Comics and Narration

Chapter Five. The Question of the Narrator

79 Chapter Five The Question of the Narrator “In literature, things are not recounted because they happen; they happen because they are recounted.” —Alberto Manguel, L’Angoisse du lecteur [The Anxiety of the Reader]1 I consciously and deliberately left aside the question of “different instances of enunciation” in the first volume of The System of Comics.2 I will now introduce it here. Moreover, it has to be said that up until now, comics theory has had very little to say on the subject. This near-silence may be read either as an acknowledgement of the difficulty of the question when applied to the Ninth Art, or as a sign that it has not so far been deemed to be of primary importance. 5.1 instanCes oF enunCiation in the graphiC narrative It is well-known that the narrator—the teller of the story, the source responsible for the enunciation of the narrative discourse—is a key concept in literary narratology , which takes great care to distinguish it from the real-life author. The narrator is an instance constructed by the text. The narratological theories that have so far been put forward, in France and elsewhere, disagree over a central issue. Some maintain that there can be no story without a narrator, and that any such hypothesis is impossible, unthinkable. Within this perspective, story and narration are, then, more or less synonymous, or at least presuppose each other. In the view of Sylvie Patron,3 these “type one narratologies” (at the front rank of which is classic French narratology, as exemplified by Tzvetan Todorov, Gérard Genette, or Paul Ricoeur) adhere to a communications theory model of the nar- 80 the Question of the narrator rative, that is to say they consider that the story is necessarily and in every case a message delivered by an enunciator to a recipient. This interpretation is open to question, however, if the author can be considered as the emitter of the “message .” I do not see any automatic link between the approach to narrative within a communications theory framework and the postulation of the presence of a narrator. Establishing that link in fact demands a conceptual leap. Other theories allow that some stories seem to tell themselves, stories in which no trace can be found of the intervention of any narrator and therefore argue that there are no grounds for decreeing that there must be one. It follows that the existence of a narrator, rather than being assumed as a matter of principle, can only be deduced from the observation of a certain number of markers of narration discernable in the text. The narrator, whether regarded as a compulsory agent or as optional, is defined in every case as an intermediary between the story and the reader, an instance that expresses a point of view on the events recounted. This point of view is referred to by Todorov as a vision, by Genette as a focalization, by Franz Karl Stanzel as a Mittelbarkeit (an indirect transmission, or mediacy), and by Ann Banfield as a subjectivity. Can narratological theories, initially conceived to account for literary texts, be extrapolated to domains not based on writing? Film theorists were the first to attempt this, but, there too, the question of the narrator is contentious. While most film semiologists (particularly André Gaudreault, François Jost, André Gardies, Jacques Aumont) have adopted the following credo: “there is no story without a narrator,” others (such as Christian Metz, Raymond Bellour, Gilles Deleuze and, following him, André Parente) have freed themselves, in different ways, from this tenet of poststructuralist semiological orthodoxy. In any case, no extrapolation from literary narratology can be envisaged unless the concepts are revised. Given that the “explicit traces of the narrator” identified in literary works were necessarily linguistic traces, an author such as Schaeffer, for example (like Todorov before him), came to the conclusion that “the application of the technical notion of ‘narration’ should be restricted to the verbal sphere.”4 If one wishes to pose the question of the cinematic narrator, it is, then, important to arrive at a different definition of this “technical notion” by identifying specific markers of cinematic enunciation. Idem for comic art. In other words, I do not believe in the possibility of establishing a general science of narratology that would be valid across all types of narratives in whatever medium. I believe that the issue of the narrator can legitimately be raised in rela- [3.15.235.196] Project...