more easily to non-communication, for the
simple reason that it is more detachable from the enunciator of an utterance
in time and space than is spoken language. Communicational models face

31. The comical qualities of this passage when read aloud reveal that this is a curious form
of narration. The words form, quite literally “unspeakable sentences.”
32. In this respect my proposal is very similar to Monika Fludernik’s suggestions in To-
wards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, where she defines narrativity as centering on experientiality
(1996: 26) and as always implying the consciousness of a protagonist (30). For Fludernik “no
teller is necessary” (26) for narrativity.
298   Part II: Chapter 11

difficulties with regard to some narratives. By understanding all narratives

(fictional and nonfictional, fictionalized and nonfictionalized alike) along the
lines of a communication model, we run the risk of modeling the subject
after the model, instead of vice versa (Richardson 2006: 139ff.).
The concept of the narrator can be a helpful tool for the interpretation of
a text. Many narratives firmly attach words, thoughts, and opinions to nar-
rators which are quite different from their authors. It therefore makes sense
to talk about narrators. It is perfectly possible to refer to James Frey as the
narrator of A Million Little Pieces, and to Bret Easton Ellis as the narrator of
Lunar Park. However, this does not solve questions raised by the non-report
of the author in fictionalized narratives. Since narrators as “agents” do not
invent, they cannot help to explain passages that are—inside fiction itself—
obviously invented and not reported. Putting all parts of a fiction “in the
mouth” of a narrator brings with it a double problem in fictionalized nar-
ratives since it tends to deprive them of their distinctive fictionality without
really explaining what the positing of a narrator was meant to explain: the
absence of report in the author’s narrative.
Having said that the author uses unnatural narration as part of the global
communication of the narrative to the reader, the question is with what
terms to best describe that type of narration. What is the relation between
authorial communication and unnatural narration? Turning back to Phel-
an’s account of disclosure functions and narrator functions one could say
that in unnatural narration, the disclosure functions proceed not along the
narrator-authorial audience track but the author-authorial audience track as
the author, in the interest of disclosure, violates the limits of narratorial com-
munication. Compared to the description quoted above with the two tracks
consisting of the narrator-narratee track and the narrator-authorial audience
track, this seems to me a welcome addition. I much prefer the description
that the author violates the limits of narratorial communication over the
description that the narrator unwittingly reports information since I believe
that there is no report at the local level and at the level of the character-
narrator. In this respect, then, Phelan’s model and my own model converge.
And this convergence reinforces the idea that the author and not the narrator
is necessary to explain the specific phenomena discussed.
The global communication from author to reader exists in any written
narrative whether natural or unnatural, mimetic or non-mimetic, fictional
or nonfictional. This description hardly captures the specificity of the men-
tioned passage in the “fictional present” and the consequences of using tech-
niques of fictionality and unnatural narration. To do this, I believe, we have
to disentangle the words from a narrator. The author violates the limits of
 Nielsen, “Natural Authors, Unnatural Narration”   299

narratorial communication, but also of real-world discourse. It is a moment

of fictional invention (whether the narrative is globally a fiction or not), not
a moment of report by the character-narrator. Attributing the words to the
author is correct but only in the sense that he is producing a fictionalized pas-
sage in a way that is not reducible to naturally recurring oral discourse.
The real author may or may not choose to construct the narrative in such
a way that a narrator addresses a narratee. And having chosen to construct
a narrator, the author may or may not limit the narration to telling what this
narrator would be likely to know. The unnatural features of non-communi-
cation (no one telling anyone on any occasion and for any reason about any
events) are neither necessary nor sufficient features ontologically or generi-
cally in fiction, but they are features of fictionality.
My proposal has the advantage of acknowledging the ability of authors
to employ such features of their choosing, as well as their ability to transcend
normal communication and the rules governing conversation or storytelling
from narrator to narratee. This ability to go beyond communicational mod-
els is paradoxically, yet completely logically, possessed by no narrator under-
stood within the framework of the very same communicational model.33
It seems important to acknowledge that the explanatory power of com-
municational models is great, but limited in relation to the sum of all narra-
tives. Some narratives are natural, others are not. If we analyze all narratives
according to the same model, we oversimplify matters. It would seem that an
important task for narrative theory is to develop models that account for the
specific properties of storyworlds, of experientiality, and of representations
and narratives that resist description and understanding based on linguistic
understandings of natural, oral communication.
As I have shown, narration cannot always be understood according to
the rules of communicational discourse. Furthermore, this fact ties narra-
tion more closely to its flesh-and-blood author. Far from being deprived of
responsibility, this author is responsible for all his/her choices, including the
possible choice of techniques of fictionalization and of non-communicative
passages or whole narratives. To realize the full potential of authors, we
should “employ” rather than “imply” them.

33. In this article I have limited myself to claiming that there are features of fictionality
that the concept of the narrator will obscure rather than explain. In a broader context there
is no denying that I also agree with Walsh on his more general point that “[ . . . ] the narrator
is always either a character who narrates, or the author” (Walsh 2007: 78).
300   Part II: Chapter 11

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A Journal of Narrative Studies 1.1: 79–96.
Alber, Jan, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson (2010) “Unnatural
Narratology: Beyond Mimetic Models.” Narrative 18.2: 113–26.
Banfield, Ann (1982) Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Lan-
guage of Fiction. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Barthes, Roland (2004) “The Death of the Author [1967].” Authorship. From Plato to
the Postmodern: A Reader. Ed. Sean Burke. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
125–30.
Cohn, Dorrit (1999) The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Doubrovsky, Serge (1977) Fils. Paris: Éditions Galilées.
Ellis, Bret Easton (2005) Lunar Park. New York: Vintage.
Fludernik, Monika (1996) Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge.
——— (2001) “Fiction vs. Non-Fiction: Narratological Diffentiations.” Erzählen und
Erzähltheorie im 20. Jahrhundert. Festschrift für Wilhelm Füger. Ed. Jörg Helbig.
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——— (2006) Einführung in die Erzähltheorie. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesell-
schaft.
Frey, James (2003) A Million Little Pieces. New York: Random House.
Genette, Gérard (1980) Narrative Discourse [1972]. New York: Cornell University Press.
——— (1988) Narrative Discourse Revisited [1983]. New York: Cornell University Press.
——— (1993) Fiction & Diction [1991]. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
——— (1997) Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation [1987]. Cambridge: Cambridge
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Herman, David (2007) Ed. The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Lanser, Susan (2005) “The ‘I’ of the Beholder: Equivocal Attachments and the Limits of
Structuralist Narratology.” A Companion to Narrative Theory. Eds. James Phelan
and Peter Rabinowitz. Malden: Blackwell. 206–19.
Lejeune, Philippe (1975) Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil.
Löschnigg, Martin (1999) “Narratological Categories and the (Non-)Distinction Between
Factual and Fictional Narratives.” Recent Trends in Narratological Research. Papers
from the Narratological Round-Table ESSE4—September 1997—Debrecen, Hungary,
and Other Contributions. Ed. John Pier. Tours: Université François Rabelais. 31–48.
McHale, Brian (1987) Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen.
Nielsen, Henrik Skov (forthcoming) “What’s in a Name? Double Exposures in Lunar
Park.” Bret Easton Ellis. Ed. Naomi Mandel. London and New York: Continuum.
Phelan, James (1996) Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology.
Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.
——— (2005) Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration.
Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
——— (2007) Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory
of Narrative. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.
 Nielsen, “Natural Authors, Unnatural Narration”   301

Phelan, James, and Peter Rabinowitz (2005) Eds. A Companion to Narrative Theory.
Malden: Blackwell.
Phelan, James, Robert Scholes, and Robert Kellogg (2006) The Nature of Narrative. 2nd
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Pier, John, and Jean-Marie Schaeffer (2005) Eds. Entorses au pacte de la représentation.
Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.
Richardson, Brian (2006) Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contem-
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——— (1997) “Postmodernism and the Doctrine of Panfictionality.” Narrative 5.2: 165–
87.
Walsh, Richard (2007) The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fic-
tion. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.

