Description and Narrativity: "The Piece of String"

Algirdas Julien Greimas; Paul Perron; Frank Collins

New Literary History, Vol. 20, No. 3, Greimassian Semiotics. (Spring, 1989), pp. 615-626.

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 Description and Narrativity: "The Piece of

Algirdas Julien Greimas

1. The Situation of Description in Narrative Discourse

B
EFORE UNDERTAKING the analysis of textual units we can iden-
tify as "descriptive" we must first of all attempt to situate
them within the entire narrative and also distinguish them
from other discursive units by using the most objective identification
criteria possible. It is indeed desirable that formal segmentation pro-
cedures progressively replace our intuitive comprehension of the text
and its articulations. T o do this it would seem appropriate to use the
knowledge we have of the narrative structures of different and com-
parable texts and to consider them as models enabling us to predict
narrative unfolding.

1 . 1 . Segmentation by Spatiotemporal Criteria

Maupassant seems to have distributed the entire story contained
within "The Piece of String" on two successive Tuesdays as the mo-
ment of its temporalization. The narrative schemata of the two days
appear to be both syntagmatically recurrent and paradigmatically op-
posable to one another.
This temporal segmentation is followed by a division of the two
days that is both temporal and spatial. Closely correlated with the
displacements of the actors of the story, each of the temporal units-
days-can be subjected to a spatial distribution giving rise to the fol-
lowing narrative typology:

