Is the Butler Home? Narrative and the Split Subject in the Remains of the Day.

Contributors: Molly Westerman - author. Journal Title: Mosaic. Volume: 37. Issue: 3.
Publication Year: 2004. Page Number: 157+.

Is the Butler Home? Narrative and the Split Subject in the Remains of the Day.

by Molly Westerman
This essay reads the narrative structures of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day
using postcolonial and psychoanalytic theory. It argues that ambivalence and
inconsistencies in the narrator's language do not create unreliability but tell us what the
narrator does not know: how his experience as a split subject is constituted, and how it
constitutes him.
It is 1956, in Oxfordshire, England. An aging butler works in an old "big house," once a
site and symbol of British imperialism, now the object of "an American gentleman"
(Ishiguro 139) and at the mercy of his economy. The butler's former employer has been
discredited, soiled by Nazi sympathies that he nurtured between the wars. The butler has
always privileged order; in the face of so many changes, he now works even harder to
stabilize his identity and that of the house. Such is the situation of Stevens, the narrator of
Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, whose painful emotional life manifests itself
in narrative peculiarities--struggles on the page--which form not merely the narrative
structure of a story but the story itself.
Narratologists, notably Kathleen Wall, have produced valuable readings of these
structures. Other critics have brought Lacanian insights to bear on Stevens's emotional
life, or used postcolonial theory or historical research to examine Stevens as an
historically constituted entity. In this essay, I explore a relationship amongst these
factors, considering the novel's frame narrative, implied audience(s), temporal structures,
repetitions, inconsistencies, gaps, and ambiguities, for what they reveal about Stevens
and his place in the world. The attributes often taken as proof of Stevens's narrative
unreliability are actually the very mode by which The Remains of the Day inscribes
Stevens's ever-conflicted subject position and the processes through which it is created
and maintained.
In identifying with the house that is both his workplace and his home, Stevens objectifies
himself and internalizes a deep divide. Stevens stereotypes (in Homi Bhabha's sense)
himself and his nation: he signifies England by its "big houses" and their butlers in an
attempt to stabilize a social narrative that defines the narrative of his life. If Englishness
can be fixed, if butlers can be made to stand for Englishness, and if Stevens can reduce
himself to the single identity category of "butler," then he has only to keep the house
clean to make sense of everything. As the butler attempts to control his desires and his
world, conspicuous failures pull reader and narrator out of the imaginary sense that all is
well, that things are as they should be. These attempts and failures occur at the level of
the text.
It is interesting that Stevens explicitly addresses the first-person narrative of The Remains
of the Day to an audience, a "you." He expresses great concern that members of his
profession remain in character unless completely alone; he claims that one must maintain
one's professionalism and dignity before any audience, that one must never be "off-duty"
in the company of another person (43, 169). In view of the beliefs and identity we come
to know, it seems very strange that he writes to a "you" of his feelings, memories, and
flaws.
Often, the second person is used in the formula: "you" will understand and empathize
with "my" perspective. The plot does not explain this style of storytelling; Stevens is a
butler (rather abashedly a novel-reading one), not a writer. Some features suggest that
Stevens addresses himself: the narrative style bears comparison to that of a journal or
diary, as events of the day are written in the past and present tenses, alongside events of
the distant past. Also, his stream of consciousness often drives the narrative in non-
chronological, variably connected directions (so that events of different types and
different decades are juxtaposed, because of associations in Stevens's mind). These diary-
like elements underscore the question of to whom Stevens writes or speaks. Yet other
elements, such as the extensive use of dialogue, confuse an uncomplicated reading of the
book as diary.
Stevens does address people (or a person) very similar to himself; he assumes knowledge
and interests that require his audience to be composed of servants in big houses, arguably
only butlers. In his us-and-them style of discussing American-ness and characteristics of
other nationalities, he implies an English audience. Further, he assumes such familiarity
with particular butlers and valets that his "you" may include only persons from his
region. This close resemblance between the narrator seeking self-understanding and
meaning, and his implied audience, suggests that the text works at least in part as internal
dialogue. For instance, Stevens justifies his unusual journey away from Darlington Hall
with a specific reading of a letter from the former housekeeper Miss Kenton, by which he
asserts that she wants to return to the house. He argues somewhat desperately for this
reading: in these passages, Stevens seems to try to convince himself that he has not made
an enormous mistake. On the other hand, while the "you" of this text may include the "I,"
its audience is at least sometimes plural. Stevens omits certain names because "they are
likely to be still remembered in certain circles" (37), implying a close and contemporary
audience beyond himself. Perhaps, as the retired butler on the pier muses, "you never
know who you're addressing" (242).
The elusive "you" is one indication of a larger unresolvability in Mr. Stevens's narrative.
Uncertainty, revision, pretending, and lying figure prominently throughout The Remains
of the Day. After all but lying outright to the hospitable Taylors and Harry Smith and
(mis)leading them to believe him a gentleman, Stevens explains, "I trust I need hardly
underline the extent of the discomfort I suffered tonight on account of the unfortunate
misunderstanding concerning my person" (193). He is uncertain as to whether Miss
Kenton or Lord Darlington made a particular statement (60) but goes on to build a
narrative on Darlington having made it (62). On two occasions he denies ever having
worked for Lord Darlington (120, 123), later brooding over several explanations: an
English distaste for discussing former employers, the idea (false, he insists) "you" may
get that "I am somehow embarrassed or ashamed of my association with his lordship,"
and finally his desire to avoid hearing more "nonsense concerning his lordship" (125-26).
Another moment of ambiguity occurs when Stevens listens at the door of French
diplomat M. Dupont as American senator Mr. Lewis attempts to win him over to his side,
against Darlington and friends (94-96). Stevens insists so strenuously that such
eavesdropping is "common" and in no way "subterfuge" (94) that he seems to doubt it
himself. In one scene, Miss Kenton asks, "Why, Mr. Stevens, why, why, why do you
always have to pretend?" (1) (154), a question that haunts the narrative long before she
gives it voice.
If, as I argue, Stevens's memory and its revisions and inconsistencies constitute the story,
"narrative unreliability" is an especially interesting term here: Stevens can be a reliable
narrator of that story only by including contradiction. Kathleen Wall approaches this
conclusion when she writes that The Remains of the Day "asks us to formulate new
paradigms of unreliability for the narrator whose split subjectivity, rather than moral
blindness or intellectual bias, gives rise to unreliable narration" and that "the novel may
be seen to be about Stevens's attempts to grapple with his unreliable memories and
interpretations and the havoc that his dishonesty has played on his life. The issue of
unreliability thus saturates both form and content" (23). However, "The Remains of the
Day and Its Challenges to Theories of Unreliable Narration" does not include a total
subversion of the concept, to which Wall and her rather structuralist narratological
assumptions are too indebted. Instead, she backs away and argues that the implied author
uses Stevens's "verbal tics," including his use of "one" in place of "I" when he attempts
"to erase some part of himself" (23), simply as signs of his unreliability.
Wall argues that Stevens is "dishonest" because he is too weak to face the universal
situation of "psychological conflict that inheres in being aware of one's fractured
subjectivity, or of the way in which values that rule one part of one's personality diminish
one's ability to comfortably meet the needs dictated by another part" (23). Stevens's
condition is his personal fault, a weak response to a universal truth. The novel, in
contrast, allows Stevens to narrate himself, a complex voice in a particular situation. Here
I borrow Wall's insight regarding this novel's "form and content" and attempt to follow its
logic a bit further. What Stevens enacts on the page is a personal utterance. It is an
expression of his life within, creating, and created by a symbolic structure--language,
texts, mythology, an internalized father--put into relief by "these changing times"
(Ishiguro 16).
Mr. Stevens is an excellent worker. He devotes his life to his job, works on his days off,
and rarely leaves his place of employment. Like the subjects who "work all by
themselves" (Althusser 182), Stevens decides to be this kind of worker "on his own."
And, like the subjects Althusser describes, Stevens often makes decisions that we can see
are not in his interest, that cannot make him happy. Of course, Althusser would argue, the
structures of ideology that reproduce and maintain the conditions of society (including its
workers) have created and educated Stevens. "Ideological State Apparatuses" make
everyone into subjects; as for Stevens, his national identity and the service system (which
masks and yet is part of the class system) combine to wedge him pretty firmly in place.
One critic calls him "the prototype of an 'ideological servant': he never questions his role
in the machinery, he never opposes his boss even when he makes obvious mistakes, that
is, he does not think but obeys" (Salecl 180). However, as the world around him changes
(over time and, as he travels, spatially), he begins to suspect the internal tensions and
contradictions of his subjecthood. Stevens does think: he thinks every work of the text,
and these tensions are the content of this novel.
One especially prominent "tic" of Stevens's narration is that he returns over and over,
from various angles, anxiously, to the question of what makes for English greatness.
After a long description of the English landscape and the "greatness" that distinguishes it,
its "sense of restraint" (28-29), the narrator shifts abruptly: "This whole question is very
akin to the question that has caused much debate in our profession over the years: what is
a 'great' butler?" (29). In this move, Stevens associates butlering (and himself) with
Englishness. After all, "when you think of a great butler, he is bound, almost by
definition, to be an Englishman" (43). When his American boss, Mr. Farraday, exclaims,
"You're always locked up in these big houses helping out, how do you ever get to see
around this beautiful country of yours?" Stevens thinks: "Those of our profession,
although we did not see a great deal of the country in the sense of touring the countryside
and visiting picturesque sites, did actually 'see' more of England than most, placed as we
were in houses where the greatest ladies and gentlemen of the land gathered" (4). Butlers
produce and order the houses that take on the whole meaning of England. Significantly,
this part-for-the-whole is spoken not by an external third-person voice but by an English
butler attempting to justify a life of service.
Even these few examples suggest that Stevens's definition of Englishness, which (like
everything else) he needs to have singular and static, is problematically plural. It begins
to split open at the level of the text, where Stevens has more and more trouble shielding
himself from his own contradictions. England is its "greatest ladies and gentlemen," its
ruling class, and at the same time England is butlering, dignity-as-obedience, knowing
one's place. Put differently, on one side, butlers are the most English part of England; on
the other, the ladies and gentlemen they serve are that part. He writes these two parts-for-
the-whole in a sort of sleight-of-hand, averting his eyes. Stevens sees and writes Nation
with a convenient blindness to class; at the same time, he displays an absolute obedience
to class, through his meticulous participation in the hierarchy of the service system. The
shield protecting Stevens from these alarming contradictions does have cracks, though,
and they widen as his world shifts, as Darlington's name becomes an embarrassing one
and Darlington Hall becomes an English curiosity to wealthy foreigners.
Stevens's habits of thought work to protect his image of the world, and to clarify and
stabilize his role in it, by rationalizing and/or concealing contradictions like these. For
instance, he displays an amazing ability to think in binaries when he imagines the public
and the private spheres. If one is not completely alone in a locked room, one is in public.
Any loosening of the heavy cloak of "dignity" is equal to "removing one's clothes in
public" (211, 43); interestingly, many of these clothes are hand-me-downs from men he
calls Lord and Sir, so that in effect his dignity is given to him by that hierarchy and those
authority figures (10). Clearly he allows himself little room for negotiation. He creates
this schema himself: he models it after a one-dimensional version of his father, associates
it with the best of Englishness (which, again, is a problematically multivalent term), and
names it "dignity." The mythology of the butler has its texts: stories told by or about Mr.
Stevens senior. Stevens's paradigmatic example of dignity is a story in which an English
butler in India discovers a tiger in the dining room, discreetly asks permission to shoot it,
and, upon providing more tea for the guests, informs his employer that "there will be no
discernible traces left of the recent occurrence" by the usual time for dinner (36). After
recounting this tale, Stevens imagines how his father "must have striven throughout his
years somehow to become that butler of his story" (37)--and imagines him achieving that
goal, in part by serving the man who caused the death of Stevens's older brother (40-42).
Despite his warm relationship with the construct of his father as paradigmatic butler,
Stevens's relationship with his father, the actual person, is unhappy and contradictory.
Stevens must constantly labour to cover that complicated real relationship with an
imaginary one. Indeed, a portion of this novel's quiet pain is born of Stevens's struggle to
hold up the mythic father while averting his eyes from the human one; the pain is made
palpable through the narrative's ambiguities and contradictions. When he insists that Miss
Kenton call his father "Mr. Stevens" rather than "William," even though he is the under-
butler (53-54), he expresses (though awkwardly and indirectly) respect and even
affection. At times, however, Stevens is almost unbelievably harsh. At one point he says
to his father: "The fact is, Father has become increasingly infirm. So much so that even
the duties of an under-butler are now beyond his capabilities" (65). Following a verbal
gesture of obedience, Stevens's shift to the third person reads as mocking and even
rebellious. And yet he attributes to Miss Kenton "a certain sense of guilt" when they look
out at the incredibly poignant sight of his father attempting to prove to himself that he is
still competent, walking repeatedly over the ground where he had fallen with a tray (67).
Stevens attempts to make value and sense of his life through a strenuous interpretation of
his father's ideas about dignity, which requires that his father become a myth of the
father, and the ideas become laws. His professional life is rigidly structured, far beyond
even the considerable requirements of his place in society. He ignores and denies his
emotional life almost out of existence. Stevens's persistent but persistently repressed
desire for "human warmth" (245), especially apparent in his feelings about Darlington
and Farraday and his nostalgia for a lost closeness with Miss Kenton, is paradigmatic
here. Instead of telling himself that he fears the intimacy, risk, and change associated
with acting on his desire, Stevens produces a mythology for his constraints and
congratulates himself for his constancy to them. It is understandable, then, that Stevens
experiences "unease mixed with exhilaration" (24) when his drive takes him outside
familiar territory.
The journey away from Darlington Hall is certainly an unusual point in Stevens's life.
The normally stolid narrator shocks us with moments of melancholy introspection, as
when he bemoans that he let precious time with Miss Kenton slip away, that "there was
surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render
whole dreams forever irredeemable" (179). He seems driven both to understand and to
ignore his life's schisms. As changes of time, place, and employer disrupt the systems he
has so carefully constructed, it becomes more difficult for Stevens to patch over the
cracks as they widen, and he anxiously repeats, revises, and explains in excess.
Often, Stevens seems so constrained by his complex of imperatives as to be unable to say
what he means. Having "been preoccupied for some hours with the matter of Miss
Kenton's sorrow" at the death of her aunt (177), he approaches her to offer his
condolences but can only bring himself to criticize her work. Another time, when Miss
Kenton tries to talk to Stevens about a mistake his father made, he describes himself as
"resolved not to waste further time on account of this childish affair" but chooses the
most childish imaginable plan of action (which fails), "to stride out of the room very
suddenly at a furious pace" past the waiting Miss Kenton (58). Protecting his construction
of his father as ideal butler, Stevens utterly abandons the dignity that this construction
supposedly signifies.
Such an "arrested, fetishistic mode of representation" is similar to that which Bhabha
calls "stereotype." In the formation of the imaginary through the mirror stage, "the
subject finds or recognizes itself through an image which is simultaneously alienating and
hence potentially confrontational. This is the basis of the close relation between the two
forms of identification complicit with the Imaginary--narcissism and aggressivity" (77).
Bhabha uses Lacan's general theory to understand the specific discourse of stereotype. He
writes, "Like the mirror phase 'the fullness' of the stereotype--its image as identity--is
always threatened by 'lack,'" and, because it is "a form of splitting and multiple belief, the
stereotype requires, for its successful signification, a continual and repetitive chain of
