Porter Institute For Poetics and Semiotics, Duke University Press Poetics Today

Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics
Review: Framing Narrative

Author(s): Michal Peled Ginsburg
Review by: Michal Peled Ginsburg
Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Winter, 1997), pp. 571-588
Published by: Duke University Press
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Framing Narrative
Michal Peled Ginsburg

French and Italian, Northwestern
Gerald Prince, Narrative as Theme: Studies in French Fiction. Lincoln: University of

Nebraska Press, 1992. x + 161 pp.
lan Reid, Narrative Exchanges. London: Routledge, 1992. vi + 265 pp.
Bernard Duyfhuizen, Narratives of Transmission. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University

Presses, 1992. 278 pp.
The study of narrative in recent decades has been intimately linked to the
rise and fall of structuralism as theory and methodology. Though narra-
tive was an object of study before structuralism rose to prominence, and
remains so today, it is with structuralist analysis that it acquired a privi-
leged position at the forefront of literary studies. Constituting itself as a
"science"-narratology1-it developed a terminology and a set of proce-
dures and, most importantly, firmly established narrative as a category and
object of study. In its displacement of such terms as the novel or prosefiction
in favor of narrative, more was involved than expanding the field of study.
The shift toward narrative as the operating term indicated the assumption
that the proper object of study is the aspect of texts that lies beyond (or
"under") their generic or historical differences, which is, precisely, their
narrative aspect. Though Roland Barthes already expressed a marked dis-
enchantment with this project in the early 1970s (Barthes 1974), it is the
"return to history," which, under the name of "new historicism" or "cul-
tural studies," dominates current literary studies, at least in the United
1. I will use the term narratology to refer to this tradition of French structuralist analysis of
narrative, with its American-European and/or post-structuralist continuation.
Poetics Today 18:4 (Winter 1997). Copyright ? 1997 by The Porter Institute for Poetics and
Semiotics.
572 Poetics Today 18:4
States, that made this project appear both obsolete and ideologically sus-
pect. And yet, paradoxically, as the three books under review (and many
others) indicate, if narratology is on the wane, the term narrative has not
lost its hold. If anything, the term has increasingly gained power to dis-
lodge other terms so that, as Gerald Prince argues, it is used now where
formerly one may have used terms such as explanation, argumentation, theory,
hypothesis, ideology,fiction, art, message, and so on (1992: 16). The broader the
term becomes, the more difficult-but also the more urgent-it is to de-
termine what, if any, specificity it still may have.
The search for that something "which, in the text, makes up narra-
tive proper" (Prince 1992: 19) meant a move away from an analysis of the
"represented world," a move aided by the increasing suspicion-charac-
teristic of both literary criticism and literary production of our century-
of the claims of nineteenth-century realism. Thus, in his introduction
Bernard Duyfhuizen (1992) explicitly distances himself from critics who
center on the "mimetic depiction" of life and suggests that we should pay
more attention to the process by which the story gets to be told-the "nar-
rative of transmission." This narrative of transmission is not a "singular
event," it is not a separate element of the narrative; rather, it is a perspec-
tive, "it constitutes the entire textual system when viewed as the narrative
of transmission" (28). As such, it inflects the way we understand the entire
narrative.
Ian Reid's 1992 book has a similar concern. The study of narrative, he
argues, should pay more attention to "the pragmatics of storytelling as a
relationship between communicants," to the dynamics of exchange, and in
so doing complicate our understanding of exchange itself, show "the tex-
tual devices that work against any fixed framework of exchange" (3). This
focus is proposed in opposition to another way of looking at narrative,
which Reid sees as both dominant in the field and erroneous, and which
centers on "the mimesis of an action" rather than on "interaction" (13).
The move away from the represented world operates in Prince's book,
too. Whereas traditional thematic readings purport to show what a text
tells us about the real world, Prince's book first locates "themes," or more
precisely, "theming," not in the text but in the reader, and then takes
narrative itself as a theme, thus removing us twice over from the repre-
sented world.
Prince explicitly acknowledges that the choice of "narrative as a thematic

frame" has been facilitated by narratology (19). But this facilitation, he
Ginsburg * Framing Narrative 573
argues, is no more than a manifestation of a more general phenomenon:

"Themes are born, they die, they are reborn, they have ups and downs;
and their vitality is not only or not so much a function of their nature,
their richness, their suppleness as it is a function of their situation" (23),
that is, of the cultural context in which they are elaborated. Themes, then,
are not determined by the represented world nor, strictly speaking, by the
text; they are produced by a reader (hence Prince's move from "theme"
to the activity of "theming") who constructs a frame that determines the-
matic relevance or irrelevance (9). Theming itself, however, has also to be
understood in relation to other possible interpretative gestures. Readers
can "frame" the text in different ways according to whether they read "for
the theme" or "for the plot," whether they privilege "image" or "charac-
ter" (5). This understanding of framing suggests that in reading we not
only highlight some themes rather than others but that our very activity
of theming is the result of a choice to highlight a specific dimension of the
text. Inasmuch as theming means foregrounding some aspect of the text
at the expense of the other, it suggests that there may not be one frame
through which we can see the text as a whole. Framing here suggests the
possible heterogeneity of the text.
Now, it seems intuitively right to claim that a certain theoretical-cultural
climate may encourage us to highlight "image" or "character"; and Peter
Brooks, for one, has argued in Readingfor the Plot (1984) that highlight-
ing "plot" has been on the whole looked down upon by critical discourse.
But is "reading for the theme" also contingent upon a certain theoretical
perspective? Prince is explicit about the cultural contingency of particular
themes, but his study does not question the status of theming itself as an in-
terpretative gesture (even though much in his argument would invite such
consideration).
Since theme is broadly defined as a relation of "aboutness," Prince, like
other critics concerned with the issue (e.g., Bremond 1985; Brinker 1993;
Rimmon-Kenan 1985), distinguishes it from other relations of "aboutness."
A theme involves only general and abstract entities,
ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and so on.... if theme is a macrostructural category

