CONCLUSION:

Unless we know the identity and space-time locations of the textual speaker and his discourse
referents (narrative agents) we cannot be said to have grasped the text as a narrative, but merely as a
set of complex expressions with some semantic information to be sure. (Margolin, 1984:184)
In dealing with linguistic subjectivity, the central assumption has been that there is not
exactly a one-to-one correspondence between the representation of the world in language and the
real world. Language does not directly refer to the world as it is but to one given speaker's or the
collective group perception of the world (Chatelin, 1987). The mediation of the speaking subject is
inexorably enshrined into and greatly influences the choice of linguistic forms. Three main
parameters have been shown to be constitutive of language-use in general, and to be particularly
exploited in literature. The first is the representation of the world in terms of person, space and time
[the deictic parameter]. The second is the representation of the world as perceived by one given
centre [the perceptual parameter]. The third is the representation of views about the world, feelings,
attitudes etc. [the affective/modal parameter].
In inventorying the most salient forms that function as primary subjectivity markers, it is
hardly surprising that clear affinities have been observed between deixis and other not necessarily
deictic affectivity indices (Fowler, 1986; Kerbrat, 1980; Parret, 1983; Todorov 1970).
Egocentricity, that is, the subjective attitude of the individual speaker as inscribed in the utterance,
seems to be the common denominator. Both deictic and affective cues necessarily presuppose a
centre from which they emanate. What differs is the nature of this centre, not its presence. A vital
distinction has been made between the deictic centre, the perceptual centre and the sentient or
cognitive centre.
The concept of self is loosely used in narratology to refer to any one of the three above-
mentioned centres [deictic, perceptual or sentient] or to any combination between them. However,
if these three components are taken to be constitutive of self, then, theoretically at least, the
following possibilities emerge as potential ingredients constituting ego:
deictic centre perceptual centre sentient/cognitive centre
1* - - -
----------------------------------------------------------------------
2* - + +
- -
----------------------------------------------------------------------
3* + - +
-
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 4 + + -
----------------------------------------------------------------------
5 + + +

The first and second categories are not possible. It is inconceivable to refer to ego in
language without anchoring it spatio-temporally. The deictic parameter is constitutive of self.
Alain Robbe-Grillet attempted to create "pure" perceptual centres meant to have no deictic
anchorage or any centre of consciousness. His failure has significantly been demonstrated in part
two of the thesis. An "impersonal" camera cannot be said to have no deictic anchorage since it has
to be positioned somewhere. The only parameter which allows for some leeway is the cognitive
parameter since it could be conceded that cameras are deictic and perceptual centres but do not have
any cognition [although this remains controversial since a camera, unless set randomly, tends to be
focused in a purposeful way so that, in a sense, it functions for the purposes of some kind of
organizing principle]. It might be argued that computers are pure cognitive centres for which
deictic and perceptual considerations are irrelevant. However, computers could be said to be made
to "perceive" through the keyboard commands or through a camera or some sort of input
mechanism. Thus the only category which totally applies to people is the fifth one.
Taking the binary opposition of speaker versus "the other" as a central distinction, and
assuming that every ego is made of a deictic element (D), a perceptual element (P) and a cognitive
element (C), then the various possibilities for the interaction between the I-sayer and the "not-I"
could be classified along the following cline ranging from total distinction to total overlap:
total alienation total overlap
--------------------------------------------------------------------->
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8#D=D D=D D=D D=D D=D
D=D D=D D=D#P=P P=P P=P P=P P=P P=P P=P P=P#C=C
C=C C=C C=C C=C C=C C=C C=C
When applying to two entities, the confronting one and the confronted one [either the
narrator mediating the character's three-dimensional ego or one character mediating another
character's three-dimensional ego], eight possibilities emerge:
First, the narrator is in full control. The character's deictic, perceptual and cognitive
coordinates are relegated to the third person, the not-I. No identification whatsoever obtains
between them. In first-person narratives the I-narrator can elect to be totally distanced from his
former self as an I-protagonist at the three levels of deixis, perception and cognition. This happens
especially in novels where the narrator has undergone a conversion for the better and wishes to
dissociate himself from his past.
