Fiction, pretense, and narration - critique of 'The Logic of Literature'

Style, Spring, 1998 by David Gorman

Quite clearly, the author of The Logic of Literature doubtless never meant to satisfy common sense (even if a part of the persuasive force of her formulations comes from analogous formulations of common sense). The fact that she distances herself from it is thus certainly not a decisive objection to her theory: it simply shows that we cannot appeal to the deliverances of common sense to affirm the theory's correctness.

Thus the question of its plausibility poses itself at the level of its status as a technical theory. To test the degree of plausibility of such an item, we have three rather reliable means available. The first is to see which generally recognized phenomena (recognized in other technical discourses, i.e.) are denied by the theory in question, and which phenomena by contrast it incorporates better than such and such a concurrent theory. A second is to see whether the theory effectively explains everything that it claims to explain. And the third is to compare the theory with concurrent explanations in respect of what could be called their 'conceptually economical character.'

Let us begin from the first point. Hamburger's theory rejects as nonpertinent a large part of the phenomena analyzed by narratology. As I have already discussed this problem, I will simply stress one point: these phenomena have a textual presence of such pregnancy that the fact of being unable to integrate them hardly speaks in favor of a theory. But could it not be that in compensation the phenomena which Hamburger explains pose problems for narratology? For the latter indeed fiction in the third person is a pretended (serious) narrative, hence the mimesis of a speech act (as first-person narrative is). Hamburger's analysis claims to have shown that certain phenomena are practically never encountered in (serious) narrative in the third person, while they are omnipresent in fictional narrative. How can it be maintained that narrative in the third person is the pretense of a serious narrative, if some of its most important characteristics are impossible in the latter?

Let us note first that the phenomena Hamburger enumerates are far from being as evident as she claims. Thus some of them, contrary to what she maintains, are perfectly represented in serious, third-person narrative, whether written or oral: this is the case of dialogues, verbs of situation, and verbs of feeling applied to third parties. Sometimes her interpretation seems risky at best: this is notably the case in respect of her affirmation of the atemporal character of the preterite. Two counterexamples will suffice to show this. The first is that of iterative narrative: if the preterite had no temporal function, every iterative narrative, that is, every "single narrative utterance [that] takes upon itself several occurrences together" (Genette, Narrative Discourse 116), would be impossible, since every recapitulation presupposes the logical relevance of the category of the past tense in relation to the moment of narration. The other is that of prolepsis, that is, of the anticipation of future events. Even if it is less widespread in third-person narrative than in narrative in the first person, it is nevertheless not absent. Now, when we are confronted by a sentence of the type, 'Later on he came to regret this decision,' we cannot fail to realize that the act of utterance is posterior to the decision of which we are told, and that this act of utterance is referable to a narrator who is situated outside of the Here and Now of fictional characters.