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INTRODUCTION TO NARRATOLOGY NARRATOLOGY: a term used since 1969 to denote the branch of literary study devoted to the analysis of narration, and, more specifically, of forms of narration and varieties of narrator. NARRATIVE: a telling of some true or fictitious event or connected sequence of events, recounted by a narrator to a narratee. It consists of a set of events (the story) recounted in the process of narration (discourse); the events are selected and arranged in a particular order (Plot). NARRATOR: one who tells, or is assumed to be telling the story in a given narrative, i.e. the imagined voice transmitting the story. NARATEE: the imagined person whom the narrator is assumed to be addressing in a given narrative. ELEMENTS OF ANALYSIS: PLOT; SETTING/SPACE; TIME; CHARACTER; FOCALISATION/POINT OF VIEW. Ioana Mohor-Ivan English Literature: From the Later Renaissance to the Rise of Romanticism 87

1. PLOT The pattern of events and situations in a narrative, as selected and arranged both to emphasise relationships (usually cause and effect) between incidents and to elicit a particular kind of interest in the reader (through surprise or suspense.) A simpler definition would be: the authors design for a novel, in which the story plays a part, as well as the authors choice of language and imagery. The concept of plot was first developed by the Greek philosopher, Aristotle, to describe the properties of drama. His formulation introduced concepts such as the protagonist, or hero, whose fate is the focus of the audiences attention. The hero may be in conflict with an antagonist in the form of a human opponent or of some abstract concept such as fate; or the conflict may be in his own mind. As the plot progresses, it arouses expectations in the reader about the future course of events and how characters will respond to them. A concerned uncertainty about what is going to happen is known as suspense. If what in fact happens violates the readers expectations, it is known as surprise. A plot has unity of action if it is perceived by the reader as a complete and ordered structure of actions, directed towards the intended effect, in which none of the component part (incidents) is unnecessary. Aristotle claimed that it does not constitute a unified plot to present a series of episodes which are strung together because they happen to a single character. Many picaresque narratives, nevertheless, such as Defoes Moll Flanders, have held the interest of the readers for centuries with such an episodic plot structure. A successful development which Aristotle did not foresee is the type of structural unity that can be achieved with double plots, where a subplot - a second story that is complete and interesting in its own right - is introduced to broaden our perspective on the main plot and to enhance rather than diffuse the overall effect. The subplot may have either the relationship of analogy to the main plot, or of counterpoint against it. The order of a unified plot, as Aristotle pointed out, is a continuous sequence of beginning, middle, and end, and develops through the stages of exposition, amplification, climax, denouement. In many plots the denouement involves a reversal in the heros fortunes, which frequently depends on a discovery, i.e. the recognition by the protagonist of something of great importance hitherto unknown to him or to her. Novelists in particular have at times tried to subvert or ignore the reader's expectation of a causally linked story with a clear beginning, middle, and end, with no loose ends. James Joyce and Virginia Woolf wrote novels that explore the minutiae of a character's experience, rather than telling a tale. However, the tradition that the Ioana Mohor-Ivan English Literature: From the Later Renaissance to the Rise of Romanticism 88

novel must tell a story, whatever else it may do, survives for the most part intact. English novelist E M Forster, in Aspects of the Novel, defined it thus: The king died and then the queen died. The king died and then the queen died of grief at the king's death. The first is the beginning of a series of events; the second is the beginning of a plot. 2. SETTING/SPACE Setting refers to the part which may be played by location or milieu or historical time in the design of the novel. This is most commonly a reflective or supporting role; it underlines or enhances the nature of the action or the qualities of the characters which form the substance of the novels. Setting may be a means of placing a character in society which allows scope for the action his nature is capable of, or it may generate an atmosphere which has a significant function in the plot. In simple terms, the relations between setting on the one hand and character and events on the other, may be causal, or analogical: features of the setting may be either cause and effect of how characters are and behave; or, more by way of reinforcement and symbolic congruence, a setting may be like a character or characters in some respects. While the examples above tend towards the broadly personifactory, the more conventional, undramatised settings play an important part in promoting verisimilitude and indirect characterization. 3. TIME The amount of time which is allotted in the narrative to the various elements of the story is determined with respect to the amount of time which these elements take up in the story. One must distinguish here between the moment in history when the story is supposed to take place, and the time-span covered by the story, i.e. the fictional time taken up by the action (e.g. a whole generation, a single day.) The most influential theorist of fictional time is Gerard Genette, who isolates three aspects of temporal manipulation or articulation in the movement from story to narrative/text: a) order (refers to the relations between the assumed sequence of events in the story and their actual order of presentation in the text.) Any departures in the order of presentation in the text from the order in which events evidently occurred in the story are termed anachronies, i.e. any chunk of text that is told at a point which is earlier or later than its natural or logical position in the event sequence. They naturally divide into flashbacks and flashforwards. The first (called analepses by Genette) is an achronological movement back in time, so that a chronologically earlier incident is related later in the text; the second (prolepses)is an achronological movement forward in time so that a future event is Ioana Mohor-Ivan English Literature: From the Later Renaissance to the Rise of Romanticism 89

