On Narratology: Criteria, Corpus, Context

Author(s): Gerald Prince

Source: Narrative, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Jan., 1995), pp. 73-84
Published by: Ohio State University Press
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DIALOGUE

On Narratology:

Criteria,

Corpus,

Context

GERALD PRINCE

Over a dozen years ago, in a fine book called The Narrative Act devoted to
the study of narration and point of view, Susan Sniader Lanser noted that narra
tology (by which she meant "formalist-structuralist
poetics of narrative"), in its
or
no
sex
to
of
attention
narrative, paid
gender (she tended to use the
exploration
terms interchangeably):
in
narrative
modern
theory is there mention
"[N]owhere
of the author's or narrator's gender [this vacillation too may be telling] as a sig
. . .
nificant variable
[yet] surely the sex of a narrator is at least as significant a
as the narrator's grammatical person, the pres
factor in literary communication
ence or absence of direct address to a reader, or narrative temporality" (46-47).
A few years later, in a 1986 article entitled "Toward a Feminist Narratology,"
Lanser examined some of the reasons why the feminist and the formalist investi
gation of narrative had ignored each other. For, just as narratologists paid little
to questions explored by feminist theory and criticism, the latter hardly
showed enthusiasm for narratology:
feminist thinkers may have produced a lot
on
of suggestive work
narrative (or linear narrative, or "bad" linear narrative)
attention

"inherent"

and?say?its

Oedipal

configuration,

but

without

much

recourse

to

and arguments. I will condense Lanser's account

claims, methods,
narratological
while recasting it and underlining
its implications:
(a) "everyday" terminology
versus technical language, the attempt of (some) feminists to speak and write in
to everyone and thus implicitly to criticize the elitism, au
ways understandable
and
of "science" including the attempt of narratol
thoritarianism,
protectionism
a
to
ogist
develop
special (scientific) vocabulary; (b) distrust of binary logic and
it hierarchies,
of universals
exclusions, and repres
(as tools of the patriarchy,
versus
them
in
of
reliance
confidence
and
(as necessary to argumentation
sions)
to
the
rules
that govern all and only narra
of
basic
the
and
enterprise
specifying
versus
semiotic approach, the view that narrative
tives); (c) mimetic orientation
says something about and influences the world versus an interest in narrative as
a meaning-producing
instrument, with no consideration of how related or ade

Gerald
Director
Narrative
(to appear

is Lois

Prince

of the Center
as Theme

of Romance
and Co
Term Professor
and Jerry Magnin
Languages
He is the author of
of Pennsylvania.
Studies at the University
on a guide to the twentieth-century
novel in French
and is now working

for Cultural

(1992)

in 2001).

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74

Gerald Prince

is; and (d) sensitivity to context and emphasis

quate to the world this meaning
on the role of sex or gender in the production
and processing
of (narrative)
versus
context
of
bracketing
(since narratologists
meaning
aspire to grasp and
analyze

narrative

qua

narrative).