or frame allowing for the unification of distinct (and discontinuous) textual ele-
ments, it is an "idea" frame rather than an action frame (plot), an existent
frame (character, setting), or an image frame (imagery). Moreover, theme is
distinctive, if not unique, because of its relation to textual surface structure: it
does not consist of textual units, and it is different from them in kind; rather
theme is illustrated by any number of textual units (or by other macrostructural
categories, such as plot, or by other themes), just as a general law or rule or
precept is illustrated by an example. (5; Prince's emphasis)
Theme is a concept illustrated in a text.

Prince's interest is "narrative as a theme," and he claims that by study-
ing narrative as a theme we can find out what narratives themselves (rather
than critics) tell us about narrative. Such a claim is reasonable when one
posits that themes are "in" the text; but, as I have suggested, Prince's point
of departure for his entire argument is that themes are not in the text, that
they are produced by readers through a framing activity called "theming."
By reverting to a position that his entire project is set on rejecting and by
relying on the long-standing deference to the "authority" of the text over
against mere "critics," Prince may be seen as attempting to persuade us
that his analysis will not only foreground the relation between narrative
and truth but also will tell the truth about narrative (about narrative's re-
lation to truth), since it is what narrative itself tells us (rather than what a
reader-critic, situated in a certain theoretical-cultural context, "themed").
What, however, of the relation between narrative and truth? Candide,
the first narrative Prince analyzes, deals with "explanations," and, accord-
ing to Prince, its upshot is to contrast two ways of explaining,
two kinds of logic, two modes of discourse. There is, on the one hand, the
metaphysics espoused by Pangloss.... On the other hand, there is the kind
of narrative favored by the narrator . . .this kind is respectful of facts and
contexts, mindful that the world is full of discontinuities and singularities, and
preferring the (correct) listing of events to their (often spurious) totalization.
Candide pits dogmatic philosophy against circumstantial narrative and opts for
the latter. (63)
Though in the last sentence Prince implies that in rejecting Panglossian

philosophy Candide rejects one kind of philosophy-dogmatic, "bad" phi-
losophy-I would argue that Panglossian dogmatism is merely a hyper-
bolic way of characterizing philosophy per se, that is, the quintessential
philosophical search for "what is true regardless of circumstances," what
is "atemporal, acontextual, and general" (63). It is not at all clear that, as
a narrative, Candide rejects this philosophical search. Certainly, something
in this "philosophical tale" suggests to us that it relates to the contingent,
context-bound experience of particular men and women in particular
situations in a way that is quite different from that of a text by Balzac
or Zola, and that Voltaire has a certain investment in types (Candide,
Pangloss, etc.) and symbols (the garden). Rather than reading Candide as
pitting bad philosophy against good narrative (with the possibility then of
rejecting the former without evacuating narrative of all claim to truth),
Candide should be read as divided between two incompatible aspects-
contingent narrative and universalizing philosophical discourse-neither
of which can be discarded.
Indeed, using Prince's formulations, one can claim that every "theming"
of a text will produce such a division since it is precisely themes that em-
body the "philosophical" in narrative: They have to do with concepts and
ideas that, by definition, have a broader range of generality than events
and settings, and their relation to the surface text is that they illustrate a
general law. Themes are the "philosophy" we extract from the contingent
happenings of contingent characters in contingent settings, which is (ac-
cording to this view) narrative. To say that Candide rejects philosophy in
favor of narrative would mean that it resists theming; or, conversely, to
resist theming as a frame (and read, for example, for the plot, for narra-
tive in the narrow sense) would mean giving up the search for truth, for a
general or generalizeable meaning in narrative. Our long-standing reluc-
tance to do so may suggest why "reading for the theme" is not subject to
the same cultural fluctuations as reading for other frames and why in spite
of repeated recent attempts to valorize narrative in all its contingency and
historicity, critics by and large cannot resist the temptation to smuggle the
"philosophical" dimension through the back door (and hence, also, the
"authority" of the text).
In tracing the intellectual climate responsible for "the extraordinary suc-
cess of narrative as thematic frame" (17), Prince mentions the understand-
ing of the work of art as its own end-the "aesthetic" view of art-on the
one hand, and the understanding of narrative, and indeed of language, of
"every communicative and signifying practice" as "partly defined in terms
of a poetic, self-referential function," on the other (17). In this last formula-
tion, Prince evokes Roman Jakobson's analysis of literature as dominated
by the "poetic function," understood as a "set (Einstellung) toward the
message as such" (1960: 356). But Jakobson's understanding of literature
and the poetic function is curiously at odds with Prince's notion of self-
referentiality and aesthetic autonomy. Jakobson's "focus on the message"
(ibid.) does not mean that the message is about itself; it means, rather, that
relations among signifiers are foregrounded. These relations among signi-
fiers create what Jakobson, borrowing Poe's expression, calls "an 'under-
current of meaning"' (ibid.: 373). Since this "undercurrent of meaning"
is generated by various kinds of equivalence among signs (the result of
the superposition of similarity over contiguity), it has an "overwhelming
effect" (ibid.: 371). From Poe's "Raven," to Mark Antony's funeral oration,
to an election slogan, what, according to Jakobson, characterizes poetic
language (that is, language where the poetic function is dominant and
which, as he repeats again and again, is not restricted to poetry or even
to literature) is the way equivalencies on the level of the signifier generate
effects. The Jakobsonian concept of poetic language leads to a formal de-
scription and/or a rhetorical reading rather than to a thematic analysis.
Reading narrative as "focused on the message" in Jakobson's sense does

