Telling in Time 1 Sternberg

Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

Telling in Time (I): Chronology and Narrative TheoryAuthor(s): Meir SternbergSource: Poetics Today, Vol. 11, No. 4, Narratology Revisited II (Winter, 1990), pp. 901-948Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1773082 .Accessed: 06/10/2011 05:01

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Duke University Press and Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to Poetics Today.

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=duke

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1773082?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

Telling in Time (I): Chronology and Narrative Theory

Meir Sternberg Poetics and Comparative Literature, Tel Aviv

All I wish is, that it may be a lesson to the world, "to let

people tell their stories their own way." Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

1. What's Wrong with Chronology?

My main title has two bearings on narrative, one necessary, the other

optional, one directed to the medium and the other to the object of narration. On the one hand, telling in time is telling in a temporal medium, where all items and structures and effects must unfold in an ordered sequence. Whether viewed from the transmitting or the re-

ceiving end, communication there proceeds along a continuum. This is evidently a sine qua non for verbal storytelling, as for all literature and discourse in language, but not for them alone. It applies no less

necessarily to a variety of syncretic, multimedia forms of discourse-

dance, theatre, opera, cinema-whose extension in space yet combines with an irreversible progression in time. Whatever the grouping of their signs at any given moment, it cannot so much as freeze, let alone

develop or regroup, except from moment to moment along the communicative process. Nor is this because they signify a narrative-which

they usually do-but rather because, like narrative, their signifiers follow a line even in their least narrative moments, as when describing a

place or a state of affairs. Temporality in the sense of discourse sequentiality (linearity, directionality) thus controls an assortment of media, art forms, representations. And the straining against the "tyranny of time" throughout the ages, in modernism, for example, only reaffirms and redefines the tyrant's power with each abortive rebellion.

On the other hand, in a sense limited and optional to narrative

(factual, fictional, epic, dramatic, operatic, cinematic) as the represen-

Poetic.s Today 11:4 (Winter 1990). Copyright ? 1990 by The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. (:(:( 0333-5372/90/$2.50.

902 Poetics Today 1 1:4

tation of an action, telling in time also means telling in chronological sequence: according to the order in which events have (or, if fictional, are supposed to have) occurred, so that the discourse marches in step with the world. The telling follows, reflects, imitates, if you will, the line of the happening-from earlier to later, from cause to result. The temporality imposed on the signifiers by art forms an icon of the temporality built into the signifieds by nature.

This pinpoints the relation between the two senses of telling in time, the communicative as against the mimetic or iconic. If the first sense is necessary but not peculiar to narrative, the second is peculiar but non- necessary. For narrative must tell about the workings of time (events, developments, changes of state) in some time-medium, verbal and/or otherwise, but not perforce in their original order of time. The first sense opposes temporal to spatial media, as conditions of discourse arrangement; the second presupposes both a temporal object and a temporal medium-a narrative, in short-so as to oppose two options for sequencing the one along the other: chronological versus nonchronological narration.

Equally available in principle, the two rival options have indeed been practiced and elaborated throughout the history of narrative. Some of the great practitioners in either tradition even fall into pairs, as with the Bible and Homer, Gibbon and Fielding, Trollope and Dickens, The Rainbow and Ulysses. This makes it all the more remarkable that narrative theory knows so little, and finds so much to complain, about telling in step with time.

Chronological ordering has long suffered from a bad name as an inferior method of arrangement, if artistic or viable at all. Backed by the prestigious practice of Homer and Greek tragedy, Aristotle's Poet- ics already ranks the "simple" plot, plodding from beginning through middle to end, below the "complex" plot with its unexpected reversals and discoveries. And if Aristotle does not explicitly condition artistic form and effect on temporal displacement, his successors have done so in no equivocal terms. Renaissance and Neoclassical criticism doctrinally opposes the "natural" or "historical" to the "poetic" order, elevating the jump in medias res into a distinctive feature of epic and literary storytelling in general. So do the Russian Formalists, with their numerous Structuralist progeny and kindred spirits to this day, by appeal to a more sophisticated distinction: the orderlyfabula underlying the work must be disordered in the finished sujet for the sake of aesthetic "making strange." Again, E. M. Forster (1962 [1927]) laments the necessity of the low and atavistic "story," forwarded by "and then?" as against the intelligent "why?" of the "plot," which reaches its height in the mystery-novel plot through inversions of the time sequence. Modernism in the Jamesian tradition will have the writer deform

Sternberg * Telling in Time 903

and ambiguate the objective order of happening into a subjective order of perception, discovery, reminiscence, thought. From yet another quarter, Joseph Frank (1963, 1981) and his followers have celebrated (post)modernism's shift from temporal to so-called spatial form by means of similar disarrangements.

All this, culminating in the shift from time to space, reveals another curious disparity between the two senses of telling in time: a second- order disparity, to be exact, concerning attitudes to the element of choice. On the one hand, the demands of temporal discourse ("one damned thing after another") have often exercised artists, along with their partisans in criticism, most vocally those modernists bent on imaging and shaping simultaneity against the grain of the medium. On the other hand, the option of assimilating the discourse to a chronology would seem to figure among theorists (the spatialists definitely included) as a regrettable freedom, one not to be exploited on pain of losing the name of art. The two objections, to the constraints on spatializing and to the license of chronologizing, appear at variance. Except that, if you look harder, they do share a significant feature, namely, a distaste for time regarded as the line of least resistance. By such a valuation, chronological narrative toes not just a line-literally speaking-but a double line: the medium's and the world's, both given beforehand. What could make a softer option, as it were, than aligning words in conformity to a line of events, aligning events in the groove of the medium? I

To be sure, nobody who has thought about narrative structure and interpretation is likely to deny that for narrative to make sense as narrative, it must make chronological sense. For if the events composing it do not fall into some line of world-time, however problematic their alignment and however appealing their alternative arrangement, then narrativity itself disappears. From early to late is, moreover, not only the order of nature but also the order of causality, hence of plot coherence. Being chronological, the sequence of events is followable, intelligible, memorable, indeed chrono-logical. So much so, the critical approaches I have instanced might say, that it becomes too akin to the way of the world, too mimetic and transparent for art. To qualify

1. The two lines have even been correlated or, still more incredibly, identified at the hands of antilinearists. For example, "It is obvious that the closer the structure of a narrative conforms to causal-chronological sequence, the closer it corresponds to the linear temporal order of language" (Frank 1981: 235). Or, "We read narratives one word after another, and in this sense all narratives are chronological sequences" (Smitten and Daghistany 1981: 13). (Cf. the definition of "the sign as well as the sentence and all larger units of discourse" as "primarily narrative" in Scholes [1974: 17].) To the background of such tie-ups (the norms behind the fusion and confusion of linearities) we shall return; see for now Sternberg (1990).

904 Poetics Today 11:4

for art, chronology needs to undergo such deformation in the telling as to be only gradually reformed or reconstructed in the reading, trial- and-error fashion, with appropriate delays and twists and surprises en route, if not pockets of darkness and ambiguity to the end.

This is what the antichronologists might say, and at best do say after a fashion, yet a sadly poor best it remains. By speaking of its poverty I do not just mean that the case has seldom, if ever, been seriously argued-the rule being quick dismissal in opposition to the favored

telling out of time. Not to put too fine a point upon it, all the stances

against chronology known to me (and I have searched high and low) are riddled with weaknesses, usually compounded. None achieves anything like coverage, and with it explanatory power, in regard to the facts of temporality in narrative practice: genres, canons, repertoires, features, variations synchronic and diachronic within the overall system. Most involve errors in reasoning as well, from plain non sequiturs (see note 1) through equations of form with role or effect (e.g., chro-

nologizing with copying, dechronologizing with defamiliarizing) down to specious reversals of pro into con, as though whatever motivates and recommends one ordering must count against another. Further, hardly any of these approaches will come under scrutiny without be-

traying (here and there, flaunting) some absolutist view of art and/or

reality, complete with bias, a priori ranking, designs on canonization, judgment in the guise of statement. With flaws of such magnitude ag- gravating one another, the case should have been discredited by now- if not long ago, then at least in our own age, unprecedented for its investment and advances in the study of narrative time. Only, it hasn't been: quite the contrary, in fact, so that one may well wonder why.

What's wrong, then, with chronology? Nothing in principle, I shall

argue, any more than with nonchronological strategies of narration; but there is something wrong with narrative theory-a few things, actually, which for convenience I will divide below into empirics, logic, ideology, and, crosswise, methodology. Faced with such manifold as well as multivoice antagonism, the poetics of orderly storytelling must in a way begin from less than scratch. Hence the constant movement in what follows, under the rubrics indicated, between metatheoretical and theoretical inquiry, between matters of principle and of fact, between received images or formulas and dynamic operations, between

negative findings and positive proposals or counterproposals. I hope to show that those different tacks of analysis join forces to point in the same direction. But I have no doubt that they point away from the established premises, prejudices, practices-all formalist in the sense of reifying and ranking narrative sequences without regard to communicative (generic, historical, ideological, purposeful) context.

Negatively speaking, the dismissal of chronology would seem inde-


fensible on the old or old-new formalist grounds, often even on its own terms; the only question is what to substitute for it and them, and to my mind the answer lies in a functional poetics. To put it in a nutshell, chronology is what chronology does, and its doings not only have their rationale but also surprisingly vary with the operative norms and choices. The uniform-looking, early-to-late sequence thus comes to perform multiple as well as distinctive roles, which inform and in effect transform it from one context to another. So much so that the sequence may generate what theory is traditionally least able to envisage and accommodate: functional deformation (of norms, responses, world views, expectancies) in chronological formation. Thus the recourse to telling in time against the dominant convention of arrangement, or a chronology linked, propelled, begun and/or closed in an unexpected fashion. And if disorder lurks below the surface of temporal order-which would also entail the converse-then the very notion of (dis)ordering needs to be redefined accordingly. Still, even readers left uneasy about this positive thrust of the argument should at least find enough evidence for the need to reconsider the issue together with its implications. Any alternative would be an im- provement on the present state of unquestioning consensus.

Such rethinking becomes all the more urgent once we appreciate the range and weight of the implications. For the set of ills to be discussed (under empirics, logic, etc.) does not conspire against chrono-logical telling alone. By a virtually forced chain reaction, such ills affect all other arrangements of sequence-dechronologizing itself included, if only because isolated and valorized by fiat-with the further result that the temporal panorama shrinks into polarity. It could hardly be otherwise within a binary approach, so current among theorists, where to privilege one (dis)ordering term is to throw the rest out of value, focus, even sight. Along with the devaluation of chronology vis-a-vis anachrony, for example, goes the neglect of multilinear narrative or of linguistic sequence or of cognitive dynamics, which reduces to neither pole of ordering. Since these are all staples of narrative as a time art, their fate becomes another, wider measure of the logic of polariza- tion. Unless we manage to encompass and interrelate those multiform absentees within a single frame of analysis, along with the traditional extremes and to the redefining of their extremity, we cannot hope for a theory of sequence-not even of narrative temporality proper.

Less immediately and homogeneously, yet nonetheless consequen- tially, the trouble stretches beyond time to intersecting narrative dimensions: space for one, point of view for another, to cite two generic essentials and battlefields. Further, the calls for promoting either dimension at the expense of time-for breaches in event order to build up spatial or perspectival form-make it doubly revealing that

906 Poetics Today 11 :4

the theory of these forms has suffered from much the same omissions and commissions as that of time.

For instance, take the loaded contrast between "spatial" and non-

spatial narratives, or its equivalent in the antithesis, attacked by Booth (1961) but lately drawn anew, between what Jamesians called narratives with and without a point of view. Given that in narrative some-

thing happens somewhere as well as sometime, could any narrative (even if it would, or however orderly) do otherwise than extend its referents and meanings in space? If so, doesn't the restrictive use of the term "spatial" just express a preference for a certain, supposedly antitemporal mode of spatiality? Likewise, since narrative entails sub-

jectivity, the talk about the presence or absence of point of view-or, more recently, of the narrator-boils down to the favoring of a certain narrative stance, duly polarized. Indeed, why should space, or perspective, stand opposed and rise superior to time at all? Why ally them, conversely, with telling out of time? Again, is it an accident that, like

chronology, omniscient narration is both the least valued and the least

explored mode in its field-regardless of their currency among story- tellers old and new? Is it an accident, further, that omniscience looks most compatible with chronology, if only because the all-knowing narrator has timely access to the whole truth, so that he can tell without

gaps? Or, how is it that the theory of reported discourse echoes tem-

poral theory in package-dealing form and function? Thus, the wide-

spread but false claim that direct quotation merely serves to reproduce ("copy") the original event, while the free indirect style operates to the

higher ends of irony or ambiguity, is a precise counterpart to the roles and values generally assigned to the orderly versus disorderly forms of telling.

This will suggest the magnitude and the unity in variety of the problems left or created along the broad front of narrative. Yet their very family resemblance also argues for a different kind of theory, which has actually withstood some of the tests and promises to meet others

by treating narrative notjust as a rule-governed but as a role-governed discourse, a flexible interplay of means and ends in communication. Here is not the place to detail the methodology or its history, which in certain respects goes as far back as the implications of Aristotle's Poet- ics. For the moment, let me say only that the cumulative results of my own earlier inquiries into the cruxes mentioned above (e.g., on space, see 1970, 1978: esp. 203-34; 1981, 1984; on narrative models and omniscience, 1978: 246-306; 1985: 58ff.; on reported discourse, 1982a, 1982b, 1986), as well as into time proper, would seem to invite extension and integration in terms of an overall functionalist approach. So would certain new developments and ongoing reorientations in other fields concerned with discourse, though not (or, optimistically,

Sternberg ? Telling in Time 907

not yet) in the mainstreams of literary theory. In particular, one can no longer expect anything of the kind from literary Structuralism, a movement best known perhaps for its attempts to systematize the analysis of narrative, but also most encumbered with the preconcep- tions and coincidences just illustrated. As practiced since the 1960s, Structuralist narratology turns out, on the whole, a formalism in dis- guise, often contrary to its professions and its textual analyses alike. A strange mixture results-and differently mixed in different hands, phases, even performances-but almost invariably with a strong element of form reified, instead of related to a network of synchronic and diachronic relations as part to whole. Structuralism at variance with the idea of structure? No wonder that, despite the fine synthesis in Culler (1975), at times verging on transformation, Structuralism has recently lost so much of its appeal and impetus. The question is not how to restore them but how best to draw the lesson and turn it to account within some other framework.