to a call for a
Lanser's discussion of these incompatibilities was preliminary
feminist narratology whereby, she hoped, "feminist criticism, and particularly the
and insights of
study of narratives by women, might benefit from the methods
.
.
.
be
the
in turn, might
altered by
understand
and
narratology
narratology,
ings of feminist criticism and the experience of women's texts" (342). To start the
movement
to pose some of the questions and
toward such a revised narratology,
on
a
some
sex- or gender-conscious
focus
of the (textual) aspects that
study of
to
narrative would have
confront and discuss, Lanser analyzed a short letter, al
legedly written by an unhappy young bride to an intimate friend. Lanser's choice
may have been perplexing (though willfully so). As she herself noted, the letter?
which hardly made up a narrative in the usual sense of the term (it did not re
port events; it did not tell about changes in states of affairs)?was
probably
could be reached about its real author's
apocryphal and no definite conclusions
sex; in other words, no definite conclusions could be reached about the possible
influence of that sex on the nature of the text. But Lanser's analysis was interest
ing, nonetheless,
especially when bearing on questions of narrative situation,
letter
voice, and tone (because of the constraints on her gender, the unhappy
to indirection). Besides, more obviously perti
writer had to resort systematically
nent examples could, no doubt, have been provided. In her 1986 PMLA article
on the engaging narrator and then in her Gendered Interventions
(an excellent
study of narrative discourse and gender in the Victorian novel), Robyn Warhol
or with male
showed that, contrary to what often obtains in male-authored
an
narrated fiction,
engaging rather than distancing attitude toward the reader or
the narratee tends to prevail in female-authored
novels or with female narrators.
an
as
Lanser's call for what she depicted
("Toward
"expansive narratology"
A Feminist Narratology"
who argued in
358) was criticized by Nilli Diengott,
and Feminism"
that gender is not a differentia specifica of narra
"Narratology
no
and
that
"there
tive
is
need, indeed, no possibility of reconciling feminism
with narratology"
(49), given that the former constitutes an interpretive, critical
enterprise while the latter is a theoretical activity. In her response ("Shifting the
and Narratology"),
Lanser renewed her call for dialogue
Paradigm: Feminism
among "feminists, narratologists, and feminist narratologists" (59) and maintained
that gender-inspired
and goals
questions about the nature, scope, methodology,
of narrative poetics could lead to its positive transformation.
more than Lanser did?what
narra
In what follows, I do not consider?any
narrative theory or criticism,
tology might bring to feminist- and gender-oriented
and care
that, according to her, the "comprehensiveness
though I will mention
can prove valuable methods
for tex
with which narratology makes distinctions
tual analysis" ("Toward A Feminist Narratology"
346). Nor do I intend to ex
by Lanser
plore the reasons for feminist "resistance" to narratology?advanced
and others, like Josephine Donovan who, in "Toward a Women's Poetics," in
veighs against the formalist "dissection of literature as if it were an aesthetic ma

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Narratology

and Context

75

so many nuts and bolts easily disintegrated

chine made up of ...
from the
whole" (108; quoted in "Toward a Feminist Narratology"
I will say
342)?though
that at least some of those reasons strike me as nostalgic
(the longing for a
stance
the
not
transparent language,
against "deathly science"),
particularly com
.
.
.
for
of
"'both
and'
but
'nei
nevertheless
pelling (the preference
strategies
ther . . . nor'"), and even misguided.
for
the
of
existence
Thus, arguments
universals need not be regressive (in fact, they sometimes have been and can be
progressive) and beliefs in certain universals need not entail beliefs in others (I
believe that all human beings die; I do not believe that all human beings enjoy
Mozart);
similarly, though they often constitute a symptom of or basis for preju
which I think we all de
dice, distortion, and repression, binary distinctions?on
to
not
lead
the
creation
of
and exclusions;
necessarily
pend?do
hegemonies
besides, itmay be relevant to point out that narratology does not always proceed
in terms of simple binary differentiations?think
of its account of narrative speed
it
canonical
which
tempos
(and the/?ve
isolates), or of narrative frequency (and
or
of
the
basic
its three
tripartite investigation of links between narra
modes),
itmay be relevant to point out also that nar
tive, narrating, and narrated?and
not
exclude
the
middle (think of free indirect discourse).
always
ratology does
want
to
the first time and mindful of the argu
for
What
rather
I
discuss,
(not
ments advanced by Lanser, Diengott,
and others), is why some of the challenges
a
to
like
category
posed
"gender" should be addressed by narra
narratology by
tologists and how they might be assessed.1
It is important to note at the outset, I think, that the very domain of narra
tology is (and has been) in flux and that the discipline keeps on changing as its
boundaries are (re)drawn. Though narratology may already be old, it is still quite
has argued, given that narratology
immature. As Michael Mathieu-Colas
is a
theory of narrative, its scope depends, first of all, on the definition of narrative.
When the latter is viewed primarily as a verbal mode of event representation (the
linguistic telling of events by a narrator as opposed to, say, the enacting of them
on stage), the narratologist
pays little or no attention to the story as such, the
the
what
is
that
instead on the discourse,
narrated,
represented, and concentrates
the narrating, the way in which the "what" is represented. This view is certainly
favored by some important dictionaries
(e.g., the Grand Larousse de la langue
on
custom
well
and
it
have
its side: the latin term narrare desig
may
fran?aise)
the Western
nated a linguistic act and?in
tradition?the
opposition between
diegesis and mimesis,
recounting and representing, epic and drama, narrative
and theater goes back to Plato and is still very common. Furthermore,
this view
may well capture the specificity of a purely verbal rendition of events by a narra
tor and, in particular, account for the many ways in which the same set of re
lated events can be told?compare
"Mary ate before she slept." and "Mary slept
after she ate." or consider "John mounted
his horse before riding off into the
sunset." as against "John rode off into the sunset after mounting his horse." But
this view neglects the fact that nonverbal or mixed modes of event depiction
(e.g., movies or comic strips) are frequently taken to tell stories, to recount them,
or are frequently referred to as narratives; besides, it tends to forget that the
story too makes narrative whatever it is (after all, without story, without events,

