Structuralism & Narratology

French Structuralism: 1966–1980

Submitted by: Sehrish Aslam

Mahwish Abid
Afshan Abbas
Madiha Bashir

Ph.D. English (Ling+Lit)

Submitted to: Dr. Fauzia Janjua

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French Structuralism: 1966–1980

Background

Human beings are storytelling creatures. Aristotle says that two qualities define human

being’s relationship to ‘representation’ to art and stories. The relationship we can create with

fictional beings is fundamental to how narrative works. We have grand historical or cultural

narratives. The narrative is not less than a way of being in the world, of organizing reality in such

a way as to give it meaning. The narrative relies on complex working in our minds. We process

the cues provided to us by an author to make a world through our imagination; then we go and

live in it and take it for real for at least a little while. The narrative is fiction and lies and it's a

kind of truth. According to [Link], the narrative is the representation of an event or a series of

events. Thinking of our own lives as a process of story-making and storytelling helps us be

intentional about constructing our experience in meaningful ways. To understand how narrative

works, we have to look at characters and how they act and feel. We have to look at how events

unfold over time, and how those events play out as important. We have to look at the setting and

description and the ways an author helps us visualize spaces and places. A good story calls upon

our ability to enter into a relationship with characters we might have to be able to empathize with

them.

Parts of the story include characters, actions, time, and how they work together. Stories

impart the imaginative capacity to understand others. In the early and mid-twentieth century

readers who called themselves formalists and structuralists dedicated themselves to the study of

the formal components of narrative. This impulse to classify and categorize comes from

Aristotle’s Poetics. Stories could take as their purpose the providing opportunity to enter into a
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different reality or to transcend reality altogether. The plot is the guiding framework of the

narrative, but the plot itself is made up of smaller parts. The logic of hierarchy depends on

differentiating between major and minor events.

Moreover, the origins of structuralism are connected with the work of Ferdinand de

Saussure on linguistics along with the linguistics of the Prague and Moscow schools. In brief,

Saussure's structural linguistics propounded three related concepts:

1. Saussure argued for a distinction between langue (an idealized abstraction of language)

and parole (language as actually used in daily life). He argued that a "sign" is composed

of a "signified" (signifié, i.e. an abstract concept or idea) and a "signifier" (signifiant, i.e.

the perceived sound/visual image).

2. Because different languages have different words to refer to the same objects or concepts,

there is no intrinsic reason why a specific signifier is used to express a given concept or

idea. It is thus "arbitrary."

3. Signs gain meaning from their relationships and contrasts with other signs. As he wrote,

"in language, there are only differences 'without positive terms.”

Structuralists believe that every system has a structure and that structures are the 'real things’

that lie beneath the surface’ or the appearance of meaning emerged as a trend in the 1950s

challenged New Criticism and rejected Sartre’s (1905-1980) existentialism and its notion of

radical human freedom; it focused instead how human behavior is determined by cultural, social

and psychological structures. It tended to offer a single unified approach to human life that

would embrace all disciplines:

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1. Roland Barthes (950-1980) and Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) explored the possibilities of

applying structuralist principles to literature.

2. Jacques Lacan studied psychology in the light of structuralism,

blending Freud and Saussure (857-1913). 

3. Michel Foucault’s (1926-1984) The Order of Things examined the history of science to

study the structures of epistemology (though he later denied affiliation with the

structuralist movement). Louis Althusser 1970) combined Marxism (1818-1883) and

Structuralism to create his brand of social analysis

Structuralism, in a broader sense, is a way of perceiving the world in terms of structures. The

essence of Structuralism is the belief that “things cannot be understood in isolation, they have to

be seen in the context of larger structures they are part of”, The contexts of larger structures do

not exist by themselves, but are formed by our way of perceiving the world.

In literary theory, structuralism is an approach to analyzing a narrative material by examining

the underlying unchanging structure. The structuralists claim that there must be a structure in

every text. Hence, they say that everything that is written is governed by a specific set of rules, a

“grammar of literature”. Therefore, Narratology is a humanities discipline dedicated to the study

of the logic, principles, and practices of narrative representation.