Much the same question arises (as we shall see) in regard to various other formalisms, old and new: the ways of generalizing from narratives to narrative via ready-made poles, for example, have changed in essentials far less over the ages than may appear to modern eyes or even in the light of the many genuine achievements and refinements since the Greeks. This remains to be argued, of course, and against opposition. But supposing those paradigms have not changed, or not consistently and for the better, where do we go from here?

Here, therefore, my specific focus does multiple duty. The following argument carries no special brief for chronology, except as a junc- tion and symptom of larger issues, that is, as part of a whole on which its treatment both depends and reflects, for better or worse. Indeed, having already made one plea for it in the context of expositional ordering (1978: 183ff.), I do hope to develop the matter further toward a poetics, but with one important shift in emphasis. If this strategy cries out for notice and justice, denied it from Aristotle to yesterday, then its revaluation cannot but present a mirror and a challenge to our theorizing about narrative.

2. Empirical Coverage, or: What Are the Facts?

2. 1 Chronology Missed and Dismissed vis-a-vis Anachrony: History, Fiction, Value As a rule, the practice of chronology has received the scantiest attention, to the point of judgment in absentia. Geared to disorder, theory traditionally leaves out of account the how's and why's of chronological narrative, its range and fortunes, sometimes its very existence. This produces the largest single hole in the study of temporality, one that modern developments have only widened by altogether refusing it


notice and interest-let alone parity-except of a negative kind. Even in empirical terms alone, the failure to cover one of the two primary ordering options throws the whole picture into imbalance. And any attempt to gloss over the omission only brings out its magnitude and

consequences. For this line at its most extreme, as well as its most explicit, we had

best turn to recent narratology. Consider Gerard Genette:

Narrative anachronies (as I will call the various types of discordance between the two orderings of story [histoire] and narrative [recit]) implicitly assume the existence of a kind of zero degree that would be a condition of perfect temporal correspondence between narrative [recit] and story [histoire]. This point of reference is more hypothetical than real. Folklore narrative habitu- ally conforms, at least in its major articulations, to chronological order, but our (Western) literary tradition, in contrast, was inaugurated by a characteristic effect of anachrony .... We know that this [Homer's] beginning in mediass res, followed by an expository return to an earlier period of time, will become one of the formal topoi of epic, and we also know how faithfully the style of novelistic narration follows in this respect the style of its remote ancestor, even in the heart of the "realistic" nineteenth century. (1980: 35-36)

In virtually denying the reality of the chronological order, this statement is extreme,2 none the less so because it sounds moderate. Its very appeal to the facts is rare enough (a welcome change from judgment by deduction or implication), while its shrewd hedging even appears to guard against overstating the case. Note how the qualifier, "in its

major articulations," actually maximizes the strength of the claim by discounting all slight or local or forced departures from the "story's" chronology. The refusal to load the dice by promoting and adding these to the ranks of genuine ("major") anachrony makes good sense. After all, even the most orderly narrative in folklore and elsewhere (if there is an elsewhere) will double back in time to introduce new characters or to enact a simultaneous occurrence or just to glance at some

antecedent, with no perceptible effect of disordering. (In visual terms, this would correspond to the difference between the small and the

large departures from the straight line in Tristram Shandy's diagrams of temporality. There are "common ins and outs," he says in laugh- ing away certain squiggly peccadilloes, "incident to the lives of the

greatest ministers of state; and when compared with what men have

2. Even relative to the position in the earlier (and, significantly, less theoretical) context of Genette, where he is satisfied to affirm that "the order long considered natural is nothing but one order among others" (1969: 221). The line strik-

ingly hardens in time along with the theory; and it undergoes further hardening at the hands of disciples, fellow Structuralists, or even outsiders (see notes 3 and 18, below).


done-or with my own transgressions at the letters ABD-they vanish into nothing" [Sterne 1940 (1759-67): 474].) To lump together such "minor" adjustments with, say, in medias res, would therefore be to weaken and trivialize the empirical claim against chronology, almost to the point of vacuity.3

But Genette's good sense makes it all the more incredible that he should go so far as to deny the "real" existence of chronological narrative, reducing it to "hypothetical" status or zero-point. The stronger the claim, the easier its refutation and the stranger the disregard for the massive evidence to the contrary.

Most conspicuous for its absence here is the entire range and tradition of history-telling in the largest sense, contrasted with fiction-

telling by its drive to factuality and governed by the arrow of time. Chronicle, historiography proper, biography, autobiography, diaries, news items, documentaries, travelogues, official and scholarly report- ing, perhaps half of the narrative corpus in all: these genres of discourse do not receive here so much as passing mention, still less rea- soned dismissal. I say "perhaps half" only to be on the safe side. It is not just that the proportions have over the ages increasingly changed, along with culture and technology, in favor of historical (as against fictional) discourse. They have always favored it, if only due to the

pervasiveness from time immemorial of everyday storytelling, much

3. Such weakening is actually to be found even in related and derivative accounts. For example, Todorov (1966: 127, 139) bases a similar empirical position on the disparity between linear discourse and the multiple story-threads rendered by it. So does Rimmon-Kenan, a disciple of G(enette's, who repeats the master's words but misrepresents his claim by grounding it in the pressures of multilinearity rather than in the preference for anachrony (1983: 16-17, 45-46); another follower, Bal, likewise speaks of chronology as "a theoretical construction" absent from "nearly all novels" and "most short stories," owing to the exigencies of narration (1985: 51, 53). (Genette himself shows admirable consistency in postulating "major articulations" alone as the criterion for distinguishing text-length sequences. If anything, this criterion is pushed too far. Narrative Discourse (1980) thus leaves aside the whole issue of simultaneity, on the grounds that the "heterodiegetic" shift in time (unlike the "holnodiegetic") supposedly "does not entail real narrative interference," hence no real anachrony (ibid.: 50, 71). In a later work, he even goes so far as to retract his own reference here to the Iliad as an in-medias-res narrative, indeed as the paradigm of anachrony in "(Western) literary tradition." Arguing against himself-and, as it happens, myself-he will not take the belated Catalogue of Ships and the retrospections of Nestor as sufficient evidence for major disarrangement: "C(ela n'autorise pas a appliquer a l'Iliade ... la formule in medias res. On ne peut pas serieusement assimiler la structure temporelle de l'Illade a celle de l'Odyssee" ( 1983: 21, n. 2). The Iliad accordingly becomes chronological, the Odyssey alone remains anachronous. One need not agree about these particular cases (and I don't) to see that Genette is right in principle: better to limit than indiscriminately widen the scope of anachrony. Where simultaneity comes in and how to tell major from minor inversions are problems to which we shall return.


of it historical in the sense of making a truth claim and following the appropriate sequence. (With children, as experiments made by psycholinguists have established, this sequencing is even the rule, both in the production and the comprehension of stories.4) All the more so if we throw into the balance the forms of "minimal narrative"- the petite histoire, so to speak, at its most petite-which Genette himself elsewhere allows as a matter of principle.5 The more minimal the

narrative, of course, the more chronological, if for no other reason than because its mini-sequence leaves less room (if any) for disorder-

ing. And it is equally evident that the mini-histories produced every single day in ordinary talk outnumber the fictions in all the canons and annals of literature put together. So whatever the margin of safety and however one considers the field-in terms of numbers, genres, media, activities, developments-the extent of the omission is nothing short of staggering.

These facts being for the most part hardly new, if to some incon-

venient, how come the narratives of real existence are all denied real existence in narrative? Like everyone else, of course, theorists have their specializations, their likes and dislikes and indifferences, their

4. For some discussion and references, see Clark and Clark (1977: 506-8). One might arguably extend this rule so far as to build it into narrative competence at large. Among other support, take the conclusion drawn in Labov (1972) from an empirical study of adolescent and adult as well as preadolescent narrators.

Throughout their performances, he finds, "the clauses are characteristically in

temporal sequence," reflecting "a linear series of events which are organized in the narrative in the same order as they occurred" (ibid.: 360, 378). This would be less characteristic of literary than of the oral-spontaneous narration with which Labov is concerned. Still, such findings are applicable to a large part of the overall narrative corpus (system, activity), and also, less simply, generalizable about the rest as a presumption of narrative discourse in the telling and the reading. As it

stands, of course, Labov's idea of limiting narrative by definition to orderly narrative (spelled out in Reinhart [1985]) goes to an extreme comparable, though opposed, to Genette's. 5. "I walk, Pierre has come are for me minimal forms of narrative, and inversely the

Odyssey or the Recherche is only, in a certain way, an amplification (in the rhetorical

sense) of statements such as Ulysses comes home to Ithaca or Marcell becomes a writer"

(Genette 1980: 30; see also 1983: 14-15). Within this single-clause / single-event minimum, obviously, all manipulations of order are ruled out. More often, the minimum postulated by scholars rises to two events. But their sequential mobility remains at best limited, in fact as well as in principle-and some would even consider this an understatement about the minimum anld well beyond it. Thus Labov,

generalizing from his body of evidence, would introduce orderly sequence into the definition itself: "We can define a minimal narrative as a sequence of two clauses which are temporally ordered: that is, a change in their order will result in a change in the temporal sequence of the original semantic interpretation" (1972: 360). For other discussions of minimal narrative, see Prince (1973: 16-37; 1982: 1-4) and Scholes (1974: 95-96).


horizons of reading and reference, let alone their lapses of memory.6 But such relatively innocent, accidental reasons do not quite explain the size and persistence of the hole. As one might predict from this re- currence, the imbalances of individual theorists have their origin and sanction in a variety of limits (limitations, delimitations) institutionalized by narrative theory-or in the absence of a unified narrative theory.

Unhappily, the narrative field is parcelled up among several disciplines, which tend to work in casual or even studied disregard for one another's very subject matter as well as methods and findings. Thus the inquiries into so-called artistic/literary, historical, and everyday narrative all too often go each its own institutional way: a division of labor with little interdisciplinary feedback and synthesis. So little that (say) between a Genette's disposal of narratives articulated by chronology and a Labov's ruling out of narratives based on anachrony, the entire field of narrative vanishes. This is doubtless an extreme case, yet not atypical nor restricted to empirical self-isolation nor unparalleled outside poetics and linguistics. Among the disciplines involved, again, the modern poetics of narrative is not only the best equipped and least shut-in but comparatively also (under the influence of semiotics, above all) the most ambitious. It alone shows occasional aspirations to inclusiveness of coverage, to generalizing the play between unity and diversity, narrative and narratives (as in the introductions to Barthes [1977] or Genette [1980] or the Poetics itself). Even then, however, the project is liable to obstruction or deflection from the slanted choice of materials, within as well as without the poetic sphere. Nowhere does the scientific drive to generality give way before traditional isolation- alisn and prescriptivism as in the handling of time. Behind the special interest in anachrony, it would appear, there is something like a vested interest: the relevant corpus gets delimited, established, indeed canonized by fiat.

If history-telling is passed over in silence because its temporal norm

6. Including lapses with regard to their own statements about the corpus as well as to the corpus itself. For example, in excluding chronology from the picture, historical manifestations and all, (enette forgets two of his own inclusive moves. One, already noted, is the principled insistence on the mini-(hi)stories of everyday life as not only a part but even the basis and model of narrative. Yet, among the features extrapolated from this minimal paradigm, sequence finds no place, except obliquely, under the incongruous category of "tense" (1980: 30-31). The other move shows up in the recurrent formula "real or fictitious" (e.g., ibid.: 25, 27, 87, 161, 198), likewise designed to subsume the whole of narrative under the theory but never going much beyond a gesture. In fact, so far from gaining anything like equal attention, let alone equal status, the "real" branch occasionally appears to make the "fictitious" stand out by contrast (e.g., ibid.: 208, 213), and usually, as here, just disappears.


involves "correspondence between narrative and story"-because its discourse as well as its action adhere to the line of chronology-then the argument falls into a vicious circularity, a victim to its own conceptual and terminological premises. The conceptual circle leaps to the eye. Why is no temporal correspondence to be found?-Because narrative, realistic as well as epic, departs from story order. And why does historical narrative get excluded, failing to qualify, perhaps even to come to mind?-Because there is to be found in it such temporal correspondence. Ergo, chronology leads only a "hypothetical" existence in the story, as reconstructed along the zigzag sequence of reading, not a "real" existence in the discourse written and read. (Q.E.D.)7 Only thus can the empirical facts be made to lend support and re- spectability to a normative preconception about order-to a bias for disorder which Genette shares with most of his predecessors and, above all, contemporaries, not least his fellow Structuralists. Of these, a few likewise seek, while others spurn, the cover of objectivity.8 But partial coverage is partial coverage.