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76

Gerald Prince

changes in states of affairs, no narrative). When,

tive is defined not so much in terms of mode (a narrator
but rather by its
(linguistic as opposed to nonlinguistic)
ratologist focuses on the structure of represented events
binations. But he or she might then neglect to account

without

on the contrary, narra

narrating) or substance
object (events), the nar
and their possible com

for the various forms a

third direction. If both story and dis
given story can take. There is?as usual?a
course, narrated and narrating make up narrative, narratologists who define the
latter as the representation
(verbal or nonverbal, with or without a narrator) of
one or more events can try to integrate and give equal importance to the study
of the "what" and the "way."
Of course, even if all narratologists

agreed on a definition of narrative, they

still have to determine what in narrative is specific or relevant to narra
tive. There is a lot more than narrative in narrative (comic power, psychological
insight, tragic force) and narratology aspires to be a theory of narrative qua nar
rative: it attempts to characterize all and only possible narrative tests to the ex
tent that they are narrative (that they exhibit features distinctive of or particularly
if narrative is the representation
of events or
associated with narrative). Now,

would

in states of affairs, some temporal relations, say, are narrative-specific

comic power or psychological
insight are not (since there are many?
too
that
that
neither and many non-narratives
exhibit
many?narratives
perhaps
a
not
exhibit both). But if comic power or psychological
does
constitute
insight
can
same
be
of
the
of
said
of
narrative,
character,
descrip
differentia specifica

changes
whereas

the last one?

tion, or even of focalization. Yet these three categories?especially
In other words, the
have attracted a great deal of attention from narratologists.
argument against making room for an ingredient such as gender in narratological
on the grounds that this ingredient is not specific to?distinctive
of?
models
narrative hardly seems compelling.
If the distinctiveness
criterion is not determinative, what about the integral
pay (infinitely) more attention to a narrator's diegetic
ity criterion? Narratologists
situation
presumably

or degree
because

of

covertness
every

narrator

than,
can

for

instance,

be

described

sex

to a narrator's
as

extra-

or

intra-,

or gender
homo-

or

and every narrator can be described as more or less overt or co

heterodiegietic
vert but not every narrator can be characterized
in sexual or gender terms (what
is the narrator's sex in "Mary ate before she slept" or in "John rode off into the
sunset after mounting his horse"? more generally, if narrative features and narra
tological accounts constitute and designate a narrating agency, must this agency
attention to narrative
be gendered?) However,
pay considerable
narratologists
narrate
to
without
it
is
space, say, though
referring to the space of
quite possible
the story, the space of the narrating instance, or the relations between them?
consider "Jane spoke to Irma before she spoke to Sally." They pay even more at
tention to characters though it is not difficult to find (minimal) narratives without
con
or not the latter are taken to be anthropomorphic
characters, whether
"First it rained and then it snowed." In other words, the argu
structs?consider
ment against making room for a feature like "gender" because it is not integral to
it could be argued that narrators
narrative also proves unpersuasive.
Besides,
and narratees must, like actors or characters, be gendered or not gendered and
that this aspect of their nature can remain unspecified.