Contributors

Jan Alber is assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Frei­
burg (Germany), where he teaches English literature and film. He is the author
of a critical monograph entitled Narrating the Prison: Role and Representation
in Charles Dickens’ Novels, Twentieth-Century Fiction, and Film (Cambria Press,
2007) and the editor/co-editor of collections such as Stones of Law, Bricks of Shame:
Narrating Imprisonment in the Victorian Age (University of Toronto Press, 2009),
Unnatural Narratology (de Gruyter, forthcoming), and Why Study Literature? (Aar-
hus University Press, forthcoming). Alber has also authored and co-authored articles
that were published or are forthcoming in such international journals as Dickens
Studies Annual, The Journal of Popular Culture, Narrative, Short Story Criti-
cism, Storyworlds, and Style. In 2007, he received a scholarship from the German
Research Foundation (DFG) which allowed him to spend a year at The Ohio State
University doing research under the auspices of Project Narrative. His new research
project focuses on unnatural (i.e., physically or logically impossible) scenarios and
events in fiction and drama.

Monika Fludernik is professor of English literature at the University of Freiburg,

Germany. She is the author of The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fic-
tion (Routledge, 1993), Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (Routledge, 1996), which
was awarded the Perkins Prize by the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature
(SSNL), Echoes and Mirrorings: Gabriel Josipovici’s Creative Oeuvre (Lang, 2000),
and An Introduction to Narratology (Routledge, 2009). She has edited special issues
on second-person fiction (Style 28.3, 1994), on “Language and Literature” (EJES
2.2, 1998), on “Metaphor and Beyond: New Cognitive Developments” (with Don-
ald and Margaret Freeman, Poetics Today 20.3, 1999), and on German narratology
(with Uri Margolin, Style 48.2–3, 2004). Further publications include collections of
essays (e.g., Hybridity and Postcolonialism: Twentieth-Century Indian Literature,

303
304   Contributors

1998; Diaspora and Multiculturalism: Common Traditions and New Developments,

2003; and In the Grip of the Law: Trials, Prisons and the Space Between, with Greta
Olson, 2004). Her articles include papers on expatriate Indian literature in English,
British aesthetics in the eighteenth century, and narratological questions. Work in
progress concerns prison settings and prison metaphors in English literature and the
development of narrative structure in English literature between 1250 and 1750.

David Herman teaches in the English Department at The Ohio State University. The
editor of the Frontiers of Narrative book series and the journal Storyworlds, he has
published a number of studies on interdisciplinary narrative theory, narrative and
mind, storytelling across media, modern and postmodern fiction, and other topics.

Susan S. Lanser is professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Women’s and

Gender Studies at Brandeis University. She is the author of The Narrative Act: Point
of View in Prose Fiction (1981) and Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Nar-
rative Voice (1992), and the co-editor of Women Critics 1660–1820: An Anthology
(1995) and Letters Written in France (2001). Lanser has published numerous articles
in journals such as Style, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Feminist Studies, Textual Prac-
tice, Semeia, Eighteenth-Century Life, the Journal of Homosexuality, the Journal
of American Folklore, and Novel and in books including The Faces of Anonymity,
Reconsidering the Bluestockings, Blackwell Companion to Narrative Theory, and
Singlewomen in the European Past. Her research interests include narrative theory,
the novel, eighteenth-century cultural studies, the history of gender and sexuality,
and the French Revolution. Lanser is currently completing a book entitled The Sexu-
ality of History: Sapphic Subjects and the Making of Modernity.

Martin Löschnigg studied English and German literature and linguistics at the Uni-
versities of Graz (Austria) and Aberdeen (UK). He is currently associate professor of
English, chair of the Section on the New Literatures in English, and deputy director
of the Centre for Canadian Studies at Graz University. Löschnigg was a visiting
scholar at the Free University of Berlin and at Harvard University in 1995 and 1996,
and a visiting associate professor of English at the University of Minnesota in Minne-
apolis in autumn 2005. His main research interests are narrative theory, autobiogra-
phy, the English novel, the literature of war, and Canadian literature. Löschnigg has
published on the literature of the First World War (Der Erste Weltkrieg in deutscher
und englischer Dichtung [1994] and Intimate Enemies—English and German Liter-
ary Reactions to the Great War 1914–1918, edited with Franz K. Stanzel [1993]),
on fictional autobiographies (Die englische fiktionale Autobiographie: Erzählthe-
oretische Grundlagen und historische Prägnanzformen von den Anfängen bis zur
Mitte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts [2006]), and on Canadian literature with Maria
Löschnigg (Kurze Geschichte der kanadischen Literatur [2001] and Migration and
Fiction: Narratives of Migration in Contemporary Canadian Literature [2009]).

Amit Marcus studied comparative literature and philosophy at The Hebrew University
of Jerusalem. He is the author of Self-Deception in Literature and Philosophy (Wis-
 Contributors   305

senschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2007) and of several articles which were published in
international journals such as the Journal of Literary Semantics, Mosaic, Narrative,
Partial Answers, and Style. The main focus in his research so far has been on unreli-
able narration and fictional “we” narratives. He was granted a scholarship from the
Minerva Foundation for the years 2006–2008 at the universities of Freiburg and
Giessen, and recently received another scholarship from the Humboldt foundation
for the years 2010–2012 at the University of Freiburg.

Jarmila Mildorf completed her PhD in sociolinguistics at the University of Aberdeen

(Scotland) and now teaches English literature and language at the University of Pad-
erborn (Germany). She is the author of Storying Domestic Violence: Constructions
and Stereotypes of Abuse in the Discourse of General Practitioners (University of
Nebraska Press, 2007) and she has co-edited a volume on Magic, Science, Technol-
ogy, and Literature (2006) as well as a special issue of the journal Partial Answers
on Narrative: Knowing, Living, Telling (2008). Mildorf has also published articles
in collections and journals such as The Sociology of Health and Illness, The Journal
of Gender Studies, Narrative Inquiry, and COLLeGIUM. Her research interests are
narrative, gender studies, language and literature, and medical humanities.

Henrik Skov Nielsen is professor in the Scandinavian Institute at the University of

Aarhus (Denmark). He is the author of articles and books in Danish on narratology
and literary theory, including his dissertation on digression and first-person narrative
fiction, Tertium datur—On Literature or on What Is Not. His publications in English
include articles on Bret Easton Ellis, Edgar Allan Poe, psychoanalysis, and extreme
narration, including an article on first-person narrative fiction in Narrative 12.2
(2004). A recent article, “Colonised Thinking” on the US influence on the humanities
in Europe was published in the Oxford Literary Review (2008). He is the editor of a
series of anthologies on literary theory, and is currently working on a narratological
research project on the relation between authors and narrators.

Alan Palmer is an independent scholar living in London and an honorary research fel-
low in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University.
His book Fictional Minds (University of Nebraska Press, 2004) was a co-winner of
the MLA Prize for Independent Scholars and also a co-winner of the Perkins Prize
(awarded by the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature). His new book, Social
Minds in the Novel, will be published by The Ohio State University Press. He has
contributed essays to the journals Narrative, Style and Semiotica, as well as chapters
to Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences (ed. David Herman), Narratology
beyond Literary Criticism (ed. Jan Christoph Meister), Introduction to Cognitive
Cultural Studies (ed. Lisa Zunshine), Contemporary Stylistics (eds. Marina Lambrou
and Peter Stockwell), and The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness
in Narrative Discourse in English, 700 to the Present (ed. David Herman). His chief
areas of interest are narratology, cognitive poetics and cognitive approaches to lit-
erature, the cognitive sciences and the study of consciousness, the nineteenth-century
novel, modernism, and the history of country and western music.
306   Contributors

Richard Walsh is senior lecturer in English and Related Literature at the Univer-
sity of York, where he teaches primarily narrative theory, early film, and American
literature. His first book, Novel Arguments: Reading Innovative American Fiction
(Cambridge University Press, 1995), argued for the positive rhetorical force of non-
realist narrative modes, and opened up a line of inquiry that defined his subsequent
research in the field of narrative theory. Beginning with “Who Is the Narrator?”
(Poetics Today, 1997) and culminating in The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative
Theory and the Idea of Fiction (The Ohio State University Press, 2007), Walsh pro-
poses a fundamental reconceptualization of the role of fictionality in narrative, and
in doing so challenges many of the core assumptions of narrative theory. His current
research is concerned with narrative in its broadest interdisciplinary contexts, using
the concept of emergence as a way to negotiate between its ubiquity and its limita-
tions. He is the leader of the Fictionality Research Group, and director of Narrative
Research in York’s Centre for Modern Studies.