 Second, the narrator can mediate the character's deictic and perceptual coordinates but
identify with the character's affective and cognitive stance. Sympathetic narration falls into this
category. In first-person narratives the narrator can perceive his former self to be distant deictically
and perceptually but chooses to relive the past experience emotionally or ideologically.
Third, the narrator can mediate the character's spatio-temporal and cognitive positions but
identify with his perception of the state of affairs. In first-person narratives the narrator's perception
of his former self can be distanced at the levels of deixis and cognition but vivid at the level of
perception such as remembering now a particular smell or taste etc..
Fourth, the narrator can mediate the character's perception and cognition but their deictic
centres overlap. In first-person narratives the narrator can drop the spatio-temporal remove between
his present and former selves but keep the perceptual and cognitive parameters distant. The second,
third and fourth possibilities are, in a decreasing order of narrator-mediation variations of the Free
Indirect Style (Leech & Short, 1981; Pascal, 1977).
Fifth, the narrator's involvement can be greater by dropping any mediation at the levels of
perception and cognition and only keeping the spatio-temporal remove. The narrator can mediate
the character's deictic centre but identify with his perceptual and cognitive centres. This category
has affinities with the interior monologue (Cohn, 1966).
Sixth, the narrator can mediate the character's perception but identify with his deictic and
cognitive centres. In first-person narratives the narrator's mediation of his former self can operate
only at the perceptual level but will keep the levels of deixis and cognition intact. The stream of
consciousness technique might fall into this category.
Seventh, the narrator can mediate the character's cognitive centre but their deictic and
perceptual centres overlap. In first-person narratives this might signal a dramatic change of
emotions or ideology but a vivid spatio-temporal and perceptual identification. The Free Direct
Style (Leech & Short, 1981) falls into this category.
Finally, there may be a total overlap of the three centres so that both selves fuse into one
another. The narrator's mediation is effectively nil. In first-person narratives, it amounts to I in the
role of speaker dealing with I in the role of d‚locut‚ here and now (chapter two).
The situation becomes much more complex when another character is introduced as a three-
dimensional ego. In that case, we have three selves with every self having three components where
the narrator mediates character 1 who mediates character 2. If eight possible combinations obtain
between every two of them, the overall set of possibilities for degrees of mediation going from the
narrator to character 1 to character 2 could be computed in the following equation:
(23)3 = 29 = 512
However, a few qualifications need to be added to this figure. First, allowance has to be
made at the deictic level for the three components of person, space and time to have various degrees
of mediation. As has been shown in the thesis, deictic mediation can be partial, that is limited to
one or two of these coordinates. Instead of the rigid relation of equal versus not equal, there are
gradations in between which can in principle be measured.
At the level of perception, not all the five senses are equally relevant all the time in the
narrator's report. Indeed, sometimes, the narrator can choose to remain silent at all about
perception. Chapters eight to eleven have shown that even then perception is inferrable.
The most heterogeneous parameter is the cognitive one as it includes a miscellany of
emotions, value judgments, ideological positions, prejudices, degrees of knowledge or learning etc..
Allowance has to be made for various combinations between them. For instance the narrator may
not agree with the content of what he is reporting but may emotionally sympathise with it and vice
versa. Besides, not all of these considerations are necessarily relevant all the time.
Further layers of embedding are theoretically possible. Besides the situation is much more
complex than the above figure might suggest. Thus a typology of narrative voice could fruitfully
explore possibilities of classifying various styles [empathetic, free direct etc..] along the above
paradigms. It is believed that the merit of this distinction is that it is more specific about measuring
the degree of mediation, specifying which centre is responsible for which clue in the text, the degree
of audibility of every voice and how the power hierarchy within narrative determines which centre
has the most audible voice. It is hoped that this distinction will open new horizons for further
research in narratology.
The various identities of the mediators (either narrators or characters...) together with the
various degrees of each mediator's intervention and especially how many levels of mediation there
are constitute the ultimate source of ambiguity of reference in narrative. The narrating activity (or
system of identification) on the one hand, and the text as utterance (or identified system) on the
other, these are the two poles for any indexical analysis (Margolin, 1984).
