Genette: The Non-Narrative Moment and the Impossibility of Repetition

Megan Minarich

Narrative Theory

Prof. Jay Clayton

8 OCT 2008

 

In Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, Gérard Genette lays out a schema for understanding how time functions within a narrative through examining how various phenomena within a narrative relate to one another. For Genette, story (signified) is that which tells of an event or events, narrating is the production of narrative action, and narrative (signifier) is “the narrative text itself,” or that which we use to think about the relationships between the content of the narrative and how it is told (Genette 27). He writes, “Story and narrating thus exist for me only by means of the intermediary of the narrative” (29). This seems to indicate that story and narrating, then, either do not exist without the narrative or that they cannot exist in any meaningful way, as their meaning can only be approached through the narrative text itself.  Is it even possible to have story and narrating without a narrative text? For although Genette’s study focuses on Proust’s work, I do not get the sense that he is discounting oral storytelling wherein the narrative text would not exist in written form. Given, then, the impossibility of having story and narrating without narrative, what happens when we insert non-narrative (movement) into the mix? An instance of this type of movement could arguably still be interpreted along the lines of order, duration, frequency, mood and possibly voice, but how does this change, if at all, the relationship between the non-narrative text, or the non-narrative instance within the narrative text, and story/narrating? Such moments could certainly have their own temporality, but can we situate this temporality within the larger narrative? How could we account for atemporal moments? Are these possible? (I am thinking in particular about when photographs or other static images pop up in a narrative text.)

 

 

I found Genette’s analysis of repetition within a narrative to be particularly fascinating. Repetition is usually taken to indicate the (re)production of more of the same, of identical copies that, according to Benjamin, are without history or authority. Genette, however, redefines repetition. After listing the same statement three times, he argues that: “…none of the [repeated] occurrences is completely identical to the others, solely by virtue of the co-presence and their succession, which diversify these three statements into a first, a next, and a last” (114). With this, Genette employs temporal markers of appearance in the text (which is a use of order different from that described in the first section) to differentiate between three sentences that, on the page, are identical and that, temporally, happened once at the same moment, as it is the same event being described. What is at stake in the impossibility of identical repetition? What happens when we put Genette in conversation with Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”?