In either or both senses of the word, this partiality goes back to the very opposition of "story" and "narrative," which is value-laden rather than purely descriptive. Along with the opposition itself-as I began by indicating and will later specify-such valuation constitutes neither a rarity nor a novelty. It is as old as classical dealings with action sequences, and it resurges within a diversity of twentieth- century movements, from Jamesianism and Impressionism to current

7. Compare the opposite exclusion of the fictional (and less explicitly, of written and nonverbal narrative even where factual, like history writing) by (socio)linguistic fiat. "We define narrative as one method of recapitulating past experience by matching a verbal sequence of clauses to the sequence of events which (it is inferred) actually occurred" (Labov 1972: 359-60). Narrative is natural narrative, natural narrative refers through language to actual events, and actual events

(re)appear in proper sequence. Of these different restrictive postulations, that con-

cerning "actuality" is the most arbitrary because least motivated even by the em-

pirics and logic which govern the discipline itself. Not only do we tell one another fictions as well as lies, but they may well meet the rest of the criteria postulated: naturalness, verbalization, sequentiality. And if they do vary from recapitulated actualities in sequence, it would surely be important to know the extent, the manner, and the reason of the variance-as important as it would be for students of fiction to learn the reverse and for students of narrative to work out the overall

picture. 8. For example, as Barthes does in his open contempt for "readerly texts," predictably characterized by their insistence on "internal chronology ('this happens before or after that')" and subjection to "the logico-temporal order" (1974: 16). This

despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that "they make up the enormous mass of our literature," while the "writerly," properly reversible text would give one "a hard time finding it in a bookstore" (ibid.: 50, 52).


experimental writing. Throughout, breaking time counts as making art, chronological ill-formedness (discontinuity, ambiguity) equals aesthetic well-formedness. All these movements sound dogmatic and exclusive, of course, but then they do not really pretend otherwise. None aspires to a general theory of narrative, as often do their narratologi- cal equivalents in recent poetics and semiotics, which are accordingly our immediate concern now. By the terms of his case, a Jamesian will spurn everyday storytelling as beneath artistic notice (or as anything except raw material for art, "germs" in the language of James's own Notebooks and Prefaces). With relative impunity, he will also rule out history-telling, if only because its factual constraints set it apart from the art of fiction. And fictional chronologies themselves (like narratorial commentary or omniscience) will be found wanting by his modernist standards of presentation, sense-making, rhetoric, episte- mology. Obviously, however, a narratologist can indulge in the old luxuries of choice and prejudgment only at the cost of the new, all- inclusive, interdisciplinary ambitions. This makes the recent attempts to have it both ways, not always deliberately, so self-defeating and so in need of acrobatics. Like much else, beginning with the idea of "real" versus "hypothetical" sequence, the contradiction is generally found to originate in Victor Shklovsky's theory of prose (1965: 3-57; 1966), where a refreshing breadth and pluralism coexist with a rigid formalism in doctrine as well as in name. Thanks to the former, the door has at last opened to noncanonical genres. Due to the latter, we have inherited a recipe for defamiliarization of sequence: to imi- tate the course of events (as given in the fabula) is to lay out a dead form, while telling out of time has the supreme merit of deforming the fabula materials into perceptual life. Once you adopt this formula, in whatever variant, trouble ensues-even regarding areas that it ought to cover and by reference to the very criteria (from artfulness down to specific effects) that it exalts. Above all, even supposing that the stories we tell one another are lacking in craft, permanence, development, hence in value, and supposing that they lose thereby all claim to equality and synthesis with the rest (two big if's), then what becomes of the crafted tradition of chronology? Inescapable, the problem is also irresolvable by any half measures: either free sequencing or forced theorizing for and from one model of sequence.

As usual with Russian Formalist and French Structuralist narratology, Genette's "story" thus bears the same relation to "narrative" as (mimetic) content to (poetic) form, signified to signifier, what to how. The terms for the first pair of concepts widely-e.g., the Formal- ist fabula vs. sujet, Barthes's (1977: 79-124) fonctions-actions vs. narration, Ricardou's (1967) fiction vs. narration, Todorov's (1966) histoire


vs. discours-but their antithesis persists and so does their loading or scaling.9 For anything like artistic status, "narrative" must supposedly break away from the lifelike "story" because art works by deviance and disharmony. By the same token, "narrative" must allegedly far out- rank "story" because art privileges the signifier, the form, the how- the set toward the message, as Jakobson (1960) defines the poetic function, crucial but not at all restricted to literature. Hence the im- perative need for dislocating story into narrative, so that the one will be pushed underground and the other pulled to the foreground. Only by such inversion of temporal into higher priorities (world into discourse, imitating into making-strange, transparence into self-focused

opacity) can tales generate on or through their time-axis the differentia specifica of poeticity, literariness, art at large.

Just another manifestation of the old quarrel between "form" and "content?" So it may look, especially in view of the terminology to which some of the exponents themselves resort, combined with their

slogans and practice. But this is not necessarily, nor invariably, the issue in question. One encounters the same antithesis even among

9. With the partial exception of Todorov (whose terms reappear in Chatman's Story and Discourse [1978] along with the attitude): he does regard histoire as an artistic product, yet not by virtue of its chronology but of its cross-temporal features and operations. On this point he repeatedly takes issue with the Shklovsky orthodoxy, following instead the lead of certain other Formalists. Notable among them is Propp, who lays it down as a law of the morphology of the folktale that "the sequence of functions is always identical" (1968 [1928])-in flat rejection of Shklovsky's argument that "it is precisely the sequence of events that is distorted most of all" (ibid.: 21-22). But then Propp and his heirs, due to their anchorage in a homogeneous corpus or at least a uniform sequence of action, give precedence anyway to the narrated fabula over the narrative sjuzet (but see ibid.: 107-13). A shift more in practical emphasis than in theory, this still involves a definite imbalance (radicalized in a contemporary assault on Formalism by Bakhtin / Medvedev, who would scrap the distinction altogether: "The material is artistic through and

through.... Although we can separate story from plot as the Formalists under- stand it, the story itself is, nevertheless, artistically organized" [1985 (1928): 113] and better left unseparated.) So a two-level or multilevel analyst like Todorov might rather trace his descent further back to Aristotle, for whom value is a matter of

degree: a "whole" (or "simple" plot) fulfills the artistic minimum of causal linkage, while a "complex" plot rises to the maximum through the chrono-logical disorder-

ing of the "whole" with a view to startling discovery and/or peripety. Finally, having myself adopted the fabula/sjuzet pair in my work since the 1960s (e.g., 1978), it may be well to repeat that its use there implies no endorsement of even the moderate ranking affirmed by Aristotle, let alone the Shklovskian extreme. On the

contrary, the need to resist temporal normativism already makes part of the thesis,

though the focus is admittedly on the then more pressing (and still underexplored) dynamics of the "crooked corridor." For clarity, however, I will try here to avoid this doublet, except in the context of Formalism.


theorists and critics whom nobody would otherwise blame or praise for "formalism" in the sense of "anti-contentualism," as one might Aristotle, Shklovsky, etc. Ian Watt's important study of Conrad (1981) is a case in point, oriented by any standard to meaning, world view, ethics, psychology, sociocultural environment. Observe how, in ap- plying Genette's time-apparatus, Watt echoes the familiar dualism, empirics and all, with a strong thematic-semantic (as well as overtly evaluative) accent of his own:

In most of the shorter and simplest forms-the fairy tale and the ballad, for instance-the words usually follow the presumed chronological sequence of events in the story; one thing happens and then another and then another, and the narrative follows them in that order. But in longer and more complex fictions it is difficult to make the events of the story and the order of their telling in the narrative completely coordinate; the weightier the story's burden of meaning, the greater the tendency towards a disjunction between the original chronological order of the fictional events and the order in which they appear in the narrative. This distinction is presumably related to the fact that though the mere forward progression of the story may hold the reader's immediate attention through suspense, it cannot satisfy the re- fective mind when it comes to ask why an event occurred or what is the moral significance of a character. (Watt 1981: 286)

Deeper and more widespread than may appear, then, the polarity concerning sequence will not lend itself to translation into others. As

throughout my argument, the problem is not only or even mainly the

opposition of form to content but the marriage of form to function: of

dechronologizing to the poetic extreme (role, status, canon, meaning, interest) and of chronologizing to the nonpoetic. Disordering accordingly comes to figure as an automatic marker, even a measure, of properly narrative behavior and value.

That is why historical and history-like ordering presents such an awkward fact to theorists of this stripe (whether or not raising their sights to narrative in its full range and extent). Unless willing to question, if necessary to abandon, their very basis and value scheme, they are in effect compelled to deny (or forget or at least minimize) either the art, literariness, poeticity, narrativity, etc. of such ordering or its existence. As chronological content, signified, inert matter crying out for formation by way of deformation, how can it be valuable or, em- pirically, how can it be?

Among the leaders of French Structuralist narratology, for instance, Genette (1980) takes the empirical line of denial, Barthes (1977) the overtly normative. However far apart in coverage, the two proce- dures yet converge in (de)valuation. For Barthes does take account of history-telling, often beyond cursory glances, only to force it into a


Procrustean bed of signification that leaves no room for mimetic adherence to time, or for hard reference in general. He will even half admit that such wrenching finds its motivation in the premises of the approach (norms, methods, interests) rather than in the specifics of the discourse on which they are brought to bear. "Analysis today," we hear in his best-known programmatic essay, "tends to 'dechronologize' the narrative continuum and to 'relogicize' it" (1977: 99). Not surprisingly, like every narrative continuum, historical narrative comes either to manifest the twin operations of "relogicizing" and "dechronolo-

gizing" or to suffer the consequences. In Barthes's hands, it actually undergoes now one fate, now the other.

If recalcitrant, that is, historical ordering supposedly dooms itself to an inferior status, outside the pale of "logic." According to the programmatic essay just mentioned, "Aristotle himself, in his contrast between tragedy (defined by the unity of action) and historical narrative

(defined by the plurality of actions and the unity of time), was already giving primacy to the logical over the chronological. As do all contem-

porary researchers (Levi-Strauss, Greimas, Bremond, Todorov), all of whom . . . could subscribe to Levi-Strauss's proposition that 'the order of chronological succession is absorbed in an atemporal matrix structure'" (ibid.: 98). But this generalization fails both in theory and in fact. In theory, because it divorces "logical" from "chronological" patterning. Surely, the logic of causality does not oppose (break, override,

replace) but presupposes and tightens the line of chronology. Within or without history, how a movement from cause (as chronological ante-

cedent) to effect (as consequent) is "atemporal" passes one's under-

standing. If anything, time then only grows more directional, more

salient, more unabsorbable by any other matrix. To Barthes's rhetorical question, "Is there an atemporal logic lying behind the temporality of narrative?," the short answer is therefore, no-or at least, not insofar as the underlying alternative (and superior) to time relates to causal concatenation. So much for the principle involved, whether in the context of fiction, historiography, or natural storytelling (which typically disappears here from view after the introductory fanfare about the diversity of narrative, and no wonder, considering its resistance to

being absorbed and so redeemed "in an atemporal matrix structure").

Regarding historiography proper, moreover, the statement proves em-

pirically untenable in reducing "historical narrative" to the form of

episodic chronicle that Aristotle had in mind. As Barthes knows perfectly well, historians have since given "primacy to the logical over the chronological" no less than fiction-makers, or more precisely, have been concerned to fill out and weld the chronological series of events into chrono-logical, hence meaningful, plot. By this standard, grant- ing for the sake of argument the inferiority of chronicle, all plots


would enjoy the full artistic honors of "logic" even amidst chronicle- like temporality.10

Elsewhere, perhaps because Barthes does know better," his treatment of this corpus switches emphasis (from "relogicizing" to "dechronologizing"), along with tactics (from missing one feature to discover- ing another), and accordingly value judgment (from minus to plus). His essay on "Historical Discourse" (1970) thus celebrates the "friction between two time-scales-history's and the history book's," predictably featuring the historian's urge "to desimplify the chronological Time of History by contrasting it with the different time-scale of the discourse itself (document-time as we may for brevity call it); to 'dechronologize' the historical thread and restore, if only by way of reminiscence or nostalgia, a time at once complex, parametric, and nonlinear, re- sembling in the richness of its dimensionality the mythical time of ancient cosmogonies, inseparable from the word of the poet or seer" (ibid.: 148). Examples would be the harking back to the antecedents of a new character, or prefatory glances forward by way of announc- ing the work (ibid.: 147); or for that matter (to liven up the rather tame, almost anticlimactic illustration offered in the argument here), the new, "deep" perspective given by Butor's Mobile on American history through "mixing ex abrupto Indian narratives, an 1890 guidebook,

10. In fact, the chronicle itself (or the likewise plotless annal) is not an inferior but just a different mode of organizing reality: for some attempts to trace the difference see White (1980), Danto (1985: 149-82), and, diachronically, Butterfield (1981). But most recent students of historiography, not least the literary-minded ones, still view this intrageneric divergence in the normative terms institutionalized since Aristotle-just as they diminish the role of chronology within the plotted history. Whatever else may separate them, for example, Ricoeur follows Barthes, and allegedly Aristotle, in opposing the logical to the chronological and insisting on "an achronological notion of narrative temporality" (1984: 38ff., 239, n. 20), with predictable consequences for chronicle, the dynamics of chrono-logism, and the dividing line between history and fiction. 11. For example, "For Voltaire, there is no history in the modern sense of the word, nothing but chronologies" (Barthes 1972: 86). In discussing Michelet's La Sorciere as a work of novelistic history, Barthes even inverts the hierarchy of time vs. logic and attaches both to the sequence of events. "Causality is precisely what his narrative permits him to omit, since in fiction the temporal link is always substi- tuted for the logical link," and it is just this "primacy of the event over its material cause . . . which it is the narrative's function to display" (ibid.: 111). Here, causality figures as temporality plus logic, temporality (and value) as narrative minus logic. Nor is this the end of the story. By another change of mind, S/Z (1974) repeatedly criticizes the "readerly" or "classic" text for following "a logico-temporal order" at the cost of reversibility. Accordingly, time and logic retain their attach- ment to action sequences-with the difference that they have now lost their value, together ("logico-temporal") or apart, and the substitution of the one for the other no longer characterizes, far less recommends, fiction. By implication, however, historiography (like readerly fictions) still follows a logico-temporal order.

918 Poetics Today 1 1 :4

and today's automobiles" (Barthes 1972: 178-79). In principle, however, these instances of "zigzag progress" or "dechronologizing" count for little since they are forced, optional, and idiosyncratic, respectively. Barthes makes much ado about variables and accidentals at the expense of the essentials of historiography, so as to assimilate factual to fictional discourse, rule-governed ordering to licensed disordering.12 Again, the tendentiousness leaps to the eye, particularly because the would-be assimilator needs no telling where the generic difference in arrangement resides. "Is La Sorciere a work of history? Yes, since its movement is diachronic, since it follows the thread of time from the death of paganism to the dawn of the Revolution" (ibid.: 103).

This goes to show how, under normative pressure, extremes meet. The attempt to cut off historical from fictional narrative in terms of logic meets their yoking together in terms of anachrony. So do Genette's oblivion and Barthes's manipulation of the historical genre, and on the same ground: the refusal to admit chronology, with or without causality, as a viable arrangement. For all the aspirations to scientific or semiotic descriptiveness-comprehensiveness, even- handedness, pluralism-the old stock response to form assumes at most a novel guise. Going straight is going wrong; a mirror to the

way of the world (or, worse, to history, or, worst of all, to personal experience) entails a bare, transparent discourse. Given such common

ground, the only question is whether to disregard the offender, spell out his offense, or plead for him by appeal to redeeming (S/Z would call them "writerly") features, however occasional, like discontinuity and arbitrariness in narration.

