On Narrativity

On Narrativity
Author(s): Algirdas Julien Greimas, Paul Ricoeur, Paul Perron and Frank Collins
Reviewed work(s):
Source: New Literary History, Vol. 20, No. 3, Greimassian Semiotics (Spring, 1989), pp. 551-
562
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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On N arrativity*
AI gird as Julien Greimas and Paul Ricoeur
R
ICOEUR: It is a pleasure to share once again a discussion session
with Professor Greimas. Our paths have often crossed over
the years and our friendship has increased along with these
exchanges. Let me first say how my own agenda led me not only to
cross Greimas's path but also led me along the same road with him.
Coming from the disciplines of phenomenology and hermeneutics, I
was first interested in the way semiotics responds to the aporias of
hermeneutics, which is fundamentally based on the notion of preun-
derstanding that is necessary before scientific discourse on literature
and more specifically on narrative can be elaborated.
My initial conviction was, and to a large extent still is, that we have
a first mode of understanding narrative configuration before having
the slightest notion about semiotics. When linguists speak of pho-
nemes they are dealing with objects that have no social or institutional
existence. Narratives, by contrast, already have their social functions,
and they are understood in a certain way in social intercourse among
writers, narrators, readers, and speakers, for example. Therefore,
this first order intelligibility, if I may so call it, has in a sense its own
rules which are, if not thought out, at least understood. The best
document concerning this type of understanding prior to any semi-
otics is provided by Aristotle's Poetics, which has a very articulate
system of categories that ignores the difference between deep struc-
tures and surface structures. Aristotle speaks of the "mythos" as the
configuration of incidence in the story and uses the term "sustasis" to
refer to a sort of system of events. But the kind of intelligibility linked
to our acquaintance with the way stories are plotted is closer to what
Aristotle in the rest of his work called "forensis," that is to say, prac-
tical intelligence, which is closer to the way we use our intelligence in
ethical and political matters than it is to the kind of episteme that
functions in physical and social sciences at their systematic level.
* This discussion was the closing session of a colloquium on the "Universals of
Narrativity" held at Victoria College, University of Toronto, on June 17, 1984 during
the Fifth International Summer Institute for Semiotic and Structural Studies.
552 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
My first approach to semiotics was therefore to consider the kind of
rationality it introduced in this field as being a second-order rational-
ity that has as its object not narratives themselves but the preunder-
standing we have of them. Hence, I would say that the rationality at
work in semiotics derives from this first-order intelligibility, without
being subordinated to it, for it has its own function precisely because
it introduces a new kind of rationality into this first-order intelligence
and understanding. This can be compared to what happens in the
field of history, where there is a sense of belonging, a tradition of
having expectations of the future. Thus, there is a kind of inner
intelligence, an intelligibility of the historicality that characterizes us.
But when historians bring their rules of explanation to bear on a
topic, an inquiry and a dialectic is introduced between first-order
intelligibility, the intelligibility of being historical, and historiography,
the writing of history.
My main theme would therefore be that to explain more is to un-
derstand better, and it is in the exchange between understanding
better and explaining more that semiotics makes sense for me. It
increases the readability of texts which we have already understood to
a certain extent without the help of semiotics. Hence the following
three problems that we shall discuss since Professor Greimas kindly
accepted the format of my own questions, for which I am most
grateful.
The first problem I would like to raise is the relationship in Grei-
mas's semiotic system between deep structures, with their para-
digmatic principles, and superficial or surface structures. I I would
like to go even further and raise the problem of the relationship
between these deeper structures and the text understood at the locus
of figuration, the figurative level of the story. My hunch here would
be that if the rules of transformation that belong to a logic of narrative
have a narrative character, it is to the extent that they go from the
peripeteia of the surface to the dynamics, without which the system
would not exist. My claim here is that surface is more than a kind of
reflection of deep structure, it is more than the instantiation of nar-
rative rules that can be construed at the deeper level. Something
happens at the level of figuration that makes the dynamism of the
processes described possible. In other words, to use vocabulary famil-
iar to semioticians, in the shift from paradigmatic structures to their
syntagmatization, the historicization of the story occurs at the surface
and then it is by reflection of the surface at the deep level that the
deep level itself may be said to transform, to provide transformations
from a first state of effect to a last state of effect.