Werner Wolf is professor and chair of English and General Literature at the Uni-
versity of Graz (Austria). His main areas of research are literary theory (concerning
aesthetic illusion, narratology, and metafiction in particular), functions of literature,
eighteenth- to twenty-first-century English fiction, eighteenth- and twentieth-century
drama, metareference in various arts, as well as intermediality studies. His publica-
tions include, besides numerous essays, Ästhetische Illusion und Illusionsdurchbrech-
ung in der Erzählkunst (Aesthetic Illusion and the Breaking of Illusion in Narrative,
1993) and The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of
Intermediality (1999). He is also co-editor of volumes 1, 3, 5, and 11 (forthcoming)
in the book series “Word and Music Studies” (published by Rodopi), and has co-
edited Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media (2006) and Description in
Literature and Other Media (2007), both in the “Studies in Intermediality” series at
Rodopi. Wolf is currently directing a project funded by the Austrian Science Founda-
tion (FWF) on “Metareference in the Media,” which hosted several conferences. Two
proceeding volumes (also in the series “Studies in Intermidiality”) were also edited
by Wolf: Metareference across Media: Theory and Case Studies (2009) and The
Metareferential Turn in Contemporary Arts and Media: Forms, Functions, Attempts
at Explanation (forthcoming).

Author Index

2001: A Space Odyssee (Kubrick), 170 Bal, Mieke, 13, 44, 105, 105n1, 116,
Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner), 107 119−22
L’académie des dames ou la philosophie Balzac, Honoré de, 41
dans le boudoir du Grand Siècle Bamberg, Michael, 13, 263
(Chorier), 191, 193, 197 Banfield, Ann, 14, 114, 117, 123,
Aczel, Richard, 54n14 276n4, 282
Adolphs, Ralph, 152 Barrin, Jean, 191
Aelred, 202 Barry, Sebastian, 122
Alber, Jan, 14, 14n15, 17−18, 21, Barthes, Roland, 2, 166n9, 277
275n3 Bartlett, Frederick, 264
L’Alcibiade fanciullo a scola (Rocco), Beaujour, Michel, 261n3
202 A Beautiful Mind (Howard), 173, 173n19
American Psycho (Ellis), 276, 292 Behn, Aphra, 202
Aretino, Pietro, 189−92 The Belle of Belfast City (Reid), 122,
Arabian Nights, 38, 42−43 122n13
Aristotle, 195 Belinda (Edgeworth), 199
Armstrong, Nancy, 188 Benveniste, Émile, 282
Auerbach, Erich, 186 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits
Austen, Jane, 200 des Lustprinzips) (Freud), 215n18
The Autobiographical Subject (Nuss- Billy Liar (Schlesinger), 51
baum), 189n4 Black, David A., 168
Autobiography (Mill), 264−65 The Blair Witch Project (Myrick and
Sánchez), 46
Blake, William, 17, 138−58
Bach, Michaela, 164 “The Bloody Chamber” (Carter), 108
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 8, 15, 52−54, 56, 94, Booth, Wayne C., 9−11, 17, 115,
100, 187, 189−90, 193 166−67, 169n13, 177, 181

307
308   Author Index

Boothe, Brigitte, 13 Cohn, Dorrit, 46, 116, 276n5, 280,

Bordwell, David, 47n9, 163 290−91
The Bourne Identity (Liman), 171 Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plot-
Branigan, Edward, 47n9, 174 ting Time and Space in Narrative
Bremond, Claude, 2 Fiction (Dannenberg), 187
Bridget Jones Diary (Fielding), 201 Come As You Are: Sexuality and Narra-
Brooks, Peter, 262 tive (Roof), 7, 187
Bruder, Gail A., 146 Coming to Terms (Chatman), 118−19
Bruner, Jerome, 255, 261−63, 265 Confessions (St. Augustine), 264n6
Bruss, Elizabeth, 268n9 The Confessions (Rousseau), 262,
Bunyan, John, 257−58 266−67, 267n7
Conrad, Joseph, 63, 70, 78
The Coquette (Foster), 196
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Wiene), The Countryman and the Cinemato-
171 graph (Paul), 124
The Cambridge Companion to Narrative Currie, Mark, 77n28, 164
(Herman), 277
Camus, Albert, 18, 209, 224−27, 230
“Camus’ Stranger Retried” (Girard), Dällenbach, Lucien, 59
225 Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sap-
The Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), phic History of the British Novel
61−62 (Moore), 187, 188n3
Carter, Angela, 108, 110 Dannenberg, Hilary, 187
Carter, Elizabeth, 196 Daphnis and Chloe (Longus), 66
Cat and Mouse (Katz und Maus) “The Dead” (Joyce), 158n14
(Grass), 18, 209, 211−19, 223, Death of a Salesman (Miller), 123
226−30 Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (Girard),
Cervantes, Miguel de, 209 206, 210, 225, 229
Chafe, Wallace, 13 Defoe, Daniel, 62
Chambers, Ross, 230−31 Dennett, Daniel C., 166−67, 169, 181
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 61−62 Dialogues of the Courtesans (Lucian),
Chatman, Seymour, 2, 14, 17, 21, 105, 189
107, 109−11, 113−16, 118−20, Dickens, Charles, 108, 174
120n11, 126, 128−30, 163, 164n3, Diderot, Denis, 192, 199, 202
168−69, 171−72, 244, 246 The Distinction of Fiction (Cohn), 290
Chomsky, Noam, 109, 129 Doležel, Lubomír, 12
Chorier, Nicolas, 191 Dostoevsky, 54, 208, 208n6, 209
Cicero, 201 Doubrovsky, Serge, 291, 291n28
Cinderella, 109−10, 123 Duchan, Judith F., 146
Cité des dames (Pisan), 189
Citizen Kane (Welles), 49
Clarissa (Richardson), 191, 197−200, Eakin, Paul John, 255, 261−62, 269
202 L’école des filles, ou la philosophie des
Cleland, John, 193, 199n9 dames [The School of Venus] (Mil-
A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick), 170−71 lot), 191n6
Coetzee, J. M., 290 Edgar, David, 123
 Author Index   309

Edgeworth, Maria, 199 Frye, Northrop, 268n9

Edwards, Derek, 152 Fury (Lang), 170
Edzard, Christine, 174
Erlich, Victor, 106
Eichenbaum, Boris, 106 Gallagher, Philip J., 143−44, 146, 148
Eliot, George, 84, 101 Gaiman, Neil, 124
Ellis, Bret Easton, 276, 286, 288, Gates, Henry Louis, 8
291−92, 295, 298 Gaut, Berys, 164, 166, 169n13
The Emergence of Mind (Herman), 13 Genet, Jean, 18, 209−10, 219−24, 226,
Emmott, Catherine, 146, 148−49 229−30
Entertaining Strangers (Edgar), 123 Genette, Gérard, 2, 8, 9, 13, 16, 21,
37−42, 44−46, 48, 55, 59, 61, 78,
106−7, 111n4, 114−15, 117−23,
The Fall (La chute) (Camus), 18, 209, 128−29, 206n3, 207, 211n10, 257,
224−26, 227, 228, 230 275, 276n5, 281, 291n28
Famous Last Words (Findley), 107 Georgakopoulou, Alexandra, 13
Farwell, Marylin, 187 Gibson, Andrew, 2, 3, 15, 58, 77−78
Faulkner, William, 107 Girard, René, 15, 18, 21, 206−31
Fenwick, Eliza, 191, 196 Gleckner, Robert F., 142, 142n4
Ferenz, Volker, 172−73 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 114, 202
Fictional Minds (Palmer), 83, 85 Goffman, Erving, 61, 61n11
Fielding, Helen, 201 Goldmann, Lucien, 187
Fielding, Henry, 117n7 Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners
Field, Todd, 158n14 (Bunyan), 257
Fight Club (Fincher), 174n20 Grass, Günter, 18, 209, 211−13,
Fina, Anna de, 13, 250 215−17, 219, 223, 226, 230
Findley, Timothy, 107 Greenberg, Mark L., 142
Fludernik, Monika, 5, 11, 13−16, 19, Greimas, A. J., 2, 187
22, 22n18, 45, 51n10, 107, 111n4, Grice, H. P., 175
186, 234, 239, 256, 259−60, 269, Griffiths, Paul E., 152
277n6, 297, 297n32
Fonte, Moderata, 189
Forster, E. M., 15, 106−7 Hale, Dorothy M., 8
Foster, Hannah, 196 Hamburger, Käte, 112, 157n13, 275n1,
Frank, Joseph, 70 282
Frankenstein (Shelley), 44, 70−73, 202 Harré, Rom, 154, 251
Freeman, Mark, 13 Haywood, Eliza, 191, 193−94
The French Lieutenant’s Woman Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 39n3,
(Fowles), 46, 283−84 63−64, 70−71
Freud, Sigmund, 196, 211n9, 215n18, Heinze, Rüdiger, 14
288 Helbig, Jörg, 9, 174n20
Frey, James, 20, 276, 282, 284−91, Hemingway, Ernest, 151, 169, 278
293−98 Herman, David, 1−6, 6n7, 8, 11, 13,
Friedemann, Käte, 112 17−19, 22n18, 23, 79, 87, 166, 239,
Frow, John, 53n12 246−47, 264−65
Frye, Lawrence, 217n20 Herman, Luc, 5
310   Author Index