Dominated by structuralist approaches at its beginning, narratology has developed into a

variety of theories, concepts, and analytic procedures. Its concepts and models are widely used as

heuristic tools, and narratological theorems play a central role in the exploration and modeling of

our ability to produce and process narratives in a multitude of forms, media, contexts, and

communicative practices.
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Therefore, structuralism in Europe developed in the early 20th century, mainly

in France and the Russian Empire, in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the

subsequent Prague Moscow and Copenhagen schools of linguistics. As an intellectual

movement, structuralism became the heir to existentialism. After World War II, an array of

scholars in the humanities borrowed Saussure's concepts for use in their respective fields. French

anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss was arguably the first such scholar, sparking a widespread

interest in structuralism. Structuralism is an ambiguous term that refers to different schools of

thought in different contexts.

French Structuralism: 1966–1980

French structuralism eventually gave the decisive impulse for the formation of

narratology as a methodologically coherent, structure-oriented variant of narrative theory. This

new paradigm was proclaimed in a 1966 special issue of the journal Communications,

programmatically titled “L’analyse structurale du récit.” It contained articles by leading

structuralists Barthes, Eco, Genette, Greimas, Todorov, and the film theorist Metz.

Three traditions informed the new structuralist approach toward narrative: Russian

Formalism and Proppian morphology; structural linguistics in the Saussurean tradition as well as

the structural anthropology of Lévi-Strauss; the transformational generative grammar of

Chomsky. Against this background, the structuralists engaged in a systematic re-examination of

the two dimensions of the narrative already identified by Šklovskij, Fabula, and Sujet, re-labeled

by Todorov in French as Histoire and discours and by Genette as Histoire and récit.

From 1966 to 1972, narratology focused mainly on the former. At the most abstract level,

the semiotician Greimas concentrated on the elementary structure of signification. Building on

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Lévi-Strauss’s (1955, [1958] 1963) structural analysis of myths, Greimas ([1966] 1983)

proposed a deep-level model of signification termed the “semiotic square”, which represents the

semiotic infrastructure of all signifying systems. The mapping of this universal deep structure

onto a given narrative’s surface structure can then be explained in terms of transformational

rules. Finally, a typology of six functional roles attributable to characters (main vs. secondary

character, opponent vs. helper, sender vs. receiver; cf. Greimas [1973] 1987) complements the

approach. Barthes ([1966] 1975) proposed functional systematics of narrated events which

distinguishes “kernels,” i.e. obligatory events that guarantee the story’s coherence, and optional

“satellites” that serve to embellish the basic plot. Todorov (1969) furthered the linguistic analogy

by equating actions to verbs, characters to nouns and their attributes to adjectives, and then by

then linking these elements through modal operators. This narrative syntax operates on the

abstract level of a narrative langue: instead of accounting only for the manifest sequence of

events represented in a given fictional world, this “grammar” also included the logic of virtual

action sequences, e.g. those imagined in a narrated character’s mind. Bremond (1973) explored

the logic of represented action from yet another angle, modeling it as a series of binary choices in

which an “eventuality” results in “action” or in “non-action” and, in the former case, in

“completion” or in “non-completion.” The interest in questions of action logic and narrative

grammar was taken up in Prince (1973) which synthesized and systematized the earlier

approaches, and yet again in Pavel (1985), which combined Bremond’s abstract binary logic

with game theory (cf. Herman 2002).

While the theoretical ambition and level of abstraction of early structuralist models of

narrative were impressive, their practical relevance was hard to prove to philologists.

Greimassian semantics is a case in point: used as a descriptive grammar, its categories were
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defined with a degree of generality too broad to be faulted; put to the test as a generative

grammar, its yield was too abstract to demonstrate the necessity or the explanatory power of the

transformational process from semiotic deep structure to the surface structure of narrated events

and characters. This systematic and methodological gap was addressed by Genette ([1972]

1980), who presented a comprehensive taxonomy of discourse phenomena developed alongside a

detailed analysis of narrative composition and technique in Proust’s À la recherche du temps

perdu. Broadly speaking, Genette’s narratological taxonomy covered three functional domains of

literary narrative: the temporal structure and dynamics of representation (in the dual sense of

product and process of representational activity); the mode of narration and its underlying logic

of narrative communication; and the epistemological and normative constraints of the gathering

and communication of information during the narrative process. The terminology and

neologisms introduced by Genette in together with his taxonomy soon became the narratological

lingua franca.

