Action between plot and discourse

THOR GRÜNBAUM

Abstract

In this article, I argue that the representation of simple, bodily action has
the function of endowing the narrative sequence with a visualizing power.
It makes the narrated scenes or situations ready for visualization by the
reader or listener. By virtue of this visualizing power or disposition, these
narrated actions disrupt the theoretical divisions, on the one hand, between
the narrated story and the narrating discourse, and on the other hand,
between plot-narratology and discourse-narratology. As narrated actions,
they seem to belong to the domain of plot-narratology, but insofar as they
serve an important visualizing function, these narrated actions have a com-
municative function and, as such, they can be said to belong to the domain
of discourse-narratology. In the first part of the article, I argue that a cer-
tain type of plot-narratology, due to its retrospective epistemology and ab-
stract definition of action, is unable to conceive of this visualizing function.
In the second part, I argue that discourse-narratology fares no better since
the visualizing function is independent of voice and focalization. In the final
part, I sketch a possible account of the visualizing function of simple actions
in narratives.

Keywords: action; narratology; plot; discourse; reader-experience; visual-

ization.

1. Introduction

Most people would agree that a theory of narrative should distinguish be-
tween the story a narrative is telling and the way it is telling its story. That
is, it is common practice in theories of narrative to draw a distinction be-
tween the narrated story and the narrating discourse. Together with this
distinction we find, naturally enough, a division of labor in the study of

Semiotica 165–1/4 (2007), 295–314 0037–1998/07/0165–0295

DOI 10.1515/SEM.2007.045 6 Walter de Gruyter
296 T. Grünbaum

narratives. Thus, we group together theories that study the narrated

story, let us call this group plot-narratology, and separate it from the
group of theories that study the way in which the narration tells or com-
municates its story, let us call this group discourse-narratology. The pur-
pose of this article is not to criticize and reject these divisions. There is an
element of truth in them. Rather, I will argue that certain narrative phe-
nomena are lost if one dogmatically clings to this set of divisions, since
these phenomena cut across the distinction between story and discourse.
The problematic phenomena I will be concerned with in this article essen-
tially involve the narration of characters’ intentional bodily action. My
aim is to explain why the aforementioned divisions often lead to a false
or misleading conception of what such an action is, and to explain how
such actions are narrated by verbal narratives and what function they
commonly serve in the narratives.
The result of clinging tenaciously to a strict division between narrated
story and narrating discourse has too often been that narratology has
blinded itself to some of the important functions that narrated actions
serve in literature. In brief, my claim is that purposive action is a basic
embodied and spatial-orientational phenomenon and that these bodily
and orientational structures in di¤erent ways make themselves manifest
in the verbal narration of action. They endow the narration of action
with a visualizing power: They make the narrated scenes or situations
ready for visualization by the reader or listener. By virtue of this visu-
alizing power or disposition, these narrated actions disrupt the theoret-
ical divisions, on the one hand, between the narrated story and the nar-
rating discourse, and on the other hand, between plot-narratology and
discourse-narratology. As narrated actions, they seem to belong to the
domain of plot-narratology, but insofar as they serve an important visual-
izing function — they can be characterized as a mechanism that makes
the narrated scenes easily visualizable or even prompt the reader to
visualize them — these narrated actions have a communicative or narrat-
ing function and as such they can be said to belong to the domain of
discourse-narratology.
In what follows, I will proceed by first explaining why ‘traditional’
plot-narratology is unable to grasp and describe a certain type of bodily
action and its visualizing function. Second, I will try to describe how this
type of action functions in verbal narratives and make a comparison with
seemingly identical ideas in discourse-narratology, particularly concern-
ing the notion of ‘direct’ or ‘scenic presentation.’ Third, based on this
background, I will point to certain real (extra-literary) life experiences
in which this narrative visualizing function is grounded. Hopefully this
should make it clearer why this basic structure and function are relatively
 Action between plot and discourse 297

independent of ‘modern’ discourse-narratological distinctions between

voice and focalization (or point of view).

2. Plot-narratology and action

Let me start by providing a characterization of how modern plot-

narratology conceives of action. The account (or perhaps caricature) that
follows will most likely not match the position of any particular theoreti-
cian, but does seem to describe some common denominators or presuppo-
sitions shared by many people working in this field.
In narratives, a story is told. In order to understand the nature of nar-
ratives, it is therefore important to study the structures and rules that
govern the narrated story. An important leap forward will have been ac-
complished if one can manage to describe how a story should be struc-
tured in order to be a story; that is, if one can extract some minimal cri-
teria for being a story. One important insight pointing in this direction
seems to be that in order for some text to be a story it must describe or
otherwise depict some event that is or could be happening. In other words,
the narrated story cannot be constructed out of static, purely descriptive
sequences, but must contain some minimal narration of happenings.
Thus, a narrated story must contain some narrative sequence that depicts
or unfolds some dynamicity or change. Propp (1968: esp. ch. 2 and 3) and
later Barthes (1966) named these sequences functions, since these sequence
can be conceived of formally as functions that take a present state of af-
fairs and change it to a new one. Others have called such sequences for
events or actions (see Abbott 2002: ch. 2). We can therefore say that in
order to be a story, a narrated story must contain at least one narrative
sequence that depicts or narrates some event or action that functions so
as to bring us from one situation to a new one. Consequently, accord-
ing to this understanding, action should be understood minimally as the
transformation of one state to another one. To be sure, most narratives
contain more than one transformation or action, and narratives as we
know them can be looked upon as successions of actions (transforma-
tions). The task of plot-narratology has therefore been to discover the
principles that govern the construction of such action-successions.
A first step in this direction was the insight that not all actions or trans-
formations were of equal importance to a story. Many of the actions
could be completely eliminated without causing the identity of the story
to change. One idea is, then, that if one keeps on peeling o¤ apparently
inessential or secondary actions, one will, at some point, reach the core
stock of actions that together constitutes the basic structure or identity
298 T. Grünbaum

