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This podcast is an introduction to José Angel García Landa's paper "Un momento de Virginia Woolf", a close reading of a passage in Virginia Woolf's essay "A Room of One's Own", examining the way in which the author expresses her theory of the androgynous mind through the spontaneous thought processes of a moment of epiphany in a "center of consciousness" or focalizing self.

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Narrative levels and the structure of enunciation

A colleague from the University of Belgrade is interested in some narratological themes I have addressed before, more specifically the issue of embedded narratives. The basic question he asks me about is:

whether the transition between narrative levels can be defined in terms of the structure of enunciation.

Suppose a narrator tells a story in which Mary says that Peter told her that the king was dead. Does the presence of an embedded act of enunciation suffice to establish a distinct narrative level, or must that act organize a further narrative domain?

I am particularly interested in the minimum structural conditions that distinguish an embedded speech act from a genuinely embedded narrative. Could the distinction be formulated in terms of the relations between narrating instances and represented content, without appealing to the number or complexity of sentences?

  So the  core question is : what are minimal conditions for establishing a new narrative level? 

 

My answer goes as follows:

Dear Pavle,

Mieke Bal addressed this issue in her book Narratologie: Essais sur la signification narrative dans quatre romans modernes (Paris: Klincksieck, 1977), which is not at all the same as her Narratology, and much rarer to find. If you can get it on loan however I would advise its reading. For her, every instance of direct speech is an embedded discourse, so there is not an absolute borderline between embedded narratives and any other kind of embedded discourses. Well, the more it becomes a distinct narrative, with different characters and a different plot-line, the more reason you have to speak of a different, and embedded, narrative. All the more if this narrative is explicitly presented as a fiction, story, etc., written or invented by one of the characters. There may be a change of level in terms of enunciation, and also a different (embedded) fictional world, which is another matter. But there may be many intermediate forms — a lengthy narrative by a character about the past of this intradiegetic narrator, or about other characters... so you see there are a number of dimensions or paramters which may lead you to consider a given discourse as a distinct and embedded narrative. But any sentence, or any representation, by a character, however minimal, may exhibit some degree of narrativity, so the way I see it is as a gradient with many different degrees; some people may speak of autonomous embedded narratives in some instances, other cases may be more debatable. Again, some embedded representations may be quite distinct as framed or embedded forms, but lacking in narrativity, so that is another dimension to take into account. I wrote a paper on this issue, alas it is in Spanish, but I'm told AI translation works wonders nowadays, I'll have to try it myself some day! It should be included in this bibliography on narrative embedding, or maybe you'll find some other reference which turns out to be useful:

https://bibliojagl.blogspot.com/2024/01/insercion-marcos-narrativos-y-nivel.html

Anyway, if you want to discuss any of the issues mentioned, drop me a line by all means.

Best regards,

 

— the paper in question is, perhaps, this one:

_____. "Nivel narrativo, status, persona, y tipología de las narraciones." Academia 9 Feb. 2011.*

         https://www.academia.edu/435296/

         2015 (+AI podcast, 2026)

And it has an introductory podcast in English too. 

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