In contrast to his formalist predecessors and structuralist colleagues, Genette had no

intention of designing a fully coherent and self-contained theory of narrative. This sparked

fundamental narratological controversies over Genettian concepts such as “focalization” (Bal

1977; Jahn 1996, 1999b) and set the stage for numerous debates that were to result in

postclassical narratology. Some of this criticism was addressed in Genette ([1983] 1988).

1. Claude Levi Strauss (1908-2009)

Applying Saussurean principles to the realm of anthropology, Claude Levi Strauss in

his Structuralist Anthropology (1958) analyzed cultural phenomena including mythology,

kinship and food preparation. Employing the concepts of langue and parole in his search for the
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fundamental structures of the human mind, Levi-Strauss argued that myths from all cultures as

well as human thought across cultures share the same underlying structures, as they are all

governed by universal laws.

In the wake of this theory, in his The Savage Mind, where he compares the bricoleur and

the engineer, he observed that the savage mind has the same structures as the civilized mind, and

that human nature is the same everywhere. He proposed that all myths consist of the same

underlying structures — elements that oppose and contradict each other, and other elements that

mediate and resolve those oppositions, for instance, figures like the trickster, raven, coyote

appear in the myths of all cultures serving the same purpose. Levi Strauss was inspired by the

philosophy of Hegel who explained that in every situation there are two opposing forces and

their resolution — the thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Levi-Strauss also coined the word

“mytheme”, which is the smallest component part of a myth, and proposed it that these

mythemes may be studied synchronically or diachronically to analyze the deep structure of myth.

1.1 Theories of Myth

Lévi-Strauss developed a deep interest in the beliefs and oral traditions of Indigenous

groups in America during his time in the U.S. The anthropologist Franz Boas and his students

had pioneered ethnographic studies of the indigenous groups of North America, compiling vast

collections of myths. Lévi-Strauss, in turn, sought to synthesize these in a study spanning the

myths from the Arctic to the tip of South America. This culminated in Mythologiques (1969,

1974, 1978, and 1981), a four-volume study in which Lévi-Strauss argued that myths could be

studied to reveal the universal oppositions – such as dead versus living or nature versus culture –

that organized human interpretations of and beliefs about the world.

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Lévi-Strauss posited structuralism as an innovative approach to the study of myths. One

of his key concepts in this regard was the bricolage, borrowing from the French term to refer to a

creation that draws from a diverse assortment of parts. The bricoleur, or the individual engaged

in this creative act, makes use of what is available. For

structuralism, bricolage and bricoleur  are used to show the parallels between Western scientific

thought and indigenous approaches. Both are fundamentally strategic and logical; they simply

make use of different parts. Lévi-Strauss elaborated on his concept of the bricolage with respect

to the anthropological study of a myth in his seminal text, "The Savage Mind" (1962).

1.2 Theories of Kinship

Lévi-Strauss’s earlier work focused on kinship and social organization, as outlined in his

1949 book "The Elementary Structures of Kinship". He sought to understand how categories of

social organization, such as kinship and class, were formed. These were social and cultural

phenomena, not natural (or pre-ordained) categories, but what caused them?

Lévi-Strauss’s writings here centered on the role of exchange and reciprocity in human

relationships. He was also interested in the power of the incest taboo to push people to marry

outside of their families and the subsequent alliances that emerged. Rather than approaching the

incest taboo as biologically-based or assuming that lineages should be traced by familial descent,

Lévi-Strauss focused instead on the power of marriage to create powerful and lasting alliances

between families.

1.3 Criticism
Like any social theory, structuralism had its critics. Later scholars broke with the rigidity

of Lévi-Strauss’ universal structures to take a more interpretative (or hermeneutic) approach to

cultural analysis. Similarly, the focus on underlying structures potentially obscured the nuance
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and complexity of lived experience and daily life. Marxist thinkers also criticized the lack of

attention to material conditions, such as economic resources, property, and class.

Structuralism is curious in that, although it was widely influential in multiple disciplines,

it was not typically adopted as a strict method or framework. Rather, it offered a new lens with

which to examine social and cultural phenomena.

2. Roland Barthes (1977)

Roland Barthes was one of the earliest structuralist or poststructuralist theorists of

culture. His work pioneered ideas of structure and signification which have come to underpin

cultural studies and critical theory today. He was also an early instance of marginal criticism.