An indexical study of narrative is an effort to identify different centres; assign for every
deictic centre its deictic field, for every act of perception its perceptual range and for every attitude
its illocutionary force (Levinson, 1983), to define the relationship between the various centres
informing the text in terms of agentivity (who is doing what to whom?), perspective (who is
experiencing what?), affectivity (what is the subjective attitude of whose locus of consciousness
towards whom or what?), modality (who is believing what about the present state of affairs?), voice
(whose voice is audible? and whose voice is being mediated?) and especially power (who is
exercising control over whom?). This is what Margolin calls a "process of triple contextualisation"
for it is based on the distinction between three levels of analysis (Margolin, 1984:182-3):
(a) with respect to the time, place and situation of literary communication of its author and
original audience; (b) with respect to the time, place, identity and interrelations of the posited
textual speaker and his textual addressee, constituting the context of utterance or enunciatory
system (situation of narrative communication) of the act; (c) with regard to the time, place and
identity of the individuals referred to in the narrative utterances of the textual speaker, constituting
the referential system of the text.
The task of the analyst is to identify, locate and analyze each one of these contexts first
separately, then, in terms of the combinations and interrelationships between them. By recognizing
the existence of different levels and worlds, and consequently different centres, we are less likely to
get confused in the allocation of deictic, perceptual and attitudinal cues to their respective centres.
The above-mentioned possibilities provide the basis for the notion of narrative
transformations. The argument is that despite the complex surface structures informing widely
different narrative forms, every use of indices pertaining to person, space and time or to attitudes
and modal judgments is amenable in essence to the binary opposition "I" versus "not-I". The
complexity stems from the transformations which these basic structures undergo.
Consider the following diagram:

The model proposed here is based on a basic opposition between one locus of consciousness
as the axis of reference or anchorage and all the others being shifters, that is, they are defined with
respect to this centre.
At the outset (level 1) the axis of reference is the author as an enunciator engaged in the
production of discourse (since uttering here equals writing activity). Immediately, the world is
structured round this centre. Person, space and time only have value when seen with respect to him.
He can address direct enunciatees (whose presence is necessarily imagined as the reading time or
enunciatee's present of reading is not coreferential with the author's writing time); or he could
pretend to be addressing himself as an alterego - the deception stems from the fact that however
self-reflexive the form of address might be, the author as enunciator can not help having target
readers in mind; otherwise there would be no point in writing and publishing a book anyway.
Similarly, the fictional world of the story takes its definition against the author's real world. At this
level, this relationship is extra not intra-textual. The author's efforts and allusions are to be
interpreted or inferred by a process of reconstruction by the reader.
The processes of contextualisations and anchoring within the narrative start at level 2. The
existence of posited textual voices or speakers (narrators) is inevitable (Margolin, 1984). However
"figural" or "transparent" or "impersonal" the narrative might be, pure mimesis (Genette, 1966)
simply does not exist, nor can it possibly do so and still conserve any coherence. Here again, we
find the opposition between the posited textual speaker(s) as axis of reference and the world within
which this/these narrator(s) live(s), which is necessarily inscribed within the fictional world of the
story and which hinges round this central axis.
If the author is taken as the defining centre, "I/here/now", then all the potential centres
within the story are by definition others/there/then. But the moment we move into the story, and
take an overall textual speaker (Margolin's global narrator) as the defining centre,"I/here/now", then
all the other potential centres in the story are necessarily others/there/then. In other words, the
allocation of any value for person, space and time depends first and foremost on the identification
of one defining centre acting as an axis of reference.
The necessary presence of a posited textual speaker does not mean that there is necessarily
one and only one narrator. In fact, as Margolin has pointed out, texts could be univocal (that is, told
by one global narrator) or polyvocal or decentered, that is, told by many different narrators (cf
Bakhtin's polyphony). Whatever the case might be, the determining factor defining every use of the
deictic, perceptual, affective and modal devices in a text is the person of the narrator speaking
"here" and "now".