Hernadi, Paul, 276n5 Labov, William, 13, 237, 240

Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Narra- Lacan, Jacques, 210, 211n9
tives (Farwell), 187 Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de, 202
Hewitt, Lynne E., 146 Lakoff, George, 138
Hilliard, Kevin, 213n16, 215n18, Lämmert, Eberhard, 2
217n20 Lang, Fritz, 165, 168
“Hills like White Elephants” (Heming- Langenhove, Luk van, 154
way), 151 Lanser, Susan, 2, 7, 18, 53n13, 293,
Hitchcock, Alfred, 52, 165, 172 295−96
Homer, 39, 41 Larroux, Guy, 64, 64n16
Hornby, Richard, 67 Die Leiden des jungen Werthers
Hutcheon, Linda, 59, 108, 108n3, 110 (Goethe), 202
Huxley, Aldous, 65−66 Lejeune, Philippe, 223n25, 268n9, 270,
276n5, 280, 293, 295
Less than Zero (Ellis), 292
The Importance of Being Earnest Lettres de Milady Juliette Catesby à
(Wilde), 62−63 Milady Henriette Campley, son amie
The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote (Riccoboni), 191, 195−97, 199−200
of La Mancha (Cervantes), 208, Levinson, Jerrold, 163n2, 164n4, 167,
208n5 169n13
Levinson, Marjorie, 186
Les liaisons dangereuses (Laclos), 202
Jahn, Manfred, 9, 9n10, 11, 11n13, Lieblich, Amia, 235, 237
22n18, 46n7, 121, 121n12, 164, The Life and Strange Surprising Adven-
169n13, 244 tures of Robinson Crusoe (Defoe),
James, Henry, 15, 115 62, 65n17, 189
Jakobson, Roman, 68, 207, 213n16 Linde, Charlotte, 265
Jameson, Fredric, 187 Little Children (Field), 158
Jane Eyre (Brontë), 188, 200−201, 203, Living to Tell about It (Phelan), 278
283 Lodge, David, 15
Jerslev, Anne, 180 Longus, 66
Johnson, Mark, 138 Lost Highway (Lynch), 18, 165, 175−81
Joyce, James, 107, 158n14 Love Letters between a Nobleman and
Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (Rousseau), His Sister (Behn), 202
191, 197, 198−99 Lucian, 189
Lukács, Georg, 187
Lunar Park (Ellis), 20, 284, 285−86,
Keen, Suzanne, 157n13 291−93, 295, 298
Kellogg, Robert, 280 Lynch, David, 18, 165, 175, 181
“The Killers” (Hemingway), 169 Lysis (Plato), 202
Kindt, Tom, 10n12, 167
Korte, Barbara, 107
Kubrick, Stanley, 165 Mandeville, Bernard, 191n6
Marcus, Sharon, 187, 201
The Masqueraders; or, Fatal Curiosity
Laas, Eva, 163n2, 173n19 (Haywood), 191, 193−95, 197
 Author Index   311

McHale, Brian, 14, 186, 291n20 Nocturnes for the King of Naples
McKeon, Michael, 188, 268 (White), 8
Melmoth the Wanderer (Maturin), 49−50 Notes from Underground (Dostoevsky),
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Cle- 54
land), 193, 197, 199 Nünning, Ansgar, 5−6, 13, 22, 119,
Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (Sheri- 187
dan), 191, 195−97, 200 Nussbaum, Felicity, 189n4
Mercadal, Dennis, 264n5
Il merito delle donne (Fonte), 189
Metropolis (Lang), 171, 171n16 Odyssey (Homer), 38
Mezei, Kathy, 7 Olney, James, 261, 269, 269n11
Middlemarch (Eliot), 84−104, 201 Olson, Greta, 173n18
Mill, John Stuart, 264−65, 268 Once upon a Time in the West (Leone),
A Million Little Pieces (Frey), 20, 276, 51
284−91, 293−98
Mimesis (Auerbach), 186−87
Mink, Louis O., 261−62, 269n11 Page, Ruth, 7
Mitchell, W. J. T., 142n4, 144, 144n7 Pallavicino, Ferrante, 191n6
Moby-Dick (Melville), 49 Palmer, Alan, 12, 15−16, 22, 165,
Montaigne, Michel de, 195 166−67, 169, 175, 177, 181
Moore, Lisa, 187, 188n3 Pamela (Richardson), 188, 199
Morón Arroyo, Ciriaco, 219n21 Patron, Sylvie, 123
Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 169, 173n19 Pascal, Roy, 52
Müller, Günther, 118 Paul, R.W., 124
Müller, Hans-Harald, 167 Pavel, Thomas, 2
Müller-Funk, Wolfgang, 263 Le Père Goriot (Balzac), 41
“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” Perkins Gilman, Charlotte, 201
(Poe), 68−69 Persuasion (Austen), 99
Petsch, Robert, 112
Petzold, Jochen, 22
Narrative Discourse (Genette), 37, 38n2, Pfister, Manfred, 113
39, 207 Phelan, James, 9−11, 15n17, 17, 181,
Narrative Discourse Revisited (Genette), 276n3, 277−82, 296−98
40 Phillips, Michael, 140
Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics Philosophie dans le boudoir (Sade), 191,
(Rimmon-Kenan), 2 193
Narratologies: New Perspectives on Pier, John, 291n20
Narrative Analysis (Herman), 1−2 Pisan, Christine de, 189
Nathan, Daniel O., 165, 168n11 Plato 16, 36, 38−39, 41, 45−47, 55,
The Nature of Narrative (Scholes and 109, 189, 201−2
Kellogg), 280 Poe, Edgar Allan, 68
Le neveu de Rameau (Diderot), 202 Point Counter Point (Huxley), 65−66
Nielsen, Henrik Skov, 14, 20 The Political Unconscious: Narrative as
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 151, 220 a Socially Symbolic Act (Jameson),
Nobody’s Fault and Little Dorrit’s Story 187
(Edzard), 174 Potter, Jonathan, 239
312   Author Index

Pratt, Marie-Louise 175 Sade, Donatien Alphonse François, Mar-

“Preface” (Shelley), 73 quis de, 193
Pride and Prejudice (Austen), 200 Sandman (Gaiman), 124
Prince, Gerald, 2, 114n5, 207, 221 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 11, 146
Proust, Marcel, 209−10, 212n13, 226 Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, 291n20
Schmid, Wolf, 111n4
Schneider, Ralf, 11, 22
Rabinowitz, Peter, 9−10, 154n12 Scholes, Robert, 280
Ragionamenti (Aretino), 189 Searle, John, 40n5, 156
A Raw Youth (Dostoyevsky), 209n6 Secresy, or The Ruin on the Rock (Fen-
Reed, Jeremy, 221n22, 223n23 wick), 191, 196−97
À la recherche du temps perdu (Proust), The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
210 (McLeod), 51
Reid, Christina, 122 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 211
La religieuse (Diderot), 192, 199 Segal, Erwin M., 147
Remembering: A Study in Experimental Sense and Sensibility (Austen), 200
and Social Psychology (Bartlett), Shakespeare, William, 65, 67
264 Shaw, George Bernard, 128
Rentz, Kathryn C., 238 Shelley, Mary, 44, 70, 202
La retorica delle puttane (Pallavicino), Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 73
191n6 Sheridan, Frances, 191, 195
Le rêve d’Alembert (Diderot), 202 Sheringham, Michael, 270
The Rhetoric of Fictionality (Walsh), Shklovsky, Victor, 4, 106−7, 113
10n12, 15, 123, 281, 294 Sir Charles Grandison (Richardson), 199
Ricardou, Jean, 59−60 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 17, 109−10,
Riccoboni, Marie-Jeanne, 191, 195 123, 128−29
Richardson, Alan, 137 Smith, Murray, 175, 177n24
Richardson, Brian, 8, 14, 39n4, 46n7, Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, 257,
47n8, 275n3, 280, 280n12 268n9
Richardson, Samuel, 191, 197−99 The Smoking Gun, 286−87, 294
Ricoeur, Paul, 108, 261−62, 268n9 Songs of Innocence and Experience
Riessman, Catherine Kohler, 234, 236 (Blake), 139, 142, 142n4
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, 2, 21, 77, Spielhagen, Friedrich, 112
81, 119, 206n3, 211n10, 215n18, Sperber, Dan, 251n3, 294
227, 247 Sprinker, Michael, 255
The Rise of the Novel (Watt), 187 Stage Fright (Hitchcock), 172
Rocco, Antonio, 202 Stanzel, Franz Karl, 2, 8, 16, 21, 37, 44,
Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 65 46, 105−6, 111−19, 121, 126−30
Ronen, Ruth, 12 Stearns, Carol, 152
Roof, Judith, 7, 187 Stearns, Peter, 152
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 191, 197−98, Steen, Francis, 137
262, 266−67, 267n7 Sternberg, Meir, 2
The Rules of Attraction (Ellis), 292 Sternlieb, Lisa, 201
Ryan, Judith, 212n14 Stoppard, Tom, 122
Ryan, Marie-Laure, 9, 12, 42−43, 125, Story and Discourse (Chatman), 2, 107,
282−85 109, 118−19
 Author Index   313