Barthes was always an outsider, and articulated a view of the critic as a voice from the margins.

He wrote towards the end of his life: Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, and Camera Lucida:

Reflections on Photography. Barthes writes ‘the novelistic without the novel’, as he himself put

it. Indeed, this is arguably the true basis of his originality, over and above his theories of writing

and signification.

2.1 Barthes and Semiotics:

Barthes is one of the leading theorists of semiotics, the study of signs. He is often

considered a structuralist, following the approach of Saussure, but sometimes as a

poststructuralist.

A sign, in this context, refers to something which conveys meaning – for example, a

written or spoken word, a symbol or a myth. As with many semioticists, one of Barthes’s main

themes was the importance of avoiding the confusion of culture with nature, or the naturalisation
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of social phenomena. Another important theme is the importance in being careful how we use

words and other signs.

One characteristic of Barthes’s style is that he frequently uses a lot of words to explain a

few. He provides detailed analyses of short texts, passages, and single images to explore how

they work.

In Saussurean analysis, which Barthes largely uses, the distinction between signifier and

signified is crucial. The signifier is the image used to stand for something else, while the

signified is what it stands for (a real thing or, in a stricter reading, a sense-impression).

The signified sometimes has an existence outside language and social construction, but

the signifier does not. Further, the relationship between the two is ultimately arbitrary. There are

many different ways a particular signified could be expressed in language or different objects

divided-up. None of these ways is ultimately superior to the others.

2.2 Roland and Narratology:

Barthes’s influential study of narrative in 1966 (Barthes 1966: 1–27) continues the

semiotician’s mission of unmasking the codes of the natural, evident between the lines in the

works of the 1950s. Taking a James Bond story as the tutor text, Barthes analyses the elements

which are structurally necessary (the language, function, actions, narration, of narrative) if the

narrative is to unfold as though it were not the result of codes of the convention.

Characteristically, bourgeois society denies the presence of the code; it wants ‘signs which do

not look like signs’.

2.2 Codes and Languages:

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Barthes proposed that we could organize the lexis into five main groups, all working in

combination in a narrative ie the five groups or codes as he called them, are the narrative modes

of organizing the units so that meaning is generated. The five codes Barthes works with here are

the hermeneutic code (presentation of an enigma); the semic code (connotative meaning); the

symbolic code; the proairetic code (the logic of actions); and the gnomic, or cultural code which

evokes a particular body of knowledge.

The hermeneutic code (HER.) refers to any element in a story that is not explained and,

therefore, exists as an enigma for the reader, raising questions that demand explication. Most

stories hold back details to increase the effectiveness of the final revelation of all diegetic truths.

We tend not to be satisfied by a narrative unless all "loose ends" are tied; however, narratives

often frustrate the early revelation of truths, offering the reader what Barthes terms "snares"

(deliberate evasions of the truth), "equivocations" (mixtures of truth and snare), "partial

answers," "suspended answers," and "jammings" (acknowledgments of insolubility). As Barthes

explains, "The variety of these terms (their inventive range) attests to the considerable labor the

discourse must accomplish if it hopes to arrest the enigma, to keep it open" (76). The best

example may well be the genre of the detective story. The entire narrative of such a story

operates primarily by the hermeneutic code. We witness a murder and the rest of the narrative is

devoted to determining the questions that are raised by the initial scene of violence. The

detective spends the story reading the clues that, only at the end, reconstructs the story of the

murder. See the Star Trek Lesson Plan for an example of a television episode that invokes this

code.

The proairetic code (ACT.) refers to the other major structuring principle that builds

interest or suspense on the part of a reader or viewer. The proairetic code applies to any action
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that implies a further narrative action. For example, a gunslinger draws his gun on an adversary

and we wonder what the resolution of this action will be. We wait to see if he kills his opponent

or is wounded himself. Suspense is thus created by action rather than by a reader's or a viewer's

wish to have mysteries explained.

These first two codes tend to be aligned with temporal order and thus require, for full

effect, that you read a book or view a film temporally from beginning to end.