In semiotic terms, this is tantamount to excluding the icon from the category of signs, or at best relegating it a priori to the bottom of the signification hierarchy, on the grounds that its signifier (e.g., the

portrait, the ideogram, the onomatopoeic sound) mirrors its signified (e.g., the portraitee). The comparison is far from random because, in certain quarters, the icon has actually suffered invidious distinction

(just as in others it has gained honorific status) on various grounds: for example, that the relation of similarity which defines it is problematic, or that iconicity mixes with other relations and needs to be

decomposed. (Eco [1976: 191-217] offers a critical, indeed hypercriti- cal, survey of approaches to the icon in semiotics; on its fortunes in

literary and art criticism, see Mitchell [1986]). The fact remains that

12. For an opposite but nonreductive approach-from or through history to novel-see Kermode (1977). Contrast also Prince's view that narrativity depends on the categorical presentation of events, whereby "their occurrence is given as a fact (in a certain world) rather than a possibility or probability. The hallmark of narrative is assurance. It lives in certainty: this happened then that" (1982: 149).


even such misgivings do not, and certainly need not, carry over from the icon as individual sign in the lexicon or as spatial sign-group to the icon of time as a sequential combination, a narrative syntax. Thus, the likeness between the orders of happening and telling makes a simple and single relation, one so well defined that it would be a pity to blur it through figurative and indiscriminate stretching to sequences other than chronological. Further, as indicated by the wide currency of the notion, most experts nowadays see no reason for demoting or ban- ishing the icon in the first place. That hardly any semiotics-minded narratologist, least of all a Genette or a Barthes (e.g., 1968), would dream of such a thing-which is still short of denying that icons exist- throws into relief its occurrence in regard to chronology. The icon is as much a sign, as much dual, as much versatile, as much governed by convention and effective in communication, as the arbitrary symbol; it just rests and works on a different logic within the overall system. But then isn't that precisely the case (only more so) with the iconic syntax of chronological telling? Though I have never found the question voiced, it surely imposes itself regardless of whether one actually makes the comparison.

At this awkward juncture, Genette's terminology plays into his hands, as it were, insidiously abetting the denial and oblivion of the facts. The argument's circularity-cum-bias is both deepened and veiled by an unfortunate ambiguity in the French term histoire: between "history" (as a finished product, a genre of narrative discourse) and "story" (as a reconstructed chronology, the Formalist fabula), hence between "real" and "hypothetical" sequences of events.13 By its (con)fusion of modes of existence, the terminology itself comes to invite, and apparently legitimate, a policy of wholesale exclusion. Quite literally, the narratives of real existence are denied "real" existence in narrative because they are denied even nominal existence as "narrative." How can history (histoire) count as narrative, even in name, where the approach presupposes and privileges an opposition of story (histoire) to narrative (recit)? How can the signified "story" double as a signifying (let alone significant) history? For that matter, how can the

13. As if this montage were not enough, Structuralists have also adopted and often misapplied the histoireldiscours opposition in Benveniste (1971: 205-15), which relates to the axis of objectivity vs. subjectivity. The results have been set forth in Culler (1975: 197-200) and Bordwell (1985: 21-26). I would only add that once Benveniste's axis is yoked together (or, worse, identified) with the Formalists' as well as with common usage, histoire takes on no fewer than three references or modes of existence: as a genre of factual discourse, as a chronology behind nairra- tive discourse, factual or fictional, and as a plane of narration divorced from the context of its utterance. The French term, of course, also denotes what its English equivalent, "history," no longer does: a story of any kind.


histoire (petite and otherwise) of everyday life gain admittance, or the

imaginative mimesis of history in due sequence? Whether cause or effect or (probably) both, the slippage in refer-

ence is another revealing measure of the preconception and the price built into the approach anyway. Regardless of nomenclature, what this entire tradition will not (indeed, given its premises, cannot) recognize is that history or history-like telling also involves a choice to narrate in a certain manner: to bring the narrative and the narrated order of events into correspondence. Provided that the choice might have gone the other way, and it always might, the two orders remain in principle as distinct (textual vs. reconstructed, or if you will, signifier vs.

signified, form vs. content, how vs. what) in "iconic" harmony as in

"arbitrary" disharmony. Within the system of ordering and discourse as a whole, each might-have-been plays ground to the actual figure employed-the disorderly to the orderly as well as vice versa-and one cannot even know in advance which interplay will turn out the more effective, perceptible, aesthetic, and the like. About this larger claim, more soon. At present, it is enough to see that the two temporal forms are equally dual, equally available, equally relational, equally referable to temporal norms of (dis)arrangement by or against which

they operate in context.

Failing this principled awareness, one is liable not just to miss the

viability and variety of chronological narration but even to mistake its

duality for unity. The "real" chronology then gets reduced or assimi- lated to the "hypothetical," the signifying discourse to the signified events, the form to the content. Telling in time is all "story," as it were, to the exclusion of "narrative." No wonder that the same as-

sumptions breed the same reductions in related issues. For Genette, among others, even ("isochronous") pacing thus marks the "hypothetical" zero-point of duration; or, outside time altogether, direct quoting allegedly "copies" the original utterance so that, again, "one cannot

speak here of narrative" (Genette 1980: 86-88, 169).14 Of these rul-

ings out of narrative, take the two most assorted-looking, the first and the last. They find their common denominator in a bias that offends

against the plurality and very make-up of signs: all icons in discourse- whether in arrangement or in citation-would then not so much re- flect as replace, not stand but substitute for, the object in the world. The signifier (the order of telling, the quotation) must either formally diverge from the signified (the order of happening, the original utter-

14. The latter equation of image and object has in effect been since withdrawn

by Genette (1983: 39), who assents to my argument (Sternberg 1982a) against the copy theory of direct discourse-but apparently without drawing the same conclusions about the rest of the "copies" and copy-making in general.


ance) or merge into the signified to the vanishing point. Either arbitrary signification or no sign but zero-sign.

The twofold reference of histoire, then, pinpoints a conceptual blind spot, whose implications for narrative theory not only reach beyond time but also range from empirics to logic, methodology, even ideology. To the latter trio we shall have occasion to return. Having glanced at their common source or juncture, let us now proceed with the facts of chronology that have been ruled out of existence as well as of significance. Once the varieties of history-telling enter, anything like Genette's empirical claim (less far-fetched versions included) breaks down under the weight of the evidence-and with it, at the very least, the basis for a comprehensive theory of narrative ordering.

I say, at the very least, because the rule of noncorrespondence in ordering does not even govern artistic, as distinct from historical, narrative. The distinction itself is fuzzy, growing more and more so with every new insight we gain into the little-known arts of history-telling.15 By any standard, the historical genre boasts some of the masterworks of narrative: the Bible, Herodotus's Histories, Thucydides' The Pelo- ponnesian War, Tacitus's Annals and Histories, Snorri Sturluson's Heims- kringla, Froissart's Chronicles, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire come readily to mind. Hardly anyone will rank them below yesterday's novel, and, on closer inspection at least, not so much despite as owing to their mimesis of sequence. However inclined or con- ditioned to the contrary, the attentive reader will often discover that their very artistry benefits rather than suffers from the adherence to the arrow of time. Beyond mere taste and intuition, moreover, the history of historiography anchors such discoveries in a bedrock of fact, including a dynamics of form. It takes vision and craft to make large- scale icons of time or, once made, to redesign and reanimate their iconicity.

15. Better known now, though, to students of historiography than to those of literature. This is not the place to go into that body of work, except to say that it has undergone notable developments in recent years and that a closer interwork- ing with the poetics of fiction would benefit either inquiry. For some approaches to historiography, see Gallie (1964); Scholes and Kellogg (1966); Braudy (1970); Mink (1970); Hexter (1971); Momigliano (1977); White (1978, 1980); Butterfield (1981); Ricoeur (1984); Sternberg (1985); see also the bibliography in Canary and Kozici (1978). The same holds true for the study of so-called natural or everyday narrative by linguists, sociologists, psychologists, cognitivists, most of them working in complete isolation from literary material and methodology. Typically enough, to repeat, Labov (1972) excludes by definition (not just, like the standard work on historiography, by training) the whole realm of the fictional, as his opposite numbers in poetics do that of the factual: this symmetry of exclusion, carrying over to the sequences and the media posited, reflects in miniature the fragmentary state of the art.


This manifests itself as early as the originators of historiography proper, the Bible and Thucydides. Their very alignment of events into grand chronological-causal design marks a revolution in plot structure, world view, realism, rhetoric, all at once. Among other strategic departures, the Bible opposes its purposive and irreversible course under God to the cyclical ("Myth of Eternal Return") temporality of Oriental narrative, while Thucydides explicitly rejects Homer's poetic license and opens ab ovo with the causes of his war. In either cultural framework-and in diametric contrast to the Formalist/Structuralist

key premise-the sense and art of distortion themselves arise from

straightening out the form of time. The apparently harmonious formation reverses or transforms into perceptible deformation because it works against some conventional norm of ordering, whether cyclical return in the way of the world or in medias res as a topos of epic discourse. Each reversal thus brings out the exercise and the range of choice behind what looks like simple mimesis by way of recording, the distance that in principle always separates the option for chronology (as well as anachrony) from the automatic, the familiar, the line of least resistance.

Nor have the genre dynamics launched by its originators ever come to a stop. Long institutionalized in turn, and never quite rivalled, these

pioneering novelties of the ancients have yet been adapted, reshaped, even challenged by numerous models and variants of truth-telling since, with fiction either a contrastive background or a fellow traveller. The more changes introduced over the ages-often accompanied by vocal historiosophic polemics about appropriate form-the wider the

range of choices available to each historical (or history-like) narrative. And as change and choice ramify, so of course does the multi-

formity in the apparent uniformity of telling in time. Like all other

representation, iconic plots of history are made and remade by art

(culture, invention, convention) for a purpose, not found, much less

given ready-made, in nature. Even Aristotle, though both a doctrinal mimeticist and no friend to history-writing, shares neither the copy theory of mimesis, nor the dismissal of temporal mimesis as artless, nor the equation of artistic form with fictive material. What he objects to is the weak or absent causality of the chronicle, rather than the events and the sequence of history as such, which enable and demand causal shaping at the artist's hands.

The poet or "maker" should be the maker of plots rather than of verses; since he is a poet because he imitates, and what he imitates are actions. And even if he chances to take an historical subject, he is none the less a poet; for there is no reason why some events that have actually happened should not conform to the law of the probable and possible, and in virtue of that

quality in them he is their poet or maker. (Aristotle, Poetics: 145 la, 27-34)


Imitating is plot-making, not copy-taking; and even finding counts as such making because one finds in history only what one seeks for artistic imitation. Or, as the variation on Aristotle in Gombrich (1969) has it, making always comes before matching.16 Therefore, except for the norm of early-to-late movement, itself exhibiting protean implemen- tation under the cover or common denominator of iconism, everything in historiography remains as open to arrangement as in imaginative discourse-including (pace Aristotle or Barthes [1977]) the option between loose chronicle and fast chain.

Further, the room left for making is still larger than may appear, because the historical teller works not only along chronology, as he must by rule, but also below its surface. There he is free to compose and interpret the march of time through other (including otherwise

sequential) patterns or to manipulate artless-looking exigencies and fractures (including what Genette would consign to "heterodiegesis," among other "minor articulations" out of story-time) in the best novelistic manner. Actually, the process began and the precedents were set long before the rise of the novel. One should bear this in mind because the novel is associated with fiction and fiction (much less jus- tifiably) with the glory of artistic disordering, associations that have

produced in literary circles a sense of superiority to factual narrative and, correspondingly, a need for apologetics or emulation among literary-minded studies of historiography, though rarely among prac- ticing historians. Without any sense of inferiority, let alone crisis, the

practitioners have always gone about their proper business: to realize and explore and stretch the distinctive possibilities of their craft, the latitudes amid constraint.

Even in the age of Fielding, with his Aristotelian "complex" plots, Gibbon evolved his own art of nontemporal and supratemporal se-

quence: antithetical, parenthetical, hierarchical, climactic, and de-

16. In terms of ideology, again, the creative force of all making as pattern-making and sense-making resurfaces in the critique of Russian Formalism by Bakhtin / Medvedev: "Life, the aggregate of defined actions, events, or experiences, only becomes plot [siuzhet], story [abula], theme, or motif once it has been refracted through the prism of the ideological environment, only once it has taken on con- crete ideological flesh. Reality that is unrefracted and, as it were, raw is not able to enter into the content of literature" (1985 [1928]: 17)-or, for that matter, of historiography. In fact, when it comes to the question of chrono-logical ordering as making, the negative attitude to history and history-like telling rests on two opposite grounds: that, artistically, the tale is ill made or not made at all (because a simple mirror or replica of given continuities), and that, ideologically, it is too well made (because too orderly to be real, realistic, or anything but made-up). This belongs to a later part of my story; yet need I point out how extremes meet again, only to highlight afresh the curious drives behind the theorizing about time in narrative, time and narrative?


scending ("falling"), all joined rather than opposed to the official order because they promote the thematic sense of what happened or happens in time. Millennia before, however, we find Thucydides crosscutting, in the guise of simultaneity, between different events of the same winter or summer to counterpoint, say, Athens with Sparta; or modelling their struggle (as Cornford [1971 (1907)] has brilliantly shown) on Aeschylean tragedy. Again, consider Herodotus's digres- sions, as strategic as Homer's, whether in their leisureliness and timing amidst conflict, their intercultural lights, or simply the pleasure they take and give in the wide world. Not least impressive is the Bible's management and orchestration of its grand chronology from Gene- sis to Kings, which I shall trace in a sequel as a generic paradigm, a canon-length icon of time from Creation to Exile, devised by a poetics anything but transparent within a culture otherwise hostile to images.