-
topic space

at home on !he r-d in town on !he mad at home cpiloyc

~~~~~~

* This analysis first appeared as "Description et narrativitk a propos de 'La Ficelle' de

Maupassant," in the Revue canadienne de linguistique romane, 1 (1973), pp. 13-24.
616 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

The spatialization of the narrative also brings to the fore both the
syntagmatic and paradigmatic aspects of its organization. Though the
space in which the narrative takes place is circular and symmetrical-
from "home" to "home"-we can see that this symmetry is there only
to underscore the transformations of the contents inscribed in the
spatiotemporal coordinates:

beginning end

first Tuesday health. . . sickness

I second Tuesday health. . . moral and physical death

Nonetheless, the spatiotemporal framework established is not

only a formal framework but also the place where displacements,
deeds, and actions of the protagonists of the narration take place.
From this it follows that the relations between places and actors, top-
onyms and the anthroponyms, as well as their variations, are narra-
tively significant.
At first glance the segmentation of the narrative corresponds in the
main to the canonical articulation of a great many narrative objects. It
also reminds us of the results of the Proppian analysis of Russian
folktales. Yet we can immediately note significant differences, since in
contrast to the Proppian narrative, where the hero is initially in con-
junction with society and then travels to solitary and hostile spaces to
accomplish great deeds, Maupassant's hero is a solitary hero who travels
in order to be in conjunction with society. Utopic space, which by
definition is the place of disjunction and solitary confrontation, be-
comes here the place of conjunction and social confrontation.
Even before beginning any analysis whatsoever of content we can
say that (a) the narrative structure appears as a conflict between two
protagonists, the individual and society (which seems obvious), and (b)
from a narrative perspective, the segments of texts traditionally
designated as "descriptions" have a specific function of establishing
and making the collective agent called society act (this still remains to be
demonstrated).

1.2. Segmentation by Knowledge

Beginning with the principle that in a closed text all semantic re-
dundancy is significant-as opposed to open texts where it is only
"noisem- and that it is all the more significant that it is manifested in
identical or comparable terms in natural languages, the following
phrase repeated twice can be taken as a formal mark:
DESCRIPTION AND NARRATIVITY

The news spread.

The news spread throughout the region.

This mark is confirmed by the very presence two lines later of another
redundant phrase:

And he began to tell the story of the piece of string.

(he) began to relate his story, now completed by its denouement.

Since the "news spread everywhere" can be considered as the dif-

fusion of social knowledge and the "story of the little piece of string" as
the diffusion of individual knowledge, we can say that the marks we
introduced institute a boundary within the narrative which in turn
appears as the narrative of the confrontation of two types of knowledge and
two types of knowing-how-to-do. The individual hero seeks to influence
public opinion while the antiherolsociety opposes the former through
its own interpretation of the facts. In addition, we can clearly see that in
the first part of the narrative the absolute knowledge of the subject of
narration, who, using the reader as accomplice, speaks of characters
and things as though he were omnipresent and omniscient, is op-
posed to differentiated knowledge that is introduced-such and such an
actor knows such and such a thing. The first part of the narrative-
that part including the "descriptive" sequences currently being dis-
cussed-is intended to represent the being and the doing of the pro-
tagonists, in comparison with individual or social knowledge which is
the "object" of the second part. A new segmentation of the narrative
can be carried out:

( 1st part) (2nd part)

social being and doing social knowledge
2.

individual being and doing individual knowledge

According to our model of predictability, the function of said descrip-

tive sequence will therefore be to introduce the collective actant, So-
ciety, into the narrative and to present it according to its being and
according to its doing. This obviously remains to be demonstrated.

1.3. Segmentation by Grammatical Criteria

A third criterion of segmentation-furnished by the author as a

result of his strict observance of the classical rules of nineteenth-
century prose, which confer specific temporal marks on the textual
618 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

units defined as "descriptions," "actions," and "dialogues"-can be

added to the previous ones. We know that descriptive units are char-
acterized by the use of the imperfect tense and delimited by the pret-
erit which frames them.
Thus, against the backdrop of his "objective" discourse founded on
absolute knowledge, the narrator relates the being and the doing of

the actors he portrays. If we now regroup both the spatiotemporal

segmentation criteria and the grammatical marks we obtain the fol-
lowing partition:

descriptive sequence I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . descriptive sequence 2

descriptive descriptive descriptive descriptive
segment 1 segment 2 segment 3 segment 4
(on the market (at the inn)
square) square)
"the peasants "At Jourdain's. . ."
roads. . ." of Goderville. . ." felt the cows. . ."

(1) An evenemential sequence that interrupts the flow of the imper-

fect tenses of the description and frames them within the two preterits
("he saw" [il apercut] and "he was lost" [il se perdit]) is inserted between
descriptive sequences 1 and 2.
(2) Descriptive sequence 2 is in turn delimited by a preterit ("the

-
drum began to beat" [le tambour roula]) signaling the beginning of the
second evenemential sequence followed by several dialogue sequences.
The entire first part leading up to the introduction of the problem-
atics of differentiated knowledge can be presented by the following:
descr. seq. 1 + even. seq. 1 + descr. seq. 2 + even. seq. 2+ (dialogued seqs.)

segm. 1 segm. 2
n
segm. 3 segm. 4

(3) We can see that the opposition of contents referring sometimes

to the collective actant and sometimes to the individual actant (Maitre
Hauchecorne) corresponds grosso mod0 to the syntagmatic modulation