of the story. In other words, one can, as Barthes famously did (1966), dis-
tinguish between ‘cardinal’ actions and secondary ‘catalyzer’ actions. The
‘cardinal’ actions denote the set of actions or transformations that one
cannot eliminate from the story without changing the story in essential
respects, while ‘catalyzer’ actions refer to those that can be omitted with-
out changing the story’s basic identity. In this way, the ‘catalyzer’ actions
are conceived of as having a secondary function: they are a kind of oil
that greases the narrative machinery by filling in the details between one
‘cardinal’ action and the next. By removing all secondary actions from
the story and thus liberating its cardinal structure, it suddenly becomes
apparent how seemingly di¤erent stories across di¤erent epochs and cul-
tures are the same or share the same underlying plot. I think these are im-
portant insights that I see no reason to belittle.
Having marked o¤ ‘cardinals’ from ‘catalyzers,’ one can proceed to
study the combination of ‘cardinal’ actions. Inspired by contemporary
structural and generative linguistics, attempts were made in the late sixties
to excavate the deep grammar of narrated stories, i.e., the principles that
govern any concatenation of ‘cardinal’ actions (for a paradigmatic exam-
ple, see Todorov 1969). In accordance with changing tides in philosophy
and linguistics, the study of plots has changed too. It has by now become
acceptable again to investigate what could be seen as the referential level
(the level of the represented), such as narrated events, persons, and situa-
tions, and their ‘ontological’ status. In this vein, researches like Ryan
(1991) and Ronen (1994) have systematically investigated the relations
between, on the one hand, the psychological attitudes of the narrator
and the characters, and on the other hand, the ‘ontological’ status of
the events that are being narrated, which, depending on their relation to
the narrator’s or character’s attitude, have the status of ‘real,’ ‘dreamt,’
‘desired,’ etc. However, two things seem to remain constant in plot-
narratology, back in the sixties as well as now: namely, the claim that an
action can be adequately defined in minimal terms as a transformation of
one state to another, and consequently that some transformations are
more essential to the story than others.1

3. Presuppositions and consequences of plot-narratology

It is a fundamental premise for this plot-narratological research tradition

that the research is carried out after completed reading. Its interest and
method are through and through retrospective. That is to say, its funda-
mental question is this: The complete story taken into consideration,
which actions are primary (‘cardinals’) and which are secondary (‘cata-
 Action between plot and discourse 299

lyzers’)? To answer such a question it is of course required that one knows

the story in its entirety and is able to evaluate each sequence in its relation
to the complete teleological endpoint (see Culler 1975: 138–139).
If one combines this retrospective epistemological perspective with the
minimal definition of action as transformation, then the result is a fur-
ther restriction of one’s research field. If one makes these basic assump-
tions and restricts one’s study to the retrospective investigation of the
principles governing the combination of cardinal transformations, then
plot-narratology will have a strong tendency to limit the investigation to
the temporal and ‘semantic’ aspects of the story. People have thus been
quick to confirm Lessing’s claim that narrative literature is the art of suc-
cession and time, while painting (photo and, to some extent, motion pic-
ture) is the art of simultaneity and space (see, for example, Stanzel 1995:
155). The impression of spatiality that the narrated world might seem to
possess is under all circumstances a problem that falls under the general
heading of point-of-view and thus belongs to the study of the narrative
discourse. The impression of space is elicited not by what is told — the
narrated events — but by the way the events are told, by the manner of
telling. In contrast to this ‘traditional’ narratological conception of the
spatiality of the narrated world, I would claim that by limiting the narra-
tological study of actions to their most minimal, temporal and ‘semantic’
aspects, you make it impossible to see how the narrated actions play an
important role in making the narrated world into a spatial world.
If one takes the way in which the narrated story unfolds during the act
of reading as one’s point of departure for the theoretical description of
the narrated actions, the result will be di¤erent. First of all, from this per-
spective the distinction between ‘cardinal’ actions and ‘catalyzer’ actions
appears to lose its psychological validity (Toolan 2001: 26), because from
this perspective neither the reading subject nor the narrated characters
will be capable of giving a résumé of the entire story. They will all be
placed in actu, caught up in the story as it unfolds. If we take this ‘in
actu-perspective’ as our point of departure, then the narrated actions will
appear as having an important aesthetic function. Conceived from this
perspective, the narrated actions manifest themselves as playing an im-
portant role in the reader’s experience of the narrated story, as well as
for her immersion and engagement in the story and her aesthetic appreci-
ation of it. To put it in the form of slogan: From the retrospective per-
spective after completed reading, we are able to grasp the narrated story,
but as readers placed in the ‘in actu-perspective,’ we are grasped by the
narrated story. In order to understand the manner in which the narrated
story is able to ‘grasp’ us, we must ground our investigation on the way in
which the narrated story unfolds ‘in actu’ during the reading. Only by
300 T. Grünbaum

making this our epistemological starting point are we able to analyze the
structures and mechanisms that enable and, to a certain extent, determine
how we are ‘griped’ or ‘touched’ by the story.