not involve considering narrative as either autotelic or self-referential, but
rather involves seeing it as a verbal construct that has the power to affect
and overpower us.
Prince's gloss on Jakobson's self-referentiality is that language (or nar-
rative) "does not merely describe the world; it makes it. It describes itself
and the world it makes" (17). If Prince starts by distinguishing "making"
the world (a performative) from "describing" it (a constative), he also un-
does the distinction by subsuming both within the act of description. This
allows him to treat self-referentiality as a relation of aboutness. And once
self-referentiality is defined as a relation of aboutness, it is possible to treat
it like other relations of aboutness, to talk, for example, about its "mimetic
adequacy" (131), as he does in his discussion of Patrick Modiano's Rue des
boutiques obscures, the novel that exemplifies, more than any other he dis-
cusses, narrative as making rather than describing a world. Thus, accord-
ing to Prince, what narrative ultimately tells us about itself, when it goes
as far as possible in "freeing" itself from representing the world (by cre-
ating this world, by being simply about itself), is that its contingency and
arbitrariness (the result of its complete independence of the "real world")
are accurate representations of the world as it really is. We are back to a
definition of themes as being what the text tells us about the world.
One of the aspects of the text that Prince isolates as playing a cru-
cial role in identifying themes, and narrative as a theme, is what he calls
the "disnarrated." The disnarrated designates a dimension of virtuality:
"What did not or does not take place" (32). It operates both on the level of
narration and on the level of the narrated, pertains to the vision of either
the narrator or the character. In general, it indicates "choices not made,
roads not taken, possibilities not actualized, goals not reached" (36). The
importance of the disnarrated is that by indicating that, on some level,
things could have been otherwise, by "foregrounding" the narrative or the
narration, it "carries some such message as 'This narrative is valuable be-
cause it develops in a different and more interesting manner.' . . . 'This
narrative is worth narrating because it could have been otherwise, because
it usually is otherwise, because it was not otherwise'" (36, emphasis in the
text). The disnarrated is, then, one of the ways in which the narrative qua
narrative receives definition, is differentiated from others, and thus be-
comes its own theme.
On first introducing the term, Prince says, "I will call disnarrated [the
category] that covers all the events that do not happen though they could
have and are nonetheless referred to (in a negative or hypothetical mode)
by the narrative text" (30). Certainly, there are cases (such as Diderot's
Jacques lefataliste) in which a narrator tells us explicitly that the story could
have gone one way but didn't, that the narration could have taken a differ-
ent direction but didn't. But Prince's allusion to Claude Bremond's idea
that every narrative function opens up two possibilities, of which one is
actualized while the other remains virtual (Bremond 1980), suggests that,
even in cases in which such explicit statements are absent, the disnar-
rated operates. In general, previous narratives as well as the idea of a
"genre" constitute a certain background of expectations or possibilities, so
that when something different takes place in a certain narrative they be-
come the "virtual," highlighting the way the narrative is different from
others. The disnarrated is, then, the context in which the text is situated
and that foregrounds its difference. But in this case, the disnarrated is not
only virtual but also not exactly "in" the text. Prince, however, insists that
the disnarrated has to be clearly designated. Contrary to his arguments
that "theming" is an activity of framing undertaken by a reader and that
themes are not in the text, Prince seems to insist on the actual existence
of the disnarrated in the text and on its relative autonomy of the fram-
ing activity of the reader: Something is disnarrated "only if it designates
in that diegesis a possibility that remains unrealized" (34). On the whole
Prince's idea of the disnarrated seems to join Barthes's notion of the text's
"difference" being constituted through intertextual relations-difference
without any positive terms-(Barthes 1974: 3), whereas his insistence on
the presence of the disnarrated in the text may be a way of smuggling in a
modicum of positive identity.
As one of the critics who actively contributed to the formation and propa-
gation of narratology, Prince's relation to the structuralist endeavor is free
from anxiety or rivalry (but does have some self-irony). With Reid, how-
ever, this is not quite the case. I started this essay by suggesting that the
very term narrative became possible when critics posited that texts in differ-
ent genres, from different historical periods and cultures, and in different
media, still share a common dimension, which is precisely the narra-
tive dimension. In the best narratological tradition, Reid's book treats a
thirteenth-century Icelandic text, several short stories, a novel, a child's
book, and a mixed-media text. But Reid justifies his choices not in terms
of adherence to narratology (from which he takes his distance repeatedly),
but rather as a challenge to the tendency of "too many critics" to narrow
down the term narrative unnecessarily, and somewhat illegitimately, and
equate it with the novel (16). But, though the emphasis on the novel in re-
cent years may be partly due to critics' bias toward canonical works and
their failure to recognize other forms of narrative, it may also reflect a re-
action to the narratological project. The privileged realm of narratology
was the short text, whether myth, folk tale, or short story (indeed, the kind
of texts Reid on the whole favors). The inability of structuralist analysis to
deal with complex, long texts left an entire area-that of the traditional
novel-unattended. At the same time (as I already mentioned earlier), in
reaction to what was perceived as an ahistorical formalism in narratology,
there has been a growing interest in historically and culturally specific
forms of narrative-the novel, for instance, or even specific forms of the
novel (such as the "traditional novel").
Be that as it may, Reid's choice of texts raises the question of what he
means by "narrative," and it may come as no surprise that he very often
defines the object of his study entitled Narrative Exchanges as simply "liter-
ary texts" (e.g., 16) or even "texts." He defines text as "negotiated framing
of sign-values" that, since it occurs in "an interpersonal context," can-
not be "perfectly stable" (27). Within this broad category-texts-Reid
attempts to give narrative a relative specificity by highlighting two pro-
cesses-substitution and dispossession: "Because the generic specificity of
narrative is a matter of degree, not of essential category, there is little
profit for present purposes in attempting to contradistinguish narrative
from (say) poetry. In so far as some lyric or epic form may work in sub-
stitutive or dispossessive ways, to that extent it partakes of narrative" (18).
What underlies narrative, what allows us to group together texts of vari-
ous genres, periods, forms, and media is, according to Reid, that in them
"exchange" is made complicated and unstable by substitution-"an alter-
ing of the value of the signs" - and dispossession - "a wresting or arresting
of control over the relative positions of the parties" (27). It is not surprising
that this account of the relative specificity of narrative echoes the defini-
tion of "text." Reid himself points out (e.g., 50) that substitution inheres in
the nature of signs and dispossession in the act of communication. As we
will see, Reid's understanding of narrative as exchange involving substitu-
tion and dispossession receives its urgency from a polemic he carries on
against the "orthodox" view of narrative as having to do with sequence of
events, that is, with "stories." This makes his most explicit statement about
the broad application of the term narrative somewhat paradoxical: "Rather
than existing at a remove from the give and take of other uses of lan-
guage, from their semantic struggles and fiduciary agreements, storytelling
does in fact share with all human communication both conflictual and
contractual structures" (201, my emphasis). Thus, at the point where Reid
acknowledges the lack of specificity of narrative (it is like all other human
communication), he also argues for its specificity (or else, how can he
make this claim?). In order to do so, he relies on the definition of narrative
as "storytelling," a definition against which he has polemicized throughout
the preceding two hundred pages.
Reid is interested in "narrative exchanges," an area, he claims, that
has been given very little critical attention. Such a study highlights "the
ways in which texts are reflexively inscribed with the conditions of their
tellability" as opposed to "viewing narrative in orthodox neo-Aristotelian
fashion as the mimesis of an action" (13). The rejection of the latter view
is a refrain that is repeated from the first pages of the book (13) to its
last ("the primary constitutive element is not any represented chain of
events . . ." 206) at frequent intervals (14, 16, 19, 23, 24, 26, 39, and so
on). This view is characterized as "orthodox," "axiomatic," "definitive,"
"uncritical," and "classic," and it is said to be upheld by "many theorists,"
by "most studies of narrative" (19), or, alternatively, to be a "structuralist
notion" (23). What emerges from this refrain is a diagnosis of contem-
porary studies of narrative as locked within an orthodox narratology. It
presents critics of narrative as if they naively adhered to an unproblematic
notion of represented events, as if the questioning of the notion of "rep-
resentation" or of "events" has never reached their ears or impacted their
work. It ignores the way narratology itself reflected on some of its gestures
and the way subsequent critics continued this reflection. It engages Reid
in a false polemic against a series of more or less imaginary adversaries.
When not attributing this "uncritical" view of narrative to critics at
large, Reid associates it with structuralist narratology. In order to eco-
nomically handle structuralist narratology and its "orthodox" views, he
has chosen to discuss in some detail a work of synthesis that he character-
izes as "a neat digest of received ideas" on narratology (21). This is not the
place to evaluate either the merit of the work (by Rimmon-Kenan) he has
chosen or the accuracy with which he represents it. My point, rather, is
that the choice of this book involves a false confrontation: Rimmon-Kenan
is for Reid merely the conveyor of "received ideas," and the real adver-
saries are never invited to the battle. Particularly striking is Reid's refusal
to engage with Barthes and especially with S/I, since S/Z, I will claim,
undermines most of Reid's charges against structuralist analysis of narra-
tive. Indeed, many of the views Reid proposes as corrections of the "struc-
turalist notion" or of critics' "orthodox" views were already formulated
by those critics themselves.2 Thus, for example, Reid identifies (validly or
2. One example: Reid justifies his use of metonymy as a form of metaphor by saying, "The
famous dichotomy established by Jakobson [1956] between metaphoric (selecting from a
not-this is not my point) a problem "lurking in Rimmon-Kenan's state-