other stereotypes" (77). The verbal tics described but not explained by Kathleen Wall can
be understood as an effect of "a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates
between what is always 'in place,' already known, and something that must be anxiously
repeated." Perhaps it is what Stevens thinks "needs no proof" that "can never really, in
discourse, be proved" (Bhabha 66).
Stevens desperately wants to achieve fixity of meaning, peace of mind. The stereotype,
like his narrative, "is a complex, ambivalent, contradictory mode of representation, as
anxious as it is assertive" (Bhabha 70). In this way, Bhabha's argument about racial
stereotyping illuminates the experience of a white English butler. Stevens stereotypes
himself, living on inertia, unable to progress toward any other goal. Even as he attempts
to plant himself in a golden past and cling to its ethic of loyalty, Stevens almost
compulsively paints for us a portrait of Darlington as political and moral failure (as in
Ishiguro 146). He cannot control his language, his story, himself. Stevens attempts to
make a manageable object of himself, to narrate himself into stillness, but the meaning of
Stevens's image of himself slips constantly away, as in the chain self--Darlington Hall--
England, and Stevens faces the image with identification and repulsion.
In this novel of the big house, a political plot is interwoven intimately with romantic and
domestic threads. Bhabha asserts the multiplicity of "subject positions [...] that inhabit
any claim to identity in the modern world" (1), a multiplicity resisted by Stevens as he
clings to stereotype. His preoccupation with dignity, with his demanding definition of
"private" as alone, emphasizes a divorce between public and private. The binary
translates into Stevens's self as radically split subjectivity. For him, "the borders between
home and the world become confused: and, uncannily, the private and the public become
part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting" (9).
This experience of unhomeliness, central to Bhabha's understanding of the colonial and
postcolonial experiences of a colonized people, is all too descriptive of Stevens.
The narration of The Remains of the Day does not occur in the house but reaches
constantly toward it. Stevens's memory is monopolized by the house, with no apparent
prehistory, and in this way Stevens is defined by the house. He produces and maintains
Darlington Hall with the same dedication that he applies to producing and maintaining
himself. And at the same time as he identifies with the house, Stevens's unhomeliness is
multiple. His home is also his place of work and so a public place; it is for a long time the
home of Miss Kenton, with whom he shares an uncomfortable closeness, and then the
home of her lack, and the home of his employer. Now, it is the property of an American:
the butler finds himself straddling two systems, longing for and clinging to "noble"
Englishness while living in (and commodifying himself and his culture for) nouveau-
riche American logic. In the past it was, as he repeats enthusiastically, the site of political
events (over whose content he has no control) and the unfolding of world history (with
which he maintains a peculiar relationship of identification and distance).
Stevens's inability to define himself outside the house results in the loss of both private
pleasures or comfort and public agency. This dual sense of lack manifests itself in
jumbled language and other markers of what might normally be described as
unreliability. At the Taylors' house, when Mr. Andrews asks whether he is the Mr.
Stevens in Parliament with "some very sensible things to say about housing," he
responds, "In fact, I tended to concern myself with international affairs more than
domestic ones" (187). The play of the words "housing" and "domestic" as both literal
terms and political metaphors, as well as Stevens's image of himself as involved with
international affairs, emphasize the "disorienting" relation of public and private in the
house. This imaginary situation shuts Stevens out of politics, because he has confused
political efficacy with housekeeping. Much of The Remains of the Day is devoted to
justifications for Darlington's support of the Nazis and assurances that he was truly a
moral and great man, justifications and assurances baffling outside Stevens's particular
logic. His devotion, which he wishes he could make unquestioning, to the house and all
that orders it renders him powerless, only able to take whatever his employer does and
accommodate it.
By July 1956, the time of the narration, Darlington Hall has become the "colonized"
home of an American who explicitly commodifies Englishness and Stevens himself: "I
mean to say, Stevens, this is a genuine grand old English house, isn't it? That's what I
paid for. And you're a genuine old-fashioned English butler" (124). He is "part of the
package" (242). Indeed, at the time of this frame narrative, "English culture constitutes a
valuable form of capital in the new American-dominated world order" (McCombe 89),
and Stevens is part of Farraday's investment in that market. But, more significantly,
Darlington Hall is the site of Stevens's continual work of stereotyping and commodifying
himself. As the house's butler, he promotes the very order that defines and constrains
him. Similarly, he produces his own picture of England, stabilizing the country by
constructing its entire meaning from the ladies and gentlemen who visit Darlington Hall:
in the face of Farraday's "England," a physical landscape to be travelled and seen,
Stevens insists, "It has been my privilege to see the best of England [...] within these very
walls" (4). As Bhabha explains, "Private and public, past and present, the psyche and the
social develop an interstitial intimacy. It is an intimacy that questions binary divisions
through which such spheres of social experience are often spatially opposed. These
spheres of life are linked through an 'in-between' temporality that takes the measure of
dwelling at home, while producing an image of the world of history" (13). Stevens's
home, like his self, is ambivalent (although he tries not to see it). They are imaginary
ideals of complete identification, containing and increasing his enormous degree of
alienation, and his desire as well as his fear of desire.
The sense of Stevens-as-colonized may lie at the base of claims such as Susie O'Brien's
that "Ishiguro attempts to subvert [...] the notion of benevolent paternalism which was
invoked to legitimate the deployment of power by the British ruling class, both at home
and abroad" (789). She argues that Stevens submits "to a social order that reflects and
supports the model of filial devotion deployed by empire to mask the enforced servitude
of its colonies." His relationship to Lord Darlington is one of "childlike devotion" and
thus aligned with the paternalist discourse of colonization (790). O'Brien explains
Stevens's "strained" relationship with Mr. Stevens senior as a filial metaphor for the
rising of a new social order, in which the aging father (Britain) cedes power to the up-
and-coming son (America). Stevens, though, is clearly in his own decline, and his
thoughts on his father belie a fear of aging, not the sense that all is well because the new
order has replaced the old.
The relationship between butler and new order is as complicated and gap-ridden as the
one between butler and father, and its expression is characterized by the same sorts of
slips, silences, and tics. Before he returns to Darlington Hall to serve "the new world
order represented by Farraday" (O'Brien 793), Stevens admits to a retired butler he meets
by chance, "I gave my best to Lord Darlington. I gave him the very best I had to give, and
now--well--I find I do not have a great deal more left to give" (Ishiguro 242). While
"Stevens' first person account [...] ironically comments on the pathology of colonial
nostalgia without ever completely disavowing it" (O'Brien 801), it does so through the
ambivalence in Stevens's texts (his sense of self as well as his narration of the novel), not
through a straightforward alignment of Stevens with American values.
When Stevens writes "We call this land of ours Great Britain, and there may be those
who believe this a somewhat immodest practice" (28), he uses a lovely English landscape
as evidence of British greatness, sliding to rather a smaller meaning than was originally
intended (and than he implies). July 1956 was not a particularly good time to have tied
one's identity as closely to the traditional "greatness" of Great Britain as Stevens does. By
most accounts, at the moment of Ishiguro's frame narrative, the scales have tipped:
Britain is well on its way to the loss of its empire. At the same time, American
(economic, discursive, political) systems are taking over a Britain very much accustomed
to being in charge; this Britain, like Stevens, is entering a phase in which its existing
identity and modes of ordering the world no longer function. Because of bleak economic
prospects in England, "manor homes such as Darlington Hall were falling into the hands
of wealthy owners from abroad" (McCombe 88-89). Indeed, when Stevens mentions
Farraday's nationality, the former butler to whom he opens up at the end of the novel
remarks "American, eh? Well, they're the only ones can afford it now" (242). In 1956,
British popular sentiment was in many ways anti-American, but (perhaps in part because)
"American capital" held enormous sway nonetheless (McCombe 87).
The specific historical position of the frame narrative--July 1956--is also rather salient. In
his fascinating reading of the Anglo-American relations in which The Remains of the
Day is situated, John P. McCombe refers to "the ambivalence towards US political and
cultural hegemony that is central to Ishiguro's narrative" (79). He discusses in some depth
the Suez crisis that came to a head in precisely the month when we meet Stevens.
According to one historian, for Anglo-American relations suffering "traumas throughout
the early 1950's [...] Suez was the final straw" (Sanders 169). Stevens takes his trip
through an England facing change and anxiety, and an increasing discomfort with its own
and the United States's roles in the world. Again, this discomfort becomes apparent
through Stevens's repetition, contradiction, and excessive explanation as he attempts to
cover up challenges to the systems, values, and rules by which he lives.
In histories of decolonization, it is also striking that Britain of the late 1940s through at
least the 1950s is envisioned as the "junior partner" of the United States (as in: Sanders
58; McIntyre 94) at much the same time as Britain is reworking its relationships with its
colonies, smiling encouragingly at them as junior partners in a commonwealth, through
teeth gritted in anxiety. Sanders points out that "the decolonization in India in August
1947 demonstrated that Britain was prepared to pursue colonial policies rather more in
keeping with American conceptions of the way a liberal Great Power ought to behave"
(57). For Stevens as well as his father, on the other hand, the paradigmatic English butler
has a "native" (Indian) staff and shoots a tiger discreetly to avoid disturbing the
gentlemen having tea in the drawing room (36).
Stevens does side with American values in arguing against traditional British snobbery
regarding recently acquired wealth. He disapproves of the Hayes Society's claim that if
we fail to see the fundamental difference of worth between "true ladies and gentlemen"
and the "newly rich," "we may as well adopt the proprieties of Bolshevik Russia" (32).
However, he simultaneously supports traditional British ideas of Empire: "It would have
been a far worthier calling, for instance, to serve a gentleman such as Mr. George
Ketteridge, who, however humble his beginnings, has made an undeniable contribution to
the future well-being of the empire, than any gentleman, however aristocratic his origin,
who idled away his time" (114). To contribute to the British Empire is to "further [...] the
progress of humanity" (114). He is as self-contradicting in this as in all other situations.
Stevens does want to adapt to the changing demands of his job at Darlington Hall and
reflects that "not only is Mr. Farraday a most excellent employer, he is an American
gentleman to whom, surely, one has a special duty to show all that is best about service in
England. It is essential, then, to keep one's attention focused on the present" (139). Yet he
cannot avoid his memories, and he is terrified by his perceived need to banter with
Farraday.
The colonial nostalgia noted by O'Brien operates within the disorienting temporality of
Stevens's unhomeliness. In his narrative, past and present tenses can be uncomfortably
close, multiple, and confusing, despite his attempts to make sense of time in the mutually
exclusive binary "now" and "then." In less than a page, Stevens often narrates events of
the five-minutes-ago past, the continuing present, and the decades-ago past, and each of
these categories includes its own multiplicity of tenses. Stevens attempts to stabilize his
world, resolving "to keep [his] attention focused on the present; to guard against any
complacency creeping in on account of what [he] may have achieved in the past" (139).
Even in this passage, though, Stevens can only exchange his years-past achievements for
a months-past mistake, unable to make meaning on his trip without depending on his past
at Darlington Hall.
Stevens's symbolic structure is fixed; he cannot push himself beyond his stereotype of the
English butler as a metonymy for England, even when he finds himself sold with the
house to an American. Under Darlington, he had simply trusted his Lord to choose
political ends; in the anecdote when Stevens is so proud that his well-polished silver
"might have been at least a small factor in the change in [Darlington's] guest's mood," the
silver seems actually to have contributed to Nazi sympathy in England (138). The same
issues surface more obviously when Stevens follows Darlington's order to fire the Jewish
maids (148), and in Stevens's own reflections as his doubt and regret increase (as in 194-
99, 201). The novel may engage in politics, but the butler cannot.
Stevens includes several episodes of storytelling and reading in his text. He is defensive
about his novel-reading, protesting that it is actually a mode of professional improvement
(167). He reads encyclopedias and travel narratives, professedly also in order to develop
his vocabulary and knowledge for chatting with the master and his guests. It is in this
context that Stevens repeats over and over his firmly professional reading of Miss
Kenton's letter, even though its meaning is elusive and shifts throughout the novel.
This letter motivates the novel's action, that is, Stevens's related journeys through
England and through his memories. The letter is emptied of and filled with meanings by
turns: its multiplicity leads him to wonder whether he has used Miss Kenton's language
"in order to signify something quite other than what it says" (Lacan 744). It does seem he
uses the letter's words so, but, just as Lacan describes such signification (metonymy) as a
way to approach a truth beyond or behind "some sort of communique of the facts,
however official," Stevens tells us and himself a true (though always ambivalent) story
about his own desires. He uses language in a process of identifying his sense of lack and
rushing to mask it from himself (as in Bhabha 74-75), and the narrative shows us this
process. His use of Miss Kenton's language in her letter works similarly, as he realizes
the inadequacy of the sign but acts as if it had some ultimate, knowable significance.
Stevens closes with a related gesture, returning to his need for straightforward meaning
and his deep investment in his identity as butler. At the novel's end, Stevens consciously
doubts the value of his life's work: "You see, I trusted. I trusted in his lordship's wisdom.
All those years I served him, I trusted I was doing something worthwhile. I can't even say
I made my own mistakes. Really--one has to ask oneself--what dignity is there in that?"
(243). But Stevens has not built himself to sustain such doubt, and he gives it up. We
leave Stevens "caught in the rails--eternally stretching forth towards the desire for
something else--of metonymy" (Lacan 751): his obsession grasps for a new object.
Bantering, he decides, is "the key to human warmth," the guarantee of a fulfilling
relationship with Mr. Farraday, and a magical solution to the problems of an aging butler
(245). Bantering will fix everything. It will let the world make sense again. Ultimately,
Stevens returns to the house and all it means to him, leaving his symbolic structures more
or less in place.
The text opens all these questions, problems, and wounds without resolving them. It
produces this rich and intriguing texture, this swirl of politics and romance and hope and
misery and motion and inertia, through Stevens's narrative. When the butler enacts his
complicated existence on paper, the access we have to it is provided by the text's very
ambiguity, ambivalence, and unresolvability. Although Stevens often expresses an
understandable desire to communicate "without ambiguity" (17), The Remains of the Day
uses the frustrations and limitations of his language as modes of representation, providing
a dense account of its narrator's split subjectivity. They allow the novel to include
precisely what its narrator does not know and cannot say.
NOTE
1/Throughout the essay, all emphasis in quoted material belongs to the original authors.
WORKS CITED
Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." Lenin and Philosophy,
and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left, 1971.
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day. New York: Random House, 1988.
Lacan, Jacques. "Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud."
Critical Theory Since 1965. Ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle. Tallahassee: Florida
State UP, 1986. 738-56.
McCombe, John P. "The End of (Anthony) Eden: Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day and
Midcentury Anglo-American Tensions." Twentieth-Century Literature 48.1 (Spring
2002): 77-99.
McIntyre, W. David. British Decolonization, 1946-1997. New York: St. Martin's, 1998.
O'Brien, Susie. "Serving a New World Order: Postcolonial Politics in Kazuo Ishiguro's
The Remains of the Day." Modern Fiction Studies 42.4 (Winter 1996): 787-806.
Salecl, Renata. "I Can't Love You Unless I Give You Up." Gaze and Voice as Love
Objects. Ed. Renata Salecl and Slavoj Zizek. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. 179-207.
Sanders, David. Losing an Empire, Finding a Role. New York: St. Martin's, 1989.
Wall, Kathleen. "The Remains of the Day and Its Challenges to Theories of Unreliable
Narration." Journal of Narrative Technique 24.1 (Winter 1994): 18-42.
MOLLY WESTERMAN is a doctoral student and teaching fellow at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she studies literary theory and the twentieth-century
British novel. She holds an MA in English literature from the University of Illinois and a
BA from Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.