To illustrate this point I will take two examples, the second from
ON NARRATIVITY 553
Greimas's work itself. The first example is the study by one of Grei-
mas's former students, Louis Marin, on narrative in the Gospels, in
which he examined the role of the traitor who may be defined as an
opponent.
2
In the actantial system it is easy to recognize the place of
the traitor in the system, but the fact that this traitor is Judas, and that
he has individual characteristics, is not secondary. For we can see that
in the development of the character, say from Mark to John, there is
an increasing enrichment that at the same time enriches the story
itself, the plot itself. In Mark, Judas is simply one of the twelve apos-
tles who shares the same meal with Jesus. He fulfills the prophecy that
the Son of Man will be delivered to His enemies, but there is some-
thing contingent at every moment, since Judas is a proper name that
connects the function of delivering the Son of Man to the traitor who
makes treason happen. Making something happen therefore seems to
introduce a contingency, the equivalent of what Aristotle called the
peripeteia, which belongs, I think, to the surface of the text. It would
therefore seem to me that we cannot apply to the relation between
deep structures and surface structures something which would be too
close, for example, to the unfortunate distinction between infrastruc-
ture and superstructure in Marx, where the superstructure would be
a mere reflection of the infrastructure. We have here instead a dia-
lectic of a kind that needs to be recognized.
I will take my second example from Greimas's wonderful book,
Maupassant: The Semiotics of Text: Practical Exercises, a 250-page analysis
of a 6-page short story, "Two Friends."
3
The surface of the text nar-
rates the story of a failed fishing expedition that will end with a
reversal of roles because the enemy who has captured the unfortunate
fishermen does not succeed in making them confess they are spies
and that the fishing expedition is a cover story. The two friends refuse
to accept the role of spies, and they are executed by a firing squad.
The important event is that they are cast into the water and given back
to the fish. At the end of the tale the Prussian officer catches the fish
and has them fried up for himself. According to Greimas's analyses,
in fact, it is the unfortunate fishermen who offer the fish to the
officer. Greimas comes to this conclusion by constructing all the
proper semiotic squares. He sets in the right place the oppositions
between life and nonlife, death and nondeath and therefore all the
exchanges among the four poles of the square. But it seems to me
there is something decisive that does not belong to the model as a
logical model, namely, the way in which the homologation of the
individual characters is made in relation to the roles. This homolo-
gation of the sun with cold life, the empty sky with cold nonlife,
Mount Valerian with cold death, and the water with cold nondeath is
brought about through the initiative of the enunciator. It is very
important for this homologation to be decisive since it gives the clue
to the whole story and makes the immersion of the unfortunate fish-
ermen into a quasi resurrection. The enunciator's initiation of this
very homologation makes the story unique. This is the story in which
the miraculous fishing expedition in the end becomes the loser's vic-
tory. Therefore one could ask if it is not the surface of the text that
provides the element of contingency and the series of unpredictable
decisions which keep the story moving. Pushing this to the limit, I
would say finally that the deep structure reflects the surface and not
the contrary.