The semantic code (SEM.) points to any element in a text that suggests a particular, often

additional meaning by way of connotation. In the first Lexia that I quote from Barthes' S/Z,

"Sarrasine" is associated with "femininity" because of the word's feminine form (as opposed to

the masculine form, "Sarrazin"). The question of femininity later becomes an important one in

Balzac's story about a man's love for a castrato that he, at first, believes to be a woman. By

"connotation," Barthes does not mean a free-form association of ideas (where anything goes) but

"a correlation immanent in the text, in the texts; or again, one may say that it is an association

made by the text-as-subject within its own system" (8). In other words, Barthes marks out those

semantic connotations that have special meaning for the work at hand.

The symbolic code (SYM.) can be difficult to distinguish from the semantic code and

Barthes is not always clear on the distinction between these two codes; the easiest way to think

of the symbolic code is as a "deeper" structural principle that organizes semantic meanings,

usually by way of antitheses or by way of mediations (particularly, forbidden mediations)

between antithetical terms. The concept is perhaps most analogous to Algirdas Greimas'

understanding of antagonism and contradiction in narrative structure. A symbolic antithesis often

marks a barrier for the text. As Barthes writes, "Every joining of two antithetical terms, every
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mixture, every conciliation—in short, every passage through the wall of the Antithesis—thus

constitutes a transgression" (27).

The cultural code (REF.) designates any element in a narrative that refers "to a science or

a body of knowledge" (20). In other words, the cultural codes tend to point to our shared

knowledge about the way the world works, including properties that we can designate as

"physical, physiological, medical, psychological, literary, historical, etc." (20). The "gnomic"

code is one of the cultural codes and refers to those cultural codes that are tied to clichés,

proverbs, or popular sayings of various sorts.

Together, these five codes function like a "weaving of voices," as Barthes puts it.

3. Gerard Genette (1930-2018)

Important Concepts in Genette's Narratology

The work of Gerard Genette in the field referred to as “narratology” represents one of the

most important contributions to narrative theory, considered as a branch of literary theory, in the

second half of the twentieth century. Genette was born in Paris, where he studied at the Lycée

Lakanal and the École Normale Supérieure, University of Paris. After leaving the French

Communist Party, Genette was a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie during 1957–8. He received

his professorship in French literature at the Sorbonne in 1967.

Gerard Genette's work (1972 and 1983) fits into the German and Anglo-Saxon academic

tradition and is intended to serve as both a culmination and a renewal of the school of

narratological criticism. According to Genette, internal analysis, like any semiotic analysis,

exhibits two characteristics. Firstly, it is concerned with narratives as independent linguistic

objects, detached from their context of production and reception. Secondly, it aims to reveal an
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underlying structure that can be identified in many different narratives. Using a rigorous

typology, Genette has developed a theory of narratological poetics that may be used to address

the entire inventory of narrative processes in use. According to Genette, every text discloses

traces of narration, which can be studied to understand exactly how the narrative is organized. As

a typology of narrative, Gerard Genette's theory of narratology is regarded by many specialists in

the field as a reading method that marks an important milestone in the development of literary

theory and discourse analysis. By using narrative voice as a concept through which all the other

categories are articulated, Genette engages the context of production as a fundamental element.

His major work is the multi-part Figures series, of which Narrative Discourse is a section. His

trilogy on textual transcendence, which has also been quite influential, is composed

of Introduction à l'architexte (1979), Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1982), and

Thresholds of Interpretation (1997). The most important of the structural narratologists, Gerard

Genette, has argued for the autonomous nature of the literary text. Genette’s work has been of

particular use to literary critics for his attempts to develop models of reading texts in a rigorously

analytical manner. The analysis of narrative has been Genette’s abiding concern, as his

voluminous work on the subject adequately demonstrates. In this present study, I will analyze

some important notions of the narrative suggested by Genette.

Genette, for instance, argues that the narrative voice has many levels. The voice is

constituted by the following elements:

(1) Narrative Instance: This refers to the actual moment and context of the narration, the

“temporal setting” of the enunciation of the narration. This context of the narrative moment is

crucial to understand the meaning of that utterance.

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(2) Narrative Time: This is the time indicated by the tense (of the verb) in the narrative. The

narrative instance also indicates the time of narration with respect to the events narrated. For

example, the narrative may be about a future event, where the narrative time is prophetic. Or, in

certain novels, the time of the event is the time of the narrative itself, where the event is

narrated as it happens. In third-person narratives, there is no such time of narration because the

events are recounted from a perspective outside the narrative itself. Thus narrative time refers to

the time of the narrative.