related textually before its time. The two types of anachrony entailed by them are called correspondingly: retroversions and anticipations. b) Duration (concerns the relations between the extent of time that events are supposed to have actually taken up, and the amount of text devoted to presenting those same events.) Maximum speed is said to constitute ellipsis (no text space is spent on a piece of story duration); the opposite situation is a descriptive pause (text without story duration.) Related terms are summary and scene. In summary the pace is accelerated through a textual compression of a given story period into a relatively short statement of its main features. In scene, story and text duration are conventionally considered identical (e.g. purely dialogue passages.) c) Frequency (how often something happens in story compared with how often it is narrated in text.)it may be: singulative (telling n times what happened n times); repetitive (telling n times what happened once); iterative (telling once what happened n times.) 4. CHARACTER A pe rsonage in a narrative (or dramatic work): it is normally expected of a novel that it should have at least one character, and preferable several characters shown in processes of change and social relationship. CHARACTERIZATION: the representation of persons in narrative and dramatic works. It may include direct methods (narrative), like the attribution of qualities in description or commentary, and indirect (or dramatic) methods inviting the reader to infer qualities from characters actions, speech or appearance. A distinction was made by Forster made between FLAT and TWODIMENSIONAL characters (which are simple and unchanging) and ROUND characters which are complex, dynamic (i.e. subject to development) and less predictable. Another classification was advanced by W.J. Harvey (Character and the Novel), including protagonists, background figures, intermediate figures. POINT OF VIEW/ FOCALISATION POI NT OF VIEW: The way a story gets told - the mode or perspective established by the author by means of which the reader is presented with the characters, actions, setting, and events that constitute the narrative in a work of fiction. A broad division is established between THIRD-PERSON and FIRST-PERSON narratives. In a third-person narrative, the narrator is someone outside the story proper, who refers to all the characters in the story by name, or as he, she, they. In a first person narrative, the narrator speaks as I, and is himself a participant in the story. a) Third-person points of view: 1) the OMNISCIENT point of view: the convention in a work of fiction that the narrator knows everything that needs to be known Ioana Mohor-Ivan English Literature: From the Later Renaissance to the Rise of Romanticism 90

about the agents and the events; is free to move at will in time and place, to shift from character to character, and to report (or conceal) their speech and actions; and also that the narrator has privileged access to the characters thoughts and feelings and motives, as well as to their overt speech and actions. Within this mode, the narrator may be INTRUSIVE (not only reports, but freely comments on and evaluates the actions and motives of the characters, and sometimes expresses personal views about human life in general: e.g. Dickens and Hardy), or UNINTRUSIVE (IMPERSONAL or OBJECTIVE) (i.e. describes, reports, or shows the action in dramatic scenes without introducing his own comments or judgements, e.g. Hemingway.) 2) the LIMITED point of view: the narrator tells the story in the third-person, but within the confines of what is experienced, thought, felt by a single character (or at the most by very few characters) within the story. Henry James, who refined this mode, described such a selected character as his focus or mirror, or centre of consciousness. In a number of Jamess later works all the events and actions are represented as they unfold before and filter to the reader through the particular awareness of one of his characters. Later writers developed this technique into STREAM-OF-CONSCIOUSNESS narration, in which we are presented with outer observations only as they impinge on the current of thought, memory, feelings, and associations which constitute the observers awareness (e.g. Joyce, Virgina Woolf.) b) First-person points of view: This mode naturally limits the point of view to what the first-person narrator knows, experience, infers, or can find out by talking to other characters. We distinguish between the narrative I who is a fortuitous witness of the matters he relates, or who is a minor or peripheral participant in the story, or who is himself or herself the central character in the story (e.g. Mark Twain, Salinger.) F OCALISATION: Term used in narratology, covering broadly the same semantic sphere as point of view (i.e. the interpretation of the text as grounded, or anchored, coming from a particular speaker at a particular place at a particular time.)The basic contrast is established between external/internal focalisation. External focalisation occurs when the focalisation is from an orientation outside the story (i.e. the orientation is not associable with that of any character within the text.) Internal focalisation occurs inside the represented events, and involves a character-focaliser.