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Narratology

and Context

11

Other criteria prove just as problematic. Simplicity, for example, is not only
a function of the measures
selected (number of elements used in the model,
number of rules for combining these elements, diversity of the elements or the
rules) but also a function of the results yielded (what if these are inconclusive or
be
and elegance?another
frequently invoked criterion?should
uninteresting?);
left to the tailor.
In the end, perhaps the most consistently applied and applicable criterion is
of
that
productivity. The inclusion (after some reluctance) of such categories as
and vindicated
in narratological models was motivated
character or description
accounts
in
of narra
by their traditional and continued importance
"adequate"
or
as
to
to
as
be
linked with
raise narra
tive possibilities
well
by their capacity
tively pertinent problems (about plot structure, say, about narrative domains and
energetics, about narrative speed and frequency). Now, sex or gender (and race,
here I am resorting on
class, religion, age, ethnicity, sexual preference, or?and
or
purpose to seemingly trivializing features?height
weight) may prove to be
as
just
(even if they do not have "tradition" behind them). In any
productive
case, it would be easy (or, at least, not difficult) to start incorporating them ex
plicitly in a narratological model, for instance by subsuming them under the ru
bric "distance" (the space obtaining between narrators, characters, events narrated,
and narratees, a space that can be temporal, intellectual, emotional,
etc.) or
even?more
subsuming that rubric under them (given the element
radically?by
gender, for example, such and such a set of distances may obtain).
Just as arguments inspired by the wish to include elements like gender in
accounts can challenge the criterial basis of certain narratological
narratological
cor
decisions, they can put into question the actual nature of the narratological
tries to formulate rules pertinent to all and only possible narra
pus. Narratology
and reasonings do not depend on a particular set of
tives. Ideally, its methods
narratives (great ones, literary ones, fictional ones, or even extant ones) and nar
ratologists have been known to invent narratives in order to bolster their demon
strations and prove their points. Still, there is a narratological
canon, a set of
texts repeatedly used as illustrations (La Modification
for second-person narra
"A Rose for Emily"
tive, "Hills like White Elephants" for external focalization,
for the homodiegetic narrator-observer, Ulysses for stream of consciousness). And
this canon is undeniably androcentric: Robyn Warhol points out, for instance,
to the Study of the Narratee," there are as many as
that in my "Introduction
eighty examples "and only two of them [I could have sworn it was three!] are
from female-authored

works" (Gendered Interventions

7).
it constitutes an
is indeed a theoretical activity but?since
Now, narratology
is far from indif
instance of "theory transitive" rather than "intratransitive"?it
ferent to critical enterprises (just as feminist critical practice is not detached from
theories in general and feminist theories in particular). On the one hand, narra
tology provides tools and ideas for investigations of specific texts and leads to so
called narratological
criticism, of which I think there are two main variants.

First, narratological
description can not only help to characterize the specificity
of any given narrative, to compare any two (sets of) narratives, and to institute
narrative classes according to narratively pertinent features, but it can also help
to illuminate certain reactions to texts and it can hein to found or suDDort certain