ment: Exactly how can mere combination, in itself, guarantee a story's
completeness, since the number of events per sequence or of sequences
per story, is variable?" Reid counters in terms that read like an elabora-
tion of one of Barthes's arguments in S/Z: "The point must be stressed
that a sense of narrative completeness cannot be a property of any action
sequence; it is a function of reading, an interpretive fiction" (24).3
Reid's characterization of the "actionist orthodoxy" (24) as insisting that
narrative is primarily the representation of a sequence of events is misleading
at best. True, some narratologists-Claude Bremond, Algirdas Greimas,
Tzvetan Todorov, each in his own way-took as the starting point for their
formulations Propp's analysis of the folk tale, an analysis that emphasized
the crucial role of sequence and position in sequence. But when Reid ar-
gues that "sequence of events" cannot give an accurate account of what
goes on in a narrative and "proves" this claim by demonstrating the insuf-
ficiency of plot summary (see, for example, nlo), he is not really engaging
Propp's analysis since the object of the latter is not actions but their under-
lying functions. Propp's list of thirty-one functions is anything but a plot
summary. At any rate, those structuralists most inspired by Propp also set
out to modify him beyond recognition, and the first thing to disappear
at their hands was precisely the prominence given to sequence. Indeed,
Barthes is a precise observer when he claims that "all contemporary re-
searchers (Levi-Strauss, Greimas, Bremond, Todorov) ... could subscribe
substitutive repertoire) and metonymic (combining through contiguous relations) is a further

