What Do Temporal Antinomies Do to the Story-Discourse Distinction?: A Reply to Brian Richardson's Response

Brian Richardson's essays on the challenge that temporal antinomies present to the story-discourse distinction are insightful and thought-provoking. In "Defense and Challenge: Reflections on the Relation Between Story and Discourse," I discussed Richardson's "'Time is out of Joint'" and "Denarration in Fiction" and argued that temporal antinomies do not always present a real problem to the distinction in question. In his response to my essay, Richardson offers a further consideration of the issue, one that allows me to clarify some parts of my argument.

Richardson's response can be classified into three parts, the first of which focuses on "the contradictory chronology" of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (234). In that play, four days pass in the human city, while, at the same time, one night passes in the fairies' wood a few miles away. In "'Time is out of Joint,'" Richardson used this case to illustrate plays that "resist or even preclude" the distinction "between the order of a story's events and the order in which they appear in the narrative" (299). In his response, Richardson agrees with me on the point that we can reconstitute a story from the text, but he still asserts that such a "dual" story with two different chronologies "problematizes or compromises Genette's conception of temporal order" (234). Now, first of all, it should be noted that what we are facing is not a matter of order but a matter of duration (Genette). Given the fact that the two chronologies are, in Richardson's words, "internally consistent," we can, if we choose, establish a proportional relation between them. Since "one night in the fairies' wood" = "four days in the human city," if one hour passes in the wood, then approximately eight hours pass in the city. To extend this reasoning, if it takes, say, five lines to narrate (or ten minutes on the stage to perform) one hour in the wood, then we will have the formula: discourse time = five lines (or ten minutes), story time = one hour in the wood and eight hours in the city. What is at issue here is not the story-discourse distinction, but the concept of story time itself. It is true that Genette has mainly focused on stories with one chronology, but there is no fundamental incompatibility between his general principles and the abnormal time scheme of Shakespeare's play, even as the play indicates that the concept of story time needs to be extended to accommodate stories with more than one "internally consistent" timeline.

It should be noted that my conception of "mimesis" is broader than Richardson's. As discussed in "Defense and Challenge," a narrative can mime a fantastic or absurd "textual reference world" (Ryan 24-25), as in the case of the dual timeline in A Midsummer Night's Dream. What is said about A Midsummer Night's Dream applies to some of the narratives discussed in Richardson's "Beyond Story and Discourse." In these narratives, the story-discourse distinction is still applicable and the temporal analysis will be complex rather than straightforward, calling for the establishment of proportional relations, sometimes even new analytical categories. In such narratives, that is to say, the relation between story time and discourse time is only more complicated, not really impossible to determine.

The second part of Richardson's response centers on La Jalousie by Alain Robbe-Grillet, who, as quoted by Richardson, unequivocally states that he was merely playing with "the sentences" in terms of the chronology of the novel. In "Defense and Challenge," I made it clear that "the distinction between story and discourse will collapse only when a work is neither explicitly nor implicitly mimetic, when we no longer make any effort to find out 'what really happened,' when we attribute the impossibility of determining story facts (including fantastic or absurd story facts...