Story and Situation (Chambers), Vervaeck, Bart, 5

230−31 Veyne, Paul, 108
The Stranger (L’étranger) (Camus), 225 Vieux Carré (Williams), 123
The Steward of Christendom (Barry), Violence and the Sacred (La violence et
122, 122n13 le sacré) (Girard), 213n15
Sturges, Robert, 201−2 The Virgin Unmask’d: or, Female Dia-
Swift, Graham, 271 logues Betwixt an Elderly Maiden
Lady and her Niece (Mandeville),
191n6
Tajfel, Henri, 246
Talese, Nan, 289
Talmy, Leonard, 138 Waiting for the Barbarians (Coetzee),
The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare), 290
67 Walsh, Richard, 10n12, 14−17, 22,
Tannen, Deborah, 13, 239, 242−43 109−10, 123−25, 127, 130, 169n14,
The Temptations of Big Bear (Wiebe), 277, 280−81, 294, 296, 299n25
107 Warhol, Robyn, 7
A Theory of Narrative (Theorie des Waterland (Swift), 271
Erzählens) (Stanzel), 45 Watt, Ian, 187
The Thief’s Journal (Journal du voleur) Werth, Paul, 146
(Genet), 18, 209, 219−24, 226−27, White, Edmund, 8
229−30 White, Hayden, 109, 114n5, 269n11,
Thomson-Jones, Katherine, 164 280
Todorov, Tzvetan, 2, 2n2, 177n25, 277 The Whores Rhetorick: Calculated to
Tom Jones (Fielding), 40, 123 the Meridian of London (Pallavi-
To the Lighthouse (Woolf), 151 cino), 191n6
Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (Flud- Wiebe, Rudy, 107
ernik), 116, 126, 259, 297n32 Wilde, Oscar, 62−63
Travesties (Stoppard), 122 Williams, Linda Ruth, 264
Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 107, 113 Williams, Tennessee, 123
Turner, Mark, 137−39, 146 Wilson, Deirdre, 251n3, 294
Tuval-Mashiach, Rivka, 235, 237 Wilson, George, 164
Winfrey, Oprah, 285n17, 286, 289
Wolf, Werner, 9, 13−16, 22, 116
Ulysses (Joyce), 39, 42, 107 Woolf, Virginia, 83n1, 151, 169,
Unnatural Voices (Richardson), 275n3, 173n19
280n12
Unspeakable Sentences (Banfield), 14,
282 Yacobi, Tamar, 216n19
The Usual Suspects (Singer), 172 “The Yellow Wallpaper” (Perkins Gil-
man), 201
You Only Live Once (Lang), 168
Vénus dans le cloître, ou, La religieuse
en chemise: entretiens curieux (Bar-
rin), 191−92, 197 Zilber, Tamar, 235, 237
Vertigo (Hitchcock), 52n11 Zunshine, Lisa, 12, 22n18, 165

Subject Index

act: cognitive, 51; communicative, 35, autobiographical pact/contract

42−43, 150, 175; discursive, 48; fic- (Lejeune), 233, 270, 293
tive, 46; linguistic, 46; narrative, 35, autobiography, 3−4, 9, 19−20, 73, 189,
38, 42−44, 261; narrational, 115, 189n4, 219, 220, 223, 223n35,
119, 128, 154; of fictive representa- 230, 255−71, 276; fictionality of,
tion, 41; of imitation, 41; of narra- 266−70; nineteenth-century, 265;
tion, 38, 40, 41, 113−14, 116, 128, postmodern, 267
140, 148, 222−23, 226, 230; of nar- autofiction, 291, 291n28, 292, 292n30
rative representation, 16, 36, 48, 55
action(s), 95, 106−7, 153, 155, 171,
192, 216, 236, 242−43, 247. See beginning/ending, 11, 237
also event and Geschehen
action movie, 165n7
adaptation, 108n3, 158n14, 174 captions, 168, 170, 171
agency, 16, 36−37, 46−47, 55 canon, 39, 39n4, 108, 150, 199
anachrony (Genette), 107 categorical vs. holistic, 235, 237
anagnorisis, 209 character(s), 7, 10, 12, 18, 36, 41, 46,
analepsis, 62, 108. See also flashback 49, 50−53, 55, 73, 87, 91, 97−99,
anti-illusionism (Wolf), 13−14 108, 108n3, 113, 115−16, 118−26,
anti-mimeticism, 14−15 130, 140, 149−51, 154, 156, 159,
attribution theory, 97, 99−100 167, 174, 174n19, 175, 179, 181,
audience: authorial, 7, 10, 177, 298 188, 192, 199, 206−7, 208n4,
author: death of (Barthes), 277; implied, 210−11, 220, 225, 227−31, 242−43,
10, 10n12, 13−14, 14n14, 17, 47n9, 245, 250, 291n28, 292, 292n30,
119, 123, 166−67, 169n13, 181, 294−95; character-narrator, 168,
267n5, 279; real, 10, 114, 166, 276, 171−72, 172n17, 299; character
286, 292−94, 292n30, 299 perspective, 44−45; narrating char-

315
316   Subject Index

acter, 49, 53, 211, 211n10, 212n14, 211n9, 212; desired object/object
213, 216, 218, 220−26, 228; town of desire, 195, 206, 208, 208n4,
as character, 84−85. See also pro- 214, 218, 219n21; desiring sub-
tagonist ject, 206, 206n1, 208−11, 214−16,
characterization, 16, 49, 55, 83 218, 219n21, 220, 223, 226−28;
chronotope (Bahktin), 191, 192 gay, 202; lesbian, 18, 188, 190,
close-up, 120−22, 126, 178n26 193, 195, 198, 200−202; mimetic/
closure, 198−99, 209; lack of, 192, 216, triangular/metaphysical (Girard),
216n19 206−10, 206n1, 213−18, 219, 220,
coding, 61−63, 65, 67, 74−75 222−24, 226, 227−31; theory of
cognitive: approach, 12, 17, 22, 83, 158, (Lacan), 210
166; functioning, 84, 94, 97; narra- dialogic, 53−54, 56, 234; sapphic,
tive, 97−98, 101−3; revolution, 137; 186−205
terms, 56, 85 dialogue, 18, 54, 89, 126, 129, 189−93,
communicative functions (Jakobson), 228, 248−49, 290, 295; constructed
207; conative, 207; phatic, 207, dialogue (Tannen), 242, 247; male-
244, 248; poetic, 68, 213n16 male, 201; pederastic, 202
communicative model, 15, 35, 39−41, diégèse (Genette), 39, 39n3, 40−41. See
44−45, 47, 55; in film, 47n9 also diegetic universe and storyworld
configuration (Ricoeur), 108 diegesis (vs. mimesis) (Plato), 16, 36,
conflict, 94, 101, 144n6, 146 38−47, 49−51, 52n11, 53, 55. See
consciousness, 13, 83, 85, 93, 95, 116, also telling
126, 130, 140, 145, 251, 259−60, diegetic universe (vs. screen universe)
263−64, 269, 297n32; center of con- (Souriau), 39, 40, 85. See also dié-
sciousness (James), 115−16; continu- gèse and storyworld
ing-consciousness frame (Palmer), direct thought, 85. See also interior
166−67, 169, 175, 177, 181; narra- monologue
tive and consciousness, 155−57 direct speech, 89, 242−43
content (vs. form), 18, 48, 65, 74, 79, discourse (Foucault), 53, 282; auto-
155−56, 186−88, 191n6, 198, biographical, 19, 256, 261, 263,
202−3, 226, 235, 237, 263; mani- 265, 269−70; character, 46; direct
fest, 193 (Cohn), 46, 245; double-voiced
conversation analysis, 13 (Bakhtin), 52, 54; face-to-face, 138,
credits: opening credits, 170; final cred- 146; filmic, 36−37, 47; neo-colonial,
its, 170 8; oral, 50, 299; practices, 139, 150,
culturalist approach, 58, 78 152, 154; real-world, 20, 299; repre-
cut, 168, 170, 178n26 sentational, 48−50
discourse analysis, 13, 235
discourse environment, 157
death principle (Freud), 215 discursive event, 35
decoding, 74 discursive subject, 48−49, 52, 55
deictic center, 116, 123, 146n8 discursive rhythm, 91
deictic shift theory, 146−47 double deixis (Herman), 19, 235, 241,
deictic transfer, 249 246, 247, 251
descriptivity, 60 drama, 9, 16, 21, 37, 46, 65, 67, 105,
desire, 176, 179, 202, 207, 210, 113−15, 121−24, 126−28
 Subject Index   317