instance of that binary compulsion, already discussed, by which an act of reading differ-
entially produces each term as the other's 'other.' The matter has been discussed at length
elsewhere, and Maria Ruegg's remarks (1979) suffice to indicate the point of most immedi-
ate relevance here. Metaphor and metonymy, she notes, 'both involve a kind of substitution
(of one signifier for another) and both involve some degree of semantic contiguity which
provides the necessary link between the two signifiers' (145)" (128-29; emphasis Reid's).
Jakobson, however, never opposed metaphor and metonymy in the way Reid claims. In his
study on aphasia, Jakobson starts from the separation of the two axes of language - the axis
of selection and the axis of combination-in order to develop a four-term model whereby
both metaphor and metonymy can involve either substitution or predication (that is, com-
bination). In his discussion of poetic language, Jakobson goes a step further: Since poetic
language is characterized by the projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of
selection to the axis of combination "any metonymy is slightly metaphorical and any meta-
phor has a metonymical tint" (1960: 370).
3. "The proairetic sequence is never more than the result of an artifice of reading: Who-
ever reads the text amasses certain data under some generic titles for actions (stroll, murder,
rendezvous), and this title embodies the sequence; the sequence exists when and because it
can be given a name, it unfolds as this process of naming takes place, as a title is sought or
confirmed" (Barthes 1974: 19).
to Levi-Strauss's proposition that 'the order of chronological succession is

absorbed in atemporal matrix structure.' Analysis today tends to 'dechro-
nologize' the narrative continuum and to 'relogicize' it" (1977: 98-99).4
Another influence on (some of) the French narratologists was the work
of Boris Tomashevsky, especially his distinction betweenfabula and sjuzet,
which he defined as follows: "[fabula is] the aggregate of mutually related
events reported in the work ... Both [fabula and sjuzet] include the same
events but in the [sjuzet] the events are arranged and connected accord-
ing to the orderly sequence in which they were presented in the work"
(1965: 66-67). This definition indeed separates a level of events from their
representation in a text. As such, it is a subcategory of the more gen-
eral distinction between "materials" and "device," which was crucial to
the Formalists' entire understanding of literature (or literariness). But the
Formalists' interest was clearly in artistic "device," and they provocatively
claimed that the "materials" were there simply to motivate the use of de-
vices. Correlatively, their interest in the fabula-the sequence of events-
was minimal, and all their investment was in the sjuzet, which is why they
saw Tristram Shandy as the most typical of novels.
When the two terms fabula and sjuzet migrated to Western Europe and
the United States, they landed in an environment where the claims of real-
ism to faithfully represent a world that is anterior and independent of the
text have been the object of a sustained critique on the part of both authors
and critics. In such a climate, the view soon developed that the very dis-
tinctionfabula/sjuzet is the result, indeed an expression, of a mimetic illu-
sion. But to call the fabula "no more than a projection" (as Reid does in his
discussion of"histoire," 63) is not entirely accurate. The fabula is a construc-
tion by the reader; it is constructed from the only thing the reader has-the
sjuzet, and it is constructed as the origin of this sjuzet. As "constructed ori-
gin," it cannot be simply declared an error or dismissed; indeed, my earlier
discussion of Reid shows how, at least in his case, such simple dismissal
leads to self-contradiction when the rejected view returns as a phantom.
But if fabula as "constructed origin" cannot be simply dismissed, it does
not mean that it should be used naively and uncritically. Consideration of
such issues has not been absent from recent studies of narrative; it is one
4. In this article, my point is not to champion the views of certain narratologists, but to
show that the "actionist orthodoxy" against which Reid polemicizes is a straw man. Whereas
a critic such as Meir Sternberg (1990) has argued that in their antichronological stance the
structuralists and formalists, among others, were biased and self-contradictory, my point is
to demonstrate, against Reid, that they repeatedly and in various forms displaced the focus
of interest away from "sequence of events."
of the ways in which post-structuralist thought, in this case Derrida's de-

