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New Literary History, Vol. 20, No. 3, Greimassian Semiotics. (Spring, 1989), pp. 551-562.
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Fri Jun 22 07:47:01 2007
On Narrativity*
Algirdas Julien Greimas and Paul Ricoeur
R
ICOEUR: It is a pleasure to share once again a discussion session
with Professor Greimas. Our paths have often crossed over
the years and our friendship has increased along with these
exchanges. Let me first say how my own agenda led me not only to
cross Greimas's path but also led me along the same road with him.
Coming from the disciplines of phenomenology and hermeneutics, I
was first interested in the way semiotics responds to the aporias of
hermeneutics, which is fundamentally based on the notion of preun-
derstanding that is necessary before scientific discourse on literature
and more specifically on narrative can be elaborated.
My initial conviction was, and to a large extent still is, that we have
a first mode of understanding narrative configuration before having
the slightest notion about semiotics. When linguists speak of pho-
nemes they are dealing with objects that have no social or institutional
existence. Narratives, by contrast, already have their social functions,
and they are understood in a certain way in social intercourse among
writers, narrators, readers, and speakers, for example. Therefore,
this first order intelligibility, if I may so call it, has in a sense its own
rules which are, if not thought out, at least understood. The best
document concerning this type of understanding prior to any semi-
otics is provided by Aristotle's Poetics, which has a very articulate
system of categories that ignores the difference between deep struc-
tures and surface structures. Aristotle speaks of the "mythos" as the
configuration of incidence in the story and uses the term "sustasis" to
refer to a sort of system of events. But the kind of intelligibility linked
to our acquaintance with the way stories are plotted is closer to what
Aristotle in the rest of his work called "forensis," that is to say, prac-
tical intelligence, which is closer to the way we use our intelligence in
ethical and political matters than it is to the kind of episteme that
functions in physical and social sciences at their systematic level.
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.* 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 Semiotics of Text: Practical Exercises, a 250-page analysis
of a 6-page short story, "Two ~ r i e n d s . "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
produced in the history of narrative show us that what we are dealing
with is not merely an application and projection at the surface, but
that there is something really productive which follows rules, and that
these rules for plot construction belong to the figurative level. Hence,
there is productivity of the figurative level. I would like to return to
this problem later. The point I want to make here is that the figurative
level provides the dynamics for the rules of transformation and that
they are projected backwards from the surface to the deep structures.
GREIMAS: YOU are right to take me to task for having said that the
figurative clothed narrative structures. This is a bad metaphor and
certainly not the way to express the problem. One should first of all
take into account that the mode of existence of narrative structures is
a virtual mode of existence. Narrative structures do not exist per se
but are a mere moment in the generation of signification. When the
subject of enunciation says something, he utters a durative discourse
and proceeds by means of figures that are linked up. It is the figures
that bear the traces of narrative universals.
RICOEUR:I want to approach the problem from a different angle.
Are there not ways of dealing with narrative which, in a sense, bypass
this distinction between deep structure and surface structure? Be-
cause of all the difficulties in connecting the levels, the freedom of
enunciation, and also the constraints of the last level, I insist that on
this last or third level, this level of figurativization has its own rules.
Let us start with a comment made a few decades ago by Kate Ham-
burger in her book The Lopc of ~iterature,~ when she writes that the
great feat of narrative-"epic," in her own terms-is to explore minds
in the third person narrative, to take all the narrative procedures
through which we make judgments on the thoughts, feelings, actions
of third persons, and to transfer them into first person narrative,
thereby creating a pseudoautobiography. If we then say that the func-
tion of narrative is to provide a kind of mimesis of other minds, we
need new categories, and we need to know whether these categories
belong to the development of your own semiotics, or whether they are
foreign to it. This is not a critique but, rather, a question.
Let us therefore look at what is required if we begin this way, the
way Dorritt Cohn did in her work Transparent ~ i n d $where , ~ she
showed that narratives always have this function of exploring other
minds. If we do so, we get constraints of another kind which are more
of a typological than a structural nature. This is the route first fol-
lowed by Stanzel in his attempt to work out a typology of narrative
situations and, more powerfully, by Lubomir Dolezel in his attempt to
set up a dialectic between the discourse of the narrator and the dis-
course of the character. The next step is to introduce the category of
558 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
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.' 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.
Personally, and on an anecdotal level, I was troubled by the way Katz
and Fodor presented semantics as an appendix to Chomskian theory.
They simply took sentences, aligned them next to one another, and
established connections by drawing lines. They thought that discourse
could be structured in this way. I found the same thing in Germany,
where a type of text linguistics was developed that also treated only
surface phenomena.
The second point you raised is related to the increase in significa-
tion that results from passing from one level to another. First of all,
the way I present things is not by means of a combination of elements;
that is to say, I do not usually start with simple units and then combine
them to arrive at a more complex level. The problem as I see it is
related to the passage from meaning to signification. As a linguist I
see this in the procedure of articulation, a sort of continuous explo-
sion. The production of meaning is the production of difference, the
production of oppositions, and when discourse happens it takes place
by a sort of series of successive explosions that produce the totality,
the richness of discourse. On the other hand, we can very well imag-
ine that an analyst dealing with a realized discourse would begin with
the surface before going on to the deep structures. That would be
another way of proceeding.
The third point I would like to bring up is related to point of view.
What I will say about this does not come directly from my own per-
sonal research but from work done by one of my students, Jacques
Fontanille, who wrote a thesis on the problem of point of view in
discourse.' He studied cinema, painting, Marcel Proust, advertising,
and also quantum theory. He made use of common knowledge, es-
pecially when dealing with the concept of the narrator that you your-
self mentioned. From a linguistic perspective, we notice that, in ad-
dition to modalities, there exists the fundamental element of the
modulation of sentences constituted by aspectualities. These aspectu-
alities can be imagined and described only if one posits an observer
who is watching the process being actualized, whether it happens to be
inchoative, durative, or terminative. Thus, natural language already
utilizes the simulacrum of the observer to account for linguistic phe-
nomena, even at the level of the sentence. If one examines narrative
discourse one sees that these observers can be situated anywhere.
When analyzing a text by Proust one notices that the observer changes
point of view at almost every sentence. What Fontanille did was to
posit that all discourse has a cognitive level and that it is at this cog-
nitive level that a diad-two actants-is located: the observer-actant
and the informer-actant. Between the two a sort of exchange of in-
formation takes place that can be integrated into the total or partial
560 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
PARIS
(Translated and adapted by Paul Perron and Frank Collins)
NOTES
3 Algirdas Julien Greimas, Maupassant: The Semiotics of Text: Practical Exercises, tr. Paul
4 See Language in Culture and Society: A Reader in Linguist& and Anthropology, ed. Dell
5 Kate Hamburger, The Logic of Literature, tr. Marilyn G. Rose (Bloomington, Ind.,
1973).
6 Dorritt Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciomness in Fic-
7 For a detailed discussion of this point, see Jean Petitot-Cocorda, Morphogenbe dusem
(Paris, 1985),esp. pp. 260-68. See also Paul Perron, Introduction, On Meaning: Selected
Writings in Semiotic Theory, by Algirdas Julien Greimas, tr. Paul Perron and Frank
Mass., 1979).