However diverse, such master narratives all exemplify the rule of history-telling, even at its more conventional and businesslike. And because of their diversity, they also suggest the range of variation behind or below the rule. To the extent that art thrives on difficulty or that ars est celare artem, one might even raise the question of whether these interplays of unity and variety-constraint and freedom, textual and subtextual design-are not potentially subtler, more artistic, than the open ruptures of anachrony. But it is certain that they have their own manner as well as matter of composition, which would repay study apart from all judgment and labelling. That study has nowa-

days become more urgent than ever, due to the intersection of the old antichronologism of narrative theory, pushed to the limit, and the new loss of confidence in historiography, with a predictable shift of interest from historical truth to poetic issues, such as narrativity, inventiveness, figuration, rhetoric. A recent article thus bears the title "The Challenge of Poetics to (Normal) Historical Practice" (Berkhofer 1988), not without reason, yet in an overtrusting spirit, as though "Poetics" had all the answers or even all the questions relevant to the structure of historiography. On the whole, the questions and answers it has best developed so far are fruitfully applicable to the cinema, for instance, but least suited to the historical genre-along with history- like mimesis-and themselves require adjustment in its light. To look to them for guidance by way of application, here of all places and now of all times, is to ask the one-eyed to lead the way on his blind side. Rather, the challenge also needs to go in the opposite direction, so as to establish a two-way traffic between the fields. And regarding the crux of arrangement, the few examples just cited will suggest, I hope, the gains that this traffic promises. Far from an obstacle to properly artistic narration, as "poetics" would have (hi)story-tellers believe, such

chronologies, with their hidden workings, can teach poetics a good


deal about the scope and repertoire of ordering available to narrative art at large.

As with narrative art, so with literary art itself (if you want to make the distinction) and not only because the devices just instanced have equivalents in literature or a claim to literariness. The point rather lies in a wider set of facts, synchronic and diachronic, about the system of discourse as a whole. Given the variety of features defined or valued as literary, including their ups and downs over the ages, it becomes as gratuitous to contrast literature with historiography as to equate it with fiction. Such dichotomies and/or equations have often been proclaimed, especially over the last centuries. "Real inci- dents, not fictionalized by an author, may make a story [fabula]. A plot [sujet] is wholly an artistic creation": thus the Russian Formal- ist Boris Tomashevsky (1965 [1925]: 68) doctrinally privileges free invention ("fictionalized" vs. "real") along with freely disordered combination ("sujet" vs. "fabula"). Nor is he the first or the last to draw this charged double line. So, needless to repeat, do his Structuralist followers, possibly with a difference in emphasis, whereby the literariness of narrative gets explicitly attributed to its distortion of materials whose imaginativeness is more or less taken for granted. What else lends itself to such free play? (This is also why Genette's inclusive- sounding phrase "real or fictitious" recurs to so little practical effect.) Reversing the emphasis or the criterial feature, others settle for fictionality alone, which looms large in modern definitions of literature. This has its mirror-image in the attempts to infiltrate fictionality into factual discourse itself, divesting historiography of its generic truth claim so as to invest it with literary or quasi-literary dignity. I have already mentioned Roland Barthes's double-pronged attack on the boundary line separating the genres: he would both impose "friction between two time-scales-history's and the history book's" and convert historical reference into artful reality effect. What with its hyperbolism and inconsistency, this exercise in assimilation might appear to be another Barthesian jeu d'esprit, except that its fictionalizing drive reappears among some of the most professional analysts of history-telling. To Hayden White, for example, historical narratives are "verbal fictions the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences" (1978: 82). All such arguments, I believe, incur at least one category mistake between history and fiction (for reasons discussed in Sternberg [1985: 23-83, 99-128]); but my present business is the still deeper assumptions-about literature, value, ranking, compartmentalizing-that they share with the opposite side, as represented by Tomashevsky. Extremes meet once again. Whether invoked against or for historiography, whether joined to or disjoined


from the manipulation of sequence, fictionality takes on throughout the privileged status of literariness.

As always, however, the privileging reveals more about the terms and limits of the critical discourse in question than about the flexible realities of discourse itself at work. After all, what is there to condition the literary on the presence or absence of a truth claim? There is nothing to enjoin such absolute conditioning, I suggest, except art-for-art's- sake aesthetics, fiction-centered canons and narratology, antihistoricist ideologies and methodologies. Certainly not what really happened in culture, much less what happens across cultures. Literature and historiography are here not mutually exclusive but intersecting categories, which share, change, and exchange populations within the overall system of discourse. Recall that Hesiod's Muses "delight / With song the mighty mind of father Zeus / Within Olympus, telling of things that are, that will be, and that were" (1976: 24), all matters of fact, past, present, and to come, as would befit the daughters of Memory (Mne- mosyne). When the Muses later assume individual roles, the goddess of history, Clio, still figures in their midst, side by side with epic's Cal- liope. But then Homer's very epics, considered by Genette (and who not?) the beginning of "our (Western) literary tradition," were actually revered by the Greeks as inspired history, just like the Bible among the ancient Hebrews; while Gibbon's Decline and Fall or Boswell's Life of Johnson has come to occupy a place of honor in English literature (without relinquishing its historical titles and affiliation), side by side with Fielding's contemporaneous Tom Jones (typically entitled, in full, The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling).17 And whatever the reasons for such dynamic, shifting, or joint membership, they cannot attach to the handling of chronology. On the contrary, the fact that each of these pairs, the ancient and the Neoclassical, consists of one orderly and one notoriously disorderly member goes to show how literariness cuts across all forms of temporality.

Indeed, speaking of origins, we might trace back either of the temporal formations to an ancestor and paradigm in remote antiquity: the orderly to the Bible's grand chronology-and to the Greek co- fathers of history-the disorderly to Homer's epics. Alternatively, we might even use Genette's change of mind about the Iliad (see note 3, above, and Delasanta [1967: 45-46]) to locate their roots in the di-

17. The point emerges even more dramatically in a cross-cultural perspective. One striking example, discussed in Plaks (1977), would be the Chinese tradition of narrative, where "it is rather fiction which becomes the subset and historiography the central model of narration. In effect one might say that historiography replaces epic among the Chinese narrative genres" (ibid.: 342). No wonder, therefore, that the Chinese narrative system tends to present "a mimesis of temporal flux," with rich manipulations of speed rather than order (ibid.: 355-56).


vergence within Homeric epic itself. For the Iliad would then have

inaugurated the chronological line of arrangement in "our (Western) literary tradition," the Odyssey the nonchronological. Either way, ori-

gins and later fortunes would combine with the results before us, as

they have steadily accumulated from antiquity to modernity, to establish the empirical conclusion: that literature (or literariness) no more inheres in twisted than in straight deployment. Like all attempts of this kind to fix the unfixable, within or without narrative, the erection of disordering into a formal marker (locus, constant, guarantor) of

poetic discourse is doomed to failure. What is more, this still holds true if, for the sake of argument, we

restrict the corpus to (literary) fiction alone. Strangely, when looking round for narrative that "conforms, at least in its major articulations, to chronological order," Genette comes up with a single, hence "excep- tional" branch of fiction-folklore-and apparently forgets the rest.18 A wonderful act of amnesia, this, because the rest so abounds all round us-in written as well as oral discourse, in canonical and popular art, in literary and dramatic and cinematic narrative-so much so that it is hard to say offhand which of the two fictional groups, the "con- formist" or the "nonconformist," outnumbers the other. Whatever the ratio, it would surely be unthinkable to disqualify either group wholesale (or otherwise downgrade it, if only to the status of exception vs. rule or zero-point vs. significance) by the mechanical application of a time-shibboleth.

18. But then even his one-item list (an exception probably noted in deference to Propp's law of sequence [see n. 9]) would be and has been regarded by some as conceding too much to chronology. Those include doctrinal antagonists as well as allies and followers. Thus, in direct response, Barbara Herrnstein Smith: "It can be demonstrated not only that absolute chronological order is as rare in folkloric narratives as it is in any literary tradition but that it is virtually impossible for any narrator to sustain it in an utterance of more than minimal length. In other words, by virtue of the very nature of discourse, nonlirnearity is the rule rather than the exception in narrative accounts" (1980: 227). Actually, she omits to demonstrate either the specific "rarity" or the sweeping "virtual impossibility," but the grounds for both claims would presumably corresponid to those adduced by the hard-liniers on the opposite side, i.e., the exigency of multiple threads and related "minor articulations" that Genette firmly discounts for good theoretical measure (see n. 3). So once again extremes meet in the denial of chronology. Like much else in her counterargument, however, Smith's objection to the underlying value judgment, and to the entelechy it would impose on narrative history, has a point. "'There is reason," she says, "to question the propriety of that contrast between folktale and literary tradition, especially the implication of a literary-historical progression from some presumably prehistoric naive narrative synchrony to a subsequent more sophisticated narrative anachrony" (ibid.). The point holds, though, for a "reason" contrary to the empirical and general premises just cited: not that folktale is so anachronous, but that so much of the literary canon isn't-all part of the tribulations of telling in time.


Just by way of a reminder of what such polarizing would involve: Are we to opt for Xenophon's Ephesian Tale, straightforward in its main articulations, or for Longus's Daphnis and Chloe, another Greek romance but with discovery scenes? For Boccaccio's Decameron or for

Spenser's Faerie Queene? For medieval and Elizabethan or for Greek and Neoclassical tragedy? The Pilgrim's Progress or The Princess of Cle- ves? Defoe or Fielding? Gulliver's Travels orJacques the Fatalist? Trollope or Dickens? War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov? Washington Square or Daisy Miller? Alice in Wonderland or The Black Arrow? The adven-

ture/picaresque story or the detective novel? The Rainbow or Ulysses? And within Ulysses, the clocking of external events or the scrambling of internals? Evidently, the choice lies not between such fictions but between the polarizing-privileging approach and the facts whose richness it leaves unrecognized, uncoordinated, unexplained.

2.2 From Poles to Parameters and Processes of Sequence: An Interim Outline Taken together, then, all these empirical holes and imbalances have

far-reaching theoretical consequences for any account that perpetrates them, whether through oversight or doctrinal exclusion. (Both being acts of belittling in a sense, it is not always easy to tell the missing from the dismissing of facts. And the same applies, symmetrically, to the extreme pro-chronologism outside poetics: Labov's or the history manual's.) The most immediate consequence is a drastic shrinkage in

scope: from a theory of ordering in narrative-or even artistic or liter-

ary or fictional narrative-into a partial classification of disorderings

("anachronies"); and partial, as is already beginning to emerge, for more than one reason and in more than coverage.

Given the one-sidedness of the picture, synchronic as well as dia-

chronic, generic and strategic as well as quantitative, what is left out must distort the perspective on what remains. Even anachronies hardly lend themselves to adequate treatment and placement in isolation, still less so when mistaken for the standard norm, in disregard of the alternative-or rather the set of alternatives along various dimensions. For future reference and development, let me quickly outline the Big Five: (1) chronology; (2) simultaneity; (3) nontemporal sequentiality; (4) functional sequentiality; (5) suprasequentiality ("spatiality").

Telling in chronological time, needless to say, heads these alterna-

tives, and itself reveals, or conceals, much diversity and latitude under its apparently uniform "iconic" syntax. Even its better-known flexibili- ties have not received full theoretical credit or notice, largely because

they have been divorced from the operations of sequence (by which I mean narrative sequence in general, if not all sequence, including the anachronous as well as the rest of the logics mentioned above). But

chronology's popular image, having suffered most from the divorce


for its ostensible lack of resources, it would only be just to discuss the crosscutting factors involved with special emphasis on its workings.

Take the variations in the linkage of events between the chronological and the chronological-causal (chronicle vs. historiography, picaresque vs. "well-made" novel, parataxis vs. hypotaxis), or in their speci- ficity (among scene, summary, silence). Both inherited as such from the Greeks, Aristotle and Plato, respectively, neither distinction has yet been sufficiently appreciated as a resource for linear dynamics, in and out of chronology. Each, that is, needs to be carried over or projected to the axis of narrative communication as well, along which the telling and reading proceeds-not least where the discourse seems artless.

For example, what becomes, in the reading, of the official minimum linkage given in the text? It makes quite a difference to sequential processing and effect whether the paratactic line of events told (a, then b) remains a loose series after being interpreted, as in chronicle, or re- quires tightening and plotting into a "hypotactic" chain (a, therefore b) for intelligibility, as do chronicle-like surfaces from the Bible to Hem- ingway. Again, the very extent of the time-span covered by a narrative will have repercussions of all kinds on the sequence of its coverage: the greater the represented length, the heavier the exigencies of estab- lishing, molding, and sustaining the long temporal perspective. This is where one might expect the composition of the short story to vary from the novel's; the lyric's or the ballad's from the long poem's; the minimal from the elaborated narrative; a (real or imaginary) biography from a family saga; an account of a battle, a reign, a conspiracy, an uprising from a universal-national history like the Bible's or from a survey of those immense slow-motion processes that the contemporary Annales school of historians (e.g., Braudel 1980: 25-54) calls la longue duree. (As early as the Poetics, chapter 5, we find a generic distinction between tragedy, which keeps within "a single circuit of the sun," and epic, whose action has "no fixed limit of time.") Just as the represented length by itself makes a difference to the workings of communication in time, so does the representational length. It is enough to think how the problematics of connectivity and memory escalate with the shift from a life by Plutarch or an obituary notice to a book-size version of the same events in the same order. All the more so, clearly, with the proportions between represented and representational time. A succession of scenes makes one reading experience, in anything from tempo to focus-building, and alternation between scene and summary another: selection itself doubles as a combinatory force, duration and its proportioning always affect the sense of direction.

But then the features that still need to be recognized or integrated as parameters of sequence, even at its most orderly, include some that are combinatory or directional in the first place. For example, con-


sider the implications of the question with which Odysseus, urged by the Phaeacian king to recount his adventures, prefaces his narrative odyssey: "Where shall I begin, where end, my tale?" His posing of the question implies a dual choice at least (in or out of event-order?), which underlines his opting for the former with respect to both narrative limits. The choice in favor of telling in time reveals itself as no less than double because it applies to "Where shall I begin?" and, in-

dependently, to "where end?" Neither choice entails the other. Even if the teller plunges into the heart of his matter, he may still finish either with the chronological terminus or resolution (as most do, e.g., Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice, Gully Jimson in The Horse's Mouth), or with a retrospect on some earlier point, antedating that terminus, as when The Good Soldier doubles back for the last time to uncover the horror of Ashburnham's suicide. Conversely, where the narrator

begins with the chronological beginning, he is yet free to end non-

chronologically. (Lazarillo winds up by opening a gap about his wife's relations with the priest, and Gulliver by looking back on his travels.) Two variables, in short, make four possible combinations. So Odys- seus's decision against opening and closing in medias res becomes

doubly, indeed multiply, significant: his is the one pattern of the lot that accords with time at either extreme.