4. Narration of simple actions

Let me try to specify and justify these claims by a number of examples.

Let me start with Barthes’ and Chatman’s famous James Bond-example
from Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger.

One of the telephones rang in the dark room. Bond turned and moved quickly to
the central desk and the pool light cast by the green shaded reading lamp. He
picked up the black telephone from the rank of four. (Fleming quoted in Chap-
man 1969: 13)

In their treatment of an example like this, Barthes (1966) and Chatman

(1969) would peel o¤ everything but ‘One of the telephones rang in the
dark room. He picked up the black telephone.’ These two remaining sen-
tences can, they would claim, sum up the essence of the whole sequence.
They manifest the essential pattern of transformation: Initial state (not
described but implied), intruder event (ringing of the phone), and resolu-
tion event (the action of taking the phone).
By contrast, if one’s point of departure is how this situation unfolds as
one is reading it, then one’s theoretical perspective and interests are
bound to be di¤erent. One would no longer be able to define action
merely in abstract terms as the transformation of one state to another
and the relation between actions merely as succession. The example from
Goldfinger is saturated with dynamics, force, and movement, and as you
read it, you almost see the acting Bond before your (mind’s) eyes. Central
to this experience stand the simple bodily actions ‘turning,’ ‘moving,’ and
‘picking up.’ Action-verbs that denote simple bodily actions: the acts that
the agent actually performs with her body, but which would often be the
kind of actions that would be omitted in a résumé.2 This is, however, not
without theoretical implications, because it makes a huge di¤erence to the
reading-experience whether the text one is reading has the form of a sum-
mary and thus is distancing the reader from the narrated situation — for
example, ‘Bond answered the telephone’ — or, in contrast, narrates the
situation as it concretely unfolds and thus places the reader and the nar-
rated agents in actu.
If one defines action minimally as the transformation of one state to
another, as it is done by ‘traditional’ plot-narratology, then it becomes
 Action between plot and discourse 301

di‰cult to describe and understand any relevant di¤erence between the

general denomination of the whole scene (e.g., answering the telephone)
and all the simple acts that make up the scene. For plot-narratology, the
only relevant di¤erence seems to be between ‘cardinal’ and ‘catalyzer’ ac-
tions, and consequently, plot-narratology will have a tendency to focus
on the general actions and eliminate the simpler actions. Usually it will
only be the more general actions that survive the making of the résumé.
But something is lost in the making: namely, the fact that the simpler the
narrated actions are, the more persistent is the location of the reader and
the narrated agent in the concrete unfolding of the events. The ‘simplifica-
tion’ of narrated actions should be acknowledged, I think, as one of the
most important mechanisms in making the narrated world into a world
in ‘flesh and blood’ rather than a lifeless semantic construction.3 By
means of the narration of simple actions the narrated story becomes
‘present’ and ‘alive.’ The body plays an essential role in this connection.
It is, however, important to bear in mind that the presentifying and visu-
alizing function that I am referring to does not work by describing bodily
movement, but rather by narrating actions that the agents have a reason
for doing.
Let me try to make these deliberations more concrete with some exam-
ples. We can distinguish between di¤erent ways of describing actions with
respect to whether the actions are conceived of in ‘general’ terms or in
‘simple’ terms or in terms of bodily movement:
1. General, summarizing action-narration:
a. ‘The Lord hardened the heart of Pharaoh King of Egypt, so that he
pursued the Israelites, who were marching out boldly. The Egyptians —
all Pharaoh’s horses and chariots, horsemen and troops — pursued the
Israelites and overtook them as they camped by the sea near Pi Hahiroth,
opposite Baal Zephon’ (Exodus 14: 8–9).
b. ‘In the company of a Dane and two Norwegians I left the old
Lübeck in the evening’ (Andersen, Skyggebilleder: 15).
2. Simple, bodily action-narration:
a. [The explicitly described situation is the king arriving at a castle on
horse and a crowd welcoming him] ‘Before the king could reply to every-
one, he saw the lady coming toward him to hold his stirrup. Not wishing
to let this happen, he hastened to dismount the moment he saw her’
(Chrétien de Troyes, The Knight with the Lion: lines 2378–2380).
b. ‘It was my son, sleeping. I woke him. We haven’t a moment to lose,
I said. Desperately he clung to his sleep. That was natural. A few hours
sleep however deep are not enough for an organism in the first stages of
puberty su¤ering from stomach trouble. And when I first began to shake
302 T. Grünbaum