GREIMAS: In order to understand the questions raised by Professor
Ricoeur and the objections that could be made to semiotic theory, it is
necessary for me to make the following general points. I feel that not
only in semiotics but also in linguistics more generally, and, again, in
the whole of the social sciences, the first major methodological step
necessary is the identification of pertinent levels. It is only when a
scientific project posits the objects it wishes to describe or construct at
a specific level, and not at ten different levels, that it can hold a
coherent discourse on these objects. This constitutes, I believe, the
superiority of linguistics over the other human sciences. Yet, this is
also the general rule to be followed if one wishes to carry out rigorous
semiotic practice. Thus, the distinction between the deep and surface
levels is an important methodological choice. When developing mod-
els of description of narrative structures, it is necessary once again to
identify two levels: an abstract deep level and a more concrete surface
level. The difference between the two is that the surface level is an
anthropomorphic level, because all syntax of natural languages is
anthropomorphic. There exist subjects, objects, beneficiaries; quali-
fications are attributed to subjects, for example. Linguists generally
try to hide this fact, but it cannot be hidden when one investigates
discourse from a semantic perspective. This narrative level of an an-
thropomorphic nature posits relations between subject and object, the
sender and receiver, which are fundamental. The deeper level we try
to establish is the level of abstract operations, that is to say, operations
in which the operating subject is no longer a human subject but, just
as science demands, a substitutable subject. This is what guarantees
the transmissibility of scientific knowledge. Often people do not un-
derstand the necessity I felt to posit the existence of this deep abstract
level.
As to the semiotic square, it could be a square or a cube or a circle.
The shape is of no importance whatsoever. It was necessary to for-
mulate a minimum number of relational tools, and in this case, a
ON NARRATIVITY 555
fundamental structure of discourse that was as simple as possible. The
other problem raised is related to the passage from one level to an-
other. When passing from the surface level, what always raised prob-
lems for Chomsky's generative grammar is that he wanted to keep the
equivalence of forms between the unfolding at one level and the
syntactic unraveling at the other, whereas in semiotics, when passing
from one level to another level toward the surface, we posit a pro-
gressive increase in signification. Hence, there is an increase in mean-
ing as we go from deep structures toward the surface, and this in-
crease in meaning must be distinguished from the increase in
horizontal meaning which Paul Ricoeur spoke about. Within a story,
meaning increases syntagmatically. We notice-simply, for example,
by consulting a reader such as the one published by Dell Hymes on
Language in Culture and Society-that three thousand human commu-
nities fabricate proverbs, riddles, stories, and so on in the same way,
and that they narrate these by using forms which are, mutatis mutan-
dis, identical.
4
Consequently, when we speak about semio-narrative
structures we are in fact dealing with kinds of universals of language,
or rather with narrative universals. If we were not afraid of meta-
physics we could say that these are properties of the human mind.
The collective actant possesses these narrative universals and so does
humanity. However, the semio-narrative level must be distinguished
from what I call the discursive level since individuals are the ones who
fabricate discourse. They do so by using narrative structures that
already exist, that actually coexist with individuals. I thus imagine the
subject of enunciation as a kind of funnel into which the narrative
structures are poured drop by drop, and from which discourse
emerges. This discourse, that is the product of the instance of enun-
ciation, can also be divided into levels of depth, a thematic level and
a figurative level. This I feel is the beginning of an answer to your
question.
The set of constraints that is presupposed, that exists prior to all
discourse, language, and thought, is so great that many semioticians
do not know how to come to grips with it. For example, in his inau-
gural discourse at the College de France, my friend Roland Barthes
said that language was fascist. I believe that he attributed too great an
honor to fascism. We live by our organs, by our desires, in a circum-
scribed world, and our possibilities are limited. There are a great
many restrictive things in human activity, and there is nothing fascist
or communist about this. It is simply a question of the common
human condition. However, if we raise the question of the instance of
enunciation, then all of the lovers of liberty can take heart. The sub-
ject of enunciation partakes of all possible liberties. Once again a
556
NEW LITERARY HISTORY
semiotic deviation appears where each one makes use of all the pos-
sible specificities and liberties of discourse. We should take things
much more seriously. The characteristics of discursive semiotics and
what happens with the setting into discourse, or with discursivization,
is essentially a phenomenon of spatialization, temporalization, and
actorialization. Actants also are transformed into actors. But to say
that discourse is dependent upon space and time is already to inscribe
discourse, as well as the subject pronouncing it, within exteriority. In
fact, it corresponds to projecting discourse outside the I, the subject of
enunciation, and starting to relate stories about the world.