duration (Genette), 118n9 fictionality, 19−21, 37, 41−42, 45−47,

47n9, 55, 124, 256, 265, 267,
269−70, 282, 291n28, 294,
emplotment (White), 269n11 296−99, 299n33; signposts of
empty center (Banfield), 117 (Cohn), 280
Erzählzeit (Müller) (narrating or dis- fictionalization: techniques of, 20, 276,
course time), 118, 118n9, 192 280, 290−91, 294−96, 299
erzählte Zeit (Müller) (narrated or story filter (Chatman) (vs. slant), 19, 107,
time), 118, 118n9, 192 119, 120n11, 130, 155, 188, 192,
ethical judgments, 10 200, 235, 244−46, 250
evaluation, 72, 116, 237, 242 fiktionales Erzählen (Hamburger), 282
event, 6n7, 14, 38−41, 46, 49, 89, filmic composition device (FCD) (Jahn),
107−9, 111n4, 113, 119−20, 129, 164, 169n13
138n1, 143, 144n6, 146−52, filmmaker: hypothetical (Alber),
155−57, 158n14, 175, 177n25, 188, 167−77, 179, 180−81; implied, 17,
192, 197, 199, 200, 207, 210, 217, 164, 166−67, 169, 175, 177, 181;
217n20, 222, 225, 227, 236−37, real, 166−67, 175
244, 249, 260−64, 279, 290, 292, flashback, 125, 129, 172, 179. See also
294−95, 299; heterosexual, 194. See analepsis
also action(s) and Geschehen focalization (Bal), 13, 44, 105, 105n1,
experiencing I (vs. narrating I), 19, 120−22
147−48, 155. See also experiencing focalization (Genette), 9n10, 13, 16,
self 19, 36−37, 44, 51n10, 51−53,
experiencing self (vs. narrating self), 56, 83−84, 87, 93−94, 97, 105−9,
227, 243, 246, 248−49, 257. See 111, 114−15, 117−22, 117n7, 125,
also experiencing I 127−30, 210, 235, 239, 241, 244,
experientiality (Fludernik), 19, 22, 117, 249, 251, 257; ambient (Jahn), 121,
129, 256−57, 259−60, 264, 269, 121n12; external (Genette), 117n7,
275n1, 297n32, 299 119, 128−29, 169; external in film,
120−21, 169, 174; heterogeneous,
93−94; homogeneous, 93; hypotheti-
fabula (vs. syuzhet), 47n9, 105n1, 106, cal (Herman), 87; internal (Genette),
110, 124, 158. See also Geschichte, 44, 51, 53, 114, 117n7, 122, 128,
histoire, and story 130, 155, 210; internal in film,
family storytelling, 241, 243, 246 120−21, 173−74, 174n19, 174n20;
feminism, 53n13, 59, 59n2, 108, 208n4; intermental (Palmer), 84, 93; intra-
proto-feminism, 189, 201 mental (Palmer), 93; multiple, 93;
fictive, 35, 38n2, 40−46, 48, 210, 294 single, 93−94; strict (Jahn), 121,
fictivity, 157 121n12; weak (Jahn), 121, 121n12;
fiction: as a form of communication, zero (Genette), 115, 118n7, 120,
276, 298; etymological root of, 275; 122, 128−29
vs. nonfiction, 276−77, 279−80, focalizer, 93−94, 120, 122, 244; in film,
284, 287, 296; fictional present 173, 174n19, 174n20
(Cohn), 290, 298 (see also present- folk psychology, 164, 164n6, 181
tense narration and simultaneous folk theory of discourse, 151
narration) foreshadowing, 63, 65−66, 69, 70,
318   Subject Index

71n22, 73−75, 75n27, 77. See also historicism, 186, 203

prolepsis historiography, 9, 109, 269n11, 284. See
form (vs. content), 186−88, 192, 203, 237 also historical writing
frame (cognitive), 11, 11n13, 22, 59−69, hypothetical intentionalism, 17, 164,
71−72, 74−75, 77−78, 116−17, 120, 166−67, 169−70, 179, 181
124−26, 128, 147, 149, 168, 175,
237, 246, 256−57, 259−60, 263,
264n5, 270−71. See also schemata ideology, 2, 5, 8, 53−55, 119, 277
frame narrative, 61−73, 78 identity, 13−14, 19, 22, 40, 53, 55,
frame theory, 59−60, 61n10; contextual 100−101, 103, 172, 176, 179, 227,
(Emmot), 146, 148, 263 235, 241, 246, 249−50, 255−60; in
free indirect discourse, 36−37, 51−52, autobiography, 262−63, 265, 270
56, 97, 120−22, 158n14, 239, 245, immediacy, 115, 127−28, 168
249, 251, 282 indirect speech, 40n5
free indirect thought, 85, 97 in-group/out-group relations, 19, 235,
241, 246, 250
instance: narrating, 35, 37−39, 46−52,
gender, 2, 4, 7−8, 11, 15, 18, 21, 59n2, 55, 114; rhetorical model of, 36
188−89, 192, 200−202, 207, 251, intentional stance, 166−67, 169, 181
277 intentional fallacy, 166n9
genre, 53n12, 61−62, 65−67, 65n17, interior monologue, 46−47, 116,
74, 116, 118n8, 147, 153, 156, 120−22, 290. See also direct thought
189, 191, 237, 255, 257−59, 265, intermediality, 60, 66, 75, 78
267−68, 270−71, 276n3, 284; nar- interpretation, 45, 48, 49, 62, 110, 139,
rative, 8−9, 9n10, 20−21, 115, 260 159, 164−66, 168n11, 175, 178,
genre conventions, 109−10, 122 181, 236, 280, 298
genre distinction (Goethe), 114 intertitles, 168, 170−71, 171n16
Geschehen (Schmid), 107. See also event
Geschichte (Schmid), 107. See also
fabula, histoire, and story labeling, 242−43
Gricean Cooperative Principle, 175 langue (vs. parole) (Saussure), 6
group minds (Palmer), 84, 89 lesbianism, 187, 199. See also sapphic
life history research, 236−37
low-angle shot, 120
health and illness, 19, 239−41, 246−49 low-key illumination, 176n22
heteroglossia (Bahktin), 8, 190
heterosexual masterplot/heteronormativ-
ity, 7−8, 187, 200, 212n13 mediacy (Stanzel), 15−17, 21, 37,
high-angle shot, 121 39−40, 44, 46, 105−6, 111−18,
histoire (Benveniste) (vs. discours), 105, 125−30, 168. See also Mittelbarkeit
282. See also fabula, Geschichte, mediator (Girard), 16, 18−19, 206−9,
and story 213−17, 219−20, 223−28, 231. See
historical present tense, 143, 148, also rival
155−56, 290 medium, 8, 16−17, 36−37, 42, 46,
historical writing, 108. See also histori- 46n7, 50, 60, 70, 74, 106−7,
ography 110−13, 116, 119−20, 122, 124−28,
 Subject Index   319