him and help him out of bed, pulling him first by the arms, then by the
hair, he turned away from me in fury, to the wall, and dug his nails into
the mattress. I had to muster all my strength to overcome his resistance.
But I hardly freed him from the bed when he broke from my hold, threw
himself down on the floor and rolled about, screaming with anger and
defiance’ (Beckett, Molloy: 127).
3. Description of bodily movement:
a. ‘He moved a thin shrunken brown hand gently in the air in time to
his praise and his thin quick eyelids beat often over his sad eyes’ (Joyce,
Portrait of the Artist: 228).
b. ‘I lay down flat on my stomach on my son’s coat. And I now
propped my elbows on the ground and my jaws between my hands, which
carried my eyes towards the horizon, and I made a little cushion of my
two hand on the ground and laid my cheek upon it, five minutes one,
five minutes the other, all the while flat on my stomach’ (Beckett, Molloy:
154).
The di¤erence between these three types of action-narration is by no
means categorical, but should be understood as matter of degree. Already
by a first reading it is manifest that as a reader you experience what is
happening in the narration of simple actions in a di¤erent way than
what is happening in both the narration of general actions and descrip-
tions of bodily movements. In reading the narration of simple actions,
one has an immediate and quasi-perceptual understanding of what is go-
ing on, whereas in reading of the two other types of narration of action,
one has a mediate and distanced understanding of what is happening.
Concerning the more general end of the scale of possible types of
action-narration, our understanding is indirect and distanced because
our understanding implies and is grounded in a more basic understanding
of the simple actions that one has to perform in order to execute the more
complex and general actions. In order to leave ‘the old Lübeck,’ a person
has to do a number of more simple things such as walking to the coach,
entering it, etc. In order to understand what it means that the Egyptians
pursued the Israelites, one has to understand that thousands of men on
foot and on horse sat on the move. In other words, if as a reader one
wishes to visualize the events narrated by way of the more general
action-sentences, then one has to visualize all these more simple actions.
By contrast, in the body-descriptive end of the scale, the rule seems to be
that if the narration takes the form of a detailed description of a body
and its movement, then we are pushed towards an understanding of the
narrated scene that falls apart in purposeless observational fragments.
We ‘see’ a hand moving and eyelids beat, and it is up to the reader to sup-
 Action between plot and discourse 303

ply the narrated movements with some overall purpose that is able to syn-
thesize the observational fragments into a coherent whole. As a result, the
narrated scene resists visualization, or at least does not seem to prompt it.
To sum up the argument of this section, we can therefore say that there
is an important di¤erence between the three types of narration of action;
a di¤erence that ‘traditional’ plot-narratology with its retrospective epis-
temology and minimal conception of action as transformation appears
to be unable to describe and analyze. Note, however, that this argument
does not establish that a theoretical investigation of plot-structures
is in principle unable to conceive of such di¤erences and the di¤erent
functions of action-narration, but merely that de facto ‘traditional’ plot-
narratology has been unable to do so insofar as it clings to the mentioned
presuppositions.

5. The function of simple actions in narratives

The narration of simple, bodily actions has a central function in narra-

tives. They generate (quasi-) visibility and (quasi-) presence of the nar-
rated world. It is among other things the presence of such actions that
contributes to making the story lively and prompts the reader to experi-
ence that she perceives what she is reading (or listening to). In such
sequences, literature is no longer aimed at the ear, but at the eye, as Quin-
tilianus remarked (Quintilianus bk. 8, 3, 62–63). Take the following ex-
ample from The Aeneid by Virgil, depicting a boxing match between
Dares and Entellus:

At once the two rose up upon their toes

and, fearless, raised their arms high in the air.
They held their heads back, sloping from the blows,
while fist feinted at fist to tempt attack:
Dares better at footwork, nimble, young;
Entellus tall and heavy, but slow, unsteady;
his knees wobbled; his breath came hoarse and gasping.
Many a punch they threw to no e¤ect;
they beat tattoos on flank and chest — a huge
deep drumming; they landed blows all over ears
and temples; their teeth rattled beneath the thwacks.
(Virgil, bk. 5, verse 426¤.)

It is almost as if you are witnessing the match yourself. It is the simple

actions, the ones that are explicitly narrated (‘the two raised their arms
high in the air’) as well as the ones that are implied (‘Many a punch they
304 T. Grünbaum

threw to no e¤ect’), that contribute importantly to the generation of this

quasi-visibility. A kind of visibility that would disappear either if the
match were to be narrated with general action-verbs (e.g., ‘Dares won
the fight against Entellus’) or if it were to be narrated by descriptions of
bodily movement (e.g., ‘Entellus’ right arm moved towards his left side in
the direction of Dares’ right ear . . .’). Below I will attempt to describe the
structures of the simple bodily action that are able to bestow this visualiz-
ing power upon the narration. But let me first say a little more about how
these narrated simple, bodily actions are dealt with by traditional con-
cepts and categories of discourse-narratology.
In reading a sequence like the one with Dares and Entellus, most of us
e¤ortlessly and immediately visualize the narrated events. We could per-
haps say that this narrative sequence is structured in a way that makes it
ready for visualization by its reader to such a degree that the reader is
prompted to perform this visualizing activity. The consequence will be
that the reader experiences the narrated events as if she were directly
witnessing them as they unfold in the narrated world, rather than merely
being told about them afterwards. Using traditional narratological con-
cepts, we could say that the reader experiences a direct scenic presence of
the narrated events and the absence of a mediating narrator: she has the
impression of attending directly to what goes on in the non-mediated
world of the story.
With reference to Plato’s distinction in the third book of the State
between mimesis and diegesis, modern narratologists have taken up this
discussion of the relation between, on the one side, the direct or scenic
presentation, and on the other, the reporting and summarizing represen-
tation (see, for example, Stanzel 1993: 11–15 and Genette 1969, who re-
fers more directly to Plato), or between showing and telling (see esp.
Booth 1991: 93). I think it is a plausible reading of the third and tenth
book of the State to say that Plato is worried about the captivating
powers that narrative poetry possesses when the listener experiences the
narrated world as if it were real or present. In contrast, the modern narra-
tologists have been more focused on accounting for the degrees of pres-
ence of the narrator. Thus, the directness of the direct or scenic presenta-
tion is not defined, by the moderns, in terms of the experience of presence
of the narrated events but rather in terms of how manifest the narrator is.
Consequently, direct or scenic presentation is seen as a function of the
degree of presence of the narrator: minimal degree of presence implies
scenic presentation.
This narratological line of reasoning has lead to the claim that the di-
rectness of the narrated events can be reduced to, on the one hand, how
imperceptible the narrating voice is cable of being, and on the other hand,
 Action between plot and discourse 305