This level of discourse is extremely important and is probably the
least studied of all in semiotics. It is also the least organized since we
have only a very few ideas and projects to create models to account for
it. In any case, a hypothetical provisional distinction can be made
between the thematic and figurative levels. For example, when Cha-
teaubriand says that "my life was as sad as the autumn leaves carried
off by the wind," you can see that "my life was as sad" is thematic, let
us say, more abstract than "the autumn leaves carried off by the
wind." But one part of the sentence says the same thing as the other.
They can thus be superimposed, and we obtain a metaphor that will
be the figurative level. The figurative is a way of speaking in either
temporal or spatial figures, and if we examine our own discourse we
note that everything belongs to one or the other of these. The concept
of figures is of major theoretical importance for us not only, as some
claim, because in painting we distinguish abstract art from figurative
art, but also because this term, which is taken from Hjelmslev's lin-
guistic theory, corresponds to the nonsign, or the semantic part of the
sign. On the other hand, "figure" also permits us to exploit the con-
cept of "gestalt," the psychology of forms. The problem is to know
how discourse is composed-not with these photographic represen-
tations of objects, but with schemata, so to speak, of objects-and how
it is used in the most diverse situations. Chains of figures essentially
constitute so-called narrative discourse; and what narrative, from this
perspective, happens to correspond to is the exploitation of narrative
structures from the deep level. We use parts of the narrative struc-
tures that we need, and we set them in our own discourse and clothe
our own discourse in a figurative manner. Yet there do exist more or
less abstract discourses.
RICOEUR: Figures are much more than a garment. What I mean to
say is that at this level there is more than an investment, in the sense
of an instantiation; in fact, there is something productive. Precisely
what is productive is that you cannot have spatialization, temporal-
ization, and actorialization without plot. The different kinds of plot
ON NARRATIVITY 557
produced in the history of narrative show us that what we are dealing
with is not merely an application and projection at the surface, but
that there is something really productive which follows rules, and that
these rules for plot construction belong to the figurative level. Hence,
there is productivity of the figurative level. I would like to return to
this problem later. The point I want to make here is that the figurative
level provides the dynamics for the rules of transformation and that
they are projected backwards from the surface to the deep structures.
GREIMAS: You are right to take me to task for having said that the
figurative clothed narrative structures. This is a bad metaphor and
certainly not the way to express the problem. One should first of all
take into account that the mode of existence of narrative structures is
a virtual mode of existence. Narrative structures do not exist per se
but are a mere moment in the generation of signification. When the
subject of enunciation says something, he utters a durative discourse
and proceeds by means of figures that are linked up. It is the figures
that bear the traces of narrative universals.
RICOEUR: I want to approach the problem from a different angle.
Are there not ways of dealing with narrative which, in a sense, bypass
this distinction between deep structure and surface structure? Be-
cause of all the difficulties in connecting the levels, the freedom of
enunciation, and also the constraints of the last level, I insist that on
this last or third level, this level of figurativization has its own rules.
Let us start with a comment made a few decades ago by Kate Ham-
burger in her book The Logic of Literature,
5
when she writes that the
great feat of narrative-" epic," in her own terms-is to explore minds
in the third person narrative, to take all the narrative procedures
through which we make judgments on the thoughts, feelings, actions
of third persons, and to transfer them into first person narrative,
thereby creating a pseudoautobiography. If we then say that the func-
tion of narrative is to provide a kind of mimesis of other minds, we
need new categories, and we need to know whether these categories
belong to the development of your own semiotics, or whether they are
foreign to it. This is not a critique but, rather, a question.