of discourse into descriptive and evenemential sequences.

2. The Semantic Analysis of the Descriptive Sequences

Although the segmentation of the text we have carried out to a
certain degree permits us to envisage the general function of
DESCRIPTION AND NARRATIVITY 619

"description," it still does not inform us about the contents in-

vested and distributed over several segments. At this new phase we
should turn to the semantic analysis of the descriptive units we have
identified.

2.1. The Descriptive Segment: The Wanting Actant

(1) The first descriptive segment represents "the peasants and their
wives" traveling along "all the . . . roads around Goderville." We know
that within the narrative framework, displacement is generally inter-
preted as the figurative manifestation of desire-in other words, as
the narrative form of the modality of wanting with which the subject
is endowed. Insofar as it has an object, displacement can be defined as
a quest. The explanation given by Maupassant-"It was market day'-
as a matter of fact indicates the pursuit of economic and social com-
munication as the meaning of the quest.
(2) The segment itself is divided typographically into three para-
graphs, which, if we d o not take into account certain "stylistic
transitions," correspond to the presentation of three types of actors in
their roles as subjects: men, women, people in wagons.
At first glance, the partition of the descriptive segment appears to
be asymmetrical since it successively sets into play two distinct classi-
ficatory categories. We could say that men and women, divided ac-
cording to the category of sex, constitute, when combined, all of this
society. However, as people on foot, men and women are opposed to
people in wagons according to a different category, putting into play
considerations of wealth, prestige, in short, a hierarchy correspond-
ing to a certain type of power. A little later on we shall see what
restrictions need to be made as to the role-in the description of
society-of the distinction into sexes.
If we were to take the liberty here of anticipating somewhat, we
might say that this dual classification according to sex and power is
not only maintained throughout the description, but also that it can
even be considered as the generative principle of the description. We
can see that the descriptive segments which follow (segm. 3 and segm.
4) are proportional expansions of the first segment:

people on foot (men and women)

segm. 1: on the road:
people in wagons

segm. 3: at the market (people on foot)

-+ in town
segm. 4: at the inn (people in wagons)
620 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

At the level of discursive expansion, the organization of the first

descriptive segment serves to produce two new descriptive segments.
The level of discursive organization can therefore be distinguished
from the narrative level. The narrative functions attributed to the
descriptive segments so generated do not follow the same principles
of organization.
(3) The population on the move is presented neither as a collection
of individuals nor as a global society, but rather as a collection of
stereotyped classes of men and classes of women. These classes of
individuals arranged in ordinal series clearly appear when they are
opposed to society presented in segment 2 as "a crowd," "a swarm,"
"an assembly," that is to say as an undifferentiated totality.
Hence, the passage from segment 1 to segment 2 appears as the
transformation of an individual stereotyped ordinal series into a total
nonindividuated society. It is as though a collection of specific want-
i n g ~converged on a common topos in order to constitute a collective
being endowed with a general wanting:

segm. 1: on the roads segm. 2: in the market place

+
individuals + specific wantings societies + general wanting

(4) Up until now among all the actors on the move along the roads
we have taken into consideration only human beings. As a matter of
fact the stereotyped ordinal series described by Maupassant appear as
concatenated syntagmatic series that contain an implicit hierarchy:
men + cows + fowl + women. (We can see that the distinction into
sexes is mainly dominated by a hierarchy of beings established ac-
cording to their economic utility.)
We should take into account the fact that on the market square a
paradigmatic arrangement, "a crowd," "a swarm of men and beasts
mingled," corresponds to the syntagmatic disposition of humans and
animals on the roads. This can be interpreted as constituting the
complex term: /humanity/ + Ianimalityl. In this description of men,
cows, women, chickens, and ducks carried out through successive
touches, we can readily distinguish a scarcely veiled intention to iden-
tify metaphorically humans and animals. The peasant's body that is
compared to a "balloon" from which "protruded a head, two arms,
and two feet" is simply the nuclear figure of the cow following him.
The same can be said for the description of the woman, which focuses
on her head "topped by a bonnet," a description that closely parallels
the description of the heads of the hens and ducks.
Through analytical presentation at the level of narrative syntax,
DESCRIPTION AND NARRATIVITY 62 1

description makes the components of the social being explicit by estab-

lishing the modality of wanting constituting the collective actant that
society happens to be. In other words, society's invested semantic
content will appear as a mixture of humanity and animality on the
market square.

2.2. Descriptive Segment 2: The Figurative Actant

(1) This semantic analysis can be undertaken only through identi-
fying similarities and oppositions. When compared to the first seg-
ment, the second descriptive segment, initially delimited by means of
spatial criteria, because of the presence of the crowd on the market
square, was characterized syntactically as constituting the collective
actant; and semantically as defining society by the complex term I
+
humanity1 Ianimalityl.
(2) This second segment, just like the first one for that matter,
appears as the description of society as it is known and perceived in the
imagination of the subject of narration. But, whereas the first seg-
ment is modulated solely by the narrator's visual perception, the second
is subject to various sensorial orders that serve as a principle of in-
ternal organization. This description is successively founded upon
visual, auditory, and olfactory perceptions. When these three orders
unfold syntagmatically, they produce an effect of sensorial totalization