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78

Gerald Prince

Indeed, as G?rard Genette's outstanding Narrative Dis

interpretive conclusions.
course and a long tradition of (para-narratological)
and Ger
Anglo-American
manic criticism centered on narrative technique demonstrate, any narratologically
descriptive statement can become a springboard for a reading, any technical fea
ture can lead to the construction
of meaning,
any how can give rise to a why.
that
there
in
narrative
text, an autonomous
Second, by insisting
is,
any
layer
text
in
the
which
that
is "properly" narrative, a configuration
insti
constituting
tuting events as such, fixing their beginning and their end, and presiding over the
facilitates the choice of narrative as defining
itinerary linking them, narratology
or
as
thematic frame. It provides many entrance points and reference
pattern
points to the study of texts in terms of that pattern or that frame; and its influ
ence explains in part the great popularity enjoyed by the theme of narrative in
the past twenty years (the large number of critical essays arguing that such and
such a novel or short story is, among other things or above all, a reflection on
narrative) just as it explains in part the so-called narrativist turn (the reliance on
of activities, fields, and texts, from
"narrative" to discuss a multitude
arguments to scientific proofs,
speeches legal briefs, and philosophical
sessions, and L.L. Bean catalogues).
psychoanalytic
On the other hand, these investigations of specific texts and domains, these
criticism, in turn, test the validity and rigor of narra
enterprises in narratological
tological categories, distinctions, and reasonings, they identify (more or less sig
or
nificant) elements that narratologists
(may) have overlooked, underestimated,
of models of narra
and they (can) lead to basic reformulations
misunderstood;
the notion

political

tive. Genette himself admitted that, in his synthetic exploration of narrative dis
he paid little attention to certain possibilities
because Proust had not
(very much) exploited them in A la recherche du temps perdu (Narrative Dis
course Revisited
of the narra
12, 51). Thus, it can be argued that a modification
for example, may
narratives,
corpus in favor of female-authored
tological
significantly affect the very models produced by narratology; and, should it turn
out that such a change does not lead to an alteration of the models,
the latter
would be all the more credible, all the less open to negative criticism.
If narrative poetics ought to be more alert to the implications of the corpus
more
it privileges, it also ought to be more sensitive to the role of context?and,
course,

the production (or pro

specifically, say, to the possible role of sex or gender?in
cessing) of narrative. This is probably the crux of Lanser's argument, the critical
point made by any "expansive" study of narrative. The allegiance of classical
(the narratology of the sixties and seventies) to strategies inspired by
narratology
structural linguistics or generative-transformational
grammar (both of which are
indifferent to context), the concern for capturing the differentiae spe
notoriously
of
narrative, and the "scientific" ambitions of the discipline (its desire, in
cificae
to isolate narrative universals, which transcend context) resulted in
particular,
reluctance to make pragmatics part of their domain of inquiry
the narratologists'
and in their neglect of the contextual dimensions of narrative generation. But, by
the end of the seventies, perhaps because of repeated (sociolinguistic)
reminders
contexts in semiotic production
about the importance of communicative
(or be
cause of awareness that narrative can be viewed not only as an object or product

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Narratology

and Context

79

but also as an act or process) and certainly because of the very logic and devel
opment of narrative poetics, a number of narratologists
(apart from Lanser) be
more
to
context
of
certain
gan
aspects
interrogate
explicitly, if only to shed more
on
In
narrative
narrative.
and
Discourse,
qua
Story
Seymour Chatman de
light
voted several pages to the number of parties one had to posit in order to account
for the transmission of narrative messages; much more recently, inNarrative as
as "concerned
Didier Coste developed a view of narratology
Communication,
on
of
information
with the production,
and
transmission,
exchange
change and
simulacra of change" (5); and, on several occasions (e.g., "Narrative Pragmatics,
and Point"), I have stressed that narratological models ultimately should
with a syntactic, a semantic, and a discursive component?a
include?along

Message,
pragmatic

one.

