Appunti su Narratologia (Autore e Narratore)

Do we care about the author?

On the one hand, the "biography" of an author is an important element in studying his or her work (whether a single text, or, even more so, when studying his or her whole corpus).

On the other hand, the author does not write in a vacuum, as a lone individual. His or her writing always necessarily refers to social, cultural and generic codes (the conventions of a certain literary genre).

Whose is a text?

The meaning of a written text does not simply "belong" to an author but is part of a larger "intertextual" production. Think of a network of writing, where any single text comes to occupy a certain place in relations to many others, both contemporary but also belonging to the past.

In short, no textual meaning belongs "just" to the author and should be seen both as individual and collective. This is especially true when a text is "published", i.e. becomes public, handed over to its readers.

The author's

When writing a novel, the author writes in the absence of its readers (its audience); when reading a novel, a reader reads in the absence of the author.

There is a spacial gap (reader and writer are in a different space); there is a temporal gap (the reader reads when the writing has finished).

The text is the residue of a performance of writing: its "words" are linguistic signs to be interpreted.

The reader is the interpreter; s/he is the only one "working". Therefore s/he is the only one finally responsible for the text's meaning. We can say that the reader "actualizes" the meaning of a text.

Who "speaks" in a novel

If the author is absent, whom do we "hear" when we read?

THE NARRATOR, or NARRATIVE VOICE

NARRATOR

It is the fictive voice who addresses the reader, the one who "tells" the story.

It mediates the author; although constructed by him/her, the narrator is not the author.

A novel is a fiction narrated by a

substitute agent of the author: the narrator - a kind of linguistic trace left behind by the author. Why narrative "voice"? The presence of the narrator is experienced as a voice because while reading the reader silently pronounces the words of the text. The narrator's is an imaginary, inner voice. It is actually embodied in the reader (it does not exist out there), literally so when the reader reads aloud, maybe to others (not an uncommon practice in Victorian times). It is also a reminiscence from previous times when narrative was essentially an oral, communal form. The narrator as a complex medium (I) The narrator mediates the whole experience of our reading by: CONSTRUCTING THE PLOT (i.e. arranging a sequence of events in a certain way) ESTABLISHING A CERTAIN RELATIONSHIP WITH THE IMAGINED READER (e.g through style: its deliberate use of language) MEDIATING THE READER'S RELATIONSHIP WITH CHARACTERS (therefore inviting certain identifications or disidentifications) The narrator

As a complex medium (II)

MANAGING AND SHIFTING THE FOCALIZATION (the way the reader is made to "see" events or characters)

ALTERNATING BETWEEN DIFFERENT MODES such as:

1. description
2. dialogue
3. reported speech or opinions
4. more or less explicit comment or judgment
5. analogy and comparison (figurative language...)
6. information (historical, geographical, scientific, technical...)
7. metaliterary comment (direct address to reader, or reflection on the act of narrating as an artificial construct)

When the narrator becomes a character

A first-person narrator ("I") by so doing becomes a character in his or her own fiction, sometimes as a witness to other events, sometimes as a more involved participant, or even as the main protagonist.

The technical term for this narrator is: homodiegetic ("diegesis" = narration; "homos" = same), meaning that the narrator becomes part of its own narration, shares the narrative world s/he is telling about

Narrators who

Tell a story but are not part of it are called “heterodiegetic” (heteros = different), meaning that the narrator occupies a different level than the story s/he narrates.

Types of narrators

Even when narrators are not characters they can have very distinctive voices and “personalities”: they are expressed by the kind of language they use, the rhetorical means they employ in order to interest, attract, inform, produce emotions of different kind (depending also on the genre) in the reader.

In short, narrators merge with their strategies: that is why it is important to be able to recognise and describe them as precisely as possible. “Getting to know” how the narrator of a text works is your key towards a critical appreciation of a novel, a step beyond a simple reading of it.

Overt and covert narrators

For instance, there are narrators who seem to hide between the narration, as though they were objectively telling something without directly influencing the reader.

They prefer to "show" the events without explicit comments ("covert"). Others are very intrusive, we feel very much their presence, through comments, judgments, irony, biased use of figurative language to create certain positive or negative associations in the reader ("overt"). Mostly, there will be degrees: narrators can change strategies in different parts of the same novel. Focalization Focalization means the perspective or point of view adopted by the narrator when "showing" an event.