Fictions of Discourse: Reading Narrative Theory by Patrick O'Neill (review)

154 LETTERS IN CANADA 1994 Patrick O'Neill. Fictions of Discourse: Reading Narrative Theory University of Toronto Press. x, 188. $35.00 cloth Like any treatise on narratology, Fictions of Discourse is predicated on an enabling distinction,between story (narrative content) and discourse (narrative presentation), between the what of the story and the how of its telling. Because Patrick O'Neill is structuralist enough to appreciate the indispensability of this distinction and poststructuralist enough to appreciate the ludic or gamelike qualities of narrative as a semiotic system, he subscribes to what he calls the Zeno Principle, 'the principle that narrative as a discursive system is always potentially subversive both of the story it ostensibly reconstructs and of its own telling of that story.' From the very beginning, then, O'Neill is dancing through the minefield of, on the one side, the linguistic determinism implicit in structuralism's view of the text as sign system written by intertextual forces beyond the author's conscious control and, on the other side, the linguistic indeterminacy implicit in poststructuralism's view of the text as a free play of endless signification. If O'Neill is less than totally successful in emerging unscathed, it is not for lack of fancy footwork. O'Neill begins his narratological project by delineating the four levels on which his narrative theory operates. The first level is story, what 'really' happened, a chronological sequence of narrative events reconstructed and abstracted from the text. The second level is text, how what happened is told to the reader; simply speaking, text comprises the words on the page, which are themselves the inferred result of decisions made on the level of narration. The third level is narration, the inferred cause of the words on the page reconstructed and abstracted from the text; while the text is the product of authorial decisions, narration is the process concerning who is speaking and who is looking. The fourth level is textuality, the interactive process of the text's production by an author and its reception by a reader; textuality encompasses the interrelationships among what really happened, how what really happened is told, and who does the telling. The innovation of this quaternary model is the positing of this fourth level. Whereas classical narratology focuses on intratextual communication between fictional narrators (addressers) and their narratees (addressees ), it is silent about the extratextual communication between authors and readers. Indeed, authors disappear into an all-absorbent intertextual quicksand, while readers are merely the sites where various codes and conventions intersect. His model in place, O'Neill goes on to provide a useful introduction to key concepts in the discipline, concepts derived in the main from the work of Gerard Genette. O'Neill distinguishes between story-time (the temporal units of which are days, months, and years) and discourse-time (the spatial units of which are words, lines, and pages). Following HUMANITIES 155 Genette, he discusses order (when), duration (how long), and frequency (how often). Central to order are the concepts of analepsis (flashback) and prolepsis (flashforward). Central to duration is discur~ive speed, and O'Neill helpfully reviews Genette's five canonical tempos - ellipsis, summary, scene, stretch or slow motion, and pause. These tempos move from maximum to minimum discursive speed, scene being the point at which story-time and discourse-time are theoretically equal. Central to frequency is the contrast between the number of times an event 'really' happened and the number of times it is narrated; frequency may be singulative (one event, one account), repetitive (more than one narrative account of an event), iterative (only one narrative account of an event that happened more than once), and irregular (no symmetrical correspondence between accounts and events). O'Neill negotiates this dense conceptual terrain masterfully, providing a lucid exposition of how actors, place, and story-time are transformed into characters, setting, and discourse-time. Central to O'Neill is the contention that all narrative is compound discourse, that there is no undivided narrative voice; this he calls the ventriloquism effect. Here the key distinction is between diegetic and mimetic narration, between telling and showing, summary and scene. Omniscient narration is confined to a third-person viewpoint and mixes summary...