Gérard Genette’s Evolving Narrative Poetics

Author of what is perhaps the most perennial treatise of the early years of narratology and whose influence is among the most pervasive, Gérard Genette produced a narrative theory in a context that rendered that theory unique. Appearing at a time when structural linguistics, a shaky doctrine at best, was called on to act as a “pilot science” for the social sciences, Genette’s Narrative Discourse filled a number of gaps in the emerging approach to the study of narrative. Where other studies were focused largely on devising formal models of the “story” level, Narrative Discourse turned toward the signifying level, “discourse.” Where an unbridged territory lay between the deeper levels and the surface level, Narrative Discourse explored the various relations between the narrated story, the signifying narrative text and the narrating act. And where the new paradigms were neglectful of the more traditional questions of narrative theory—point of view, narrator-character discourse, narrative time, the status of the narrator—Narrative Discourse integrated them into the narratological debate. Not the least of its achievements was to have provided an innovative terminology for narrative devices, a terminology which, for instance, adopted the term “diegesis” from film theory in order to mark off the presence or absence of the narrator in the narrated world (homodiegetic vs. heterodiegetic) from the relation of the narrating act to the narrated events (extradiegetic vs. intradiegetic), or, to take another example, a terminology that drew attention to iterative narration (saying one time what occurred several times) as a form of syllepsis that shares with analepsis and prolepsis the feature of “taking together.” All in all, the achievement of Narrative Discourse was to set a new standard by providing a comprehensive and well-articulated approach to describing and analyzing the texture of narrative as a self-regulating system.

Many of the terms inaugurated by Genette have long been household words of the theoretical and critical discourse about narrative, even among paradigms that do not consciously adhere to his system. Although this theory together with its terminology and the welcome synthetic treatment of familiar narrative devices and techniques offered by Narrative Discourse have contributed to the book’s success, the theory and its application have been submitted to various critiques. In part, these critiques have resulted from but also contributed to a certain codification of the system, as revealed in school manuals and elsewhere by use of its terminology as mere labels, either devoid of its theoretical import, misapplied to the textual organization it is meant to describe, or appropriated in ways that are incompatible with its original intent.

The reply to these critiques came with the publication of Narrative Discourse Revisited in 1983. Rather than summarize the pros and cons of the various arguments put forth, what I would like to point out here is that a number of the questions debated in this book and carried on by other researchers in other forums might never have been raised, or they would have been approached from a different angle, had Narrative Discourse never appeared. What would the state of research on perspective and point of view be today had Genette, in introducing the notion of focalization, not drawn a distinction between “who sees?” and “who speaks?” Contested, modified and reformulated, Genette’s focalization in fact opened up new lines of investigation: re-conceptualizing of the relations between speaker and focalizer thanks to fine-grained linguistic analyses of the expression of subjectivity; the necessity of accounting for focalization at both micro- and macro-level; the impact of focalization that varies within a single sentence; etc. Another example of a theoretical issue for which the stage was set by Genette but whose ramifications were to be explored in other research contexts is voice. Finding grammatical person a questionable criterion by which to classify narrators and thus adopting the opposition homodiegetic/ heterodiegetic, which allows for degrees of narrator presence in the story, he identified a space for borderline, mixed and ambiguous narrators (Revisited 104). It was some years later (in 1994) that Monika Fludernik, in a special issue of Style devoted to second-person narrative, took...