(3) Narrative Levels: This refers to the relation of the acts narrated to the act of narration itself.

For example, is the narrative a story within a story? for instance. The narrator may tell us about

the events which lead to his narrating to us the story of a character: “Dear reader, when I was in

Paris I met this young man . . . we became friends . . . and then he suffered a tragedy . . . It

happened this way….” Here the early remarks are a prelude to the narrative of the events that

befell the narrator and his friend, which are to be narrated soon, as the final ellipsis indicates.

3.1 Important concepts in Genette's Narratology

This outline of Genette's Narratology is derived from Narrative Discourse: an Essay in

Method. This book forms part of his multi-volume work Figures I-III. Below are the five main

concepts used by Genette in Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. They are primarily used

to look at the syntax of narratives, rather than to perform an interpretation of them.

1. Order

Order is the relation between the sequencing of events in the story and their arrangement in

the narrative. A narrator may choose to present the events in the order they occurred, that is,

chronologically, or he can recount them out of order. For example, detective novels often begin
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with a murder that has to be solved. The events preceding the crime, along with the facts leading

to the killer, are presented afterward. The order in which the events occurred does not match the

order in which they are presented in the narrative. This mixing of temporal order yields a more

gripping, complex plot. The term Genette uses to designate non-chronological order

is anachrony. There are two types of anachrony:

1. Analepsis: The narrator recounts after the fact an event that took place earlier than the present

point in the main story.

2. Prolepsis: The narrator anticipates events that will occur after the main story ends.

Anachronies can have several functions in a narrative. While analepses often take on an

explanatory role, developing a character's psychology by relating events from his past, prolepses

can arouse the reader's curiosity by partially revealing facts that will surface later. Anachronies

have always been common in literature. In fact, Aristotle seems to have been the first one to

remark on this phenomenon, when he compares the temporal structure of the tragedy and the

epic:

In tragedy we cannot imitate several lines of actions carried on at the same time; we must

confine ourselves to the action on the stage and the part was taken by the players. But in epic

poetry, owing to the narrative form, many events simultaneously transacted can be presented

(Poetics 63, XXIV.4)

Both prolepses and analepses can be external or internal (concerning the beginning and

endpoints of the main story) and have two relevant dimensions: reach and extent. They may also

be homodiegetic or heterodiegetic, that is, dealing or not dealing with a fabula line that is

narrated earlier or later in the main story. Internal homodiegetic analepses are used to recapture
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previous fabula material. They may add something new or just repeat previous information.

Repeating analepses, or recalls, tie the narrative to its past and, if they do not add to the narrative

information, can be an important principle of stylistic construction. Prolepses are less frequent

than analepses, although they are perfectly coherent while we remain in the retrospective

narrative. But when they are present, they also contribute to the structure of expectation,

curiosity, and suspense, to the activity of gap filling and construction of coherence which is the

task of the reader of the narrative. Sometimes an otherwise straightforward narrative may include

prolepses that accentuate the feeling of curiosity: how shall we reach the stage adumbrated by

the prolepsis? A novel with a complex temporality such as Salman Rushdie's Midnight's

Children makes constant use of this kind of curiosity-goading prolepsis.

2. Duration:

The separation between an event and its narration means that there is discourse

time and narrative time. These are the two main elements of duration.

 "Five years passed", has a lengthy narrative time, five years, but a short discourse time (it

only took a second to read).

 James Joyce's novel Ulysses has a relatively short narrative time, twenty-four hours. Not

many people, however, could read Ulysses in twenty-four hours. Thus it is safe to say it has a

lengthy discourse time.

Narrative duration or speed is defined by Genette as the connections between the

variable duration of the events or story sections and the pseudo-duration (in fact, length of text)

of their telling in the narrative. Genette's "narrative time" is ambiguous: it may refer both to the

idealized reading time or to the represented time in which the narrative discourse unfolds. As this

fictional time may have its variations of order, duration, and aspect, the formula for story
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duration may be extremely complex. This only means that time can be subjected in the narrative

to an infinite modulation.

. There are four speeds of narration:

(a) ellipsis: infinitely rapid,

(b) summary: relatively rapid,

(c) scene: relatively slow,

(d) descriptive: no progress in the story.