In the process, however, Odysseus has made yet another, third choice, regarding the middle. For he not only starts and finishes

chronologically but also proceeds so in between the limits, and in a

fairly continuous manner too. Contrast the twists encountered in David

Copperfield en route from "To begin my life with the beginning of my life" (chapter 1) to "now my written story ends" (chapter 64); or the

jumps from one highspot to the next along Joyce's Portrait of the Art- ist, stretching between the infantile "once upon a time" and the adult "now and ever."

Beginning, middle, and end, then, form a set of independent components of temporality, with numerous permutations in theory and practice. These range from the all-chronological, like Odysseus's ordering, through the variously mixed (whether in Austen's fashion or Lazarillo's or Copperfield's) to the threefold anti-chronological, compounded in Tristram Shandy or The Good Soldier. Chronology in discourse, and symmetrically anachrony, is therefore never one and indivisible but always a multiphase line: its extension relative to event- order involves multiple choice at every single point and forms a matter of more or less (as opposed to all or nothing) even in strategic terms.

Further, as if to highlight the availability and the thrust of Odys- seus's choice, it runs counter to Homer's own plunge in medias res. The epic goes one way, the individual block another way. With a reversal of terms, this also happens in the Bible, where it is the internally


disordered episodes that pull against the grand chronology from Cre- ation to Exile, or in the tension between the workings of mind and clock throughout Bloomsday. In either case, whole and part stand diametrically opposed in mutual questioning, foregrounding, illumi- nation. This makes quite a difference from their marching hand in hand, whether clockwise or counterclockwise. Hence chronology, and correspondingly, anachrony vary afresh with the relations between macrosequence and microsequence, down to the level of the sentence and the phrase.

Nor does the problem of ordering, either Odysseus's or Homer's behind him, resolve itself with the decision to follow time. Where precisely to begin along the chronology, where to end, still must be determined. And here choice widens into an indefinitely large set of possibilities, so that the actual cut-off points gain salience from all the

might-have-beens: the less predictable the cutting, the more perceptible. For instance, Odysseus's autobiography could run between any two points along his career, some no less, even more, appropriate than the limits actually fixed, hence focused and in need of motivation. Why not launch the tale from the point where the teller's career of hardship and achievement originated-the muster for the Trojan War, if not the Helen scandal that triggered it? -Only because, we infer, such general textual considerations as roundness have given way before contextual motives and designs. Considering Odysseus's anxiety to impress his Phaeacian audience, it does make sense for him to start as late as his departure from Troy, crowned with the glory of the Wooden Horse and destined to awe-inspiring adventure, rather than with his departurefor Troy under the pressure of Agamemnon. (He would hardly want the Phaeacians to learn, and they never do, what Homer later discloses through Agamemnon: that the expedition against Troy wasted a full month in Ithaca, "so hard did we find it to win over the man who now is styled the Sacker of Cities" [Homer 1969: 354]). Just as Odysseus starts at a point later than might be expected, so he finishes earlier: with his arrival at Calypso's island, rather than at Phaeacia. This appears an abrupt stopping place, especially since it leaves the Phaeacian audience (except the royal house) in the dark about all that intervened, the narrator's very presence there included. Why, then, cut the narrative short instead of rounding it off? As Genette observes in another connection, "The pretext is that he told it briefly the day before to Alcinous and Arete (Book VII); the real reason is that the reader knows it in detail by the direct narrative in Book V. 'It liketh me not twice,' says Ulysses, 'to tell a plain-told tale': this reluctance is, to begin with, the poet's own" (1980: 232). The norm of economy overrides that of formal roundness.

In a larger perspective, synchronic and diachronic, such boundary-


marking on either side often assumes more than local importance, perceptibly but not exclusively so where reinforced by novelty and shock value. In the chronological line, examples range from the Bible's

opening with the creation of the world ex nihilo to the preliminary disclosure of the crime and the criminal in a subgenre of modern detective tales (anticipated by Crime and Punishment): each flouts the

operative convention, the latter to the point of reversal. Endwise, it is

enough to recall the decline into which "poetic justice" and neat un-

ravelling fell with the rise of realism, or the variations on catastrophe in tragic closure, or the fortunes of resolution-by-wedding in the history of comedy from ancient Rome to Hollywood. There is little to choose in principle between the more revolutionary of these segmen- tations and Tristram Shandy's, say, which greets us with the hero's beget- ting rather than his birth and finishes with a cock-and-bull story. The effect is equally startling, and in keeping with the whole, regardless of whether the cut-off points appear in or out of temporal sequence. Likewise with more conventional equivalents, such as the immemorial cradle-to-grave formula of biography, real or fictional, vis-a-vis the riddle/solution boundaries codified in the detective-story genre. Either way, the segmentation remains both integral to the sense of ordering and irreducible to the formal terms of orderly versus disorderly progress.19

19. Much the same assumptions underlie the two classic studies of closure, Smith (1968) oni poetry and Kermode (1967) on narrative. Both approach the ending as part of a whole that may differ in form, linear or otherwise, but not necessarily in value: along with the openness to culture (genre, history), this makes quite a change from stock responses to sequence. In Kermode, though, the change is not always apparent, largely because his emphasis falls on the sense made of sequence, without much regard to the play of narrated and narrative sequence. Consider how the absence of the latter distinction, which had not yet (re)gained currency at the time, may obscure matters: "The story that proceeded very simply to its obvi-

ously predestined end would be nearer myth than novel or drama. Peripetia, which has been called the equivalent, in narrative, of irony in rhetoric, is present in every story of the least structural sophistication" (Kermode 1967: 18). As regards the loaded opposition of orderings, this key statement looks like an Aristotelian twin to

my earlier quote from Genette (or from Ian Watt), with "myth" replacing "folklore" as the simple, concordant antithesis to the twists of sophisticated fiction. Except that Kermode's "peripetia," unlike Aristotle's own, does not require a distortion of

chronology in the plotted sequence: an early withholding of story-stuff with an eye to late disclosure. It only borrows from Aristotle the element of surprise, not the device for producing it, which shifts from the disarrangement of plot-time to the

disappointment of expectations about plot by unsettling conventional paradigms of time and reality in general. By this standard, though Kermode does not make the point explicit, there is little to choose in principle between telling in and out of

time, since either may range all the way from conformity to novelty, from "simple" advance towards an "obviously predestined end" to "sophisticated" reversal. So the contrast of predictable vs. peripeteic sequence intersects rather than overlaps with


Chronological arrangement, then, no more escapes the problematics of beginning and ending-or forgoes their profits-than any other discourse in time. The appearance to the contrary arises only if we lump together the parameters of delimitation and direction in sequence: where to cut and how to move along the chosen cut. This explains why the White King's grave advice in Alice, "Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop" (Carroll 1963: 158), is easier said than done, or if you like, easier offered to readers than practiced by writers. In the absence of any given cut-off

points at which to "begin" and "stop," they must always be supplied and motivated by the discourse. No matter how natural the choice to chronologize events, the delimitation of the segment to be chronolo-

gized yet remains variable, purposive, artificial, at best (or, depending on the value scheme, at worst), natural looking. Precisely here, the be-

ginning and the end stand opposed to the middle. For it is only when the sequence has been delimited by art, to whatever effect, that its initial and terminal points lend themselves to lifelike, chrono-logical bridging (following, "middling") from early to late and from cause to result. Odysseus, indeed, realizes this option; Copperfield declines it in favor of intermediate gaps; cut-off-point anachrony, from Homer to the overall dislocations of Tristram Shandy or The Good Soldier, pre- cludes it by twisting the narrated beginning and/or ending themselves into the narrative middle, hence the narrated middle into narrative beginning and/or ending.

This ascending scale of variation discloses afresh the multiplicity of factors and therefore choices involved throughout, notably in impos- ing limits on time without limit. No theory of sequence can afford to pass over the two strongest and most strategic points along any line, however straight, in the belief that they arise from its directionality as a narrative line. But then every formalist, deviation- or distortion- based theory of sequence must pass them over entirely or in large part, by its very terms. In a straight sequence, how can any formalism register the two points at all, when they manifest no distortion on the surface to be registered? In a twisted sequence, how can a formalist theory go beyond registering them as formal distortions to registering (let alone measuring or explaining) their distortive force between, say, novelty and conventionality? In intermediate cases, how can it register the undistorted extreme or the distortive value of the distorted? To handle all such variations, you need a functional theory whereby to re- late each temporal form of cutting (all-orderly, all-disorderly, mixed) to the appropriate temporal norms and effects.

that of chronologized vs. dechronologized sequence. (Small wonder that Kermode proceeds to oppose chronos to kairos, not to anything like "anachronos.")


Again, Odysseus gives no reasons for his multiple ordering choices -duration, direction, delimitation, except for the pretext about the end-nor does Homer behind his back, though he constantly invites the reader to supply them. The reasons are inferable from the discourse, whether in the shape of narratorial, dramatic motive (e.g., to

impress the audience) or of authorial, aesthetic motivation (e.g., economy); whether specific, like those we have touched on, or more global, like the policy of marking off the character's inset narrative from the

poet's frame. Elsewhere we find the implications made explicit, or even generalized into a rule or norm, something like a teleology of chronology.

Such explications are not very abundant relative to their numberless implicit counterparts, the silent opposition to the vocal establishment of fiction criticism. The wonder is rather that this opposition has not been silenced altogether into practical dissent but here and there finds its spokesmen among the practitioners themselves. Let us therefore

give a hearing to a few tellers in life and art who favorably contrast

orderly with disorderly telling. For variety and typicality, the three

dissenting voices I have picked out are those of an eighteenth-century historian, a nineteenth-century novelist, and a twentieth-century historical novelist whose best-known work also fictionalizes a historian as narrator, each with his own line of argument in the common cause.

In response to Hurd's 1757 commentary on Horace, Edward Gib- bon puts received opinion about ordering to the test of reason and

experience. Writing in an age when the in-medias-res jump has long been codified as the properly artistic start, Gibbon reopens the issue: "A poet may either tell his story in the natural historical order, or rush-

ing at once into the middle of the subject he may afterwards introduce

by way of Episode the events previous to it. Which method should he observe?" (1972: 31). In weighing the alternatives, he no more yields to the historian's automatic preference than to the literary establishment's, but keeps his eye on the essentials and operations of storytelling. Nor indeed is he affected by any of the pressures for "literariness" that, in a similar climate of opinion, we encounter at work among present-day analysts of historiography. Gibbon exhibits no defensive- ness about "the natural historical order," still less any minimizing of time's role in arrangement, least of all any recommendation of anach-

rony as the inherently superior "method." (Gibbon would accordingly not thank his own analysts, e.g., Keast [1956], for dissociating the art of Decline and Fall from its chronology.) On the contrary, he sees no reason why the in-medias-res rule should govern epic composition itself. And, hard as moderns will perhaps find it to believe, his main

argument is from pleasure, "which ought to be the great aim of every writer" (1972: 32).


Thrown without preliminaries into the middle, Gibbon argues, the reader can experience only "surprise and perplexity": effects that are for him inferior in themselves, if pleasurable at all, detrimental to the interest and involvement generated by that part of the narrative read in ignorance of the antecedents, and finally dissipated not in favor of a quick movement toward the conflict and the unravelling ahead but of a dilatory retrospect on the past. "At the instant we are impatient to know the event, and expect the poet should hasten to it, we are entertained with a long recital," about which "we have little or no curi- osity" by then. As with the balance of interest between progression and regression at such a juncture, so with that between chronologizing and dechronologizing as a whole. "For in every operation of the mind there is a much higher delight in descending from the cause to the effect, than in ascending from the effect to the cause" (ibid.: 32-33).

A century later, and in novelistic asides as well as in discursive writ-

ing, Anthony Trollope makes further and larger claims for "straightforward, simple, plain story-telling," from preliminary exposition through the crisis that occupies the middle to the final resolution. Behind his modest, often self-deprecating tone lurks a firm sense of purpose that impelled him throughout his career to swim against the current of Victorian taste in novelistic temporalities. He does not argue from pleasure, not at least in the sense of narrative tension and release, as opposed to "higher," less ephemeral interests of art (which Gibbon likewise may partly have had in mind when referring to "higher delight"). Nor does Trollope, like Gibbon, speak as though dechronologizing alone presented obstacles to such pleasure. Instead, he frankly redresses the balance. Having begun a novel with "two long dull chapters full of description," for example, he hastens to de- clare himself "perfectly aware of the danger of such a course. ... It can hardly be expected that anyone will consent to go through with a fiction that offers so little of allurement in its first pages" (Doctor Thorne: chapter 2). But then the opposite procedure of in medias res or of detective-story juggling, whereby "one is constrained by mysteries and hemmed in by difficulties, knowing, however, that the mysteries will be made clear and the difficulties overcome at the end of the third volume," all wonderfully ingenious, "give me no pleasure"-perhaps, he wryly adds, "from fault of my intellect" (Autobiography: 220-21). In either ordering, then, one reader's boredom cancels out another's delight. What tips the scales, in Trollope's opinion, is rather chronology's distinctive power to meet a (or, for him, the) set of artistic exigencies, ideals, goals.

