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Author(s): Algirdas Julien Greimas, Paul Ricoeur, Paul Perron, Frank Collins
Source: New Literary History, Vol. 20, No. 3, Greimassian Semiotics (Spring, 1989), pp. 551-
562
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/469353
Accessed: 19/12/2008 19:15
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On Narrativity*
Greimas's work itself. The first example is the study by one of Grei-
mas's former students, Louis Marin, on narrative in the Gospels, in
which he examined the role of the traitor who may be defined as an
opponent.2 In the actantial system it is easy to recognize the place of
the traitor in the system, but the fact that this traitor is Judas, and that
he has individual characteristics, is not secondary. For we can see that
in the development of the character, say from Mark to John, there is
an increasing enrichment that at the same time enriches the story
itself, the plot itself. In Mark, Judas is simply one of the twelve apos-
tles who shares the same meal with Jesus. He fulfills the prophecy that
the Son of Man will be delivered to His enemies, but there is some-
thing contingent at every moment, since Judas is a proper name that
connects the function of delivering the Son of Man to the traitor who
makes treason happen. Making something happen therefore seems to
introduce a contingency, the equivalent of what Aristotle called the
peripeteia, which belongs, I think, to the surface of the text. It would
therefore seem to me that we cannot apply to the relation between
deep structures and surface structures something which would be too
close, for example, to the unfortunate distinction between infrastruc-
ture and superstructure in Marx, where the superstructure would be
a mere reflection of the infrastructure. We have here instead a dia-
lectic of a kind that needs to be recognized.
I will take my second example from Greimas's wonderful book,
Maupassant: The Semioticsof Text:PracticalExercises,a 250-page analysis
of a 6-page short story, "Two Friends."3 The surface of the text nar-
rates the story of a failed fishing expedition that will end with a
reversal of roles because the enemy who has captured the unfortunate
fishermen does not succeed in making them confess they are spies
and that the fishing expedition is a cover story. The two friends refuse
to accept the role of spies, and they are executed by a firing squad.
The important event is that they are cast into the water and given back
to the fish. At the end of the tale the Prussian officer catches the fish
and has them fried up for himself. According to Greimas's analyses,
in fact, it is the unfortunate fishermen who offer the fish to the
officer. Greimas comes to this conclusion by constructing all the
proper semiotic squares. He sets in the right place the oppositions
between life and nonlife, death and nondeath and therefore all the
exchanges among the four poles of the square. But it seems to me
there is something decisive that does not belong to the model as a
logical model, namely, the way in which the homologation of the
individual characters is made in relation to the roles. This homolo-
gation of the sun with cold life, the empty sky with cold nonlife,
Mount Valerian with cold death, and the water with cold nondeath is
554 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
semiotic deviation appears where each one makes use of all the pos-
sible specificities and liberties of discourse. We should take things
much more seriously. The characteristics of discursive semiotics and
what happens with the setting into discourse, or with discursivization,
is essentially a phenomenon of spatialization, temporalization, and
actorialization. Actants also are transformed into actors. But to say
that discourse is dependent upon space and time is already to inscribe
discourse, as well as the subject pronouncing it, within exteriority. In
fact, it corresponds to projecting discourse outside the I, the subject of
enunciation, and starting to relate stories about the world.
This level of discourse is extremely important and is probably the
least studied of all in semiotics. It is also the least organized since we
have only a very few ideas and projects to create models to account for
it. In any case, a hypothetical provisional distinction can be made
between the thematic and figurative levels. For example, when Cha-
teaubriand says that "my life was as sad as the autumn leaves carried
off by the wind," you can see that "my life was as sad" is thematic, let
us say, more abstract than "the autumn leaves carried off by the
wind." But one part of the sentence says the same thing as the other.
They can thus be superimposed, and we obtain a metaphor that will
be the figurative level. The figurative is a way of speaking in either
temporal or spatial figures, and if we examine our own discourse we
note that everything belongs to one or the other of these. The concept
of figures is of major theoretical importance for us not only, as some
claim, because in painting we distinguish abstract art from figurative
art, but also because this term, which is taken from Hjelmslev's lin-
guistic theory, corresponds to the nonsign, or the semantic part of the
sign. On the other hand, "figure" also permits us to exploit the con-
cept of "gestalt," the psychology of forms. The problem is to know
how discourse is composed-not with these photographic represen-
tations of objects, but with schemata, so to speak, of objects-and how
it is used in the most diverse situations. Chains of figures essentially
constitute so-called narrative discourse; and what narrative, from this
perspective, happens to correspond to is the exploitation of narrative
structures from the deep level. We use parts of the narrative struc-
tures that we need, and we set them in our own discourse and clothe
our own discourse in a figurative manner. Yet there do exist more or
less abstract discourses.
RICOEUR: Figures are much more than a garment. What I mean to
say is that at this level there is more than an investment, in the sense
of an instantiation; in fact, there is something productive. Precisely
what is productive is that you cannot have spatialization, temporal-
ization, and actorialization without plot. The different kinds of plot
ON NARRATIVITY 557
narrator, a kind of figure that is the part of the text where someone
says something about other minds. You therefore have the narrator's
discourse, the character's discourse, and then it is necessary to de-
velop a typology to show what the constraints are. But my claim would
be that these constraints bypass the distinction between deep structure
and surface structure in your semiotics. They belong to other systems
of categorization, and I would like to know how these systems inter-
sect with yours. Here, notions such as point of view and narrative
voice would have to be introduced. (When I speak about point of
view, I am thinking about the work done by the Tartu School, Us-
pensky, for example, who tried to show that the interplay between
points of view is a principle of composition.) If, like Dorritt Cohn
following Kate Hamburger, we speak of procedures between narrator
and character, we are in fact attempting to structure enunciation
itself. This is, I think, a third dimension which should be added to the
Proppian categories of functions and actants that you have expanded.
We would then be dealing with enunciation, with the enunciator in-
scribed in the text as narrator, but also with characters. If I raise the
point it is because I think that ultimately the figurative has its own
dimension, its own structuration, which are more a part of a sort of
typology than of a logic of transformation.
I would also add that I question your own theory when you say that
there is an increase in meaningfulness when we proceed from deep
structures to surface structures. My question is, where does this in-
crease in meaningfulness come from? I do not think that it is implied
only in the transformative capacities of the deep structures, which are
constraints.7 But it is a new kind of constraint that belongs to the level
of figurativization and all the resources provided by notions such as
narrator, characters, point of view, narrative voice, and so on. These
are constraints of a different kind which are immediately figurative
but not by derivation. I am aware that your school of thought is not
a closed system but is proceeding step by step, from the most abstract
to the more concrete. I feel you have reached the point precisely
where you have to come to grips with contributions that do not come
from your own semiotics. The development of the third stage of your
semiotics requires that either you reject these categories or you re-
construct them within your own system of reference.
GREIMAS:I have always claimed that semiotics is not a science but
rather a scientific project, still incomplete or unfinished; and I leave
the task of completing and transforming it, starting from a few theo-
retical principles that I have attempted to establish, to future gener-
ations of semioticians. To begin with the deep structures and go to-
ward the surface structures is perhaps a question of strategy.
ON NARRATIVITY 559
PARIS
(Translated and adapted by Paul Perron and Frank Collins)
NOTES