construction, inflected studies of narrative.5 Brooks's understanding of plot
as constructed by a reader is another example of such argument, and it is
strange that Reid finds Brooks's understanding of plot "too perverse" (239
n. i), since it is perverse only in terms of an understanding of narrative
that Reid attributes to others but himself professes to reject.
When the pairfabula/sjuzet appeared in Paris, it got renamed (by Todo-
rov) histoire/discours, a set of terms Reid explicitly rejects. Though this
renaming has been accepted by some critics, it is somewhat questionable,
for the opposition between "story" and "discourse," in its first formulation
by Emile Benveniste (1966: 237-50), was not between the telling and the
told but between different ways of telling, between two ways in which the
enunciation (enonciation) relates to the statement (enonce). According to Ben-
veniste, in "discourse" the traces of the enunciation are present in the state-
ment, whereas in "story" they are absent ("A vrai dire, il n'y a meme plus
de narrateur ... Personne ne parle ici; les evenements semblent se raconter
eux-memes" (ibid.: 241), or, as Gerard Genette pointed out, hidden (1969:
64-67). Thus, the first set of terms (histoire/discours) cannot be so easily re-
jected and the other (enonce/enonciation) accepted, as Reid attempts to do
(14, 16-17, 62-63). And since the two terms in each set have no meaning
except in their opposition, one cannot study the signs of telling inscribed in
the told (discourse), without relying implicitly or explicitly on its opposite.
Reid's interest is in exchange, and the basic assumptions of his study are
that an exchange characterizes the act of communication and that narra-
tive (or texts) constitute in some sense (and are not simply about) com-
munication. Mostly, when Reid talks about narrative exchange, what he
means are acts of understanding or interpretation. To call an act of under-
standing an exchange is to emphasize that meaning is not a given, but
rather, is the result of an encounter: Produced by a reader through various
acts of framing, it is not entirely in the text; nor, however, is it entirely out
of the text, since the text itself is framed in a certain way so as to curb in-
terpretation. But Reid does not simply argue for plurality of meaning, or a
certain semantic indeterminacy. For him, the exchange concerns primarily
value rather than meaning: "What gets exchanged through narrative is
a set of signs that reaffirm the value of such textual transactions them-
5. For examples of analysis of narrative influenced by deconstruction see, among others

J. Hillis Miller (1982, 1992).
selves-while also forcing them, by challenge and riposte, to be always

renegotiated" (68). What participants negotiate, says Reid, is the "rate of
exchange" or the value of the transaction (reading/narrating) itself. Thus,
in his analogy between reading and viewing a picture he says, "A viewer
'pays' attention to a displayed artefact with the aim of receiving an ex-
perience of cultural worth in return, and perceives the meaning of that
exchange by framing it with reference to 'currency rates' (whatever are
seen as criteria of its equivalence)" (14). This is certainly a plausible de-
scription of what happens in a visit to a museum or in reading a classic,
but it requires as a follow-up a comparative analysis of cultural practices
to substantiate it and give it content. In the book itself, however, Reid is
most often concerned not with the value of the exchange, but with the
way in which semantic exchange depends on "human transactions" (9)-
in other words, the constraints and leeway readers have to highlight cer-
tain aspects of a text, to valorize certain dimensions.
Moreover, much of the book is an analysis of how this process takes
place within texts rather than in the empirical situation of reading. Though
Reid criticizes Barthes's notion of "codes" as "divorced from the contin-
gencies of any situation where one takes a book in one's hand . . . the
processes through which readings actually occur" (58), his study is not an
empirical one (the different readings that different readers perform), and it
discusses only marginally the way in which different frames make a differ-
ence in either the meaning of the text or the value of reading. Speaking of
Duras's Vice Consul, he says, "At a micro-level, for a reader of the Vice Consul
who is attentive to intratextual and intertextual framing it remains the case
that any wish to invest in a stable semantic exchange will be blocked and
deflected; no interpretive effort can get a secure purchase on this novel"
(102). Rather than showing how different readings by different readers pro-
duce different meanings and different valorizations of the novel and of the
practice of reading (as he claims to do), Reid hypothesizes "a reader" who
is none other than himself. I do not in the least mean to suggest that "read-
ings" of a text are an illegitimate occupation for a literary critic; nor do
I intend to criticize the particular readings Reid gives. I would like, how-
ever, to suggest that providing "readings" is not what he has claimed to do
and that what he actually does goes quite counter to his declared project.
To show how a text can curb interpretative freedom is possible through
a textual analysis, and Reid does that, often with great subtlety. But in
order to demonstrate (rather than posit) that texts cannot curtail this free-
dom with complete efficacy and that a reader can always reject these
suggestions and frame the text differently in a way that will change both
meaning and value (106), it is necessary to show or cite different readings
and demonstrate how their difference makes a difference. This "showing"

