Contemporary French and Francophone Narratology

Contemporary French and Francophone Narratology offers non-Francophone scholars a rich and timely sample of narratological research conducted in French-speaking areas. Edited by John Pier, a key intermediary between Francophone and Anglophone scholarly worlds, the volume also addresses a number of misunderstandings about the development of narratology itself, such as the idea that “classical” narratology, which originated and blossomed in France in the sixties and seventies, petered out in its country of origin, stifled by its formalist and structuralist heritage; there is too much “theory”; and there is too narrow a focus on the “autonomous” (written, literary) text at the expense of the reader, the medium, social and cultural context, and ethics. “Postclassical” narratology took over, the story goes, by overcoming such limitations in the newly booming rhetorical, ethical, and other hyphenated narratologies. Theoretical innovation, fueled by forays into cognitive, media, and gender studies, now came from American, German, or Scandinavian scholars, a broad international research community benefiting from the use of English as the lingua franca.Nuancing this history (and geography) of rise and decline, the volume aims to demonstrate that Francophone narratology is alive and kicking; that it never was the overly “codified and decontextualized undertaking that it is sometimes made out to be,” as Pier argues in his excellent introduction, since the interest for the “transmedial, transcultural, and transhistorical dimensions” of narrative was already “firmly inscribed in the structural approach to narrative” (2); and that its revival since the turn of the century is not just a response to an international “narrative turn,” but it expands in its own ways on both French and other scholarly traditions.What, then, would be specifically “French” to these ten richly diverse contributions, written by French, Swiss, Belgian, and Canadian authors (plus one American), some of whom play an active part in Anglophone international scholarly debates? In comparison to “postclassical” narratology, four characteristics stand out: sensitivity to epistemological issues, with restraint on ethical or (ideology-) critical uses of narratology—both in line with structuralism's preoccupation with scientific rigor; furthermore, a tendency toward historicizing, including an interdisciplinary dialogue with discourse analysis, semiotics, sociology, philosophy, and anthropology—a somewhat different selection, compared to the interdisciplinary inspiration in much “anglophone” narratology.These characteristics indeed run through most of the volume. In his strong opening chapter, Raphaël Baroni revisits the trajectory that led him to his functionalist theory of the dynamics of plot. His theory was actually built mostly on French narratologists, pace their allegedly narrow formalism. Baroni then teases out in the apparent objectivist approach of formalist and (French) structuralist narratology a pronounced functionalist undercurrent, making also the broader point that even narratology today is far from having solved the tension between objectivism and functionalism. The following three chapters focus on the question, much debated internationally, as to whether the concept of narrator is necessary or optional to a theory of narrative. Sylvie Patron argues that such a question is posed and answered in different ways, depending on the historical and cultural context. A genealogical approach to concepts works better than top-down theorizing to create “the conditions for [the development of a theory] to be effectively cumulative,” she notes (47). Drawing on Erving Goffman's notion of framing, Richard Saint Gelais (a representative of Quebec's flourishing narratology hub) adopts a constructivist perspective on the “narrator issue.” The centrality of the concept of narrator in narratology, he concludes, is due more to the “strength of many readers’ desire to provide narrative discourse with a (fictitious) origin” than to its actually being a basic element of narrative (67). Benoît Hennaut's discussion of the role of a narrator in post-dramatic theater and performance and Françoise Revaz's identification of “suspended narrative” as a prominent genre in media sagas and comics both illustrate the productivity of a context- and medium-sensitive model of narration. Olivier Caïra proposes to check core narratological concepts, such as “fiction,” against “folk” uses of the term—a methodology that, like the historical and context-sensitive approach, helps avoid narratological biases.Definitely specific to Francophone scholarship is the cross-pollination of narratology, discourse analysis, and semiotics. Pier's chapter shows how discourse analysis, with sources in text linguistics, enunciative linguistics, Bakhtinian “speech genres,” and Dominique Maingueneau's “scene of enunciation,” prioritizes discourse over structure, placing narrative among a myriad of forms of discourse while highlighting genericity and the inextricable relations between text and context. Denis Bertrand, a leading member of the Greimassian school of semiotics, examines narrativity alongside immanence and proposes to reconceptualize these concepts through Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's “regimes of immanence” to explore the meta-discursive interactions between the “saying” and the “said” of narrative. In his brilliant study of Pindar's Fourth Pythian Ode, Claude Calame adopts a semio-narratological approach that emphasizes the need for a pragmatically oriented rather than a structural narratology, better adapted to ancient Greek myth, grounded in ritual and song rather than in written texts.Françoise Lavocat's concluding chapter reaffirms the ideal which runs through most contributions, in which structuralist notes resonate: narratology—or even literary studies—should strive to be “a discipline whose contents can be shared, transmitted and accumulated” (217). Achieving consensus on models and concepts of narrative is a condition for disciplinary coherence, interdisciplinary cooperation, and institutional recognition, she argues.Beyond its attractive sampling of Francophone narratology, the volume by its title alone draws attention to the fundamental connection that exists in the humanities between language (and its association with cultures perceived as “minor” or “major”), local cultural and scholarly traditions, aesthetic and ethical norms, and political and institutional conditions. “French and Francophone narratology,” just like its Anglophone counterpart, refers to intellectual movements that are subject to chance encounters and nourished by migrating scholars and theories, just as much as they are products of specific times, places, and traditions. Narratological theories do not circulate in a utopian international République des Lettres in which epistemic considerations necessarily prevail. Hence, Baroni's conclusion to the first chapter holds for the whole volume: the “difference between French-speaking and English-speaking critics might lie more in aesthetics and in ideology than in epistemology” (28). In this respect this publication holds up a mirror and forms a challenge to narratology in all its languages

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