-1-

possibly suffice, since in the nature of service it is subject to other laws for its
achievements. He thus returns to the "outmoded" criteria suggested by the Hayes society,
that of attachment to a distinguished household (R 113). The general principle of judging
the value of service in part according to the object of service is still held good, but for
Stevens it is "the moral status of an employer" that should count (R 114). The "employer"
then becomes a figure for the cause that an artist serves, the traditional or heterodox view
of service to which the professional adheres. Stevens rates his own generation as a more
idealistic one, a generation who saw "furthering the progress of humanity" as their final
value (R 114). Stevens marvels at this being a new thought, undiscovered until the
narrative present: dignity, which is the field-specific norm, becomes "greatness" when it
connects to "certain ends" outside of the field.

Stevens's meditations on the subject of greatness are certainly naive, but at the same time
they shrewdly point out the impasses of traditional accounts of literary value: the
relativity of judgments made even within the profession itself, the tautological dead ends
of inherent value (dignity reduced to its etymological root, worth; good literature proven
by its complete literariness), and the problematic reliance on "employers'--patrons,
publishers, the general public. The attachment to progressive ends then appears a
reasonable solution to Stevens's question. And there lies the rub, of course, since the
relation of benevolent intentions to ends is complicated by structures--"unacknowledged
conditions and unanticipated consequences" in Giddens's terminology.