Intelligibility stands high among these: "The story must be made intelligible from the beginning, or the real novel readers [shaped, of course, in his own image] will not like it"-the less so because jumping


at once into the middle still demands retrospection on the beginning for comprehensibility, but the narrative can then satisfy it only by doubling back in midstride, at the cost of momentum (Is He Popen- joy?: chapter 1). Intelligibility ties in with the "naturalness" of gliding from cause to effect: "I cannot make Mr. Gresham hem and haw and turn himself uneasily in his arm-chair in a natural manner till I have said why he is uneasy. I cannot bring in my doctor speaking his mind

freely among the bigwigs till I have explained that it is in accordance with his usual character to do so" (Doctor Thorne: chapter 2). The

emphasis on "natural manner" links up in turn with the high ranking of lifelike portraiture above plot contrivance, rounded and compre- hensible psychology above mystery entanglements. Such orientation to character translates, again, into a scale of presentational measures: fullness above gapping, preparation and even anticipation above star-

tling retrospection, natural development in time above arbitrary delay of motive and circumstance with a view to their disclosure behind time. To distort the ordering is to distort the understanding of what

goes on from moment to moment in the interpersonal drama, and distort it to no, or no worthwhile, purpose; to present the cart before the horse-in a favorite metaphor of Trollope's-is to reverse the

proper hierarchy of elements or interests, and the proper confidence between author and reader, along with the proper time-relations. In narrative, artistic and temporal priorities march in step. "Therefore," as the opening of Dr. Wortle's School warns the reader just as it is about to foreclose the crucial plot gap, "put the book down if the revelation of some future secret be necessary for your enjoyment. Our mystery is going to be revealed in the next paragraph" (chapter 4). From all directions, then, the ends sought by Trollope converge to radicalize a

poetics of lucidity, flatly against Fieldingesque or Dickensian, let alone modernist, ambiguity. (For details, see Sternberg 1978: esp. 183-203, 258-73.)

In recommending chronology, Gibbon goes with the rule of his craft and Trollope against the dominant (i.e., Dickensian) norm of his culture. As a historical novelist, writing in the heyday of modernism at that, Robert Graves maneuvers between the two stances in I, Claudius (1962 [1934]) and Claudius the God by preaching and prac- ticing straight narrative through the mediation of his (real) hero cum

(imaginary) narrator, the emperor-historian Claudius. The reader's

pleasure in the straight telling, dear to Gibbon and double-edged with

Trollope, comes last in the hierarchy of Claudius, a professional historian of the no-nonsense school, who puts orderliness above frills and thrills and rhetoric. He accordingly begins by tracing his origins several generations back, "unavoidable" if "tedious," proceeds to his earliest childhood, and goes through his life story year by year to


the eve of his assassination (1962 [1934]: 20,35).20 If the performance betrays lapses (occasionally highlighted by way of apology) from the

rage for order, the principle itself is in force throughout, at times ag- gressively so. Thus the favorable self-comparison with the sloppiness incurred by epic license:

Like all honest Roman histories this is written "from egg [ab ovo] to apple": I prefer the thorough Roman method, which misses nothing, to that of Homer and the Greeks generally, who love tojump into the middle of things and then work backwards or forwards as they feel inclined. Yes, I have often had the notion of rewriting the story of Troy in Latin prose ... beginning from the egg from which Helen was hatched and continuing chapter by chapter, to the apples eaten for dessert at the great feast in celebration of Ulysses's home-coming. (Ibid.: 35)

Under this cover, or mimetic motivation, Graves would have the best of all worlds: unfolding events and social panorama in his favorite order, lending the tale an air of authenticity, while throwing the blame for any possible failures of interest, complete with irony, on the official teller. Yet the order remains his favorite, rationale and all, similarly deployed in Count Belisarius or Wife to Mr. Milton in the absence of a fictional historian for scapegoat.

Pleasure, intelligibility, naturalness, character-focusing, thorough- ness: the arguments are different in thrust, variable with genre and

period, representative rather than exhaustive, even open to challenge (though not to refutation) through counterargument and counterex-

ample. But all this only reinforces their cumulative point. On the one hand, each argument does invoke some legitimate teleology of chro-

nology and does call for investigating in empirical action and interaction, often richer than the official doctrine. On the other hand, those

teleologies join forces to establish a common denominator-a dynamics of narrative communication as a movement in time. All press for a

stage-by-stage advance from past via present to future, whereby each stretch along the road gains its due share of notice in turn, as against

20. In case the motivation sounds idiosyncratic, even for the procedure justified by it, here is a real-life equivalent in the voice of Rousseau as autobiographer: "Before I go further I must present my reader with an apology, or rather a justification, for the petty details I have just been entering into, and for those I shall enter into later, none of which may appear interesting in his eyes. Since I have undertaken to reveal myself absolutely to the public, nothing about me must remain hidden or obscure. I must remain incessantly beneath his gaze, so that he may follow me in all the extravagances of my heart and into every least corner of my life. Indeed, he must never lose sight of me for a single instant, for if he finds the slightest gap in my story, the smallest hiatus, he may wonder what I was doing at that moment and accuse me of refusing to tell the whole truth. I am laying myself sufficiently open to human malice by telling my story, without rendering myself more vulnerable by any silence" (Rousseau 1965 [1781]: 65).


a free shuttling through time, with constant reference and orientation to the multigap past. It is amidst or beyond this strategic unity that

variety comes in to effect particular roles and emphases and scalings: chronology itself, even if taken as uniform, is far from univalent and unifunctional.

For a fuller appreciation of this common denominator, it is also help- ful to see where it does not lie, that is, in any intrinsic value attached to the form of chronology as such. The point needs stressing, and maybe some elucidation, for the claim to the contrary has in effect been made. "In our typographic and electronic culture," Walter Ong asserts, "we find ourselves today delighted by exact correspondence between the linear order of elements in discourse and the referential order, the

chronological order, to which the discourse refers. We like sequence in verbal reports to parallel exactly what we experience" (1982: 147). This "we" must be in the nature of pluralis majestatis, because the shoe is surely on the other foot. To judge by the record, including the three- voice advocacy just cited, Ong constitutes a minority of one. But, if he clashes head-on with the entire antichronological tradition, his diver-

gence from our prochronologists is less obvious and may escape notice

altogether vis-a-vis a motivation like that advanced by Gibbon. Reconsider, therefore, how Graves's Claudius himself apologizes

for the tedium of expositional preliminaries and genealogies; how

Trollope admits the "danger" of opening with "long dull chapters," which offer "so little of allurement" compared with the in-medias-res

strategy, or with detective-story mystification, that the appeal to pleasure may lose him the argument and the reading public. Even Gibbon does not say that we are "delighted by exact correspondence"-as though the very text/world accord involved a remarkable achievement and attraction-but rather by its uses for the experience of time. We find pleasure, then, not in but through that correspondence, which generates distinctive interests and effects, such as the descent from cause to result (or, for that matter, intelligibility, portrait-drawing, thorough coverage, and the like). The difference between "in" and "through" is radical, being exactly that between chronology as form reified, once and for all, into value and as form functionalized, hence also ame- nable within limits to variation and transformation (witness our three

exponents, on top of instances cited earlier). Form with versus form without functional autonomy, if you will, or with functional autonomy versus instrumental possibilities alone.

In a larger perspective, this is also the difference between antichro-

nologists old and new, who find disharmony inherently valuable-

building a plus sign into it, if only in the role of artistic advertisement- and prochronologists, who typically count harmony in ordering as a means to some end(s) beyond itself. Disharmony makes a poetics, or


at least signals one, in the eyes of its adherents, while harmony is taken to make or this or that variant of a poetics of lucidity.21

Most generally, in inter-art terms, much the same difference separates the icons of time from the icons of space. With spatial icons, the visual kind above all, there is indeed no end of evidence for the "de-

light" given throughout history by "exact correspondence" in the form of mimesis, realism, naturalism, illusionism. Ancient Greece, where the mimetic revolution arose, has bequeathed us the legend about the birds that pecked at the grapes in the paintings of Zeuxis; or the Aris- totelian law, pointedly illustrated from the spatial arts, that "universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated," so much so that even "objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when

reproduced with minute fidelity, such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies." In the light of experience across the millennia since, Aristotle would indeed seem to have formulated here a universal law of humanity at beholding, shared by many beholders who otherwise incline toward arbitrary or disharmonious representation-as Aristotle himself does in ranking the twisted ("complex") above the orderly ("simple") sequence. (A modern equivalent would be Roland Barthes, fascinated and inspired by the photographic image [e.g., 1977: 15-78], hostile and blind to the chronographic.) The imbalance or inversion of the attitude to mimesis between the two arts reflects not only the prejudgment that chronologizing comes easily, but also the better-founded inverse: that capturing the visible (or "true" visible) world comes hard, with merit and pleasure attached to the achievement as such. Here, in some measure at least, mimesis remains self-directed and self-justifying vis-a-vis the rest of poesis.

In this respect, even the domain of the iconic interestingly sub- divides in functional terms, according to the extension of the twofold sign(s) in time or in space. The rule that making (designs, interests, sense) comes before matching (the signifier with the signified) governs plot-making in chronological order to a considerably higher degree than it does image-making in exact likeness-which may well resolve the apparent paradox that the Bible originates both the art of historiography and the rage for iconoclasm.

21. Or a pragmatics of lucidity, if we extend the rationale to orderly everyday (hi)story-telling, even at its least artful. A case in point would be the narratives cited by Labov (1972), who stresses and codifies their adherence to the order of events without providing any motivation for it-as though the combinatory (or syntactic) rule had no communicative (or pragmatic) role to play. This failure manifests anew the tendency to invest departures or disharrmonies alone with significance, no matter whether chronological harmony counts as the "hypothetical" (Genette-fashion) or the "real" (Labovian) standard. Actually, the most canonical form of telling in life and art is still informed by some function (like those we have been discussing) or else it would remain pointless and would indeed hardly become canonical.


Accordingly, as the viewpoint on chronological narrative widens from its own models and practices to its relations with anachrony and with iconology at large, its common denominator grows more salient.

Chronology is what chronology does: its value turns not on the concor- dance formed in ordering but on the motivation(s) for this concordant

ordering, from lucidity down. As I said, moreover, such motivating arguments are possibly open to

challenge, certainly to adjustment and elaboration, but not to refutation-no more and no less than their opposite numbers in anachrony. And if our trio lay themselves open to challenge, this happens insofar as they overreach themselves by making in turn absolutist claims at the

expense of the opposition, as though theirs were the privileged value scheme, with time-tactics to match. In regard to pleasure, at least, Trollope himself senses that more than one way (e.g., straight and zigzag telling) may lead to the given end, so that every author and reader must choose his own route. But no route leads to the adjudication between ends, each with its appropriate means. Polemical heat and

dogmatic fiat apart-and there has been enough of them to confuse an issue otherwise simple to the point of truism-how can one decide between extremes like intelligibility and ambiguity, naturalness and wonder, orientation to character versus intrigue, or to present and future versus past? Obviously, there is no disputing about tastes, that is, interests, values, rankings, teleologies: no logical, but at best teleo-

logical and ideological, disputing. More strictly, to anticipate the thesis of my next section, an argument for chronology is not yet an argument against anachrony, and vice versa. Only within a given strategy does it make sense to weigh pros and cons regarding tactics.

As to tactics, furthermore, our advocates are equally notable for what they omit to say. In grinding the axe of their favorite order-

ing, they do it much less than justice by giving it an air of uniformity in univalence or, when confronted with each other, in multivalence.

Chronological narrative is really as flexible and wide-ranging in means as it is variable in ends and scales, even beyond what has emerged thus far. We may now in conclusion divide its resources for multiformity into three categories, all tellingly symmetrical rather than diametrical to the options in or behind the disorder of anachrony.

There is, first, the gradation all the way between the poles of chro-

nology and anachrony, as already exhibited by the independent ma-

neuverability of beginning, middle, and end. Second, within the limits of overall chronology-as of the wildest anachrony-there remain

multiple freedoms in determining the shape of temporality: closer or looser modes of linkage and transition, length of discourse or of span and perspective, representational ratios and pacing, cut-off points, ho-

mology or disparity between macrosequence and microsequence (not


to mention the interaction with the rest of the text's components, from

language to theme). Third, narrative may bring to bear or converge on chronology, as it may on anachrony, a range of ordering forces other than either. Whether the convergence proves to be harmonious (and so mutually reinforcing) or disharmonious, it is always enriching and revealing because always held among alternative patterns of sequence.

Principled yet generally neglected (and the one exception, suprasequential or "spatial" form, misunderstood), these alternatives or complements to the two master strategies all deserve far more attention than I can give them here. Some have been developed elsewhere, though, and most will be taken up at various places below. (For example, the issues of functional sequencing and of suprasequentiality will reappear soon under the rubric of narrative logic; that of simultaneity or multilinear narration, in a later part of this series devoted to the Bible as a case study.) What immediately follows is only meant to round out my empirical argument a bit by mapping those forces onto the agenda for a general theory of ordering.

The narrative of simultaneity gets typically consigned to insignifi- cance, if not silence (e.g., Genette's dismissive reference to "heterodiegesis," presumably another of the "minor articulations"), as though its sequencing were unsystematic, undistinctive, unvaried, and just a matter of multiplying by the number of its parallel lines the essen- tial features of a single line. In fact, it could hardly occupy a more remarkable position, and not by virtue of statistical frequency alone. That frequency, verging on omnipresence, is itself an index of the extent to which multilinear action finds its mimesis in narrative because it attaches to the way of the world. And once we consider the mimesis, it shows itself peculiar in the form as well as the object of sequencing, in matter and hence in manner.

Where an occurrence-series lends itself to either chronologized or dechronologized narration at each point, a concurrence eludes both renderings by nature. Given the multiple object to be narrated, the narrative then falls between chronology and anachrony-or rather forms a tertium quid with a logic of its own, namely, the system or strategy of arrangement by turns. Within a linear (e.g., verbal) medium, you cannot tell multilinear actions in time, but only one at a time; but neither can you throw their telling out of time, because that is how they run in the happening anyway, side by side rather than early before late. In short, simultaneity amidst the dynamic world, like the description of the static, is a law unto itself in sequence-making: narrative discourse must order but cannot disorder what nature itself leaves unordered. Only what is ordered in the happening (chronology) is disorderable in the telling (into anachrony); what remains unordered in the happening (simultaneity, a fortiori the statics of description) is


orderable in the telling (into a sequence of parallel threads) without being disorderable as such, except where subject to order (e.g., within each thread by itself).

