Notes de cours
S4 - Litté Britannique (Narrative Fiction)
- Cours
- Littérature Britannique
- Établissement
- Bretagne Occidentale (UBO)
Lecture notes of 5 pages for the course Littérature Britannique at UBO
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NARRATIVE FICTION, RIMMON-KENANI. INTRO: WHAT DOES ‘ NARRATIVE FICTION’ EXACTLY MEAN ?
Narrative fiction is something that connects narration and fiction.
A first element of definition would be to say that narrative fiction is “the narration of the
succession of fictional events”, and it always involves 3 major elements: story, text and
narration (=histoire, récit et narration).
- Story refers to the narrated events, regardless of “their disposition in the text and
reconstructed in their chronological order together with the participants in these events”.
The same story can also be told through a text (with words), a film (with images), a ballet
(with gestures), etc. but it would be the same story.
- A text is a spoken or written discourse which undertakes the telling of these events.
The text is what is read. All the items or events are seen through a focalizer / a prism
/ a perspective. The eyes of the one who visualizes theses events is usually referred to
as a narrator-focalizer (Ex: in Thomas Hardy’s work). But we can also have a
character-focalizer; the events are seen through a character’s perspective.
- Narration is what is called “the act or process of production of the text”. Narration
involves 2 protagonists at least; the narrator (the one who tells the story) and the
narratee (the one who receives the story).
II. STORY
i. Story and events
The story is always part of a larger construct; the fictional reality, which can also be called the
representated world; in which the characters of the story are supposed to be living, and the
events to take place.
A story is organized along the access of temporal organization. It can also be divided into
storylines, each restricted to one set of individuals. Usually we talk about a main storyline,
and subsidiary storylines (=plot).
A story needs a combination of temporal succession and causality. (! “Roses are red. Violets
are blue. Sugar is sweet. And so are you.” isn’t a story = something is told to you, but there is no
story.)
About the difference between story and plot, E. M. Forster says in Aspects of the Novel that “We
have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also
a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. ‘The king died, and then the queen
died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot.”
We can replace ‘story’ by the terms ‘diegesis, ’representative reality’ or ’fictive reality’.
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, ii. Story and characters
A character is fictive, it also is a construct put together by the reader, thanks to various
indications scattered throughout the text. One of the most important items in the creation of a
character is its name; it gives existence and individuality, it transforms the character into a
subject.
Characters can be classified after Forster’s distinctions; that is to say if they are flat or round
characters. Three elements can be taken onto account: complexity, development/evolution
and access to ‘inner-life’.
- Complexity: we can have very different types of characters in a text: Allegorical figures
for example, who correspond to a concept or an idea yet those characters might not be
able to involve (Ex: figure of death in black). A caricature is a flat character which is not
complex.
- Development: a flat character does not evolve. A round character on the contrary, is a
character that involves/changes throughout the story. (! There are characters which are
flat in the beginning, and then round! )
- Access to inner-life Sometimes the readers access the character’s consciousness (Ex.
Poe’s short stories). Or in other cases, there are characters to which we never access.
What is a bit more complex is that sometimes you have access to a character inner-mind
thanks to a filter which can be that of a character or of the author (=feelings).
III. TEXT
i. Text and time
Time and narrative fiction can be defined as the relation of chronology between story and time
which means that story time is different from text time.
- Story time is conceived as a linear succession of events conventional construct.
- Text time is one-directional and irreversible, because it follows the process of reading;
you can only read one way.
You have a defined order of linguistic elements in a text, which can be opposed to linearity in
story time = multi-linearity. Two main elements have to be taken into accounts: order and
duration.
- Order concerns the discrepancies (=écarts) between story time and text time. For
example you can have flash-back and retrospection, or foreshadowing and
anticipation.
Analepsis = a narration of a story event at a point in the text after later
events have been told.
Prolepsis = a narration of a story event at a point before earlier events have
been mentioned.
- Duration: Sometimes there is no norm for duration. (Sometimes story coincide with
text-time but it is quiet rare.) In fact it depends on the reading-time. Conventionally,
dialog is the closest you can get to that equivalence between story-time and text-time. In
fact, duration is measured by the relation between duration in the story
(calendar/clock-measured) and the length of the time (in lines or pages) devoted to it.
So it is a temporal-spatial relationship.
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, ii. Pace and speed
There is an acceleration when a short segment of the text is telling about a long period of the
story. (Ex.: It took him 30 years to finish his project.)
There is a deceleration when a long segment of the text covers a short period of the story.
Maximum speed is an ellipsis (=omission): 0 temporal space for some story duration.
Minimum speed is a descriptive or meditative pause (Ex. in ’Far From the Madding Crowd’).
The summary or report is when the pace (=rapidité/vitesse) is accelerated through textual
condensation.
In a scene (in theater), story duration and text duration are conventionally considered as the
same.
iii. Text and characterization
1) Direct definition of the ‘telling mode’
It involves an authoritative voice which does not necessarily mean the author; it can also be the
narrator. When you have an explicit definition of the character given in the text, it is often
supported by the authority of the narrator.
2) Indirect definition of the ‘telling mode’
It usually operates through action, speech, external appearance and environment and is usually
associated with the showing mode. It displays (=met en valeur) or exemplifies an aspect which
can be an action typical of the character, an action he should or should not do, a formal speech
connected with social origins/a turn of mind/a profession or an element linked with his physical
appearance or environment (Ex.: ne pas dire « BCBG », mais décrire leur façon de s’habiller.).
3) Reinforcement by analogy or contrast
Examples: - An analogous landscape is when you have an analogy between the landscape
and the character (Ex.: Gabriel at the very beginning of the novel).
- Analogous names (Oak = chêne = tree, nature / Gabriel = angel) is when the
name of the character gives us information about him.
iv. Text and focalization
Focalization is not the same as narration; the story is always presented in the text through
the mediation of some ‘prism’ or ‘angle of vision’ expressed in words by the narrator but this
angle of vision is not the same as point of view.
In focalization there is a cognitive, emotive and ideological orientation = ‘Who sees?’ is the
question that will give you the focalizer, whereas ‘Who speaks?’ will indicates you who the
narrator is. The narrator is telling you about what the character thinks, what the character
sees…
Types of focalization: Focalization could be internal or external to the stories.
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