cannot be accomplished simply by offering a "reading," not even a read-
ing centered on the way in which these particular questions are already
posed in and by the text.
The term exchange, both in its economic and its sociolinguistic usage,
suggests an encounter between two subjects, which certainly is not quite
what happens in the case of written texts. Reid offers the clarification that
since he is concerned with texts, the exchange he describes is mediated-
the real subjects have "surrogates" (104); but these surrogates are not other
people, they are "textual intermediaries" (111). Indeed, the exchange be-
tween reader and author can be inscribed within the text; it then occurs
between "characters"- signs on paper. But even when we go outside the
text, it is clear that we don't deal with an interpersonal exchange: The
author's "surrogate" is precisely a written text. The reader is not a "per-
son" (Reid, again, is not interested in the empirical study of the responses
of actual readers), but rather a relation to a text. The reader is constituted
by various acts of framing, and framing for Reid is just another word for
the diacritical activity of reading (to read is to make a text mean some-
thing, which is to "distinguish it from other things while also relating it
to them" 44). In short, whatever may be exchanged in the encounter be-
tween readers and narratives, the exchange itself is not between persons or
subjects. It is an intertextual rather than an interpersonal exchange. But
Reid's analysis constantly presents the intertextual as interpersonal. This
sliding happens sometimes through the intermediary term voice where the
metaphor of narrative voice becomes literalized: "A narrator speaks, and
the storytelling can proceed only for as long as interlocutors and rival
narrators keep silent" (80). It also occurs through Reid's recurrent personi-
fication of texts (see, for example, 80, 86, 144). This sliding from the inter-
textual to the interpersonal and the lack of distinction between the two,
is what Paul de Man (who Reid mentions a couple of times) identified as
critical "blindness" and linked to the misrecognition of one's precursors.6
Bernard Duyfhuizen's study treats some of the same issues as Reid's and
raises some of the same problems. Duyfhuizen starts by opposing a read-
ing that "privilege[s] the thematic aspects of prose fiction" from a reading
such as the one he proposes and which highlights its "communicative as-
pects" (16). But the separation and opposition between these two aspects
6. See, for example, "The Contemporary Criticism of Romanticism" (de Man 1993).
cannot be kept for very long; indeed, Duyfhuizen explicitly resists isolating
the pragmatic as a separate layer of the text (28). What is, then, the rela-
tion between the thematic and communicative aspects? On the one hand,
much of Duyfhuizen's analysis suggests that transmission is just one theme
among others (or, as Prince would put it, one "theming"); on the other
hand, he repeatedly "discovers" that the thematic content of the narratives
he analyzes "center[s] on questions of human contact or transmission"
(58). In both cases the difference between the two has been erased.
Duyfhuizen's interest in transmission brings him to emphasize what
Jakobson called "contact," or the "phatic" function of language. In Jakob-
son's scheme, however, "contact" had a precise, hence fairly limited, mean-
ing; it is, as Duyfhuizen puts it, "the 'physical channel and psychological
connection' that an addresser uses to communicate a message in a shared
code about a known context to an addressee" (37). Duyfhuizen under-
standably feels the need to enlarge the meaning of the term, but he does
it to excess. Quoting Todorov who, in a discussion of Bakhtin, says "'The
entire utterance is contact,'" Duyfhuizen adds, "As a process of human
discourse rather than merely a 'factor,' contact engages the activities of
sending, receiving, coding, referring, and meaning that occur in any com-
munication" (39). This expansion on Todorov explains the often puzzling
usage of the term "contact" in his book (e.g., 89, 90, 91). But more im-
portantly, it explains why eventually all narrative, the whole of narrative,
becomes a matter of contact, of transmission. Starting with a presumably
neglected aspect of the text, Duyfhuizen expands the relevance of contact
so much that it loses its specificity and becomes an umbrella term for
everything in the text. With the new object or perspective lost, analysis
proceeds in its most conventional manner.
Like Prince and Reid, Duyfhuizen makes extensive use of the metaphor
of the frame. Frames, for Duyfhuizen, are certain textual elements-pref-
aces, editors' or publishers' notices, frame narratives in the narrow sense.
Isolating these elements of the text for discussion may suggest that they are
indeed local and locatable, but Duyfhuizen rightly indicates the difficulty
of separating the frame from the framed, keeping it as sheer exteriority.
He shows, for example, how narratives develop a special device to medi-
ate between the frame and the framed-the "contact character" (159).
In general, however, authors, editors, publishers, contact characters, and
others engage in what Duyfhuizen calls "textualization." To "textualize"
is "to commit to paper, to permanence as a document" and what gets tex-
tualized is "experience" (177) or, a specific case discussed in chapter 7, oral
narrative. This textualization is a kind of framing in the sense that it does
not simply permit the transmission of the narrative, but determines what it
is that will get transmitted. Hence, "Transmission is a site of power in nar-

rative. To control the lines of transmission is to have power in the fictional
universe" (20). But whereas in his elaboration of the notion of the frame
Duyfhuizen is careful to note how the frame cannot be separated from the
framed, in his major argument about textualization he is led to posit not
only their separation but also the priority of the framed over the frame.
This "mimetic illusion" is most striking in his discussion of Wuthering
Heights as an example of the textualization of oral narrative. Duyfhuizen's
purpose here is to show how the various narrators inflect the narrative:
Every narrator "recontextualizes" the narrative, thus exerting a certain
amount of control over the fictional universe. This is certainly a valid
claim, provided that we can judge contextualizations as different from
each other, which is possible in narratives that represent the same "events"
from different points of view or where a narrative is repeated with a dif-
ference. By noting how different narratives claim to be accounts of the
"same event" or how they modify a previous narrative, we can see how
characters/narrators vie for the power to have their own version of reality
prevail. But Wuthering Heights is a particularly interesting text since it mani-
fests a phobic aversion of overlap: No "event" in the novel is told twice,
and "events" told by one narrator dovetail perfectly with those narrated by
another.7 In order to show "textualization," therefore, Duyfhuizen has to
evoke some mythical extratextual reality where, for example, Nelly's oral
narrative existed prior to its elaboration or modification-its "recontex-
tualization"-by Lockwood (222, 227). It may be that such a fall into the
"mimetic illusion" is produced (or at least facilitated) by the very assump-
tion that narrative is "transmission" or "communication," rather than, say,
a performative, a practice, labor.
That Duyfhuizen as well as Reid and Prince, each in his own way, end
up falling back into assumptions they ostensibly reject need not imply that
these assumptions are inescapable; but it does suggest the hold these as-
sumptions have over us and our difficulty in thinking differently. As Reid's
example most clearly shows, the desire to "go beyond" (one of his chapters
7. For example, Catherine's written account of events describes one "awful Sunday" and
mentions that "my companion [Heathcliff] is impatient and proposes that we should ap-
propriate the dairy woman's cloak, and have a scamper on the moors, under its shelter"
(Bronte 1985: [1847] 64). At this point, the account breaks off and when Nelly narrates to
Lockwood the events of "one Sunday," she picks up at the point where Catherine left off:
"When I went to call them to supper, I could discover them nowhere" (ibid.: 88). Embedded
in Nelly's narrative is Heathcliff's, but Heathcliff does not repeat any part of Catherine's
account either. Rather he continues from the point where she broke off: "'Cathy and I es-
caped from the wash-house to have a ramble at liberty, and getting a glimpse of the Grange
lights, we thought we would just go and see"' (ibid.: 88).
Ginsburg ? Framing Narrative 587
is entitled "Beyond Narratology?") is not, in itself, a guarantee of progress

