Narrative Discourse
By Gerard Genette Pbed in 1980
Narratology denotes both the theory and the study of narrative and narrative structure and the ways that these affect our perception. As a matter of fact, this word is an anglicisation of French word narratologie, coined by Tzvetan Todorov (Grammaire du Décaméron, 1969). Since the 1960’s, the contemporary narrative theory has been rapidly developing towards maturity, in which French structuralist critic Gerard Genette plays a pivotal role. On the basis of absorbing the others’ research results, he constructs his own narrative theory, whose origin mainly includes Saussure Linguistics, Structuralism, Russian Formalism, and New Criticism.
Russian formalists argue that the literary characteristic is not what to write but how to write. Literary narrative mainly includes “sjuzhet” (plot) and “fabula” (usually refers to story. Fabula and sjuzhet (also syuzhet, sujet, sjužet, or suzet) are terms originating in Russian Formalism
and employed in narratology that describe narrative construction. Sjuzhet is an employment of narrative and fabula is the order of retelling events. They were first used in this sense by Vladimir Propp and Shklovsky.). And the plot determines the story. On the basis of this formalist concept, Propp places emphasis on form and structure of works in his Morphology of the Folktale (1928). But he only takes note of the syntactic relationship of the surface of the story. Later Gremas, Levi Strauss, and French narratologist Bremond carry out a series of comprehensive researches on the relationship between the surface and deep structures of the story, and sum up a wide variety of grammatical patterns of the story. Though large and vague, these narrative structure models provide a great reference for Genette. New Criticism representatives Brooks and Warren collaborate on Understanding Fiction(1979), put forward the question of “who speaks”, and hence draw forth the concept of “focus of narration”, which lays a solid foundation for Genette’s "focalization" theory. Moreover, as far as the study of the narrative formula, it is obvious that Genette is influenced by Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction (1983). However, in terms of the narrative form, Booth has a similar view to New Critics.
Accepting and absorbing the above-mentioned scholars’ advantages and strengths, Genette published Narrative Discourse in 1972, which makes Marcel Proust’s In search of Lost Time the research object and proposes his own unique narrative outlook. In the book, at first he indicates that narrative contains three distinct notions, namely, narrative, story and narrating, and further distinguishes them. Narrative refers to narrative discourse, which means “the narrative statement, the oral or written discourse that undertakes to tell of an event or a series of events” (Genette, 1980: 25). Story means an event or a series of events told in narrative discourse, real of fictitious. Narrating is the act of someone recounting something. To analyzing narrative discourse is, essentially, to study the relationship between narrative and story, between narrative and narrating, and between story and narrating.
Excluding Introduction and Afterword, Narrative Discourse is divided into five chapters, which are Order, Frequency, Duration, Mood, and Voice in turn. In the five chapters, Genette at length analyzes the artistic techniques of In search of Lost Time, and hence summarizes and establishes a set of his own narratology. Genette incorporates French stru
cturalist narrative theories, constructs rather comprehensive and systematic narrative theory, and thus lays a solid foundation for contemporary narratology. It is under the influence of his narrative discourse that many subsequent scholars and experts such as Miede Bal, Gerald Prince, and Rimmon-Kenan further explore and deeply dig the narrative theories. These scholars speak highly of his narrative discourse, and in the meantime put forward some doubts and challenges, in view of which Genette also published Nouveau discours du récit (new narrative discourse) in 1983 as a response. In this new narrative discourse, he discusses such questions as the classification of person, the application of the present tense, the interrelation between mood and voice, and focalization, and consequently interprets and perfects his narrative theory.
In short, Genette presents a lot of concepts which has become the standard terms of classic in the narrative field. Besides, the publication of his Narrative Discourse has aroused strong reaction and sensation in the literary theory circle. According to his narrative theory, many analyze and interpret the specific works and bear great fruit.
Chapter One order
Time is thought of as a uni-directional and irreversible flow, a sort of one-way street, just as Heraclitus said early in western history: “You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters and yet other waters go ever flowing on.” However, as far as narrative activity is concerned, “the time of even the simplest story escapes the ordinary notion of time conceived as a series of instants succeeding one another along an abstract line oriented in a single direction” (Ricoeur, 1980: 169). Narrative is the art of TIME, which is the main subject that the majority of structuralist narratological works dwell on. In narratives, TIME can be defined as the relations of chronology between story and text, possessing the duality, namely, the time of the thing told and the time of the narrative. German theoreticians refers to this kind of temporal duality as the opposition between “erzählte Zeit” (story time)discourse and Erzählzeit (narrative time). In Les catégories du récit littéraire, Todorov divides the narrative into three categories: tense, aspect, and mood. Here the tense means the relationship between the story time and the discourse time.

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