139, 142n4, 158, 167, 169, 240, 210−11, 216, 218−19, 221−23,
260, 292n30 225−31, 277−78, 297−99; extradi-
memoir, 286−90 egetic, 202; extra-subjective,
memory, 19−20, 51, 122, 155, 174, 192, 227−29; intra-subjective, 227−29;
217−18, 249, 256, 262−66, 270−71, personalized, 210
290 narrating character, 49, 53, 211,
memory play, 47n8, 122n13 211n10, 212n14, 213, 216, 218,
mental model, 145, 146n8, 147 220−26, 223n24, 223n25, 228, 293
metalepsis, 48, 78, 148n10, 217, 291n1 narrating I (vs. experiencing I), 19,
metafiction, 14, 66, 283 147−48, 155, 235, 257. See also
metaphor, 5, 16, 36−37, 42−43, 48, narrating self
50−51, 55−56, 84, 129−30, 203, narrating self (vs. experiencing self),
218, 237, 243−44, 269, 269n11; 227, 244, 246, 249−50, 257. See
cinematic, 170−71, 171n15, also narrating I
178n26, 179n27 narration, 194, 202, 206, 207, 210, 218,
meta-referentiality, 60 229−31; act of, 222, 230; as mimetic
metonymy, 64n15, 87, 247 desire, 216−17; authorial (Stanzel),
mind-narrative nexus, 140, 155, 158−59 10n12, 44, 115−16, 119, 121, 123,
mirroring, 66, 72, 75 128, 168; autodiegetic (Genette),
mimesis (vs. diegesis) (Plato), 16, 36, 38, 38, 230; cinematic, 163−81; covert
41, 44−49, 51, 55, 130, 255. See (Chatman) (vs. overt), 114−16, 126,
also showing 128, 168−69, 251; dynamic of,
mimetic rivalry (Girard), 206, 211−13, 197; extradiegetic (Genette), 39−41,
219, 226−27 39n3, 40n5, 46, 48, 55, 68, 78,
mimicry, 207, 217, 220, 228 114, 123; etymological root of, 275;
mise en abyme, 16, 59−60, 63−69, 73, first−person (Stanzel), 38, 44−45,
75, 77, 78n29 53, 108, 115−16, 128, 156, 291;
mise en cadre, 16, 59−60, 63−75, homodiegetic (Genette) (vs. hetero-
77−79, 78n29 diegetic), 41, 46, 48, 55, 118n8,
mise en reflet/mise en série, 68−69, 75, 189, 258; heterodiegetic (Genette)
77−78 (vs. homodiegetic), 38−41, 48, 55,
Mittelbarkeit (Stanzel), 111−12, 116. See 84, 194−95, 201; intradiegetic (Gen-
also mediacy ette), 38−39, 46, 48, 55, 78, 188,
mode (Stanzel), 106; teller mode, 45, 197, 202; motivation for, 217, 221,
115, 117, 260; reflector mode, 223; of historical fiction, 40; overt
45−46, 106, 114−19, 117n7, 118n8, (Chatman) (vs. covert), 46, 115−16,
128, 169 126, 128, 168; simultaneous (Cohn),
Modernism, 107, 230, 260 282, 294 (see also fictional present
modes of reading narrative, 235, 237 and present-tense narration); third-
montage, 123 person, 38, 157n13, 158n14; unreli-
mood (Genette), 37 able, 120, 257; unreliable in film,
multiperspectivism, 94n2 171−74
narration (Genette), 206, 206n3
narrative: as report, 279; as sense-
narratee, 7, 10, 18−19, 188, 193, 197, making device, 234; conversational,
199, 199n9, 200−202, 206−7, 13, 239; embedded, 49, 102; first-
320   Subject Index

person, 44, 113, 115, 117n7, 118n8, narrative turn, 3

128, 294; history of, 190; ‘natural’ narrativity, 9, 16, 19, 60, 114, 150,
(oral), 239n1, 279; reflector-mode, 236, 256, 259−60, 263, 269, 271,
114–16, 117n7, 128, 169; rhetorical 297n32; different definitions of, 105
definition of, 278, 296; second-per- narrativization (Fludernik), 269
son, 19, 248; syntax, 237; third-per- narratologies: postclassical, 6−8, 11, 23,
son, 169; unnatural, 14, 14n15, 17, 277
175, 275n3, 279−80, 291, 297−99 narratology, 2n2; classical (structuralist),
narrative clauses (Labov and Waletzky), 1−4, 5−6, 6n7, 11, 58, 146, 267,
240 271, 276−77; cognitive, 9n9, 11−12,
narrative discourse (vs. story), 7, 13−14, 14, 22n19, 139, 158, 263, 270;
16−19, 36−40, 47−49, 53, 71, 85, deconstructive, 3, 58; diachronic, 13
88, 105−11, 111n4, 114−19, 122, (see also historical); feminist, 7; his-
124, 126−29, 139−40, 146, 148, torical, 6, 186 (see also diachronic);
151−53, 157−58, 164, 192, 241, ‘natural,’ 58, 234−35; neoclassi-
260, 262, 294; different definitions cal (Wolf), 79; postclassical, 1−6,
of, 105. See also syuzhet/sujet 11−12, 14, 16, 21−23, 58, 158−59,
narrative interviewing, 236 238, 256, 263, 277; second phase
narrative levels, 35, 37−39, 41−46, 59, of, 4−5, 15−23, 158−59; postco-
71, 77−78, 85, 105−7, 111, 114; lonial, 8; postmodernist, 14−15;
extradiegetic level (Genette), 39, 46, queer, 7, 18; rhetorical, 9−11,
68, 168, 249; intradiegetic/diegetic 35−56, 278−82; socionarratology,
level (Genette), 39, 67−68, 78, 249; 239; transmedial, 8−9, 17, 19, 158;
metadiegetic level (Genette), 38; unnatural, 14−15, 17, 275n3, 280
hypodiegetic level (Bal), 64, 66−68, narrator, 105−7, 112−16, 118, 122−23,
71−73, 78 124−26, 128, 143−44, 151, 153−54,
narrative mediation, 105−6, 112−13, 156−57, 202, 207, 210, 225,
115−18, 120, 122−30, 260; exter- 227−31, 244−50, 257−58, 275, 276,
nal/internal, 208−9, 214−16; action 279, 294, 298−99; autodiegetic,
(Fludernik), 126; experiencing (Flud- 207, 211n10, 219, 227, 230−31,
ernik), 126; reflecting (Fludernik), 260; cinematic, 9, 17, 107, 115,
126; telling (Fludernik), 126; view- 118, 128, 163−65, 168−69, 169n13,
ing (Fludernik), 126 172n17, 173n19, 181; covert vs.
narrative report, 105 overt (Chatman), 116, 126, 128,
narrative representation, 9, 15−16, 168; dramatic (Jahn), 9; engag-
35−37, 48, 55, 124 ing (Warhol), 7; external (extra-
narrative situation (Stanzel), 106, 113, heterodiegetic), 209−10; first-person
116, 128, 225−26 (see also typo- (Stanzel), 108, 276, 291; heterodi-
logical circle); authorial, 44, 117n7, egetic (Genette) (vs. homodiegetic),
128; figural, 44−45, 115−17, 117n7, 10n12, 41, 84, 38−39, 168, 169n14,
121; first-person, 44, 117n7, 118n8 194, 200, 209; homodiegetic (Gen-
narrative structure: same-sex; woman- ette) (vs. heterodiegetic), 10n12,
to-woman, 190 38−41, 46, 55, 118n8, 169n14,
narrative transmission, 17, 35−41, 189, 211n10, 258; homodiegetic
44−45, 48, 51, 55, 107, 110−11, personalized, 210; omniscient, 38,
113−14, 119, 125−26, 128 108, 117n7; personalized (Stanzel),
 Subject Index   321

