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

Style, Spring, 1998 by David Gorman

the process of "making" is at work, in the sense of forming, shaping, fashioning; here is the workshop where the poietes or mimetes creates his [characters], using language as his instrument and construction material just as the painter uses color and the sculptor stone. Here literature is completely within the domain of the plastic arts, which create the semblance of reality. (233)

In fiction, narrative is transmuted into a plastic presentation: we move from the domain of language to that of appearance, of Schein. It is no doubt within this conception that the most intimate kernel of Hamburger's theory is located - but also its rather mystical point.

According to Hamburger, everything that she has said about third-person narrative goes as well, with some restrictions, for drama, because the two poetic forms constitute a single genre, that of fiction: like narrative, drama is a mimesis of life, a creation of fictional characters acting Here and Now. The restrictions are connected with the fact that drama is only a subgenre, "a sort of part extracted from the epic substance" (qtd. from the German ed., 175: gleichsam herausgeschnitten): since the dialogue is its only means of presentation, it cannot give us the direct mimesis of interior life, which narration can accomplish by means of variations of the narrative function, that is, thanks to free indirect discourse, interior monologue, or the use of verbs of feeling.(4) This postulated identity of "epic" poetry and drama obviously entails that we cease to see in "this difference of presentational form, i.e., narration and the formulation of character through dialogue, . . . a difference in genre" (196). Thus the fact of being represented is not an essential characteristic of drama, but is merely a consequence of its specific mimetic construction, namely its dialogic mise en forme: "For the locus of drama within the logical system of literature is determined solely by the absence of the narrative function, by the structural given that the [characters] are formed through dialogue" (198). "But the stage is the non-literary partial function which the verbal art work can (not must) make use of" (215). The refusal to consider effective material representation as an internal characteristic of drama finds its correlate in the refusal to treat "epic" poetry as a narrative situation: it is by reducing the two forms to their presentational content, to the appearance of life that they realize through language, that it is possible for Hamburger to unite them in a single genre.

3

Third-person narrative and drama (as well as cinematographic fiction and the mixed form of the ballad - which I disregard here in order not to overextend this summary) delimit the domain of the fictional genre. Furthermore, according to the theory of language which Hamburger defends, the system of language allows for only two sorts of logical status, that of actual utterances and that of "fictive" utterances. These two theses, taken together, obviously make it difficult not only to characterize other genres that she recognizes, namely pretended narrative in the first person and lyric poetry, but also to analyze their correlation with fiction in the global framework of a generic system.