areas of investigation seem to me worthy of

At least three context-related
some discussion here. The first pertains to different media of manifestation
and
their expressive possibilities
for example, in
(as recently explored by Chatman,
to Terms and, more specifically, in his discussion of the means by
his Coming
which verbal texts and filmic ones actualize various narrative features or favor
certain ways of presenting them). Neither film strictly conceived ("moving pic
nor written language
tures" without linguistic or other semiotic accompaniments)
finds it particularly hard to use diverse narrative speeds, frequencies, or points of
view. But they differ significantly in their ability to utilize other features that nar
ratologists have studied at length. Thus, it may be difficult for film to provide
certain signs of extradiegetic narratees (what is the filmic equivalent of a sentence
like "He bought one of those shirts that you, dear reader, would never even look
at"?), or to take full advantage of the category "person" (how are differences be
tween first-, second-, and third-person narration conveyed filmically?), or to ex
ploit something akin to free indirect discourse. In other words, perhaps certain
features can be actualized (more or less easily) by all the semiotic media whereas
other can be actualized only by some or, even, by one. Indeed, there might be
between
the mediatic
of features and their
strong correlations
exploitability
studies by Hans-Werner Ludwig
"properly narrative" relevance (as experimental
and Werner Faulstich suggest, the use of first- as opposed to third-person narra
tion in verbal narratives hardly affects the receiver's response) and narratologists
should investigate the possibility.
The second area pertains to tellability, to the qualities that make events
worthy of being told. On the one hand, tellability must be tied to context. "Great
topics" and "sure-fire themes" have, of course, long been thought or claimed to
awaken narrative desire and have long drawn the attention of best-seller seekers.
A sexist French formula for successful narratives valorizes the elements of mys
I am pregnant.
tery, religion, sex, and aristocracy: "My God, said the Duchess,
Who done it?" (Ryan 154);2 and an old Readers' Digest
recipe is supposed to
sex
and
with
stress?along
experience, foreign travel, money,
religion?personal
"How I Made Love to a Rich Bear in the Alps and
sex, or even religion do not always play equally well
of any narrative
in Peoria and Landernau; and the pointedness or pointlessness
varies with the circumstances of its reception. On the other hand, some narratolo
and the animal kingdom:
God." But money,

Found

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Gerald Prince

80

its narrative nature,

gists, in exploring what in a semiotic object foregrounds
have attempted to show that tellability (or narrativity as distinct from mere nar
results in part from certain aspects of the object qua object. In my
rativehood)
own work, for instance, I have argued that the narrativity of a text depends on
the extent to which that text constitutes a doubly-oriented
autonomous whole
which involves some kind of conflict (consider "The cat sat on the mat" versus
"The cat sat on the dog's mat.") This autonomous whole, furthermore,
is made
up of discrete,

particular, positive, and temporally distinct actions having logi

or consequences,
antecedents
and which avoids inordinate
cally unpredictable
or the latter's context
amounts of commentary about them, their representation,
Form
The
and
(Prince, Narratology:
Functioning
of Narrative).
Similarly, in her
Possible
and
Narrative
Worlds, Artificial Intelligence,
splendid
Theory, Marie
Laure Ryan not only shows that an adequate model of plot must represent the
relational changes obtaining among the constituents of the actual narrative world
(what is true in the story) and the constituents of the characters' private worlds
(the virtual embedded narratives fashioned in terms of their knowledge, wishes,
simulations,
intentions, or fantasies); she also argues that "not all
obligations,
are
created equal" (148) and that narrativity is rooted in the configuration
plots
of these changes and specifically, in "the richness and variety of the domain of
the virtual" (156). In fact, Ryan even distinguishes
between a "theory of tellabil
for potential narrative interest, and a "theory of performance,"
ity," accounting
for actual narrative appeal (148-49). But, given the difficulty of the
accounting
question of such interest or appeal, much more testing and investigation are no
doubt needed to determine the input of text or context in the production of tell
able

narratives.
The

third

area?and

perhaps

the most

relevant?is

that

of narrative

seman

tics. As Ryan's work emphasizes, narrative intelligibility is based upon the links,
in the narrative universe, between a world designated as real and a set of virtual
and notions of the
worlds (more or less adequate representations,
perceptions,
"real"

world).

