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.
_____
An answer back from my colleague in Belgrade:
Im trying to distinguish a discourse unit from a semantically
complex proposition without presupposing that the former occupies a
distinct representational or narrative level.
Consider the difference between:
(1) Ana said that Marko had an interesting story about his journey.
(2) Ana said that Marko first arrived in Rome and then travelled towards Naples.
In (1), a story is mentioned without its content being
represented. In (2), the content describes two temporally ordered
events. Yet the temporal organization of that content does not, by
itself, establish that it constitutes a distinct discourse unit rather
than a complex propositional content.
My question is whether formal discourse semantics provides an
independently motivated criterion for distinguishing these cases. More
specifically, what properties license the analysis of a semantic
structure as a discourse unit, rather than merely as a constituent of a
complex proposition?
I am particularly interested in whether such a distinction can
be established before introducing any notion of representational or
narrative level.
—and my answer to the same:
you ask, "what properties license the analysis of a semantic structure as a
discourse unit, rather than merely as a constituent of a complex
proposition?"
—as I see it it's fundamentally a
question of methodological perspective, that is, it is your perspective
that does the trick, studying syntax or semantics at a sentence level,
instead of focusing on a piece of discourse as discourse. The
disciplinary perspective you bring on the phenomenon selects the
features for analysis, and marks a given sentence, or phrase, or word,
as an object for morphological study, syntactic analysis, or discourse
analysis. An example of the way I see it, let's take a typical
sentence, those we use for syntactic analysis, e.g your example:
"Ana said that Marko first arrived in Rome and then travelled towards Naples."
—we
can ask, from a syntactic point of view, Who is the subject? Ana. Verb?
Said. Object? Relative clause, which cand then be analyzed—subject?
Marko. Verb? Arrived - Adverbs? complements? etc.
But from a discourse perspective, we may ask about the same sentence....
—who
is the speaker?, that is, who says "Ana said that Marko... etc." Well,
the speaker was yourself, before, since this was an example in your
discourse, now it's me (but quoting you, etc.). Or we might ask: "Who is
the addressee in that sentence?" That's not a piece of the sentence, of
course! That's from the perspective of discourse analysis. So, it's the
method, or the instrument or discipline (syntactic analysis, or
discourse analysis) that brings to attention or to light the objects to
be analyzed, or the dimensions of the phenomenon under study.
And,
regarding your specific question about the Ana-Marko sentences, both of
them involve a story, in the sense of a tellable sequence of events,
but the story is focused in two different ways, in 1) it is specifically
represented AS a narrative by Ana, suggesting that Marko narrated it to
her, etc., while in 2) the "same" events are summarized bypassing
Marko's narrative of them, so it is the content of his narrative rather
than the narrative act that is selected for transmission. So, a matter
of perspective, focusing for representation on some aspects of the
phenomenon rather than some other aspects, all for reasons, contextual,
interactional or whatever, which might be analyzed on any specific
occasion.
So my takeaway would be, that a given language
construction brings in a perspective on what is represented (not just in
narrative —focalization, etc.), and to that we may add that any given
discipline or sub-discipline (linguistics, syntax, discourse analysis,
narratology....) also brings its own perspective on the object of study,
foregrounding some aspects of the phenomenon which are relevant in that
field or discipline.
—best regards!