Let us therefore look at what is required if we begin this way, the
way Dorritt Cohn did in her work Transparent Minds,
6
where she
showed that narratives always have this function of exploring other
minds. If we do so, we get constraints of another kind which are more
of a typological than a structural nature. This is the route first fol-
lowed by Stanzel in his attempt to work out a typology of narrative
situations and, more powerfully, by Lubomir Dolezel in his attempt to
set up a dialectic between the discourse of the narrator and the dis-
course of the character. The next step is to introduce the category of
narrator, a kind of figure that is the part of the text where someone
says something about other minds. You therefore have the narrator's
discourse, the character's discourse, and then it is necessary to de-
velop a typology to show what the constraints are. But my claim would
be that these constraints bypass the distinction between deep structure
and surface structure in your semiotics. They belong to other systems
of categorization, and I would like to know how these systems inter-
sect with yours. Here, notions such as point of view and narrative
voice would have to be introduced. (When I speak about point of
view, I am thinking about the work done by the Tartu School, Us-
pensky, for example, who tried to show that the interplay between
points of view is a principle of composition.) If, like Dorritt Cohn
following Kate Hamburger, we speak of procedures between narrator
and character, we are in fact attempting to structure enunciation
itself. This is, I think, a third dimension which should be added to the
Proppian categories of functions and actants that you have expanded.
We would then be dealing with enunciation, with the enunciator in-
scribed in the text as narrator, but also with characters. If I raise the
point it is because I think that ultimately the figurative has its own
dimension, its own structuration, which are more a part of a sort of
typology than of a logic of transformation.
I would also add that I question your own theory when you say that
there is an increase in meaningfulness when we proceed from deep
structures to surface structures. My question is, where does this in-
crease in meaningfulness come from? I do not think that it is implied
only in the trans formative capacities of the deep structures, which are
constraints.
7
But it is a new kind of constraint that belongs to the level
of figurativization and all the resources provided by notions such as
narrator, characters, point of view, narrative voice, and so on. These
are constraints of a different kind which are immediately figurative
but not by derivation. I am aware that your school of thought is not
a closed system but is proceeding step by step, from the most abstract
to the more concrete. I feel you have reached the point precisely
where you have to come to grips with contributions that do not come
from your own semiotics. The development of the third stage of your
semiotics requires that either you reject these categories or you re-
construct them within your own system of reference.
GREIMAS: I have always claimed that semiotics is not a science but
rather a scientific project, still incomplete or unfinished; and I leave
the task of completing and transforming it, starting from a few theo-
retical principles that I have attempted to establish, to future gener-
ations of semioticians. To begin with the deep structures and go to-
ward the surface structures is perhaps a question of strategy.
ON NARRATIVITY 559
Personally, and on an anecdotal level, I was troubled by the way Katz
and Fodor presented semantics as an appendix to Chomskian theory.
They simply took sentences, aligned them next to one another, and
established connections by drawing lines. They thought that discourse
could be structured in this way. I found the same thing in Germany,
where a type of text linguistics was developed that also treated only
surface phenomena.
The second point you raised is related to the increase in significa-
tion that results from passing from one level to another. First of all,
the way I present things is not by means of a combination of elements;
that is to say, I do not usually start with simple units and then combine
them to arrive at a more complex level. The problem as I see it is
related to the passage from meaning to signification. As a linguist I
see this in the procedure of articulation, a sort of continuous explo-
sion. The production of meaning is the production of difference, the
production of oppositions, and when discourse happens it takes place
by a sort of series of successive explosions that produce the totality,
the richness of discourse. On the other hand, we can very well imag-
ine that an analyst dealing with a realized discourse would begin with
the surface before going on to the deep structures. That would be
another way of proceeding.
The third point I would like to bring up is related to point of view.
What I will say about this does not come directly from my own per-
sonal research but from work done by one of my students, Jacques
Fontanille, who wrote a thesis on the problem of point of view in
discourse.