To

explain

what

governs

narrative

meaning,

the

narratologist

must

therefore establish a map of the worlds making up the narrative universe and de
or devices allowing for the specification of their alethic
scribe the conventions
value, their truth coefficient. Now, the propositions
composing a narrative and
on the basis of their origin (as signified by the
can be distinguished
on
one
the
hand, those which the narrator expresses: they pre
text). There are,
sent or report certain states of affairs and certain series of events in a certain
world (the diegesis); they comment on them; or they comment on the presenta
its worlds

tion itself and its context. On the other hand, there are the propositions which a
character in the diegesis formulates and which also can refer to that diegesis:
In terms of the narrative,
clarify it, comment on it, or remark on its presentation.
and barring any textual indication to the contrary, the world described by the
narrator constitutes the world as it is, whatever
to our own
its correspondence
world (or the way we imagine it). If, for example, the narrator declares that Van
couver in the capital of France, that Napoleon won the battle of Waterloo,
or
that Ulysses was very naive, each one of these declarations
represents a fact in
the narrative universe, if not in our own. Note that their truth does not necessar

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Narratology

and Context

81

status of the narrator. What Philip

ily depend on the homo- or heterodiegetic
the
of
environment
in which they move about
Marlowe
and Mike Hammer
say
is no less true (in terms of the rele
and of their adventures in that environment
narrator of Middlemarch
vant world) than the statements of the heterodiegetic
or those of a CNN announcer on the finals at Wimbledon.
Similarly, incoherent
as
as
or
erroneous explana
well
commentaries
the
by
narrating voice,
deceptive
tions and illogical conclusions
(according to the text
into question the veracity of the propositions which
cast doubt on the interpretive powers of the narrator;
prive him or her of other powers. In Jim Thompson's

itself), do not always call

present the diegesis. They
they do not necessarily de

Killer Inside Me, for in

a
the
Lou
is
but
Ford
information he gives us
stance,
psychopath,
geographical
about Central City is no less correct. On the contrary, a narrator's (repeated) hes
itations concerning what is, avowals of ignorance regarding ontic matters, presen
tations of existents or events according to a point of view designated as (suspi
ciously) subjective, all weaken his or her authority, his or her ability at authenti
cation (to use Lubomir Dolezel's
term), and call into question the truth of the
the diegesis (and of the comments pertaining to them).
propositions
composing
for the propositions
formulated by the characters, their truth coefficient de
on
their conformity to what this voice says explicitly about them,
pends above all
or on the reliability of the characters themselves. In other words, however accu

As

rate these propositions may be in our world ("Paris is the capital of France," "Na
poleon lost the battle of Waterloo,"
"Ulysses was very cunning"), they are true,
to the state
textually speaking, only if they do not involve any contradiction
ments of the reliable narrator, if they are not designated by him or her as sus
pect, untrue, or fictitious, and if their source proves generally trustworthy.
the situation can often be quite complex. One frequently

Obviously,
a narrative

several

narrators

and

many

characters.

Besides,

it is not

just

finds in
a matter

of setting up distinctions between them in terms of their authority or reliability.

It is necessary to classify all the propositions
(and their relations) according to
their degree of veracity and the latter depends of the number and importance of
or relationships which are contradicted or con
the textually true propositions
firmed. Let/? and q be two propositions?formulated
first of
by a character?the
which does not contradict any true proposition whereas the second contradicts a
single one. All other things being equal, it can be said that p but not q is in con
formity with the textual truth. The same would obtain even if/? did not confirm
any other propositions and q confirmed a dozen. Suppose now that p contradicts
in the narra
only one true proposition, but one entailing numerous consequences
or
two
three propositions having no conse
tive universe, and that q contradicts
quences at all. One could then maintain,
perhaps, that p is less close to an over
all textual truth than q. But there are thornier cases. Suppose, for example, that
p and q contradict only each other and that one of them confirms more proposi
tions that the other. Should we consider (on the ground that the narrative would
thereby gain richness and coherence) the former true and the latter false? In the
same way, suppose we find two or three unimportant contradictions
in the narra
tor's discourse. Should we then conclude that he or she is not trustworthy or
or trivial miscalculations?
What
should we simply speak of absentmindedness