Just like Masuji Ono in Ishiguro's Artist, (36) Stevens finally reaches a fairly adequate
judgment of his flawed career, and just like Ono he is still able to affirm the principle of
commitment. Stevens balances his emotional account by telling himself and his
complicitous narratee: "Surely it is enough that the likes of you and I at least try to make
our small contribution count for something true and worthy. And if some of us are
prepared to sacrifice much in life in order to pursue such aspirations, surely that is in
itself, whatever the outcome, cause for pride and contentment" (R 244; my emphasis).
Ono, similarly, takes comfort in the assessment voiced by his ideological mentor
Matsuda: "We at least acted on what we believed and did our utmost" (A 204). In the
final paragraph of Remains, Stevens chides himself for not having approached the skill of
bantering "with the commitment I might have done." I take this as a signpost toward
another genre position that belongs to the narrative present of the 1950s, the Sartrean
analysis of committed art, which is also explicit about the complicity of art.

It is by the parallel between aesthetic value and the values of butlering--no matter that the
latter is an ironic caricature of the former--that Ishiguro evokes the position of litterature
engage, one that holds prose to be "in essence, utilitarian." (37) With some justification, it
could be claimed that Stevens is a better vehicle for this particular self-reflexive critique
than Ono, since Stevens's vocation cannot define itself as other than service. The purist
alternative rejected by Ono, of capturing the transience of beauty as an end in itself, is not
available to Stevens. In the allegory on cultural values performed by the text, the
autonomy of cultural production is sharply limited.

The parallel between Ono and Stevens is clear enough: while their "services" won
recognition in the context in which they were provided, they were bound up with
historical forces that had disastrous consequences, and therefore their achievements are
drastically devalued in the narrative present. In Sartre's scheme, usefully rehearsed by
Tony Tanner in an article on contemporary American writing, an artist will stand in a
relation to the values of his society that can be described as either celebration, complicity,
or contestation. (38) Ono was certainly a celebrant of the emergent and soon dominant
values of expansive militarism in the Japan of his day, while Stevens is the perfect figure
for complicity in his refusal to inquire into the significance of Lord Darlington's political
work.

What does that make Ishiguro? The accomplice, according to the definition, presupposes
a principal, and in order to suggest an answer, I wish to conclude by looking at the
principal in this orchestration of complicitous genres. The bourgeois novel faced one of
its many "crises" in the mid-1950s, with Nathalie Sarraute's L'Ere du soupfon (1956) and
the debate over the death of the novel marking a certain peak in the questioning of its
tradition. Directly pertinent for my line of inquiry here, Sarraute and Sartre in divergent
ways questioned the complicity of the form, and the latter proposed commitment as a
necessary stance. The notion of committed art was then forcefully critiqued, within the
left, by Adorno. If we leap to the time of Remains, published in that portentous year
1989, we might argue that the anxieties of the fifties have been actively forgotten rather
than exorcized. Ishiguro's investigation of complicity in the form of a historical novel of
sorts falls under the comforting banner of "historiographical metafiction," which absolves
postmodern fictions beforehand of at least the guilt of complicity, since complicity is
taken to attach inevitably to every form of representation. The mere insertion of "the
historical" in forms that are apparent to the reader as artificial, so this line of thinking
goes, will function subversively in this great enterprise of stressing "both the discursive
nature of [postmodern] representations of the past and the narrativized form in which we
read them." (39)

More specifically, it would be argued--and has been argued, as we have seen--that

Ishiguro's incorporation of historically contaminated genres functions precisely to
undermine or dispel their ideological charge. (40) The critical credentials of the novel
would then be fulfilled, and Ishiguro's stated intention to debunk a certain myth of
Englishness could be cashed in. Is the question of complicity, at the level of the novel
itself, solved as easily as all that? I think not without some reservations.

A number of very powerful reservations have already been made by Susie O'Brien.
O'Brien argues that the novel can all too easily be read as an affirmation of a new
political order represented by the easy-going American Farraday. In her analysis, the
ideological work takes place through the offices of the romance elements in Remains:
"The potentially coercive terms of this new political order [associated with Farraday] are
finally subordinated to and concealed within the universalist logic of a love story,
resistance to which can only be construed as unworldly and finally unnatural." (41) By
deciding to start from the bad old repressed days of Lord Darlington, Ishiguro certainly
seems to imply that we are now living in the good new liberated ones with Mr. Farraday.

I subscribe to O'Brien's general argument, but I think there is a further case to be made
that concerns not just the politics in this novel but the politics of the novel as a form of
expression. My approach in this paper has been guided by the time frame set by the
novel. Its narrative present in the mid-1950s creates a tension with the novel's
situatedness in the late 1980s, and by rehearsing the notions of complicity and
commitment Ishiguro resurrects a moment in the history of the novel as well as in
political history.

As a novel, Remains performs a labor of transformation of the generic elements that

precedes it. By placing in its very center a relationship between a master and a servant it
evokes the symbolic origins of the bourgeois novel in Don Quixote. In the figure of
Stevens, who is present to the reader as the carrier of the various genres, but also as the
carrier of an unchanging style that smoothes out the artifice of the different plots and the
distinctly undermotivated transitions, this novel performs a pessimistic reversal of a great
many predecessors. In Don Quixote, Sancho Panza is a servant who resists the follies of
his master. In Jeeves we see a servant who diligently manipulates his inept master so as
to maintain their mutually defining positions to the best advantage of the servant as
dominant servant. (42) D. H. Lawrence gave the power of sexuality to Lord Chatterley's
menial, Mellors. Robin Maugham's servant, better known in the film version scripted by
Harold Pinter, parasitically preys on the decadence of his master. In July's People by
Nadine Gordimer, the reversal between servant and masters, as Robbins notes, is an
emblem for a large-scale social revolution. (43) In drama, Crichton, in J. M. Barrie's The
Admirable Crichton, (44) passes the test of the desert island as "the best man" among
both masters and servants; Bertolt Brecht's manservant Matti never subordinates his own
moral being to Herr Puntilla, and J. A. Strindberg, the self-proclaimed "son of a servant
maid," has his valet Jean strike back at his master by seducing his daughter. More
generally, Bruce Robbins has demonstrated the central, and most importantly, active role
played by servants in the English fiction tradition.

Ishiguro's treatment of the dynamics between master and servant breaks the pattern in a
manner that demands critical attention. Certainly, the servant holds a central place, but he
does so at the price of relinquishing independent agency. Apart from the master's rule,
then, there is no room for maneuver. Perhaps it is not "the office of art to spotlight
alternatives," as Adorno put it, but neither can it be its task to close the door on them. It is
not just that practicing bantering in order to fit into a more relaxed form of domination is
a vile alternative. What is troubling with the scheme of ideological positions in Remains
is also the way that the main contrast presented to Stevens's blind loyalty is immediately
made suspect. Most commentators seize on Harry Smith as a voice for the opposition,
since he claims the virtues of participant democracy for the people. What must be
remembered, however, is the way his democratic rhetoric is immediately thrown in doubt
by his own pro-imperialist stance: "Our doctor here's for all kinds of little countries going
independent. I don't have the learning to prove him wrong, though I know he is" (R 192).
And this is followed up by Dr. Carlisle's disillusioned comments to Stevens the following
morning, when he identifies Smith's stance as a confused mixture of communism and
"true blue Tory" values. Carlisle then confesses that he came to Little Compton in 1949
as a "committed socialist." The commitment has clearly been tempered by his recognition
that the people he came out to serve are "happier left alone" (R 209). Carlisle's
concluding observation echoes with a particularly marked hollowness: "Socialism would
allow people to live with dignity. That's what I believed when I came out here."

Commitment becomes, in the key scenes of Remains as well as Artist, just another form
of complicity, a faith that retrospectively can be seen as valuable only for the sacrifices it
demanded. The "democratic" faith held by Harry Smith is seen to be premised on
ignorance, just as Lord Darlington's belief in authoritarian solutions stems from good
intentions but is "misguided," and Dr. Carlisle's commitment to socialism is seen to
founder on the rock of human nature. Only Miss Kenton is allowed to state her principles
and at the same time explain why she cannot act on them, but she ends up wistfully
regretting her decisions. Young Reginald pleads for "curiosity" as a minimal value, and
goes off to be killed in the war. In these examples, as in the central presence of Stevens
himself, politics is individualized and sentimentalized in an essentially pessimistic vein.
At the same time it is fitted into a parable on service with a more universalizing scope.

As a novel of structural recognition--in contrast to character-based recognition--Remains

can finally be read for a recognition of the structural identity of the novelist and the butler
as the providers of professional service. What has happened to the novel between 1956
and 1989 is the massive professionalization of this field of cultural production. It is fitting
that a writer with an M.A. in creative writing should thematize the values of
professionalism in a novel that deals with the ambivalent relation between commitment
and complicity. The choice between the two belongs to an era when novelists still, as in
Sartre's argument, were seen to have a choice to "unclass" themselves or to remain safely
within the middle class to which they belonged and which they addressed. Now novelists
are professionals, with academic credentials to show for themselves, and their "employer"
is an apparatus of mediations with a public that is often, like the writer, professionally
accredited. Stevens describes the misguided idealist among his fellow professionals who
would be "forever reappraising his employer" and withdrawing his service when the
employer failed to measure up morally. The inadequacy of such an attitude was obvious,
as Stevens notes, in that such butlers disappeared from the profession. No doubt that
serves as an appropriate comment regarding commitment in the era of professional
literary service.

Professional to a fault, the perfectly crafted novel created by writers like Ishiguro, Julian
Barnes, and Martin Amis has developed within an Anglo-American tradition that
Geoffrey Hartman once shrewdly contrasted with the "aesthetics of complicity"
cultivated by French writers. While the French novel turned on its inherited forms a
purifying kind of suspicion, the Anglo-American novel is one, says Hartman, that
"honors technique and takes pleasure in craft. Yet the relation of craft to craftiness, of
technique to a fictional in-fighting which pits the artist against art, is rarely felt." (45) A
similar sense of a self-imposed impotence is expressed by Geoff Dyer in an astute review
of Remains, when he notes that the irony here "is not ironic enough, never calling itself
into question, always immune from its own inquiring, exempt from its own attention."
(46) In the terms of my own analysis here, Remains resists a full recognition of its own
labor of transformation. As I have shown, the theme of complicity extends to the
historical complicity of forms incorporated into the novel, but as a novel it obliterates
those concrete mediations of history in favor of the purely literary ironic subversivity that
is conferred on postmodern fiction by default, thus keeping its revelations safely within
the profession.

IDENTITY WITHOUT IDENTITYDeconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with

Jacques Derrida

Book by John D. Caputo, Jacques Derrida; Fordham University Press, 1997

In the "Roundtable," Derrida emphasizes the instability of the notion of "identity," that no
so-called identity is, or should take itself to be, "homogeneous" or "self-identical," that
indeed it is dangerous to let a group--a family, a community, or a state--settle back down
into selfidentity. This notion is developed in a piece to which he refers us

____________________
9
One of the source texts for Derrida in these lectures is Kant's Perpetual Peace. See
Kant, On History, ed. Lewis White Beck ( Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), "Third
Definitive Article for a Perpetual Peace: The Law of World Citizenship Shall Be
Limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality," pp. 102-105.

entitled "The Other Heading" ( AC / OH ), published originally in a newspaper issue

dedicated to the question of "European Identity Today."