8
He studied cinema, painting, Marcel Proust, advertising,
and also quantum theory. He made use of common knowledge, es-
pecially when dealing with the concept of the narrator that you your
self mentioned. From a linguistic perspective, we notice that, in ad-
dition to modalities, there exists the fundamental element of the
modulation of sentences constituted by aspectualities. These aspectu-
alities can be imagined and described only if one posits an observer
who is watching the process being actualized, whether it happens to be
inchoative, durative, or terminative. Thus, natural language already
utilizes the simulacrum of the observer to account for linguistic phe-
nomena, even at the level of the sentence. If one examines narrative
discourse one sees that these observers can be situated anywhere.
When analyzing a text by Proust one notices that the observer changes
point of view at almost every sentence. What Fontanille did was to
posit that all discourse has a cognitive level and that it is at this cog-
nitive level that a diad-two actants-is located: the observer-actant
and the informer-actant. Between the two a sort of exchange of in-
formation takes place that can be integrated into the total or partial
knowledge of either actant according to the wish of the subject of
enunciation, who can be a narrator. This would then be a case of
syncretism between the actor-subject of the enunciation and the ob-
server. However, this is not a generalizable actantial structure. I
would therefore insist on the need to distinguish in the narrative flow
between different levels-especially the cognitive and the pragmatic
levels, for example.
As for the last question related to figurativity, I must say that I
attach a great deal of importance to research being done in this area.
During a year-long seminar given over to the study of these problems
some progress was made, but it still is not satisfying, since this level of
analysis is extremely complex. My first observation is that we can
encounter figurative expression at different levels of depth. To take
a very simple case, for example indirect discourse, when I say that it
is warm, this can mean "open the window." Therefore, "it is warm" is
a figure for saying something else. Another type is parabolic dis-
course, which is found for example in the Gospels. If you take the
parable of the Prodigal Son you can see that the four or five partial
parables, which do not start at exactly the same point, narrate the
story figuratively. Each parable is displaced a little in relation to the
other, but one can establish, by partial parables so to speak, the com-
mon thematic level that can account for the figurativization of the
whole. This is another way of grasping figurativity, the type of dis-
course which we have studied most.
Finally, figurativity is found at the deep level of discourse, as was
illustrated, for example, by Denis Bertrand in his thesis on Zola's
Germinal.
9
In Zola's story about miners living underground, spatial
configurations and spatial figures are transformed and become, so to
speak, an autonomous language. When we read the novel we think
that the lives of the miners are being narrated but, in fact, what is
narrated is the great mystery of the mediation within this under-
ground universe. Spatiality becomes an almost abstract sort of lan-
guage to speak about something other than surface figurativity.
These few examples are meant simply to point out that what I call the
discursive level of semiotics is a level in which there is an articulation,
a level at which other levels of depth can be found. The problematics
of levels is a strategy because the number of levels can be increased or
diminished in order to facilitate the analysis and the construction of
the model.
RICOEUR: I find this answer satisfactory, satisfactory because I ac-
knowledge and welcome this capacity of semiotics to expand. But I
wonder whether the initial model is not undermined by this expan-
sion, and whether the price to pay for such an expansion is not a
ON NARRATIVITY 561
complete reformulation of the basic terms of depth and surface. It is
not by chance you ended up speaking about the depth of the surface,
which, if I may say so, now has a meaning quite different from your
original usage. We are no longer dealing with the idea that there are
logical, semantic rules having a logic of transformation which are
subsequently invested with anthropomorphic roles, and that then
those anthropomorphic roles are once more invested in figures. Here
figure itself has depth, and a quite different use is being made of the
term figure than of the term figura, to which Auerbach devoted one of
his most extraordinary essays. Here we are dealing with the polyse-
mantic capacity of discourse, and it is no longer possible to know if we
are at the level of the depth of the surface. The same story may be
read in different ways because it is multilayered, and this multilayered
nature of any story calls for the role of a reader, which we have not
discussed at all. I think that by necessity we have to reintroduce the
dialectic between the text and the reader because of this polyseman-
ticism. I will give one example of bringing out the complexity of the
figure, to which we bring meaningfulness but also introduce some-
thing that Kermode called secrecy. He took the example of parables
and the strong interpretation given them by Mark. Parables are nar-
rated in order not to be understood, that is to say, there is an increase
of secrecy. The actual title of his work is The Genesis of Secrecy.