3. Frequency

Genette defines frequency as the relationship between the repetitive capacities of the Fabula

and those of the story. The notion of repetition depends on identity, and this is an operative

concept. Repeated elements are being considered insofar as they are alike; this does not mean

that there are no differences between them. Genette speaks of three types of frequency:

singulative, which involves a one-to-one relationship between Fabula events and their rendering

in the story; repetitive, when the same event in the Fabula is narrated several times (for instance,

from a variety of perspectives), and iterative, when the story gathers into a common mention

several similar occurrences in the story. Thus, the separation between an event and its narration

allows several possibilities.

 An event can occur once and be narrated once (singular).

o 'Today I went to the shop.'

 An event can occur n times and be narrated once (iterative).

o 'I used to go to the shop.'

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 An event can occur once and be narrated n times (repetitive).

o 'Today I went to the shop' + 'Today he went to the shop' etc.

 An event can occur n times and be narrated n times (multiple).

o 'I used to go to the shop' + 'He used to go to the shop' + 'I went to the shop

yesterday' etc.

4. Voice

Voice is concerned with who narrates, and from where. This can be split into four ways.

 Where the narration is from

o Intra-diegetic: inside the text.

o Extra-diegetic: outside the text.

 Is the narrator a character in the story?

o Hetero-diegetic: the narrator is not a character in the story.

o Homo-diegetic: the narrator is a character in the story.

5. Mood

According to Genette narrative mood is dependent on the 'distance' and 'perspective' of the

narrator, and like music, the narrative mood has predominant patterns. The perspective of the

narrator is called focalization. A distinction should be made between narrative voice and

narrative perspective; the latter is the point of view adopted by the narrator, which Genette calls

focalization.

Genette distinguishes three kinds of focalization:

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1. Zero focalization: The narrator knows more than the characters. He may know the facts about

all of the protagonists, as well as their thoughts and gestures. This is the traditional "omniscient

narrator".

2. Internal focalization: The narrator knows as much as the focal character. This character filters

the information provided to the reader. He cannot report the thoughts of other characters.

3. External focalization: The narrator knows less than the characters. He acts a bit like a camera

lens, following the protagonists' actions and gestures from the outside; he is unable to guess their

thoughts.

According to Genette, all narrative is necessarily diegesis (telling), in that it can attain no

more than an illusion of mimesis (showing) by making the story real and alive. For Genette, then,

a narrative cannot in fact imitate reality, no matter how realistic; it is intended to be a fictional

act of language arising from a narrative instance. Thus, in place of the two main traditional

narrative moods, diegesis and mimesis, Genette contends that there are simply varying degrees

of diegesis, with the narrator either more involved or less involved in the narrative, and leaving

less room or more room for the narrative act.

This is distinguished by Genette into two further categories:

(a) distance, or the relationship of the narration to what it narrates. This distance may be diegetic,

or a plain recounting of the story (the presentational level which is immediate as language or

gesture), or mimetic, or representing the story (character, situation, event).

(b) perspective or what is commonly called “point of view” or focus. Focus determines

the extent to which the narrator allows us to penetrate the character or the event. Narrative focus

alternates and shifts throughout the narrative and may be of two kinds (1) paralipse: where the
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narrator withholds information from the reader which the reader ought to receive according to

the prevailing focus (2) paralepse: where the narrator presents information to the reader which

the reader according to the prevailing focus ought not to receive. Genette favors

“focalization” over the traditional “point of view.” Focalization while not completely free of the

visual connotation, is broadened here to include: cognitive, emotive, and ideological orientations

of the narrator.

4. Tzvetan Todorov and Structuralism

A disciple of Roland Barthes, Mr. Todorov became prominent in the 1970s for his work

on structuralism Influenced by cultural anthropology, which focuses on recurring patterns of

thought and behavior Developed his study of the formal processes of storytelling into a 1973

book It was a structuralist approach to literary Genere, which examined the structural

features in fantasy-based texts like “Arabian Nights” and ‘Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”. His

later books included intellectual portraits of thinkers Benjamin Content, Jean –Jacques,

Rousseau, and Mikhail Bakhtin.

