Historical Changes of the Function of Spatial Description in Literary Texts

If one defines the nature of narrative as the presentation of successive actions and events, chronological succession becomes a crucial criterion. The lack of successive actions in a narrative text, one could argue, results in deficient narration. Actually, this is the position of Claude Bremond, when he says: Where there is no successive action, there is no story, but, for instance, (Bremond 1966: 62). According to Bremond, relations of the spatial contiguity of objects dominate in the description. But he does not elaborate on the description and thereby misses the opportunity to insert the description in his model of the narrative sequence. Bremond's model of the narrative sequence, which consists of virtuality, actualization and achieved result, implies a freedom of choice which can lead to nonactualization or nonresult. Precisely in the transition between two stages, the freedom of choice exists, the description may become an element which provides the motivation for a particular decision. We are inclined to posit that the description has an explanatory or predictive function with respect to the freedom of choice in Bremond's model. Philippe Hamon, the French narratologist who has made a most valuable contribution to the theory of description, acknowledges the twofold character of the description. On the one hand the description is the place the story is suspended, with a certain emphasis on the arresting of action; on the other hand the description is the place where the story is interrupted, while organizing itself (italics mine). Here, the rupture in the narrative is considered as a hinge in the narrative structure with the following possible functions: prediction of the continuation, reinforcement of the content (redundancy), and metonymic duplication of the psychology or fate of the characters (Hamon 1972: 485). Before discussing Hamon's theory of description further, we must mention some other conceptions of the status of the description. In the opinion of Gerard Genette, the description adds little to the transmission of information and in this respect is more or less superfluous. Information is

Epistemology · Linguistics · Narrative · Physics · Political science · Sociology · Computer Science · History · Law · Linguistics and Discourse Analysis · Philosophy

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