10
We
therefore have to take into account the possibility of another kind of
deep meaning, and in so doing we join up with the whole tradition of
symbolism concerning the four meanings of the scriptures, for exam-
ple. This is a tradition which, I think, has a scope quite different from
that of deep structure as it is defined by semiotics. Finally, the best
stories, those of Kafka for example, are not intended to increase
intelligibility but to increase perplexity and to call into question the
reader's understanding. Here productivity of the surface level is all
the more striking as it increases both meaningfulness and puzzlement.
GREIMAS: I agree in part with what you say. Nonetheless, I would
like to make a brief observation. What scientific status can be given to
this type of task? Both of us have been speaking about intelligibility,
but intelligibility can be situated at different levels. We can under-
stand the main line, the essential; we can also attempt to understand
the greater and greater complexity of discourse. I once investigated
automatic translation. At that time it was said that to translate the
syntax of simple sentences the computer had to carry out 2000 binary
operations. Now, if we were to take a short story as complex as Mau-
passant's "Deux amis," we could ask how many binary operations
would be necessary to analyze such a text. At each level I feel we
would reach the sum of several million at least. Discourse is a complex
object and so is the world. Hence, there are no objections in principle
if we deepen our knowledge of this phenomenon.
Now, regarding accessibility to the secret that language is, I agree
with you, except that the hidden will perhaps remain hidden because
we wish to hide things, or because we cannot speak about them. No
matter. I would simply say that we linguists or semioticians have ex-
tremely poor tools to speak about the secret of language. To speak
about meaning or signification, one of the rare means we have at our
disposal is transcoding, that is, to take a discourse, a sentence, and to
translate it into another discourse, with other words, in a different
way. This is how we understand what the first sentence or the first
discourse signified. Operations of transcoding are the only means we
have to grasp signification and, consequently, when I take a parable
such as the Prodigal Son, I am obliged to try and translate it. In doing
so perhaps I have not exhausted the totality of meaning, which is
regrettable, but unfortunately it is impossible to do otherwise.
PARIS
(Translated and adapted by Paul Perron and Frank Collins)
NOTES
1 See also, in this issue, Paul Ricoeur, "Greimas's Narrative Grammar."
2 Louis Marin, Semiotique de la Passion: Topiqu.es et figures (Paris, 1971 ).
3 AlgirdasJulien Greimas, Maupassant: The Semiotics of Text: Practical Exercises, tr. Paul
Perron (Amsterdam, 1988).
4 See Language in Culture and Society: A Reader in Linguistics and Anthropology, ed. Dell
Hymes (New York, 1964).
5 Kate Hamburger, The Logic of Literature, tr. Marilyn G. Rose (Bloomington, Ind.,
1973).
6 Dorritt Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fic-
tion (Princeton, N.J. , 1978).
7 For a detailed discussion of this point, see Jean Petitot -Cocorda, M orphogenese du sens
(Paris, 1985), esp. pp. 260-68. See also Paul Perron, Introduction, On Meaning: Selected
Writings in Semiotic Theory, by Algirdas Julien Greimas, tr. Paul Perron and Frank
Collins (Minneapolis, 1987), pp. xxiv-xlv.
8 Jacques Fontanille, Le Savoir Partage: Semiotique et thlorie de la connaissance chez Marcel
Proust (Paris, 1987).
9 Denis Bertrand, L'espace et le sens: "Germinal" d'Emile Zola (Paris, 1985).
10 Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge,
Mass., 1979).

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