Todorov argues that a work of literature can be evaluated by identifying the initial

equilibrium, examining the period of imbalance that occurs when it is broken, and realizing

how the equilibrium is restored. His theory is systematic, Like Fry’s his theory is cynical and

can arguably be applied to any work of literature and remain accurate. According to his

theory, every work of literature contains what is called an equilibrium, which is the

“existence of a stable but not static relationship between the members of society”.

He argues that a work of literature can be evaluated by identifying the initial equilibrium,

examining the period of imbalance that occurs when it is broken, and realizing how the
 22

equilibrium is restored. His theory is systematic, Like Fry’s his theory is cynical and can

arguably be applied to any work of literature and remain accurate. According to his theory,

every work of literature contains what is called an equilibrium, which is the “existence of a

stable but not static relationship between the members of society”

He argues that a work of literature can be evaluated by identifying the initial equilibrium,

examining the period of imbalance that occurs when it is broken, and realizing how the

equilibrium is restored. Todorov has a formula in which the agents are assigned X and Y

values, which will change depending on the work that is being evaluated. According to him,

this formula can be applied to any work of literature, so let’s apply it to Orwell’s Animal

Farm and see if it holds up.

The initial equilibrium of the novel is a hierarchy where the humans are above the

animals and the animals work for humans to run the farm. This is the social relationship

between the two agents at the start, but when the animals run Mr. Jones off the farm and

rename it as Animal Farm, the initial balance has now been broken According to Todorov,

the period of imbalance will begin and the rest of the novel will be a journey to creating a

new equilibrium or restoring the old one.

A new Hierarchy is established, with the pigs-snowball, Napoleon, and Squealer being

the ringleaders. At the first, there seems to be equality, but as the novel progresses it becomes

easier to see the imbalance that the lack of equilibrium is causing the animals who are

opposed to Napolean, who declares himself the leader are immediately killed and the rest left

cold, hungry and exhausted.

5. Conclusion
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Genette has developed a theory of Narratological poetics that may be used to address the

entire inventory of narrative processes in use. According to Genette, every text discloses traces

of narration, which can be studied to understand exactly how the narrative is organized. This

approach constitutes a solid foundation, complementing other researches being done in the social

sciences, e.g. sociology, literary history, ethnology, and psychoanalysis.

5.1 Summary

The development of narratology has been dependent not only on its theoretical or meta-

theoretical advances but has also emerged with the gradual consolidation of organizational and

institutional structures. In this respect, three phases can be identified:

Phase 1: The formation of cross-disciplinary narratological interest groups. Beginning

with the contributors to the programmatic 1966 special issue of the journal Communications and

the creation during the 1970s by Bremond, Genette, Todorov, Marin, and Metz of the Centre de

recherches sur les arts et le langage (Centre National de Recherche Scientifique), informal

organizational models (also represented by the Tel Aviv group with its influential journal Poetics

Today, or in the Amsterdam School initiated by Bal) have played a decisive role in shaping

narratology as a paradigmatic inter-discipline.

Phase 2: The advent of officially funded narratological institutions for academic research

and teaching since the late 1990s, such as the “Forschergruppe Narratologie” and the

“Interdisciplinary Center for Narratology” at Hamburg University, the “Zentrum für

Erzählforschung” at Wuppertal University as well as the “Center for Narratological Studies” at

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the University of Southern Denmark and the “Project Narrative” at Ohio State University in the

US.

Phase 3: The founding of national and international narratological umbrella

organizations. These include the North American “International Society for the Study of

Narrative,” the Scandinavian “Nordic Network,” and the “European Narratology Network.”

To date, the theoretical definition of narratology has generally followed one of three lines

of reasoning: the first upholds or questions narratology’s original formalist-structuralist credo;

the second explores family resemblances among the old and the “new narratologies” and their

various research paradigms; the third focuses on the methodological distinction between

hermeneutic and heuristic functions, sometimes suggesting that narratology’s scope ought to be

restricted to the latter and sometimes arguing that it ought to be defined in even more general

terms. While the merit of these theoretical definitions is obvious, narratology’s potential for

further development is perhaps better described in terms of the interaction of three concurrent

processes: expansion of the body of domain-specific theories on which narratology is based;

continuous broadening of its epistemic reach; consolidation of an institutional infrastructure,

which has helped to transform a methodology into a discipline.

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