1. Narratives: Discourse
Lesson 19
Narratives: Discourse

2. A model of narrative structure*
Plot vs discourse
Events: Propp’s functions
Roles (Greimas)
Time management
Characterization
Narrators and focalization
*Adapted from Simpson (2004) and Toolan (2006)
These categories onften go under the rubric of ‘point of view’

3. Time management: order, duration and frequency
Genette (1980, 1988)
Order: relation between the sequence of events in the story and their actual order or presentation in the narrative (flashback/flash forwards)
Frequency relation between the number of times an event occurs in the story and the number of times it is mentioned in the narrative (e.g. narrating once what happened once vs recounting more than once what happened once)
Duration: relation between temporal extent in the imagined world of the story and narrative pacing. The extremes are ellipsis (no textual treatment of an event) and descriptive pause

4. Characterization Personality traits and distinguishing features
Names and physical attributes (mr. Buckett
Setting (e.g. public vs private space, relevant for gender studies)
Dialogue
Dialect
speech and thought representation
How characters participate in conversation (cooperatively, aggressively…, resting mainly on Conversation analysis, pragmatics…)

5. Characterization: names and physical attributes
Names: Ann Grandyn, Tinker, Kathy Content (Towles, The Rules of Good Society)
Physical attributes: Mr. Buckett and his finger, Mr Tulkinghorns (Dickens, Bleak House)

6. Characterization: speech and thought presentation
For both speech and thought presentation a norm has been established, i.e. an unmarked technique corresponding to the most ‘natural way’ of rendering the original discourse event.
For spoken exchanges, the norm is identified with direct speech, as it reproduces both the content and the form of the original utterances, signaling at the same time the mediated nature of the language report.
For thought presentation Indirect Thought is considered the norm as, contrary to what the DT mode would suggest, someone else’s thought is not accessible from outside for verbatim report. DT would then be too artificial, while a mode that «only commits the writer to the content of what was thought is much more acceptable» (Leech and Short 2007: 277),

7. Leech and Short 2007 NV She talked on. Rampion made no comment.
For a moment she didn’t know where she was.  NI
NRSA
He committed himself to another meeting.
He wondered about her love for him.
NRTA IS
He said that he would return there to see her the following day.
He wondered if she still loved him IT
FIS
He would return there to see her again the following day.
Did she still love him?
FIT DS
He said, ‘I’ll come back here to see you again tomorrow.’
He wondered, ‘Does she still love me?’ DT
FDS
He said I’ll come back here to see you again tomorrow.
Does she still love me?
FDT

8. The different positioning of the norm in the two scales produces a difference in the effects created by FIS and FIT as compared to the norms. FIS is one move leftward from the norm, and thus entails a greater extent of manipulation of the original material which allows the narrator greater liberty in imposing his/her interpretation of the original message. FIT, on the other hand, is one move rightward from the norm, and thus produces the effect of placing the reader in closer contact with the character’s mind.

9. Narrators and focalization
A distinction in narratives may be made between: a. narration: the individual or position we judge to be the source and authority for whatever words are used in telling; b. focalization: the orientation we infer to be that from which what gets told is told.

10. Focalization
In the process of telling a narrative, and the concomitant specifications of time and place, some perspective or other is always implied as the vantage point from which spatiotemporally determinate events are related. This inescapable adoption of a (limited) perspective in narrative, a viewpoint from which things are seen, felt, understood, and assessed is now (following Genette, and Bal) widely referred to as ‘focalization.’
Focalization is least problematically a matter of visual perception (cf. the Anglo-American counterpart critical term: point of view). But in a more liberal interpretation it concerns all aspects of narrative orientation, including the cognitive, emotive, and ideological. (Toolan 2006: 470)

11. Spatial and psychological focalization

13. An extreme case of focalization
Shutter island trailer
Shutter island ending explained

14. Narrators and focalization
Genette: general categorization
Type of narrator
Internal
(intradiegetic)
Involved participant
(Homodiegetic)
Peripheral reporter
(heterodiegetic)
External
(extradiegetic)

15. Narrators and focalization
Genette: fine-grained distinctions concerning the narrator’s prominence
Description of settings
Identification of characters
Temporal summaries
Definition of characters
Reports of what characters did not think or say
Commentary: interpretation, judgement, generalization
Claims of full knowledge

16. Activities: Time management For years A few years ago
Wall street crash
Five months ago
By June
On June 11
Ellipses
When she came back
Setting: home for status
Last paragraph: Mrs Copace as focalizer

17. Activities: 2
They’d had a decent sex life for many years, regular and lustily uncomplicated, on weekdays in the early morning, before the dazzling concerns of the working day penetrated the heavy bedroom curtains. At weekends in the afternoons, sometimes after tennis, social doubles in Mecklenburgh Square. Obliterating all blame for one’s partner’s fluffed shots. In fact, a deeply pleasurable love life, and beyond discussion, which was one of its joys. Not even a vocabulary for it—one reason why it pained her to hear him mention it now.
She had always loved him, was always affectionate, loyal, attentive, only last year had nursed him tenderly when he broke his leg and wrist in Méribel during a ridiculous downhill ski race against old school friends. She pleasured him, sat astride him, now she remembered, while he lay grinning amid the chalky splendor of his plaster of Paris. She did not know how to refer to such things in her own defense, and besides, these were not the grounds on which she was being attacked. It was not devotion she lacked but passion.
Then there was age. Not the full withering, not just yet, but its early promise was shining through, just as one might catch in a certain light a glimpse of the adult in a ten-year-old’s face… (Mc Ewan 2014 pp )
Fiona’s arguments are presented through Thought presentation techniques. She is the focalizer, even though the narration is in the third person.
Prevalence of thought presentation backs her husband remark:
“Your problem,” he said, “is that you never think you have to explain yourself. You’ve gone from me. It must have occurred to you that I’ve noticed and that I mind. Just about bearable, I suppose, if I thought it wasn’t going to last, or I knew the reason why. So….”
The reader is not only told that there is a gap between them. The gap becomes ‘visible’ through discourse presentation choices

18. Discourse presentation in McEwans’s The Children ActDiscourse presentation: Fiona
Speech presentation
615
DS FDS
(- obtrusive)
524 (reporting clauses excluded)
NV –FIS
(+ obtrusive) 91
Thought presentation
1615
FIT-FDT
1452
NI-IT
163