Europe "today" is shaken by the tremor of unforeseen events-perestroika, the break-up of

the Soviet Union, German reunification, in a word the "new world order." This
constitutes a scene both of possibility--he has never been an orthodox Marxist--and of
violence, of genocidal atrocities breaking out in the name of nationalist and religious
"Identity" ( AC 13/ OH 6). Derrida reacts to these dangers not by denouncing the very
idea of cultural identity, but by deconstructing it, which does not mean--do we have to
keep saying this? -- leveling it to the ground or leaving it in shambles but opening it up to
difference. He thus wants to distinguish an airtight, impermeable, homogeneous, self-
identical identity from a porous and heterogeneous identity that differs with itself.
Accordingly, it must be an axiom of our reflection, he says, that "what is proper to a
culture is to not be identical to itself," that it must differ from itself, even be "different
with itself" (as when we say in English that we beg to "differ with" so and so) ( AC 16/
OH 9).

Indeed, what better example of that than Derrida himself, who addresses the question of
European identity as someone who is "not quite European by birth," that is, as someone
from the "other shore," a Levinasian image for the "other" which is literally true of
Derrida, who was born in Algeria, on the southern Mediterranean coast. A French-
speaking Algerian Jew whose family had emigrated from Spain in the last century,
Derrida says of himself that he has become, with the years, an "over-acculturated, over-
colonized European hybrid" ( AC 13/ OH 7). He is European without quite being
European, French without being French, Jewish without being Jewish, Algerian without
being Algerian (and even a little bit American). "I am European," he says, "[b]ut I am
not, nor do I feel, European in every part, that is, European through and through." He is
European "among other things," constituted by a cultural and European identity that is
not identical to itself ( AC 80-81/ OH 82-83; PdS 349-361/ Points 340350; PdS 216-221/
Points 203-207).

Derrida does not renounce the idea of cultural identity--one is French or American,
speaks a particular language, has a certain citizenship, operates within certain cultural
practices--but he wants such identity to be internally differentiated, so that one is not
identical with oneself, so marked by a "difference with itself" that the very idea of

-114

"we" is destabilized. "We" are those who cannot completely say "we," who cannot settle
into being chez soi, at home with themselves. Whatever institutes community and identity
at the same time "forbids it from collecting itself" together ( PdS 366/ Points 355). All
the momentum of Heidegger's self-centering, self-gathering center ( Versammlung ),
which was never very far from Heidegger's ferocious nationalism, would be divided from
itself and opened up to divergence and differentiation, all this Heideggerian Heim-
lichkeit would be made a little unheimlich. 10 "We" all require "culture," but let us
cultivate ( colere ) a culture of self-differentiation, of differing with itself, where
"identity" is an effect of difference, rather than cultivating "colonies" (also from colere)
of the same in a culture of identity which gathers itself to itself in common defense
against the other. The only thing that could be self-identical, he allows in the
"Roundtable," is a thing itself, something immobilized that lacks freedom, movement,
life, history--"It would be, I do not know what, a stone, a rock, or something like that."
To be sure, Derrida is speaking here impressionistically, for a closer geological analysis
would show that even inorganic substances do not lack atomic and molecular tensions,
self-differentiations, layerings, stratifications, histories, and even fossilized traces of life.
Let us pause over an example. "Our" language, here in the U.S.A., "American English,"
is not quite English, that is, British, nor is it merely American; very early on in its history,
British English received quite a dose of French, which gave it a Greco-Latin flavor, and
after a couple of centuries in the New World and of being worked over by various
Hispanic-, African-, Asian- and who knows what other "-American" experiences,
American English has become something internally divided and differentiated. We are
not complaining; this is all to its credit. "Monogenealogy would always be a
mystification in the history of culture" ( AC 17/ OH 10-11)

This is not without political import (nothing ever is), and it raises important political
questions. The languages of the immigrants, for example, should be kept alive, allowed to
feed into and disturb the dominant tongue, in order to preserve these rich national
differences and ancient memories, and also to keep the experience of speaking and
thinking otherwise alive. At the same time it must be recognized

that the surest way to perpetuate the poverty of the immigrants is for them not to learn
English. To deal with that tension, to make that tension creative, we need sufficient
numbers of well-trained bilingual teachers with adequate facilities and books who can
move easily back and forth between native languages and English so that it would never
be a question of choosing between them. But for that we need to convince the right wing
and the elderly not to vote against school district budgets, to renounce the--unhappily
quite successful--attack they have launched on children, teachers, and schools in order to
fill their own pockets. The question of opening oneself to difference, to the other, will
always come back to the gift, to trumping greed with generosity, to breaking the self-
gathering circle of the same with the affirmation of the other. The elderly will not live to
see the future in which they invest and so we ask them to give without return, for a gift, if
there is one, cannot be less than that.

To signal the notion of a culture that articulates difference, Derrida makes use of a
navigational term, "the Other Heading" ( l'autre cap ) (from the Latin caput, head, one of
my favorite words), as in the heading of a ship or plane. The expression suggests a
mindfulness of the heading of the other, which forces us to be a little more
accommodating about those who are headed otherwise, headed elsewhere, than are we.
Beyond that, the title suggests something "other than" a heading. By this Derrida does not
mean an anarchic anti-heading or "beheading"--as an international traveler himself, he
would be the last one to suggest, for example, that Air France jettison its navigational
equipment--but a delimitation of the idea of "planning ahead" in favor of an openness to
the future that does without the guardrails of a plan, of a "teleological orientation." In a
culture of identity, which keeps its teleological head, an arche heads resolutely or
ineluctably--either way, frontally--toward its own, proper telos inscribed deep upon its
hide (or engraved upon its brow, frons ), gathering itself to itself all the more deeply in an
archeo-teleo-logical unity that "becomes itself." The trick in deconstruction, if it is a
trick, is to keep your head without having a heading.

That is why, whatever similarities are suggested between Hegel's notion of a dialectical
unity-in-difference and Derrida's notion of an identity that differs with itself, the two
ideas are, shall we say, rather different. You might even say that Derridean idea is the
deconstruction of the Hegelian. So Hegelians should wipe away their Cheshire cat

smile, thinking that they are about to swallow Derrida whole, which is of course what
Hegelians tend to think whenever they are faced with "opposition." For Hegel's idea of
unity-in-difference is archeoteleological all the way down, guided deeply from within
by the momentum of a Wesen that is working itself out, becoming itself, getting to be
bei sich sein, in and through difference. Hegel is thinking of some "organic
ensemble," as Derrida says in the "Roundtable," mediating itself into an ever higher
and higher, self-spiraling unity that gathers together all these differences into a more
complex and differentiated unity. Derrida, on the other hand, is no essentialist; at
bottom there is for him no Wesen and no telos but only différance, no deep essence to
keep things on course but a certain contingent assembly of unities subject always to a
more radical open-endedness that constantly runs the risk of going adrift. That is also
why Derrida keeps putting a distance between himself and Heideggerian
Versammlung. For whatever differences there are between the history of the absolute
Spirit and the Heideggerian history of Being, between Hegelian teleology and
Heideggerian eschatology, between stepping up ( Aufhebung ) and stepping back (
Schritt-zurück ), the two are one when it comes to trumping difference with a more
originary and powerful, a more gathering unity that makes its way through the twists
and turns of empirical history. Hegelians and Heideggerians may shout as loudly as
they wish about contingency, may pay contingency the highest compliments, but they
always have something, a Weltgeschichte or a Seinsgeschichte, up their academic
sleeves. Even Husserl's history of transcendental reasonaccording to which "European
science" is the destiny first set in and by Greek logos and episteme --falls in line
behind this Greco-European, archeo-teleo-eschato-logical heading ( AC 31/ OH 27).

This is not to say that Derrida lacks a concept of history--a common complaint about
him and a common misunderstanding of the il n'y a pas de hors-texte notion. On the
contrary, by depriving himself of the idea of either a teleological or an eschatological
heading, Derrida has developed a more spare and radical idea of historical happening.
For a culture to be "on the move" with otherwise-than-a-heading means to hold itself
more radically open to a "future" ( l'avenir ), to what is tocome ( à venir ). History,
thus, is not a course set in advance headed toward its telos as toward a future-present,
a foreseeable, plannable, programmable, anticipatable, masterable future. History
means, rather, to set sail without a course, on the prow for something "new."

-117-
Such an open-ended, non-teleological history is just what Derrida means by "history,"
which means for him that something--an "event" -- is really happening, e-venting ( é-
venir ), breaking out, tearing up the circular course of Greco-German time. History is
not programmed in advance, for Derrida, not set to work within a pre-set archeo-
teleological horizon, kept all along on course, keeping its head and its heading by way
of some sort of ontological automatic-pilot ( AC 22-24/ OH 17-19). That is why when
something comes along that nobody foresaw, that surprises the daylight out of us, we
say it is very "historical." Everybody--from Ronald Reagan to the most internationally
famous "Sovietologists" in all the world's most advanced "advanced institutes"--was
left speechless by the "historic" turn of events in the "former" Soviet Union. Who
would have believed any of us would have lived to use that phrase--as recently as ten
years ago?

The paradigmatic gesture of European "modernity" for Derrida is an "auto-

biographical" project in which European thinkers tell the story of Europe as the avant-
garde and "promontory" of the West--and on this point Heidegger could not be more
modernist--composing a eulogy to a Europe that sets the heading for Western, indeed
global destiny. That is the line that Derrida would have Europe drop, so as not to close
itself within its own identity, and so as to set out instead for another shore, the shore
of the other, of the tout autre, "the beyond of this modern tradition" ( AC 33/ OH 29).
That is why the present nationalist tremors in Central Europe ought not to be
described as a "crisis" of the European "spirit." For a crisis--of which there are
Hegelian, Heideggerian, and Husserlian versions--is a thoroughly modernist idea that
has to do with a "dramatic instant of decision" ( krinein ) in which European self-
identity is at stake. It was all the hype about a spiritual crisis--of the debilitation of the
German and Western Spirit, its Entmachung --that fueled the fires of Heidegger's
National Socialism (and that of quite a few others, too). Even today Francis Fukuyama
can proclaim that the world-historical decision has been made, the crisis resolved, the
end reached. Europe has reached its teleological fulfillment as the whole globe has
opted--is still opting, the crisis will be over in a matter of weeks, now--for Euro-
American "capitalism" and a market economy, and the Evil Empire has come crashing
to the ground ( kaputt ).

Derrida would warn us against not one but two "capitalisms" (from caput ), by which
he means two too powerful headings, the one having

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to do with a cultural hegemony, the rule of European "culture," emblematized by the
European "capitals" ( la capitale, the capital city), and the other the hegemony of
economic capitalism ( le capitale ), the one criticized by Marx in Das Kapital. If we
were to force a "philosophy of history" out of deconstruction, which would be too
prestigious a label (heading) for Derrida, we might say that deconstruction can be
viewed as an attempt to extricate us from two too dominant headings that are trying to
steer everything and thereby to restore the play or slack or chance with which history
happens.