or of liberation; on the contrary, since such desire often involves a blind-
ness to the self-critique already enacted by the predecessors one wishes
to supersede, what purports to be a "step ahead" often results in an un-
critical, "compulsive" return to tenets that the presumed orthodoxy has
already challenged. This paradox does not mean that past criticism had
the last word on narrative or that the "truth" about narrative is one and
unchangeable. But it does suggest that the critical tradition to which be-
long both narratology and the way of reading which it challenged, is not
as past and gone as we may wish it to be. To the extent that we willy-nilly
depend on some of its basic assumptions, it belongs to a past that is still
present, still with us. The first step in any critical understanding, indeed
any historical understanding, of narrative has to be the recognition of our
indebtedness, and link, to this past.
References
Barthes, Roland
1974 S/Z, translated by Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang).
1977 "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives," in Image Music Text, trans-
lated by Stephen Heath, 79-124 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
Benveniste, Emile
1966 "Les Relations de temps dans le verbe frangais," in Problemes de linguistique generale,
237-50 (Paris: Gallimard).
Bremond, Claude
1980 "The Logic of Narrative Possibilities," New Literary History 11: 387-88.
1985 "Concept et theme," Poitique, 64: 415-23.
Brinker, Menachem
1993 "Theme and Interpretation," in The Return of Thematic Criticism, edited by Werner
Sollors, 21-37 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
Bronte, Emily
1985 [1847] Wuthering Heights, edited by David Daiches (London: Penguin Classics).
Brooks, Peter
1984 Readingfor the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Knopf).
de Man, Paul
1993 "The Contemporary Criticism of Romanticism," in Romanticism and Contemporary
Criticism, edited by E. S. Burt, Kevin Newmark, and Andrzej Warminski, 3-24 (Balti-
more, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press).
Genette, Gerard
1969 "Frontieres du recit," in Figures II, 49-69 (Paris: Seuil).
Greimas, Algirdas
1970 Du sens (Paris: Seuil).
Jakobson, Roman
1956 "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disorder," in Fundamentals of
Language, 69-95 (The Hague: Mouton).
1960 "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics," in Style in Language, edited by Thomas
A. Sebeok, 350-77 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
Miller, J. Hillis
1982 Fiction and Repetition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
1992 Ariadne's Thread: Story Lines (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).
Propp, Vladimir
1970 Morphologie du conte (Paris: Seuil, coll. Points).
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith
1983 Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Methuen).
1985 "Qu'est-ce qu'un theme?" Poetique, 64: 397-405.
Ruegg, Maria
1979 "Metaphor and Metonymy: The Logic of Structuralist 'Rhetoric,"' Glyph 6: 141-57.
Sternberg, Meir
1990 "Telling in Time (I): Chronology and Narrative Theory," Poetics Today 11: 901-48.
Todorov, Tzvetan
1966 "Les Categories du recit litteraire," Communications 8: 125-51.
Tomashevsky, Boris
1965 "Thematics," in Russian Formalist Criticism, translated and edited by Lee T. Lemon
and Marion J. Reis, 61-95 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press).

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Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

Review: Framing Narrative

Michal Peled Ginsburg

Gerald Prince, Narrative as Theme: Studies in French Fiction. Lincoln: University of

lan Reid, Narrative Exchanges. London: Routledge, 1992. vi + 265 pp.

Bernard Duyfhuizen, Narratives of Transmission. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University

Prince explicitly acknowledges that the choice of "narrative as a thematic

argues, is no more than a manifestation of a more general phenomenon:

ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and so on.... if theme is a macrostructural category

Theme is a concept illustrated in a text.

Though in the last sentence Prince implies that in rejecting Panglossian

Reading narrative as "focused on the message" in Jakobson's sense does

not-this is not my point) a problem "lurking in Rimmon-Kenan's state-

substitutive repertoire) and metonymic (combining through contiguous relations) is a further

to Levi-Strauss's proposition that 'the order of chronological succession is

of the ways in which post-structuralist thought, in this case Derrida's de-

5. For examples of analysis of narrative influenced by deconstruction see, among others

selves-while also forcing them, by challenge and riposte, to be always

and demonstrate how their difference makes a difference. This "showing"

is that will get transmitted. Hence, "Transmission is a site of power in nar-

is entitled "Beyond Narratology?") is not, in itself, a guarantee of progress

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