Along with the resultant constraint of sequencing by turns, however, simultaneity presents the discourse with equally distinctive latitudes for maneuvering and inventiveness. Given two lines of action, for example, whose turn comes first in the plot made and read about them? (A choice bristling with sequential effects, this, due to the power of first impressions: consider how Pere Goriot inflicts on us Madame Vauqueur's sordid boardinghouse before cutting across to the beau monde and then shuttling between the two milieus until their apparent polarity veers around into similarity.) Whichever line comes first, again, should its turn last down to the resolution and then juxtapose with the other's, or should they regularly alternate? If the latter- which offers such advantages as retardatory sequence or interlinear

play of equivalence-then how are the lines to be chopped up into

manageable or multifunctional turns? Would it pay to look behind

(e.g., for continuity) in resuming a suspended line? To forge ahead with one line beyond its proper turn (if only till the nearest stasis) before returning to the other? To spell out or rather to make am-

biguous their time-relations? Coming on top of all the openings for

manipulation along either line, these are enough to suggest the wealth of resources between the lines-and in every sense, because the very exigency of linearizing the multilinear serves as a cover (almost too effective, to judge by the record) for interlinear strategy. There is an art of ordering in simultaneity as well as in chronology, both arts being no less determinate and varied, though more hidden, than the surface

disorderings in anachrony. The same applies to a group of sequencing mechanisms which

are essentially outside world-time altogether because they all operate neither by the logic of events nor necessarily on events alone (Sternberg 1981, 1983; cf. Enquist 1981). Narrative, accordingly, shares them with linear discourse at large. But wherever and however invoked, each logic manages to render sequence coherent and its violations perceptible. Each works to this effect, moreover, in or on units ranging from the microsequence of a phrase to a text's macrosequence. Each, finally, runs across (parallel, even counter to) the lines of chronology, anachrony, simultaneity, as well as those of its own nontemporal mates.

Very briefly, what I call the hierarchical mechanism relates a series of items (things, states, qualities, characters, occurrences) to some scale of importance, whereby they emerge in "rising" or "falling" order. By this conversion of scalar into serial priority, a panorama may unfold from low to high life, a household from junior to senior members, a concurrence from weak to strong action, a record from the least to the


most impressive achievement. Or-without forfeiting the sense of priority and the sensitivity to its disturbance-the other way around in descent. Hierarchy, then, generates a sequence with order but without direction. Having order, the sequence resembles chronology in motivating and tightening a series of items. Not having a direction built into it (a property reserved for early-to-late arrangements), that sequence varies from chronology in being freely reversible; that is, deployable from either end (bottom-to-top or top-to-bottom) with no necessary effect of disordering. And given a sequence that may run in two directions, the set of parameters outlined earlier within the framework of unidirectionality re-forms under a new and newly flexible logic. Most immediately, the cruxes of beginning, middle, and end assume a very different bearing, less constrained or motivated by nature, more oriented to the diversity and decorums of culture. But the variance also manifests itself elsewhere, from the abeyance of causality, with other reality-like sequential forces, to the strengthening and baring of (social, artistic, communicative) teleology. Much the same intersection of factors thus yields novel possibilities of interaction in ordering the process of discourse.

Likewise with the perspectival mechanism, whereby items fall into a subject's order of experience, perception, recollection, association, or indeed, as in Ford Madox Ford, "impressionistic" narration. An immemorial device, perspective reaches its apotheosis in the inward- turning literature of modernism. The deictic reference point, again, appeals to the order of discourse roles, as when a string of pro- nouns (complete with the states or events clustering around them) moves "politely" from "you" to "he" to "I." The linguistic resources for ordering, finally, go beyond grammar to what grammar (as well as nature) leaves unordered. We thus find the most heterogeneous items sequenced by their verbal make-up, such as from short to long ("from Dan to Beer-sheba") or from a to z, acrostic fashion, extended to poem-length as early as Psalms and to novel-length in Michel Butor's Mobile.

Least oriented to reality, the linguistic mechanism best demonstrates the autonomy enjoyed by all in both observance and breach. Once posited-and though reversible-each nontemporal logic throws even divergences from it into relief and question in a way reminiscent of the chrono-logical. Each equally operates along, athwart, and against the objective line of chronology. So does suprasequential patterning-the so-called spatial form to be discussed-whose elements still undergo sequential processing and integration in narrative, from one phase to another. Insofar as this form consists in the mimesis of space, it en- joys its own ordering conventions, such as the descriptive movement from right to left, up to down, animate to inanimate, or the reverse.


Alternatively, if it turns on equivalence-links (straight analogy, opposition, comparison), spatial patterning may unroll in thesis-antithesis- synthesis order or according to some musical or music-like code of variations on a theme. In either instance, moreover, its deployment also remains subject to other mechanisms of linearization. As we read Pere Goriot, for example, the initial contrast between its two worlds gradually transforms into similarity under the combined pressure of disclosures about them (behind time) and developments in them (along time): the retrospection on the past and the action moving toward the future, both logics of sequence, join forces to invert the relation of equivalence.

Throughout, the relative position of the items along a (given) series makes sense in terms of their relative position within some (inferred) order other than world-time. In this reference of textual to contextual arrangement, each mechanism performs in its own way the minimum role peculiar to logics of sequence as such, chronology included: the role of providing the series in question with linear continuity and with

meaningfulness in discontinuity. But their contribution may well ex- ceed the minimum. Thus the thesis-antithesis-synthesis march can not

only organize but also thematize the plot dynamics from exposition to closure. Perspectival sequencing, especially where idiosyncratic, clockwise or otherwise, will often yield an insight into the reflector's mental

processes, even his sense of order as a whole. Hierarchical movement carries much the same implications with regard to an entire society or ideology or culture, whose world-picture reveals itself in the tiniest

microsequences. One might easily reconstruct the order of priorities known as the Great Chain of Being, for instance, from the chains of discourse forged by Renaissance and Neoclassical writers in their pur- suit of completely different matters. Further, hierarchy translates into

large-scale experiential (affective, cognitive) movement, as when a dramatic process "ascends" toward a climax or "descends" to resolution or anticlimax. Here, even with nothing sequenced by any formal scalar criteria, everything is definitely sequenced in effect, up to the entire

zigzag contour of a conflict. In this aspect, the logic of scaling intersects with the group of purely functional regulators of narrative dynamics, like the order of suspense or surprise (Sternberg 1978: 45ff.; 1985: 259ff.). As the next section will indicate, these are orders that work by and for nothing except sequential effect, orders that determine and

explain the (dis)ordering of events by appeal to master teleologies of interest. Without their sense of purpose, narrative makes no sense as a generic artifact.

The various ordinal parameters and forces gradually outlined here, from duration to direction (or sequence minus direction) to delimi-


tation, from physical length all the way to pure teleology, demand careful study. So do the key questions of where and how and why they interact among themselves-the telling in or out of time included among the rest-during the process of communication. Narra- tive theory can least afford to neglect them, on pain of dooming itself to scratching the surface, nor can it handle them by way of reduction to its favorite (and favoritist) dualism of chronology versus anachrony. The repertoire of options for making or breaking the sense of narrative discourse as process is just too multiform, too interrelated, too principled and powerful to undergo either fate, neglect or reduction, without reprisals. Across the entire field, there is much more to time than sequence, more to sequence than time, more to temporal sequence than departures from chronology, more to departures from chronology themselves than automatic violation-and-value, more to each and all of these than any typological, let alone ready-made, binary scheme can ever cover or discover in narrative.

References Bakhtin, M. M./Medvedev, P. N.

1985 [1928] The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, translated by Albert J. Wehrle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

Bal, Mieke 1985 Narratology, translated by Christine van Boheemen (Toronto: University of

Toronto Press). Barthes, Roland

1968 Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology, translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (Boston: Beacon Press).

1970 "Historical Discourse," in Structuralism: A Reader, edited by Michael Lane, 145-55 (London: Jonathan Cape).

1972 Critical Essays, translated by Richard Howard (Evanston: Northwestern University Press).

1974 S/Z, translated by Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang). 1977 Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang).

Benveniste, Emile 1971 Problems in General Linguistics, translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral

Gables: University of Miami Press). Berkhofer, Robert F.

1988 "The Challenge of Poetics to (Normal) Historical Practice," Poetics Today 9(2): 435-52.

Booth, Wayne C. 1961 The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

Bordwell, David 1985 Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press).

Braudel, Fernand 1980 On History, translated by Sarah Matthews (Chicago: University of Chi-

cago Press). Braudy, Leo

1970 Narrative Form in History and Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press).


Butterfield, Herbert 1981 The Origins of History (New York: Basic Books).

Canary, Robert, and Henry Kozici, eds. 1978 The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding (Madison:

University of Wisconsin Press). Carroll, Lewis

1963 The Annotated Alice, edited by Martin Gardner (Cleveland and New York: World Publishing).

Chatman, Seymour 1978 Story and Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).

Clark, Herbert H., and Eve V. Clark 1977 Psychology and Language (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich).

Cornford, Francis M. 1971 [1907] Thucydides Mythistoricus (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania

Press). Culler, Jonathan

1975 Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Danto, Arthur C.

1985 Narration and Knowledge (New York: Cambridge University Press). Delasanta, Rodney

1967 The Epic Voice (The Hague: Mouton). Eco, Umberto

1976 A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). Enquist, Nils Erik

1981 "Experiental Iconicism in Text Strategy," Text 1(1): 97-111. Forster, E. M.

1962 [1927] Aspects of the Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Frank, Joseph

1963 "Spatial Form in Modern Literature," in The Widening Gyre, 3-62 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press).

1981 "Spatial Form: Thirty Years After," in Smitten and Daghistany 1981: 202- 43.

Gallie, W. B. 1964 Philosophy and Historical Understanding (London: Chatto and Windus).

Genette, Gerard 1969 Figures II (Paris: Seuil). 1980 Narrative Discourse, translated by Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell Univer-

sity Press). 1983 Nouveau discours du recit (Paris: Seuil).

Gibbon, Edward 1972 The English Essays of Edward Gibbon, edited by Patricia B. Craddock (Oxford:

Clarendon Press). Gombrich, E. H.

1969 Art and Illusion (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Graves, Robert

1962 [1934] I, Claudius (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Hesiod

1976 Hesiod and Theognis, translated by Dorothea Wender (Harmondsworth: Penguin).

Hexter, J. H. 1971 Doing History (London: Allen and Unwin).

Homer 1969 The Odyssey, translated by E. V. Rieu (Harmondsworth: Penguin).


Jakobson, Roman 1960 "Linguistics and Poetics," in Style in Language, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok,

350-77 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Keast, W. R.

1956 "The Elements of Art in Gibbon's History," ELH 23: 156-62. Kermode, Frank

1967 The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford

University Press). 1977 "An Approach through History," in Towards a Poetics of Fiction, edited by

Mark Spilka, 23-30 (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press). Labov, William

1972 "The Transformation of Experience in Narrative Syntax," in Language in the Inner City, 354-96 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 1963 [1766] Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry, translated by

Ellen Frothingham (New York: Noonday Press). Mink, Louis O.

1970 "History and Fiction as Modes of Comprehension," New Literary History I: 541-58.

Mitchell, W. J. T. 1986 Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

Momigliano, Arnaldo 1977 Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography (Oxford: Blackwell).

Ong, Walter J. 1982 Orality and Literacy (London and New York: Methuen).

Plaks, Andrew 1977 "Issues in Chinese Narrative Theory in the Perspective of the Western

Tradition," PTL 2(2): 339-66. Prince, Gerald

1973 A Grammar of Stories (The Hague: Mouton). 1982 Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative (Berlin: Moutoi1).

Propp, Vladimir 1968 [1928] Morphology of the Folktale, translated by Laurence Scott (Austin: Uni-

versity of Texas Press). Reinhart, Tanya

1985 "Principles of Gestalt Perception in the Temporal Organization of Narra- tive Texts," Linguistics 22: 779-809.

Ricardou, Jean 1967 Problemes du nouveau roman (Paris: Seuil).

Ricoeur, Paul 1984 Time and Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith 1983 Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London and New York: Methuen).

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 1965 [1781] The Confessions, translated by J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Pen-

guin). Scholes, Robert

1974 Structuralism in Literature (New Haven and London: Yale University Press). Scholes, Robert, and Robert Kellogg

1966 The Nature of Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press). Shklovsky, Victor

1965 "Art as Technique" and "Sterne's Tristram Shandy: Stylistic Commentary," in


Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, edited by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, 3-57 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press).

1966 [1925] Theorie derProsa, translated by Gisela Drohla (Frankfurt: S. Fischer). Smith, Barbara Herrnstein

1968 Poetic Closure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). 1980 "Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories," Critical Inquiry 7(1): 213-36.

Smitten, Jeffrey R., and Ann Daghistany, eds. 1981 Spatial Form in Narrative (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press).

Sternberg, Meir 1970 "Faulkner's Light in August and the Poetics of the Modern Novel," Hasifrut

2(3): 498-537. 1978 Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction (Baltimore and London:

Johns Hopkins University Press). 1981 "Ordering the Unordered: Time, Space, and Descriptive Coherence," Yale

French Studies 61: 60-88. 1982a "Proteus in Quotation-Land: Mimesis and the Forms of Reported Dis-

course," Poetics Today 3(2): 107-56. 1982b "Point of View and the Indirections of Direct Speech," Language and Style

15: 67-117. 1983 "Deictic Sequence: World, Language and Convention," in Essays on Deixis,

edited by Gisa Rauh, 277-316 (Tubingen: Gunter Narr). 1984 "Spatiotemporal Art and the Other Henry James: The Case of The Tragic

Muse," Poetics Today 5(4): 775-830. 1985 The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press). 1986 "The World from the Addressee's Viewpoint: Reception as Representation,

Dialogue as Monologue," Style 20: 295-318. 1990 "Time and Reader," in The Uses of Adversity: Failure and Accommodation

in Reader Response, edited by Ellen Spolsky, 49-89 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell

University Press). Sterne, Laurence

1940 [1759-67] Tristram Shandy, edited by James Aiken Work (New York: Odys- sey Press).

Todorov, Tzvetan 1966 "Les Categories du r6cit litt6raire," Communications 8: 125-51. 1977 The Poetics of Prose, translated by Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell Univer-

sity Press). Tomashevsky, Boris

1965 [1925] "Thematics," in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, edited by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, 61-95 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press).

Watt, lan 1981 Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of

California Press). White, Hayden

1978 Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press).

1980 "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality," Critical Inquiry 7(1): 5-27.

Telling in Time 1 Sternberg

Documents

Transcript of Telling in Time 1 Sternberg