(1) In the "Roundtable," Derrida expresses his concern about the current state of
"international law" and "international organizations." To be sure, he is not opposed to
such notions in principle. His concerns are that such international structures are not
very international, that they do not reflect the will of many nations speaking together,
but are dominated by the largest and richest nations. Since the collapse of the Soviet
Union, they have been dominated by the United States in particular, whose wealth and
power, no longer checked by Soviet power, simply overwhelms the voice and
influence of smaller, poorer countries. "Internationalism," Derrida points out, has a
peculiar way of cooperating with "nationalism" (AC 49/OH 48). That is so in part
because it presupposes the existence and sovereignty of the several member nations;
in the "Roundtable," Derrida wonders whether a "new International" might actually
get beyond nationality and national citizenship to something post-national, post-
geographic. It is also true because such international associations have a way of
ending up serving the interests of the most powerful member-nations, nations who set
the international course. Indeed, such nations mask this power with meta-narratives
that show them to have been chosen by History, or the Spirit, or Destiny, or Being to
lead the way. One nation decides that its destiny is to set the course for Europe, and
thereby for the world, so that the whole planet can become itself, that is, European,
with Paris, London, or Berlin at the head of the fleet.

That is what Derrida would have Europe avoid, and this by way of biting the bullet of
the impossible. That means, on the one hand, learning to cultivate difference while
avoiding both "dispersion" and "monopoly." As he says in the "Roundtable," either
pure unity or pure multiplicity is a "synonym of death." Pure unity would be
totalitarian, and pure multiplicity would be anarchistic; either way, a catastrophe. On
the one hand, Europe needs to avoid dispersion because it is in

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constant danger of deteriorating into a myriad of nationalist idioms and self-enclosed
idiolects, into a European "apartheid." 11 On the other hand, Europeans need to
cultivate cooperation while avoiding "monopoly," a translation of their differences
into a single overarching standardization which circulates across the lines of a
transnational teletechnology. That would wipe out national difference by establishing
a uniform grid of intelligibility, a trans-national cultural capital, a central switchboard,
a central power, a capital that is not a particular city or metropolis. Such a world
would be generically Euro-American or NATO-ese; it would speak American/English,
the new lingua franca, and it would be driven by a European science that stretches
from Copernicus, Galileo, and Isaac Newton to M.I.T. and Silicon Valley. For this
world "politics" is perhaps no longer an adequate term; it would be rather a "quasi-
politics" of the tele-techno-scientific world, the virtual world (AC 41-43/OH 38-40).

To move ahead in the midst of such an aporia, to proceed where the way seems
blocked, that is to "experience the impossible" (AC 43/ OH 41) to pass through, to
travel through the aporia of impossibility (AC 46-47/OH 45-46). Only then is there a
genuine "responsibility," which means the need to respond to a situation that has not
been programmed in advance, to invent new gestures, to affirm an unstable identity
that differs from itself. That impossibility is the only possible invention, the invention
of the other:

The condition of possibility of this thing called responsibility is a certain experience

and experiment of the possibility of the impossible: the testing of the aporia from
which one may invent the only possible invention, the impossible invention [AC
43/OH 41].

(2) The other capitalism is the one criticized by Marx and celebrated by the free
market triumphalism of Francis Fukuyama, in which all the evils of capitalism, the
vast disparity of rich and poor nations, of rich and poor people in the same nation, are
swept under the rug of the march of the absolute spirit of economic freedom and the
free market:

____________________
11
D. F. Malan, South African Prime Minister during the 1950s, defended apartheid in
part by saying that viewed as a whole Europe was a good example of apartheid--
some twenty-five separated nations, languages, ethnic groups. Cited by Anne
McClintock and Rob Nixon, "No Names Apart: The Separation of World and
History in Derrida's 'Le dernier mot du racisme,'" Critical Inquiry, 13 ( 1986), 143.
See the discussion of Derrida's controversy with McClintock and Nixon in Niall
Lucy, Debating Derrida ( Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995), chap. 1.

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[N]ever have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression
affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity [SdM
141/SoM 85].

All the blatant injustice and manifest suffering of such a world is treated as a
temporary blip or empirical shortfall of the absolute progress of an Idea whose time
has come, is indeed being fulfilled before our eyes as the Evil Empire comes crashing
down. That argument, first broached here, is developed in greater detail in Specters of
Marx.

In the face of such suffering Derrida calls for a "new International," which does not
mean an anachronistic revival of a worn-out Marxist idea, another try at an
international association of workers with international headquarters somewhere. This
international "community," which would barely deserve the name of "community"
(SdM 148/SoM 90), would be forged from forces that have resisted Marxist dogma on
the one hand but have been no less resistant to conservative and reactionary
tendencies. The new International would form an ethical and moral coalition of all
those who are, as he says in the "Roundtable, " "secretly aligned in their suffering
against the hegemonic powers which protect what is called the 'new order.'" They
would constitute a coalition of everyone who is done in or headed off by the dominant
heading, every who is left out, de-posed, "de-capitated" by their race, income, gender,
nationality, language, religion, or even species (animal rights)--in a nutshell, by their
"difference."
AN OPEN QUASI-COMMUNITY

So, then, to "precipitate," to rush head-on, to a conclusion, what does it mean to have
an "identity," or, to come back to the question posed in the "Roundtable," to have a
"community," which would always mean having a common identity?

To have an identity, in a sense acceptable to Derrida, is to endure these antinomies

without having a rule to resolve them up our sleeve, which is the only chance we have
for responsibility. To have a rule in advance to solve the antinomy, one that would
settle ahead of time the singularity of each decision, as if each were a "case" of a more
general rule--that would be:

the most reassuring definition of responsibility as irresponsibility, of ethics confused

with juridical calculation, of a politics organized with techno-science. Any invention
of the new that would not go through

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the endurance of the antinomy would be a dangerous mystification, immorality plus
good conscience, and sometimes good conscience as immorality [AC 71/OH 72].

We need to avoid both the overtly self-enclosing, isolationist, protectionist

nationalisms and also the crypto-nationalism of thinking that "we" are the exemplary
case, the central site of a worldwide web, the international paradigm, charged with
setting the course that the rest must follow, that we--French or Germans, Americans or
Europeans, scientists or philosophers, etc.--are the "universal" or "reason" set down on
earth in order to set the course, to lead the way, to provide the heading. There would
be, at bottom, nothing or no one to charge or authorize anyone to provide the heading.
For there is, for Derrida, at bottom, no bottom, no Geist or Sein or logos or Divine
Voice (whether it uses Hebrew or Arabic) to legitimate such leadership. There is, at
bottom, only the "there is," il y a, différance, khôra. That is bad news only if you think
you have been given a hot line to Being or God, but for Derrida it is a way to keep
things open.

The sense of European identity and community, of any community, that Derrida can
live with consists in "opening itself without being able any longer to gather itself" to
the heading of the other and, beyond that, to something otherwise than a heading. Any
possible future community that Derrida could live with would be opened to an other
that is not its other, not the other whom one is intent on colonizing, opened and
exposed to "that which is not, never was, and never will be Europe" (AC 74-75/OH
75-77).

All of which comes down to affirming "democracy," which is an idea that is at once
uniquely Greco-European and an idea that, detaching itself from its Greco-European
moorings and genealogy, is still to come. That is not because "democracy" is a
Regulative Idea to which a lead-footed empirical reality has not yet caught up, a Good
so good that we can afford to be a little violent in its name, but because we do not
know what democracy is, what it is to become, what the democracy to come calls for,
what is coming under the heading of democracy. Democracy calls for hospitality to
the Other, but the Other is the shore we cannot reach, the One we do not know.
Democracy -the old name that for now stands for something new, a porous,
permeable, open-ended affirmation of the other--is the best name we have for what is
to come. This is said despite Fukuyama, despite the flagwaving American Right
Wing, and their lethal denunciations of the

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Other. These people think that democracy has already arrived or is due in any day
now; they seem completely blind to the deep distortion of democratic processes by
money and the media (AC 103ff./OH 84ff.). Democracy is internally disturbed and
continually haunted by the deepest demagogic corruption of democracy, by a crowd-
pleasing, hate-mongering, reactionary politics that appeals to the basest and most
violent instincts of the demos. Democracy is the name for what is to come, for the
unforeseeable future, for the promise of the unforeseeable. It might well be part of
such a democracy to come, Derrida says in the "Roundtable," to be so truly
"international" that it will no longer turn on the current notion of nation at all, of
"citizenship" in a "nation," and will require a new notion of hospitality--all of which,
today, pushes our imagination to the limit.

That polity to come will represent what Derrida often calls a "new Enlightenment"
that will know how to respect both singularity and the universal, both reason and
what a too-self-confident reason denounces as "faith" or "irrationality," both a
common law and the right to be different and idiosyncratic. But, once again, Derrida
is not announcing a regulative ideal, an horizon of foreseeability: for this democracy
to come will always be to come. It will never be in place, and it would be the very
height of injustice to announce that it has arrived, which is the kind of error made in
the triumphalism of the new world order. For justice is always what has not arrived
and, to the extent that it exists at all, it is to be found, like the Messiah on the
outskirts of Rome (RT 24), among the outsiders, the ones who have not "arrived." It
belongs to the very structure of the democracy to come, or Justice, that it is always
"to come," that it keeps the present open by way of the promise of the to-come, lest
we attribute to ourselves a good conscience in democratic matters, thereby letting
the present become an oppressive regime. The affirmation of "responsibility,"
"ethics," "decision"--even, to use an old name for something new, of "Europe"
itself--will never be a matter of knowledge (AC 79/OH 80-81), of a determinable
program, a knowable plan, of planning ahead, but of a generosity, a gift that gives
itself without return--whenever it is called for, whenever the occasion calls for it.

Thus, while it does not belong to Derrida's rhetoric to emphasize this, because he
does not much like the word "community," the same sort of qualifying restriction, or
self-limitation, would, if you remain attached to this word, attach itself to the notion
 of "community."

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Narrative Ethics

Adam Zachary Newton

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 1995

-iii

6 Telling Others: Secrecy and Recognition in Dickens, Barnes, and Ishiguro

By contrast, the title of Ishiguro's novel--befitting its more prosaic and anything-but-
Flaubertian narrator--signifies not crafted metaphor but something more "natural," a
linguistic stutter, an accident of language: "the remains of the day" can mean either
diurnal ruin ("the butt-ends of my days," in J. Alfred Prufrock's pithy phrase) or, less
ominously, merely what is left of the day before nightfall. For Stevens, unlike
Braithwaite, the occlusion of narrative surfaces does not come about through an
integument of metaphor, of art sheathing life. It is produced instead by the appearance
of a world which emerges from behind the one he discreetly and courteously escorts
us through; we see that world, mostly unbeknownst to him, through a sort of
discursive double exposure.

Like Barnes's system of metaphor, however, Ishiguro's model of after-imaging also

incorporates several levels. Thus Stevens' narrative folds together the story of global
and cultural events; the story of the passive collaboration of his employer, Lord
Darlington, with the Germans in the war years occludes a local horizon of domestic
duties and chores. The story of Stevens' professional service as butler occludes an
inner life of feeling and human connection. The story of narration itself occludes a set
of details it prefers not to tell ( Stevens' gradual sense of accumulated personal loss
and traduced professional loyalty). And finally at the level of simple sense impression,
the story of the narrator's field of vision occludes that which it necessarily excludes--
this is the story, in other words, of "looking away."