the degree to which the point of view, i.e., the epistemic origin of the nar-
rated story, can be ascribed to one of the characters in the story. In accor-
dance with this narratological model, scenic presentation can be defined
as the narrative situation in which the narrating voice has become com-
pletely transparent or assimilated to one of the characters and where all
the information (perceptions, thoughts, feelings, etc.) expressed by the
narrating discourse is relative to some character in the narrated world
and never transgresses the character’s limited perspective (so-called inter-
nal focalization).4
The problem with this account is that it restricts the phenomenon of
scenic presence or direct presentation to a specific narrative situation —
a particular form of discourse — and as a consequence is unable to grasp
(at least systematically) what is special about the narrative sequences
in which the reader experiences the narrated events in their immediate
quasi-presence. If it is true that this direct form of narration and narra-
tive experience is essentially constructed from sequences characterized
by a high frequency of simple action-narration, then modern discourse-
narratology seems unable to capture and analyze the type of narrative
structure that readers experience as direct quasi-presence of what is hap-
pening. The reason is this: since this reader-experience is prompted and to
a large extent controlled by the type of (simple) actions that are narrated,
modern discourse-narratology with its focus on narrators and the ways of
mediating is amiss when it comes to types of narrated events that cut
across types of narrative situation, such as simple actions (this is already
illustrated by the above examples, 1a, b; 3a, b).
One important problem with this form of discourse-narratology is that
its conception of ‘direct presentation’ does not correspond to the reading
experience. It might even strike us as paradoxical that it is the narrative
situation which has been pointed out by modern discourse-narratology
as the most direct that will often strike the reader as the less direct.
When reading a sequence dominated by a ‘figural narrative situation,’ in
which the narrating voice disappears or is neutralized and the epistemic
origin of the narrated information is attributed to one of the characters
(internal focalization), the reader usually has no experience of directly
witnessing or perceiving (being prompted to visualize) the narrated events.
Not that the reader experiences a mediating narrator when enjoying a
work predominantly written with a figural narrative situation. The point
is rather that when enjoying a narrative sequence dominated by the figu-
rative narrative situation, the reader is confronted with the direct presence
of words and thoughts — intellectual stu¤, not visual stu¤, not physical
events and actions. It is thus rather limited what can be directly presented
in this form of situation. The events that are narrated in sequences where
306 T. Grünbaum

the point of view is limited to a character in the story and the mediating
factor is unnoticeable are most often imperceptible events and processes,
for example, a ‘stream of consciousness,’ a torrent of thoughts and expe-
riences. It is therefore not events that the reader can easily visualize (or
be prompted to visualize) which are directly presented to her. It is, in
Booth’s words, not the protagonist’s ‘actions that are dramatized directly,
not his speech that we hear unmediated. What is dramatized is his mental
record of everything that happens. We see his consciousness at work on
the world’ (Booth 1983: 163). In other words, in such sequences, the
reader will usually experience no direct presence of things and events in
the narrated world, and if she does, it will not be because of the restric-
tion of the point of view to a character and the impersonality of the nar-
rating voice.
Let me try to illustrate these claims with a couple of examples. The first
is taken from Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie:

Les pas s’arrêtent devant la porte du bureau, mais c’est celle d’en face, donnant
accès à la chambre, qui est ouverte puis refermée.
Symétriques de celles de la chambre, les trois fenêtres ont à cette heure-ci leurs
jalousies baissées plus qu’à moitié. Le bureau est ainsi plongé dans un jour di¤us
qui enlève aux choses tout leur relief. Les lignes en sont tout aussi nettes cepend-
ant, mais la succession des plans ne donne plus aucune impression de profondeur,
de sorte que les mains se tendent instinctivement en avant du corps, pour recon-
naı̂tre les distances avec plus de sûreté.
La pièce heureusement n’est pas très encombrée: des classeurs et rayonnages
contre les parois, quelques sièges, enfin le massif bureau à tiroirs qui occupe toute
la règion comprise entre les deux fenêtres au midi, dont l’une — celle de droite, la
plus proche du couloir — permet d’observer, par les fentes obliques entre les
lames de bois, un découpage en raies lumineuses parallèles de la table et des fau-
teuils, sur la terrasse. (Robbe-Grillet 1957: 76)