on the paradigmatic level, that is to say, a global apperception of
society insofar as it can be figuratively apprehended by all the senses.
A supplementary raison d'Ctre for this descriptive segment seems to
be to present society as a figurative actant in such a way that the
plurisensorial figure envelops its previously identified syntactic and
semantic attributions.

2.3. Descriptive Segment 3: Social Doing

In Maupassant's text, the segment we have just briefly examined
is followed by a n evenemential sequence narrating Maitre
Hauchecorne's specific doing (he finds the piece of string and acts as
though he had found nothing). Like other peasants he arrived alone
in town and, having voluntarily undertaken this displacement, "was at
once lost in the slow and noisy crowd." This actor, for whom the
narrator prepares an individual subject's destiny, is conjoined with the
society that is in the process of being formed and is scarcely distin-
guishable from the social being in which he is "lost." The conjunction
622 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

will be maintained to the end of the descriptive sequence, and con-

sequently Maitre Hauchecorne will assume all the attributions the
author successively confers upon this peasant society as a whole.
(2) The evenemential sequence is inserted between two descriptive
segments we were unable to identify by means of spatial segmentation
since both primarily focused on describing the market square. This
sequence has a demarcative function and opposes the two descriptive
segments as:
segm. 2 social being
-=
segm. 3 social doing
(3) The category of sex, already exploited in segment 1, is taken up
again here to separate the activity described into two distinct types of
doing. Men are responsible for buying and women for selling, men
are given to barter and women to exchange. Masculine doing is for
the most part verbal, whereas feminine doing is an almost entirely
somatic one of an economic nature:
masculine doing buying
-- ------ -- verbal doing (bartering)
feminine doing selling somatic doing (exchange)
We can see that such a distribution of activity according to the classes
of sex is not pertinent on the "referential" plane and that to account
for this we must try to find another pertinence within the semantic
organization of discourse.
(4) If we examine things a little more closely we notice that the
narrator opposes women's impassiuity to men's aptation. The buyers'
agitation does not lead to any purchases, whereas the quiet, impassive
women carry out economic operations. At first glance it is as though
there were an attempt antiphrastically to valorize women, who are
situated at the lowest level on the scale of beings, but who nonetheless
carry out fundamental economic functions, whereas men spend their
time in chatter that has no economic significance whatsoever. But this
is not all. By getting beyond the opposition of sex, in the frenzied
activity of the market that is an object of collective wanting, we can
identify two forms of social doing: a fundamental doing of an economic
nature, completely under the aegis of a second doing that includes
social communication.
(5) In fact, the essence of social communication takes place in the
form of "endless bargaining," where the buyer's attitude, defined in
terms of perplexity, of indecision, of "fear of being cheated," is domi-
nated by a single idea, "to discover the man's ruse and the animal's
defect." In other words, social communication is so conceived that by
DESCRIPTION AND NARRATIVITY 623

definition the message sent by the sender is a lie modalized by a seeming-

to-be-true. On the other hand, the message received by the receiver
must consist in interpretive doing attempting to read as lie all that appears
to be true.
Within the general economy of the narrative the role we can attri-
bute to descriptive segment 3 becomes apparent. Maupassant's peas-
antry, constituted as a collective actant endowed with a wanting-to-do,
is placed in a situation in which a dual social doing is exercised. Eco-
nomic doing that we could consider as denotative and that should be
fundamental is nonetheless dominated mainly by a second connota-
tive doing. This doing is at the base of social relations and consists in
deceiving and not letting oneself be deceived in a world where truth is only
the mask covering a lie. We can see that such a presentation of social
doing-which Maitre Hauchecorne fully accepts and participates in-
is necessary from the point of view of narrativity. The individual who
wants to show naked truth in the form of a piece of string will be
confronted by a society that will be able to see it only as a lie.

2.4. Descriptive Segment 4: Social Sanction

This last segment yet to be analyzed is very complex from a stylistic
point of view. According to nineteenth-century conventions, bringing
the descriptive part of the text to a close offers the writer the possi-
bility of manifesting his "art" by ending with a flourish. Since we are
mainly interested in the narrative functions of this segment, we will
not attempt to exhaust all its semantic potential but, rather, we will
extract only those elements that seem narratively pertinent.
(1) We already noted that segment 4 was opposed to segment 3
insofar as it presented people in wagons gathered together in the best
inn, differentiating them from the people on foot whom we saw on the
market square. Again, this is true simply from the point of view of the
internal semantic organization of the text, since according to
"referential" external truth, Maitre Hauchecorne, who arrived on
foot, should never have gone to the inn.
On the other hand, a "logic" of the succession of segments specifies
the attributions of the class of people in wagons. The only people
found at the inn are those who can be considered to be beneficiaries
of the social doing previously described, that is to say, those who
obtained economic gains thanks to their social knowing-how-to-do,
which as we saw consists in outsmarting one's adversaries and cor-
rectly interpreting the universal lie hidden under the appearances of
truth. These are the people who come out victors of social tests.
624 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

(2) Canonical narrative forms require that after a successful act the
victorious subject will seek to have himself recognized as such. T o use
current narrative jargon, the victorious subject seeks his "glori-
fication," which can be granted only by a sender to whom the results