On this last level of what I call the novel's structure of accidental interruption, we find
a motif of averted or otherwise obscured glances. The following passage is
representative; Miss Kenton--a co-employee who has since moved on--has entered
Stevens' personal chamber, and has importunately requested to see the book he is
reading:

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She reached forward and began gently to release the volume from my grasp. I judged
it best to look away while she did so, but with my person positioned so closely, this
could only be achieved by my twisting my head away at a somewhat unusual angle.
Miss Kenton continued very gently to prise the book away, practically one finger at a
time. The process seemed to take a very long time--throughout which I managed to
maintain my posture--until I finally heard her say: "Good Gracious, Mr. Stevens, it
isn't anything so scandalous at all. Simply a sentimental love story." 35

Just as Miss Kenton interrupts Stevens by accident, so she accidentally disturbs a

professional veneer to disclose a world of tender feeling hiding just beneath. So also
does she mime, on the level of story, Stevens' own accidental self-revelation on the
level of discourse, which surfaces only as a consequence of the narrative act.
Accordingly, the novel asks us to ponder whether beneath its matter-of-fact surface
also hide the lineaments of "a sentimental love story." Just as ghosts haunt the great
house in which Stevens has worked, and as they flit about Mill's Autobiography, so
ghosts of a sort inhabit the story which Stevens meticulously relates.

Leaving Home

Like taking a leap or falling in love, Stevens' autobiographical narrative is a kinetic

act--hence the novel's conceit of an atypical journey away from home marked by
entries in a diary. 36 For Stevens and his tale, the epigraph from Pascal which stands
at the beginning of this chapter has especial import. In Stevens' case, however,
unhappiness waits merely to be discovered in the course of leaving the security of his
private chamber, an unhappiness which has always lurked there, unacknowledged.

In the same way, Barnes's Braithwaite, an aficionado of Flaubert, begins a story of

encrypted secrets away from home: in front of a statue of Flaubert in Rouen. His
journey, being ostensibly a desire "to chase the writer" (12) (or rather the writer's
voice), directly enables the act of finding his own; it is as if, to recall Merleau-Ponty,
he must trespass upon the home of another in order to occupy his own more fully, and
provide us with access to it in the bargain.

Metaphor, obviously, besides "looking away," also serves as a means of "leaving

home." Through its metaphorical intricacy, Flaubert's Parrot

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says that writing the self requires the pathos of leaving home through language, should
one seek to open to others "the secret chamber of the heart" (127). It depends on a
condition of intentionally thrown or parroted voice quite distinct from the
unconsciously inhabited quality which voice assumes in The Remains of the Day
(though the lesson of trespass each text communicates is identical).

If Stevens' narrative works through the implications of accident as interruption and

interruption as accident, Braithwaite's rehearses an interruption of another sort, a
governing structure of delay and willful juxtaposition. In carefully closing in on a self
which "emerges from behind," Flaubert's Parrot "specifies appearance but not the
materialization of a ghost." 37 Ishiguro novel also specifies "appearance," but adds to
this unifying function, which Coleridge called "esemplastic," something of the
ectoplasmic as well.

Throwing Voice

We could say provisionally that Ishiguro's is to Mill's text as Barnes's is to Bleak

House. The first exposes purely accidental features of confession, at variance with
itself as it strives to remain discreet, while Barnes's text discreetly sediments a set of
private revelations artfully coded through a mask of Flaubertian allusion and detail; if
Stevens is an "autobiographer," then Braithwaite is a "personificator." 38

It is wholly appropriate then that Flaubert's Parrot "thinks of itself" as a novel (albeit a
novel in the tradition of Bleak House, given its passion for the heteroglot), and The
Remains of the Day, by contrast, inclines toward fictive autobiography. The difference
between the two texts bears out again D. A. Miller's thesis that writing the secret self
inevitably modulates from autobiography to the novel in proportion to the increasing
pressure to encrypt one's secrets. As Braithwaite himself frames this idea, "If the
sweetest moment in life is a visit to a brothel which doesn't come off, perhaps the
sweetest moment in writing is the arrival of that idea for a book which never has to be
written, which is never sullied with a definite shape, which never needs to be exposed
to a less loving gaze than that of its author" (116).

And yet, obviously, this is wishful thinking; the best, easiest, and most "unsullied"
confession is that which remains safely virtual; written secrets, however carefully
hedged, are always open secrets. 39 The analogy between the book unwritten and the
life untold, let alone the life

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unlived, breaks down fairly quickly, however. The most reliable form of pleasure, as
Braithwaite approvingly says in glossing Flaubert, may be the pleasure of
anticipation. But Braithwaite's narrative, by contrast, dilates only in order to perfect
the finished form which autobiography must eventually assume at its end. And what
that form depends on is the hard, perhaps not ultimately pleasurable labor of truth.

Autobiography is not really abandoned for the novel in this case so much as
temporarily ventured away from; or, to think of it another way, autobiography is
"thrown" from within the novel, as a ventriloquist's voice is projected through a
dummy to play its trick. Personification and autobiography remain closely allied,
and Ishiguro's and Barnes's texts converge upon a median point even though they
may seem to differ on either side of it.

Thus each of these novels progresses toward an eventual anagnorisis, Barnes's with
careful deliberateness, Ishiguro's under the pressure of accreted accidents. In each,
the counter-text functions solely to offset, to illuminate the secrets which its narrator
 slowly decrypts. In The Remains of the Day, that counter-text comprises both the
life that did not happen and the past that is structurally identical to it, seen and
understood only in retrospect, when it no longer matters. As Braithwaite says
obliquely of himself--but it is just as true for Stevens--"It is not just the life that we
know. It is not just the life that has been successfully hidden. It is not just the lies
about the life, some of which cannot now be disbelieved. It is also the life that was
not led" (121).

In Flaubert's Parrot, books, Flaubert, and art form a counter-text of virtuality which
mediates the life which could not but be lived. Thus Braithwaite will ask repeatedly,
"How do we seize the past? How do we seize the foreign past?" Or, as Stevens puts
it in The Remains of the Day, with all the poignancy of incipient realization, and
without irony's safety-net, "Naturally, when one looks back to such [turning points]
today, they may indeed take on the appearance of being crucial, precious moments
in one's life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had. Rather,
it was as though one had available a never-ending number of days, months, years. . .
. There was surely nothing to indicate at the time such evidently small incidents
would render whole dreams irredeemable" (179).

Here, in the first of only three such moments in the text, Stevens' voice
conspicuously changes register, as a world of secrets newly discovered wells up
from beneath its occluded surface. 40 Yet for all its

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pertinacious metaphorical hedging, Braithwaite's voice, too, escapes him on occasion and
throws itself, so to speak, by accident. In the course of an ongoing diatribe against critics
for being defective readers, and having launched into a familiar opposition between what
Stevens calls the "vagaries" of social relationship, on the one hand, and the erotics of
reading, where "domesticity need never intrude," on the other, Braithwaite remarks,
"Look, writers aren't perfect, I want to cry, any more than husbands and wives are
perfect. . . . I never thought my wife was perfect. I loved her, but I never deceived myself.
I remember . . . But I'll keep that for another time" (76).

Braithwaite seems to undo this moment of vraisemblance (and others like it) when he
observes in a subsequent chapter, "When a contemporary narrator hesitates . . . does a
reader in fact conclude that reality is being more authentically rendered?" (89). I
emphasize, however, that Braithwaite's own image for contemporary fictional
technique---cubism--aptly describes the structure of his own narrative: a postmodern
ironic veneer which "shears across" an underlying realist sensibility. As he himself asks,
"Does irony preclude sympathy?" (155) 41

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Narratology: An Introduction
Book by JosÉ Angel GarcÍa Landa, Susana Onega; Longman, 19961 Introduction to the
Structural Analysis of Narratives *

ROLAND BARTHES

The article reprinted here was originally published as the introduction to no. 8 of
Communications, perhaps the most memorable issue of the pathbreaking French journal
and one generally considered to be a manifesto of the French structuralist school. This
issue, wholly devoted to the structural analysis of narrative, included seminal essays by
A.-J. Greimas, Claude Bremond, Christian Metz, Tzvetan Todorov and Gérard Genette.
In their semiological work, these critics were indebted to a variety of sources: structural
linguistics, the Prague School, Russian formalism, structural anthropology and so on. But
their most direct influences were Vladimir Propp Morphology of the Folktale ( 1928) and
Lévi- Strauss" Structural Anthropology ( 1958, trans. 1963).

In his introductory essay, Roland Barthes proposed his own deductive model for the
structural analysis of narrative at discourse level, closely following the example of
generative linguistics. Rejecting all kinds of thematic approach, he aims at the
construction of a 'functional syntax' theoretically capable of accounting for every
conceivable type of narrative. He bases his model on Propp's concept of 'function' as the
structural unit governing the logic of narrative possibilities, the unfolding of the actions
performed by the characters and the relations among them. Barthes' model improves on
Propp's in that it offers the notions of 'levels of description' and the logic of vertical
('hierarchical') integration of narrative instances, which prefigure those of Genette and
Bal. Barthes also contends that traditional classifications of character types are
unsatisfactory because they rely excessively on the privileging of one particular kind of
character: the subject. In line with Todorov and Greimas, he proposes to void the notion
of 'character' of its humanistic connotations in favour of the functional notion of agent or
'actant'. Anticipating the importance given

____________________
*
ROLAND BARTHES, Image, Music, Text. Ed. and trans. Stephen Heath ( New York:
Hill & Wang, 1977), pp. 79-117. First publ. as 'Introduction à l'analyse structurale du
récit ' Communications 8 ( 1966): 1-27.

-45-

by reader-response criticism to the narratee, Barthes defines narrative communication as

an exchange between narrator and listener. He stresses the peculiarities of literary
enunciation and insists on the differentiation between narrator (who speaks in the
narrative), implied author (who writes), and real author (who is). Barthes' later phase is
generally considered to veer towards a post-structuralist concern with desire, the pleasure
of the text, the critique of cultural stereotypes and a looser, more contextualized and
particularized approach, for instance, in his reading of a short story by Balzac in S/Z.
The narratives of the world are numberless. [ . . . ] Able to be carried by articulated
language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture
of all these substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic,
history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting (think of Carpaccio Saint Ursula ),
stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news item, conversation. Moreover, under this
almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place, in
every society. [ . . . ] Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature,
narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself. [ .
..]

Faced with the infinity of narratives, the multiplicity of standpoints -- historical,

psychological, sociological, ethnological, aesthetic, etc. -from which they can be studied,
[ . . . ] the Russian Formalists, Propp and Lévi-Strauss, have taught us to recognize the
following dilemma: either a narrative is merely a rambling collection of events, in which
case nothing can be said about it other than by referring back to the storyteller's (the
author's) art, talent or genius -- all mythical forms of chance -- or else it shares with other
narratives a common structure which is open to analysis, no matter how much patience its
formulation requires. There is a world of difference between the most complex
randomness and the most elementary combinatory scheme, and it is impossible to
combine (to produce) a narrative without reference to an implicit system of units and
rules.