210; voice-over, 9, 121, 126, 128, picture frame, 61−62, 75

158n14, 168, 171, 174n20 plot, 7, 65, 84, 100, 104, 105n1, 106−8,
narratorial persona, 114 110−11, 111n4, 119, 122−27, 129,
naturalization (Culler/Fludernik), 268, 188, 191−92, 194−201, 203, 212,
275 230, 237, 243, 247−48, 257, 259,
no-mediation thesis (Walsh), 17, 261, 292; dynamic of, 197
123−24, 130 point of view, 106, 117n7, 118−19, 121,
no-narrator theory (Banfield), 114, 123, 129
126−27. See also non-communica- point-of-view (POV) shot, 51, 174
tion polychrony, 148
non-communication, 282, 296−97, 299. polyphony, 54
See also no-narrator theory porn film, 165n7
non-diegetic inserts, 168, 168n12, 170 pornography, 188, 190−93, 200
non-diegetic music and sound, 168, positioning, 19, 154−55; social, 235,
168n12, 170, 176 250
non-natural, 61 possible-worlds theory, 2, 12, 59
novel, 209−10, 229; courtship, 188, postcolonialism, 11, 59, 78−79
193, 200; dialogue, 115; domestic postmodernism, 79, 123, 280
193, 199, 201; epistolary, 195, 197; postmodernity, 21
Gothic, 44n6, 49, 73; history of, pragmatics, 6, 12−13, 251n3
203; Modernist, 107; realist, 276n3; present-tense narration (Cohn), 38, 40.
postmodernist, 14; Victorian, See also fictional present and simul-
187−88, 201 taneous narration
prolepsis, 62. See also foreshadowing
protagonist, 18, 51, 106, 116, 121, 171,
omniscience, 45, 180, 276n3, 282 249, 291. See also character
oral narratives, 19, 235−37, 239, 241, psychoanalysis, 3−4, 18, 21, 211n9
245−46, 250−51, 259, 279. See also psychonarration, 85, 122. See also
oral storytelling thought report
oral storytelling (see also oral narra-
tives), 244, 279
overdetermined texts (Nielsen), 284, qualia, 17, 156. See also what it’s like
291−92, 295−96 queer, 3−4, 7−8, 11, 18, 21, 188, 192,
199n9, 200

painting, 9, 21, 63, 67, 73−75, 78−79,

126, 145 rapport, 244, 251
panfictionalism, 284 reader: implied, 10; real, 286
paratexts, 61−62, 66−67, 75; in film, reader-response theory, 18, 78
170; in written texts, 276, 281−82, realism, 187, 191, 260
284−85, 287−88, 290, 296 récit (Genette), 115, 206n3
parole (vs. langue) (Saussure), 6 recursiveness, 36, 42, 44, 55
person (Stanzel), 35, 37−41, 44−45 relevance theory, 251n3, 294, 296
perspective (Stanzel), 106, 113; limited, remediation, 111, 144, 158n14
45; external, 45 remedialization, 110−11, 125−28
phoneme/phone dichotomy, 109 repetition compulsion (Freud), 218, 230
322   Subject Index

ressentiment, 151 154, 158, 163, 171−72, 187−91,

rhetorical model, 10, 35−36, 40n5, 46 194, 196−97, 200, 206−7, 206n3,
rival (Girard), 206, 208, 213−19, 209−13, 215−17, 219, 223−31, 262,
223−29. See also mediator 265−66, 278−79, 286, 295. See also
Russian formalism, 2n2, 4, 106 fabula, histoire, and Geschichte
story (vs. plot) (Forster), 106−7
storyworld (Herman), 39−41, 85, 87,
sapphic, 197−98, 200−201; dialogic, 18, 98, 119, 130, 138n1, 139, 146−47,
188, 190, 201; dialogue, 191, 196, 146n8, 148n10, 149, 150−51,
200; form, 189, 202; literary history, 155−57, 158n14, 159, 216, 242,
187; narration/narrative, 189−92, 244−46, 248, 250, 276n3, 299. See
197; narrative layer, 189; (narrative) also diégèse and diegetic universe
structure, 191−92, 196, 199, 202. syuzhet/sujet (vs. fabula), 106, 110, 124.
See also lesbianism See also narrative discourse
schemata (cognitive), 11, 20, 61, 163,
263−64, 264n5. See also frame
screen universe (Souriau), 39 telling (vs. showing), 36−37, 62, 65, 69,
script (cognitive), 11, 11n13, 19, 20, 75, 113, 115−118, 193, 126−28,
256, 264, 264n5 130, 148, 155. See also diegesis
self vs. other, 268 tense (Genette), 107, 115
setting, 63, 65, 70, 108, 110, 123 text world theory, 146
sexuality: history of, 188, 190, 203 theory of mind, 97−99
shot-reverse shot, 120, 122 thought, 83, 90, 98; intermental
showing (vs. telling), 62−63, 65, 69, (Palmer), 16, 83−86, 88−102, 104;
74−75, 116, 163, 169. See also intramental (Palmer), 16, 83−84,
mimesis 91−97, 99−103
signifying (Gates), 8 thought report, 85, 89, 158n14. See also
slant (vs. filter) (Chatman), 107, 235, psychonarration
244−46, 250 temporality 123, 191
social science research methods: qualita- transmediality, 9, 60, 67, 75
tive, 235; quantitative, 235 typological circle (Stanzel), 45. See also
social sciences, 234−35, 238−39, 241, narrative situations
250
sociolinguistic narrative analysis, 235,
237 uncanny (das Unheimliche) (Freud), 213,
soliloquy, 121−22 292
speech act, 154, 192; indirect, 40n5; uncanny (Todorov), 177n25
theory, 3, 12, 109 underreading (vs. overreading), 143;
stack, 42−43 underdetermined texts (Nielsen),
story/discourse dichotomy, 13−14, 284−91, 295−96
16−19, 106−7, 109, 119, 127 unnatural, 14−15, 175, 291, 297; his-
story (vs. narrative discourse), 7−9, 18, torical development of, 14n15
36−38, 43, 49, 62−64, 66, 69−73, unnatural narration, 296−99
83, 85, 87, 102, 105−15, 118−19, unreliability, 13−14, 173n18, 173n19,
121, 123−25, 127−29, 146−47, 151, 195; cinematic, 120, 171−74, 181
 Subject Index   323

vocalization, 37 what it’s like, 140, 156−57. See also

voice (Genette), 13−16, 21, 35−37, qualia
41, 44, 47−56, 107, 115, 118−19, wipe, 168
128−30, 189, 192−93, 197, 199,
257; as idiom, 36, 44, 44n6, 48−56;
as instance, 36−37, 48−49, 52−56; you-narrative, 235, 248−49
as interpellation, 36, 52−56

zoom, 52n11, 120, 122

we-narration, 8, 213, 226

T h e o r y a n d I n t e r p r e t a ti o n o f N a r r a ti v e
James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, Series Editors

Because the series editors believe that the most significant work in narrative stud-
ies today contributes both to our knowledge of specific narratives and to our
understanding of narrative in general, studies in the series typically offer interpreta-
tions of individual narratives and address significant theoretical issues underlying
those interpretations. The series does not privilege one critical perspective but is open
to work from any strong theoretical position.

Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction: Narratives of Cultural Remission

Leona Toker

Techniques for Living: Fiction and Theory in the Work of Christine Brooke-Rose
Karen R. Lawrence

Tabloid, Inc.: Crimes, Newspapers, Narratives

V. Penelope Pelizzon and Nancy M. West

Narrative Means, Lyric Ends: Temporality in the Nineteenth-Century British Long Poem
Monique R. Morgan

Understanding Nationalism: On Narrative, Cognitive Science, and Identity

Patrick Colm Hogan

Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre

Edited by Jakob Lothe, Jeremy Hawthorn, James Phelan

The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction

Richard Walsh

Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative

James Phelan

Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction

Brian Richardson

Narrative Causalities
Emma Kafalenos

Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel

Lisa Zunshine

I Know That You Know That I Know: Narrating Subjects from Moll Flanders to Marnie
George Butte
Bloodscripts: Writing the Violent Subject
Elana Gomel

Surprised by Shame: Dostoevsky’s Liars and Narrative Exposure

Deborah A. Martinsen

Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms

Robyn R. Warhol

Politics, Persuasion, and Pragmatism: A Rhetoric of Feminist Utopian Fiction

Ellen Peel

Telling Tales: Gender and Narrative Form in Victorian Literature and Culture
Elizabeth Langland

Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames

Edited by Brian Richardson

Breaking the Frame: Metalepsis and the Construction of the Subject

Debra Malina

Invisible Author: Last Essays

Christine Brooke-Rose

Ordinary Pleasures: Couples, Conversation, and Comedy

Kay Young

Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis

Edited by David Herman

Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation

Peter J. Rabinowitz

Matters of Fact: Reading Nonfiction over the Edge

Daniel W. Lehman

The Progress of Romance: Literary Historiography and the Gothic Novel

David H. Richter

A Glance Beyond Doubt: Narration, Representation, Subjectivity

Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan

Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology

James Phelan

Misreading Jane Eyre: A Postformalist Paradigm

Jerome Beaty

Psychological Politics of the American Dream: The Commodification of Subjectivity in Twen-

tieth-Century American Literature
Lois Tyson

Understanding Narrative
Edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz
Framing Anna Karenina: Tolstoy, the Woman Question, and the Victorian Novel
Amy Mandelker

Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel

Robyn R. Warhol

Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression, and the Interpretation of Narrative
James Phelan