of the quest are directed. This is how, at least a priori, the narrative
function of the segment under study is determined according to the
model of predictability. Do the descriptive data correspond to these
expectations?
(3) A superficial glance at the segment permits us, first of all, to
identify two initial symmetrically disposed paragraphs that set the
description of the wagons and the diners in complementary opposi-
tion. The complementarity of these two descriptions is moreover
marked by Maupassant in an explicit way:

the large dining room was crowded with eaters,

as

the immense yard was filled with vehicles. . . .

The comparison that makes possible the superimposition of the two

descriptions and their equivalence (we already encountered this pro-
cess when we identified human and animal figures on the roads) and,
surprisingly enough, the fact that the horses are absent, means that
the empty vehicles take on a metaphorical relation to the diners at
table. It is through indirect metaphorization that the problem of the
sender is raised and solved by Maupassant, who describes these
"humanized" vehicles as "raising their shafts to the sky like two arms,
or with noses to the ground and their rears in the air."
Consequently, two attitudes of the collective subject in relationship
to the imaginary sender are brought to the fore. Since the relation of
the collective receiver-subject and the sender are articulated accord-
ing to the category high versus low, "air" versus "ground": (a) either
the receiver-subject raises his empty arms to the sky and has no mes-
sage to address to the sender; or (b) the receiver-subject turns his back
to the sender and with his "nose to the ground" totally ignores the
latter.
In either case, whether one misapprehends the destination of the
activity or ends up not transforming it into a value that can be ad-
dressed to the sender, the previously described social doing appears
devoid of meaning.
(4) In the absence of the sender we are confronted with an occur-
rence of auto-destination: the economic values acquired by social doing
are destined to be consumed, and the gathering at the inn appears as a
derisory sacrificial meal whose only aim is the self-destruction of the
DESCRIPTION AND NARRATIVITY 625

values acquired with difficulty. As we can see, consumer society is not

a recent phenomenon.
(5) The absurdity of this society's wanting and doing appears as
antiphrastic derision that serves as a principle in the construction of the
entire descriptive segment. This is the case regarding the represen-
tation of the fire, the source of life, which spreads light and heat but
only comes into contact with the backs of those turned to it, whereas a
"delectable odor" of food is substituted for its vivifying function. This
is indeed the case regarding Maupassant's well-known little phrase,
the epitome of the art of nineteenth-century prose, in which "all the
aristocracy of the plough" is figuratively summed up and included in
the person of the tavern keeper, the high priest officiating next to the
unaccepted fire, who is defined as a "crafty fellow who had made a
good deal of money," that is to say both by his doing and his being.

3. Textual Segmentation and the Organization of

the Text
Although this brief analysis has attempted to examine just one as-
pect of the text under consideration, it raises a certain number of
problems which may be of interest to the semiotician of narrative.
(1) Classical distinctions according to which we can identify textual
units such as "descriptions," "actions," "dialogues," and so on, while
still pertinent at the discursive surface level of manifestation, cease
to be so when the analyst tries to account for the deep organization
of the text considered as a signifying whole. If we consider that
narrativity, taken in the widest general meaning of the term, is one of
the principal articulations of texts at the deep level, the discursive
form assigned to textual segments is coupled with a second narrative
function.
(2) The analysis we have just undertaken, especially, shows that the
purely descriptive section of Maupassant's text, which is generally
opposed to the section containing the narrative proper, is indeed
organized according to canonical rules of narrativity and in its syn-
tagmatic unfolding represents an easily identifiable structure. Al-
though the description can be broken down into "scenes," and al-
though it obeys a sort of spatiotemporal "logic" of representation
(according to which the narrator's eye successively explores such and
such a space), the raison d'Ctre of this figuration is immediately ob-
vious. To organize the setting of the drama that he is about to relate,
the narrator needs to confront an individual subject, endowed with
his own truth, with another subject, this time collective, which is suf-
626 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

ficiently "real" that it includes not only knowledge about beings and
events, but also modes for interpreting truth.
We can now see that the discursive sequence called "description" is,
in fact, a micronarrative comprising the entire history of the society in
question: the institution of the collective wanting and figurativized
subject; the demonstration of its social doing; and finally the social
sanction of this victorious doing (in the end consisting in the self-
destruction of the acquired values). This micronarrative is then inte-
grated as a hypotactic narrative program in the macronarrative con-
stituting the topic of "The Piece of String": the tragic confrontation of
two types of knowledge which are both true but nonetheless placed in
contradiction.
(3) Yet the scope of this analysis remains limited. The principle
according to which surface textual segmentation does not sufficiently
account for the deep organization of the text that depends on an
implicit narrative grammar appears solidly entrenched. However,
the example studied cannot simply be generalized, since other texts
have other descriptive sequences endowed with different narrative
functions.
(4) On the contrary, the problem that has to do with the construc-
tion of collective actants is of fundamental importance for general
semiotics, which focuses not only on literary productions, but also on
historical and sociological texts-social classes, legal institutions, po-
litical organizations, economic groups, and social beings, that is to say
collective actants whose modes of existence and functions can be sub-
jected to the same procedures of analysis.

PARIS
(Translated by Paul Perron and Frank Collins)