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:
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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