No referential system could be elaborated without the identification of the defining centre.
A narrator could be such a centre. But this narrator could give expression to a character who in turn
becomes a source of deictic, perceptual and affective anchorage. All the forms of internal
perspectives (interior monologue, stream of consciousness...) hinge round this point. It all comes
down to the fact that the character is chosen as a defining centre. A further complication would be
that that character could give expression to another character who in turn becomes a defining centre.
The complexity stems from the confrontation of all these potential centres, The same
linguistic devices could have different values depending on the identity of their defining centre.
What is more, in case of displacement they could be transformations of latent canonical devices.
For instance, the third person could be a displaced first person (chapter two), there could well be a
transformation of here (chapter three), then could be a way of rendering now and the same could be
said about the past as a transformed present (chapter four), that could be a displaced this (chapter
five). But sometimes, transformations only operate half way through; that is, certain elements are
transformed and others are not; hence the ambivalence and potential confusion. Adamson's
"paradoxes" and Kerbrat's "‚nallages" - which have been shown to be the main feature of
Empathetic narrative - draw heavily on this ambivalence.
A further source of complexity is that the passage from one level to another is not always a
smooth one. Here we are well into the problematics of mediation. How do these centres relate to
each other? How does their relationship affect narrative forms?
The various levels of embedding entail a functional hierarchy of centres in the genesis of the
narrative. A power relationship exists between them. They are to be seen in terms of superiority
versus inferiority, control versus subservience...This in turn entails a whole spectrum of degrees of
interference exercised by the superior (superordinate) centre on the liberty of expression of the
subordinate centre leading thus to tension.
But on the other hand, it could also be perceived in terms of support or sympathy, empathy
or encouragement. It is interesting to explore the nature of the relationship between these different
centres and see whether there is concord or discord, harmony or antagonism, identity of interests or
rivalry... The outcome directly affects the choice of linguistic forms on the surface level of
narrative.
This power given to the superordinate centres over the subordinate ones entails a whole
process of transformations. It is interesting to analyze how the discourse of a subordinate centre is
either totally or partially distorted or tampered with, or is on the contrary set into relief and
consolidated by a superior centre. The task of the analyst is to trace down the trajectory which the
original simpler forms have followed on their way to become heterogeneous. Thus, one can talk of
a process of hybridisation going from simplicity towards complexity; from relatively clear reference
to ambiguity. This process is reconstructed the other way round by the analyst, that is from the
heterogeneous linguistic devices at the surface level which serve as clues indicating the existence of
some embedded simpler forms relating to subordinate centres.
A determining factor in the degree of mediation has been shown to be the speaker's engaging
or disengaging orientation (Greimas and CourtŠs, 1982). Modalisation is inseparable from
deictisation, both of which work in terms of investment versus disinvestment of the speaker (Parret,
1983) at the discourse production or enunciating level in the utterance or the product level.
According to his enunciatory programme the speaker adopts strategies of either manifesting his
presence [monstration] where subjectivity is emphasised, or hiding his presence and killing the
subject in him [d‚monstration] (Parret, 1983) assuming thus an air of objectivity. Both strategies
emanate from a motivated choice on the part of the speaker. Consequently, the speaker is no less
subjective when he chooses to hide than when he sets his subjectivity into relief.
It becomes obvious that the showing/hiding process [fonction monstratoire] (Parret,
1983:89) is central to an enunciatory theory of narrative. This movement to the foreground or
retreat to the background, this commitment or apparent lack of commitment should account in
principle for the speaker's subjectivising "phenomenal" orientation or objectivising "structural"
perspective (Wright, 1987). However, these are two poles allowing for a wealth of gradations in
between. When the speaker's objectivising or subjectivising intentions are placed at the centre of
attention, it becomes easier to construe linguistic forms as presence-indicators.
Linguistic clues can reveal much needed information on the spatio-temporal whereabouts of
the speaker, his attitude towards the utterance, the addressee(s) the d‚locut‚s and the other referents,
his abilities or limitations, his emotions, his world views and prejudices, his strategies, in brief, his
personality.