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Gerald Prince

82

ever decisions

they will no doubt affect what the narrative means and,

not have to choose (since their goal is not to determine
do
though narratologists
to indicate in
the meaning
of particular texts), they must be able nevertheless
that narrative meaning
their models
sometimes depends on such decisions (just
as they must be able to indicate that certain narrative passages can function as
iterative or singulative narration, as free indirect or narratized discourse, as chro
are made,

or causally governed).
In other words, they must be able to make
nologically
room for (the voice of) a variable and extratextual determiner.3
As my quick discussion suggests, narratology can and must be cognizant of
context. But there remains a significant distance between the exploration of con
textual features to understand what is "properly narrative" or to construct a model
the pragmatic dimension
is not forgotten and the kind of "expansive"
poetics that Lanser, for instance, calls for. In "Toward a Feminist Nar
ratology" Lanser states that narratology ought to "study narrative in relation to a
referential context that is simultaneously
linguistic, literary, historical, biographi
cal, social, and political" (345). Similarly, in her 1992 book entitled Fictions
of
Authority, where she explores how women writers strive, with the help of narra
in which
narrative

tive structures, to create fictions of authority while exposing them, Lanser states
that these structures should be analyzed
in terms of the power relations "that
implicate writer, reader, and text" (5). Both statements are, I think, more relevant
to (narratological)
criticism than to narratology. The latter attempts to character
ize the ways in which all and only narratives are configured and make sense
rather than the forms or meanings of specific narratives in specific circumstances.
or signification
It can indicate that narrative configuration
is a function of con
text. It cannot specify how a certain form or meaning
results from a certain
describe
context; it cannot list the infinity of possible contexts or exhaustively
most

state how the sex, gender, height, or

of them; it cannot, in particular,
or
weight of a producer or consumer, a writer or reader, affects the production
processing of narrative from and content.
Still, statements and enterprises like Lanser's help to remind us that, with
out yielding to the interpretive temptation (without conflating criticism and po
etics) and without renouncing the ideal of a description of narrative and its pos
sibilities that would be explicit, systematic, and universal, narratology
should
strive for more self-awareness,
flexibility, and attention to the concrete. It is on
this condition that it will perfect the fit between its models and the texts they en
deavor to characterize and that it will find a place in a generalized semiotics.4

ENDNOTES
1. For

a different

version

of

this discussion,

see Gerald

Prince,

"Narratology,

Narrative

Criticism,

and Gender."
2. This

is Margaret
Boden's English
rendition of "Mon Dieu,
sais pas de qui" (299; quoted in Ryan,
154).

dit

laMarquise,

je suis enceinte

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et ne

and Context

Narratology

3. A more

is presented

argument

developed

in Gerald

Prince,

and Meaning."

Narrative,

"Narratology,

83

4. This

at the 1994 International

on Narrative
Conference
in Van
Literature
paper was presented
a good panel discussion moderated
B.C. At the same conference,
and
by Kathy Mezei
Melba
raised the question
short
anew, through
Cuddy-Keane
"Why a Feminist
Narratology"
Janet Giltrow, Susan Stanford Friedman,
and Robyn Warhol.
The
presentations
by the panelists,
couver,

discussion

to characterize

tended

ber of a series including:

the pair "formalist

sentence/discourse,

as a mem

narratology"

narratology/feminist

text/context,

totalizing/specifying,

formalizing/politi

cizing, similarity/ difference, construction/deconstruction,

sedentariness/nomadism
(one might
and so on). As for the speakers, they suggested
grammar/rhetoric,
form/force,
shifting back
forth between positions,
trying to combine them, or trying not to occupy any of them.

add
and

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