This sequence is constructed is such a way that the reader will, with some
labor, be able to figure out and visually imagine the spatial layout of the
described room. A perspective on the narrated scene is indicated. As we
go along, this perspective becomes more and more specified culminating
in the indication of left-right coordinates in relation to some of the sur-
rounding physical objects. The narrating voice is impersonal and the
focalization or point of view is located inside the described room as the
perspectival origin of the left-right coordinates (‘enfin le massif bureau à
tiroirs qui occupe toute la règion comprise entre les deux fenêtres au
midi, dont l’une — celle de droite, la plus proche du couloir — permet
d’observer . . .’). Nevertheless, you experience no perceptual presence of
the scene. The whole sequence seems to fall apart in independent percep-
 Action between plot and discourse 307

tual flashes. A plausible reason for this might be that a synthesizing and
unifying element is absent and that this element is able to generate the
experience of ‘seeing’ the presented world. This visibility, or rather, dispo-
sition to prompt e¤ortless visual imaginings, thus appears to presuppose a
minimal degree of unity and continuity, and it is my claim that the narra-
tion of simple actions is a principal mechanism in the generation of such a
unity and continuity. Just imagine if we altered the Robbe-Grillet exam-
ple by inserting the following kind of sentences: ‘The steps approached
the door. The door opens and a woman appears. She walks a few steps
into the room, takes o¤ her coat and throws it on the floor.’ Neither an
analysis of the voice, nor of the focalization, nor for that matter of the
formal plot-structure, appears to be able to account for the additional
element that such action-sentences would add to the situation. It is not
because of the ‘camera-eye’ technique that we would be prompted to
‘see’ the acting woman. Note, in passing, that this description of the
Robbe-Grillet example does not imply any aesthetic evaluation: resis-
tance to visualization might be an important aesthetic quality.
To support the above claims, consider the following example taken
from Jacobsen’s short story Mogens:

When Camilla had entered her room, she pulled up the blind, leaned her brow
against the cool pane, and hummed Elisabeth’s song from ‘The Fairy-hill.’ At
sunset a light breeze had begun to blow and a few tiny, white clouds, illuminated
by the moon, were driven towards Camilla. For a long while she stood regarding
them; she followed them from a far distance, and she sang louder and louder as
they drew nearer, kept silent a few seconds while they disappeared above her,
then sought others, and followed them too. With a little sigh she pulled down the
blind. She walked to the dressing table, leaned her elbows against it, rested her
head in her clasped hands and regarded her own picture in the mirror without
really seeing it. (Jacobsen 1979: 29–30)

Like the sequence from La Jalousie, this sequence from Mogens repre-
sents a room, but in a completely di¤erent way. To be more exact, in
this latter sequence we find almost no descriptions of the room and its
spatial layout — that is, we find no explicit indications of how the per-
spective on the room is to be placed inside the room and no indications
of left and right. The narrator’s point of view cannot be placed at a spe-
cific place in the narrated room. Nevertheless, it is this sequence from
Mogens and not the one from La Jalousie that the reader is more likely
to e¤ortless visualize and thereby experience as spatial.
The sequence from Mogens does not explicitly describe a room by talk-
ing about it; rather it manifests spatiality somehow in and through its
308 T. Grünbaum

structure. In a direct and quasi-perceptible (ready for visual imagining)

way this sequence manifests a spatial situation, which as a whole is strung
together by the familiar patterns of movement and orientation that are
involved in Camilla’s simple, bodily actions. Without any special e¤ort
one visually imagines a woman pulling up the blind and leaning her
head against the window. We immediately know how it would feel to
perform such actions and how they would look to an external observer.
Tentatively, one might say that this kind of simple action cuts across an
inner-outer dichotomy insofar as our knowledge of how such actions feel
when we are executing them and our knowledge of what they look like
when another person is executing them seem to be two sides of the same
coin: normally, in simple action, first-person experience and outer appear-
ance cannot be torn apart.5 It is exactly for this reason that we will find
that the focalization in sequences with simple action-narration, like the
one taken from Mogens, is ambiguous or rather double: descriptions of a
simple bodily action ‘from the inside’ and the descriptions of its appear-
ance from the outside are but two perspectives on the same particular
event. Or rather, simple action-narration can be said to describe the
action at a level that comprises both aspects. Finally, not only do we
know how the movements involved in the execution of the simple actions
feel and what they look like, these movements are, as the execution of ac-
tions, parts of a pragmatic whole that assigns a goal to each movement
and ties the situation together in a familiar and easily graspable purposive
whole (exactly something that does not characterize the sequence from La
Jalousie). Thus, Camilla does not merely walk; rather, she walks from the
window to the dressing table in order to look in the mirror.
To be sure, the aim of this section has not been to argue that the mod-
els of modern discourse-narratology and their account of narrative situa-
tions is wrong and must be rejected. Far from it, I do acknowledge these
serious scientific results and endeavors of discourse-narratology. In con-
trast to a simple rejection, I have argued that we must be careful not to
let the models of modern discourse-narratology avail themselves of the
exclusive rights to the phenomenon of ‘scenic presentation.’ At least we
should recognize a di¤erent and important form ‘scenic presence’ or ‘di-
rect presentation,’ namely, the one in which the narrated events seem to
present themselves directly before our mind’s eye. In such sequences, the
reader experiences the narrated events as if she was an eyewitness or,
more generally speaking, a perceptual witness to their happening or un-
folding. When reading, it is as if the events unfold in actu in front of us,
in a narrated presence. It is my bet that it was this form of direct presen-
tation that the ancient narratologists (for example, Plato, Aristotle, and
Quintilianus) were most of all concerned to understand when they distin-
 Action between plot and discourse 309

guished between diegesis and mimesis, namely, as a distinction between,

on the one hand, a distancing and summarizing narration for the receiv-
ing ear and mind and, on the other hand, a direct presentation of the nar-
rated events for the receiving eye.

6. The experiential structure of first-person agency

Through my choice of examples, I have tried to illustrate that the nar-

rated simple, bodily actions remain constant in their presentifying and
visualizing function independently of whether the narrated agent is an ‘I’
or a ‘she,’ and independently of whether the situation is constructed with
internal or external focalization. In order to understand and explain this
constant function it is necessary that we leave language and literature for
a while and turn towards the lived experience of agency. Let me briefly
point to some basic structures in our experience as persons executing sim-
ple actions.
All the actions of an agent involve in a systematic way the agent’s use
of her body (let us put mental actions aside). In order to realize the goals
of her actions, the agent must do something with her body. From a phe-
nomenological perspective, to do something with one’s body means that
one has certain experiences of bodily movement and posture; and further-
more, that one enjoys certain perceptual experiences since one’s bodily
experiences are systematically correlated with certain perceptions of the
world. That is to say, the bodily sensations which form the subjective
aspect of, for example, my turning my head, are always systematically
connected to a specific type of transformation of my field of vision.6 So,
if I am to retrieve a book from the bookshelf, I must stand up and walk
to the right location and this will feel and change my visual field in a
certain way. It therefore seems obvious that it normally takes a specific
sequence of bodily sensations and perceptions of the surrounding world
before I can realize my practical goals. In other words, the experience of
executing actions and especially of executing them successfully is depen-
dent on the experience of bodily movement and perception. If this is so,
there is a level of experience on which pragmatic intentionality or purpo-
siveness, bodily experience, and perception are related to each other in a
systematic way and form a sort of unity.
These systematic relations are represented in language. Simple action-
verbs such as to run, hit, reach, jump, walk, bend over, etc., seem in their
normal linguistic context to indicate schematically the di¤erent elements
of the experience of first-person agency. You run for something, after
something, towards something, behind something, etc.; each expresses an
310 T. Grünbaum

intentional aim or directedness, that is, the pragmatic intention of the

agent. Furthermore, to run implies that the agent moves in a certain way
and we are all, to some extent, familiar with how the perceptual field
changes as an e¤ect of running. To use and understand simple action-
verbs imply this unified experiential structure, even if it is not explicitly
unfolded or elaborated in a particular context. This special function of
simple action-verbs must be understood against the background of our
understanding of agency as first-person agents. It is against this back-
ground that it becomes understandable how my use of simple action-
sentences can evoke an immediate and often perceptual understanding in
my reader or listener of what is being told. And when we (as readers)
meet sequences constructed out of such sentences, they will usually
prompt us to visualize their content. As readers we are familiar with the
bodily movements and their goals; we can do them ourselves and we
know what they look like when executed. We also know how the agent
of this kind of simple action typically orients her attention. All this con-
tributes to the fact that when you read sequences dominated by simple
action-narration you ‘see’ what you read.7
Let me end this section by making one thing clear. For the sake of
convenience, space, and clarity, I have in this section focused on the
action-verbs — this is, of course, an abstraction. The lexical or material
content of the action-verb is of real importance to the visualizing e¤ect
— that is, it is important whether the verb is ‘to shop,’ ‘to run,’ or ‘to
move the little finger’ — but of equal importance is the linguistic context
of the verb. Let me here mention just two other factors. First, we ought to
consider also prepositions as ‘up,’ ‘towards,’ ‘against,’ ‘through,’ etc.
since they seem important to the creation of perspectival figure-ground
relations within the narrated scene.8 Second, we should mention also the
importance of the syntactical structure of the sentence for the construc-
tion of the perspective on the narrated scene; for example, whether the
sentence has an active or passive construction.9

7. Conclusion

We seem to have reached what might strike some as a rather surprising

conclusion that it is not primarily in reading explicit descriptions of visual
and spatial properties of things that we experience the visibility and spa-
tiality of the presented world in literary narratives. However, if we look
more closely on how such explicit descriptions function and compare this
with insights from phenomenological investigations of perception, then it
might no longer appear so mysterious. A description of an object’s visual
 Action between plot and discourse 311

qualities, such as ‘Le bureau est ainsi plongé dans un jour di¤use qui en-
lève aux choses tout leur relief,’ relates a static and isolated state of af-
fairs. By contrast, perception and perceptual appearance are, according
to phenomenologists, not to be understood in terms of static visibility of
things and their properties, but rather as a dynamic and pragmatically
embedded process.10 In our daily dealings with ordinary objects in the
world, the objects will not primarily appear as having certain visual prop-
erties (say, as a brown cylindrical thing of such and such a height and
width), but rather as having certain functions and as inviting us to use
them in certain ways. Accordingly, we do not primarily see a co¤ee mug
as a thing with a certain geometrical shape and color, but as something
into which to pour co¤ee, something to drink from, to grasp in a certain
way, etc.
Against this background, it might no longer seem so strange that it is in
the narration of simple, bodily action, rather than in the description of vi-
sual and spatial properties, that we find the disposition to prompt visual
imaginings in readers. This places the phenomenon of action at the fore-
front when it comes to understanding the spatial and visual character of
the narrated world. It has been one of the main aims of this article to
show that in order to get a theoretical grasp of these structures of visual-
ization and ‘making-present’ it is required that we do not reduce actions
to a purely abstract or ‘semantic’ entity, to the mere transformation
of one state to another, as it has been the practice of structuralist plot-
narratology to do. Action is a complex phenomenon that at one at the
same time involves pragmatic intentionality and motivation, bodily expe-
riences, and perception of the world.
It should be noticed that, despite what some might think, the account
of the function of action in narratives that I have presented here in no
way reduces the study of narratives to a psychological study of the reader.
There are, however, many good reasons for wanting to include the expe-
riences of the reader in the account of the structure and function of narra-
tives. If we accept that narratives are produced in order to be read, to
evoke experiences, and to be understood and enjoyed, then we ought to
expect that there exists a systematic relation between linguistic and se-
mantic means and the reader’s experience of the narrated world. The
evocation and control of the reader’s experience of the narrated story
can, to some extent, be claimed to be the telos narration. Narratives
can be regarded as mechanisms for prompting experiences. If this is so,
then we should expect that we can use systematically and ubiquitously
occurring experiences and experiential structures in order to isolate and
understand the relevant linguistic and narrative structures. Furthermore,
if these narrative structures are such that they are able to prompt and
312 T. Grünbaum

control the reader’s experience of the narrated events, then it seems only
natural that we should make use of the unfolding of the narrative from its
in actu-perspective in our study of narratives — even make it our point of
departure for our theoretical investigation. It is reasonable to suppose
that some of the important objective and transhistorical narrative struc-
tures are exactly structures that are designed in order to prompt or force
upon the reader certain types of experiences — namely, the imaginative
experience of the presence of the narrated events, i.e., visual imaginings
of the situation in which the narrated simple, bodily act takes place.
It seems pointless to deny that when we read or hear stories, we some-
times sink into the story and its narrated presence — we gain imaginative
access to the here-and-now of the characters. In this article, I have tried
to show that a specific form of narrated actions is capable of serving this
visualizing function. The traditional structuralist plot-narratology, with
its retrospective epistemology and consequently its interest in the sum-
marized story, has been incapable of grasping this function. Similarly,
this visualizing function has escaped modern discourse-narratology, and
for good reasons. One reason, which was already perceived by Ham-
burger (Hamburger 1965), is that the impression of a here-and-now pres-
ence of the narrated events cannot be properly grasped in terms of a
narrating voice and point of view. To sum up, my claim is that modern
plot- and discourse-narratology fail in understanding how the narrated
agents, objects, and their spatial situation can be directly presented to
the reading subject because of certain methodological limitations. To be
more exact, the reason for this failure lies partly in the fact that the
reader’s imaginative experience of direct presence to a large extent is
made possible and is controlled by structures pertaining to simple action-
narration for which reason they ought to belong to the domain of plot-
narratology, but insofar as these structures have the function of making
possible a direct presentation and visualization, they appear to belong to
the narratological study of the discourse. In other words, the structure
and function of simple action-narration cut across traditional divisions
of labor within narratology. We therefore need a new approach if we are
to fully understand the function of action in narratives.11

Notes

1. This minimal or formal conception of action is manifest also in some recent ‘cognitive’
plot-narratological theories; see, for example, Brandt 2002.
2. In this article, I rely on the following action theoretical distinctions: By ‘simple, bodily
action’ I mean the type of action that an agent can execute directly without executing
some other action in order to do it. An example would be tying one’s shoelaces. A sim-
 Action between plot and discourse 313

ple action is to be distinguished from both bodily movements (for example, the move-
ments of one’s finger when tying the shoelaces) and complex or general actions (actions
that cannot be performed directly, but the performance of which require the execution
of some simple actions). For further discussion, see, for example, Enç 2003, esp. ch. 2.
3. Of course, action-sentences are not the only means to creating such a ‘living’ or intui-
tively present world. Among the other means one could mention ‘fluctuating transi-
tions from reporting [Bericht] to direct, indirect and free indirect speech [Erlebte
Rede]’ (Hamburger 1965: 65).
4. This narrative situation corresponds to the one canonized as ‘the figural narrative situ-
ation’ (Personale Erzählsituation in German). See Stanzel (1995).
5. See Jeannerod and Pacherie (2004) for related ideas and for relevant experimental data
from cognitive neuroscience and psychology suggesting a tight connection between
first-person sense of agency and perception of agency.
6. For a more elaborate discussion of the relation between experiences of movement and
perceptual experiences, see Overgaard and Grünbaum (2007).
7. For a more elaborate discussion of narrative sequence’s ability to prompt visual imag-
inings, see Grünbaum (2005).
8. See Talmy (2000a) and (2000b). See also Bundgaard (1999) and Hansen (2007).
9. See, for example, Dik 1989, ch. 10.
10. For introductions to and discussions of phenomenological theories of perception, see
Mulligan (1995) and Overgaard and Grünbaum (2007). For similar ideas in recent
enactive approaches to cognitive science and philosophy of mind, suggesting a neces-
sary relation between visual content and sensorimotor skills, see Noë (2004).
11. The author wishes to thank Peer F. Bundgaard and Thomas Illum Hansen for valuable
comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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Thor Grünbaum (b. 1975) is an Assistant Research Professor at the University of Copenha-
gen 3tgr@hum.ku.dk4. His research interests are philosophy of action, narratology, and
aesthetics. His publications include ‘Fortælling og indlevelse — En teori om synligheden i
det litterære værk’ (2003); ‘Roman Ingarden’s theory of schematized profiles: A dynamic
version’ (2005); and ‘What do weather watchers see? Perceptual intentionality and agency’
(forthcoming).