Where then are we to look for the structures of narrative? Doubtless, in narratives
themselves. [ . . . ]

Thus, in order to describe and classify the infinite number of narratives, a 'theory' [ . . . ]
is needed and the immediate task is that of finding it, of starting to define it. Its
development can be greatly facilitated if one begins from a model able to provide it with
its initial terms and principles. In the current state of research, it seems

-46-

reasonable 1 that the structural analysis of narrative be given linguistics itself as founding
model.

1. The Language of Narrative

1. Beyond the sentence

As we know, linguistics stops at the sentence, the last unit which it considers to fall
within its scope. [ . . . ]

And yet it is evident that discourse itself (as a set of sentences) is organized and that,
through this organization, it can be seen as the message of another language, one
operating at a higher level than the language of the linguists. 2 Discourse has its units, its
rules, its 'grammar': beyond the sentence, and though consisting solely of sentences, it
must naturally form the object of a second linguistics. For a long time indeed, such a
linguistics of discourse bore a glorious name, that of Rhetoric. As a result of a complex
historical movement, however, in which Rhetoric went over to belles-lettres and the latter
was divorced from the study of language, it has recently become necessary to take up the
problem afresh. The new linguistics of discourse has still to be developed, but at least it is
being postulated, and by the linguists themselves. 3 This last fact is not without
significance, for, although constituting an autonomous object, discourse must be studied
from the basis of linguistics. [ . . . ]

Structurally, narrative shares the characteristics of the sentence without ever being
reducible to the simple sum of its sentences: a narrative is a long sentence, just as every
constative sentence is in a way the rough outline of a short narrative. Although there
provided with different signifiers (often extremely complex), one does find in narrative,
expanded and transformed proportionately, the principal verbal categories: tenses,
aspects, moods, persons. Moreover the 'subjects' themselves, as opposed to the verbal
predicates, readily yield to the sentence model. [ . . . ] Language never ceases to
accompany discourse, holding up to it the mirror of its own structure -- does not
literature, particularly today, make a language of the very conditions of language?

2. Levels of meaning

From the outset, linguistics furnishes the structural analysis of narrative with a concept
which is decisive in that, making explicit

-47-

immediately what is essential in every system of meaning, namely its organization, it

allows us both to show how a narrative is not a simple sum of propositions and to classify
the enormous mass of elements which go to make up a narrative. This concept is that of
level of description.

A sentence can be described, linguistically, on several levels (phonetic, phonological,

grammatical, contextual) and these levels are in a hierarchical relationship with one
another, for, while all have their own units and correlations (whence the necessity for a
separate description of each of them), no level on its own can produce meaning. A unit
belonging to a particular level only takes on meaning if it can be integrated in a higher
level; a phoneme, though perfectly describable, means nothing in itself: it participates in
meaning only when integrated in a word, and the word itself must in turn be integrated in
a sentence. 4 The theory of levels (as set out by Benveniste) gives two types of relations:
distributional (if the relations are situated on the same level) and integrational (if they are
grasped from one level to the next); consequently, distributional relations alone are not
sufficient to account for meaning. In order to conduct a structural analysis, it is thus first
of all necessary to distinguish several levels or instances of description and to place these
instances within a hierarchical (integrationary) perspective.

The levels are operations. 5 It is therefore normal that, as it progresses, linguistics should
tend to multiply them. Discourse analysis, however, is as yet only able to work on
rudimentary levels. In its own way, rhetoric had assigned at least two planes of
description to discourse: dispositio and elocutio. 6 Today, in his analysis of the structure
of myth, Lévi-Strauss has already indicated that the constituent units of mythical
discourse (mythemes) acquire meaning only because they are grouped in bundles and
because these bundles themselves combine together. 7 As too, Tzvetan Todorov, reviving
the distinction made by the Russian Formalists, proposes working on two major levels,
themselves subdivided: story (the argument), comprising a logic of actions and a 'syntax'
of characters, and discourse, comprising the tenses, aspects and modes of the narrative. 8
But however many levels are proposed and whatever definition they are given, there can
be no doubt that narrative is a hierarchy of instances. To understand a narrative is not
merely to follow the unfolding of the story, it is also to recognize its construction in
'storeys', to project the horizontal concatenations of the narrative 'thread' on to an
implicitly vertical axis; to read (to listen to) a narrative is not merely to move from one
word to the next, it is also to move from one level to the next. [ . . . ]

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It is proposed to distinguish three levels of description in the narrative work: the level of '
functions ' (in the sense this word has in Propp and Bremond), the level of ' actions ' (in
the sense this word has in Greimas when he talks of characters as actants) and the level of
' narration ' (which is roughly the level of 'discourse' in Todorov). These three levels are
bound together according to a mode of progressive integration: a function only has
meaning insofar as it occupies a place in the general action of an actant, and this action in
turn receives its final meaning from the fact that it is narrated, entrusted to a discourse
which possesses its own code.

II. Functions
1. The determination of the units

Any system being the combinations of units of known classes, the first task is to divide
up narrative and determine the segments of narrative discourse that can be distributed
into a limited number of classes. In a word, we have to define the smallest narrative units.

Given the integrational perspective described above, the analysis cannot rest satisfied
with a purely distributional definition of the units. From the start, meaning must be the
criterion of the unit: it is the functional nature of certain segments of the story that makes
them units -- hence the name 'functions' immediately attributed to these first units. Since
the Russian Formalists, 9 a unit has been taken as any segment of the story which can be
seen as the term of a correlation. The essence of a function is, so to speak, the seed that it
sows in the narrative, planting an element that will come to fruition later -- either on the
same level or elsewhere, on another level. [ . . . ]

Is everything in a narrative functional? Does everything, down to the slightest detail,

have a meaning? Can narrative be divided up entirely into functional units? [ . . . ] A
narrative is never made up of anything other than functions: in differing degrees,
everything in it signifies. This is not a matter of art (on the part of the narrator), but of
structure; in the realm of discourse, what is noted is by definition notable. [ . . . ] To put it
another way, one could say that art is without noise (as that term is employed in
information theory). 10 [ . . . ]

From the linguistic point of view, the function is clearly a unit of content: it is 'what it
says' that makes of a statement a functional unit, not the manner in which it is said. This
constitutive signified may have a number of different signifiers, often very intricate. If I
am told (in Goldfinger ) that Bond saw a man of about fifty, the piece of

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information holds simultaneously two functions of unequal pressure: on the one hand, the
character's age fits into a certain description of the man (the 'usefulness' of which for the
rest of the story is not nil, but diffuse, delayed); while on the other, the immediate
signified of the statement is that Bond is unacquainted with his future interlocutor, the
unit thus implying a very strong correlation (initiation of a threat and the need to establish
the man's identity). [ . . . ]

Functions will be represented sometimes by units higher than the sentence (groups of
sentences of varying lengths, up to the work in its entirety) and sometimes by lower ones
(syntagm, word and even, within the word, certain literary elements only). When we are
told that -- the telephone ringing during night duty at Secret Service headquarters -- Bond
picked up one of the four receivers, the moneme four in itself constitutes a functional
unit, referring as it does to a concept necessary to the story (that of a highly developed
bureaucratic technology). In fact, the narrative unit in this case is not the linguistic unit
(the word) but only its connoted value (linguistically, the word /four/ never means 'four');
which explains how certain functional units can be shorter than the sentence without
ceasing to belong to the order of discourse: such units then extend not beyond the
sentence, than which they remain materially shorter, but beyond the level of denotation
which, like the sentence, is the province of linguistics properly speaking.

2. Classes of units

The functional units must be distributed into a small number of classes. If these classes
are to be determined without recourse to the substance of content (psychological
substance for example), it is again necessary to consider the different levels of meaning:
some units have as correlates units on the same level, while the saturation of others
requires a change of levels; hence, straightaway, two major classes of functions,
distributional and integrational. The former correspond to what Propp and subsequently
Bremond (in particular) take as functions but they will be treated here in a much more
detailed way than is the case in their work. The term ' functions ' will be reserved for
these units (though the other units are also functional), the model of description for which
has become classic since Tomachevski's analysis: the purchase of a revolver has for
correlate the moment when it will be used (and if not used, the notation is reversed into a
sign of indecision, etc.) [ . . . ] As for the latter, the integrational units, these comprise all
the ' indices ' (in the very broad sense of the
-50-

word), 11 the unit now referring not to a complementary and consequential act but to a
more or less diffuse concept which is nevertheless necessary to the meaning of the story:
psychological indices concerning the characters, data regarding their identity, notations of
'atmosphere', and so on. The relation between the unit and its correlate is now no longer
distributional (often several indices refer to the same signified and the order of their
occurrence in the discourse is not necessarily pertinent) but integrational. In order to
understand what an indicial notation 'is for', one must move to a higher level (characters'
actions or narration), for only there is the indice clarified: the power of the administrative
machine behind Bond, indexed by the number of telephones, has no bearing on the
sequence of actions in which Bond is involved by answering the call; it finds its meaning
only on the level of a general typology of the actants (Bond is on the side of order). [ . . . ]
Functions and indices thus overlay another classic distinction: functions involve
metonymic relata, indices metaphoric relata; the former correspond to a functionality of
doing, the latter to a functionality of being. 12

These two main classes of units, functions and indices, should already allow a certain
classification of narratives. Some narratives are heavily functional (such as folktales),
while others on the contrary are heavily indicial (such as 'psychological' novels); between
these two poles lies a whole series of intermediary forms, dependent on history, society,
genre. But we can go further. Within each of the two main classes it is immediately
possible to determine two subclasses of narrative units. Returning to the class of
functions, its units are not all of the same 'importance': some constitute real hingepoints
of the narrative (or of a fragment of the narrative); others merely 'fill in' the narrative
space separating the hinge functions. Let us call the former cardinal functions (or nuclei )
and the latter, having regard to their complementary nature, catalysers. For a function to
be cardinal, it is enough that the action to which it refers open (or continue, or close) an
alternative that is of direct consequence for the subsequent development of the story, in
short that it inaugurate or conclude an uncertainty. [ . . . ] Between two cardinal
functions, however, it is always possible to set out subsidiary notations which cluster
around one or other nucleus without modifying its alternative nature: the space separating
the telephone rang from Bond answered can be saturated with a host of trivial incidents
or descriptions -- Bond moved towards the desk, picked up one of the receivers, put down
his cigarette, etc. These catalysers are still functional, insofar as they enter into
correlation with a nucleus, but their functionality is attenuated, unilateral, parasitic; it is a
question of a purely chronological functionality (what is described is what separates two
moments of

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the story), whereas the tie between two cardinal functions is invested with a double
functionality, at once chronological and logical. Catalysers are only consecutive units,
cardinal functions are both consecutive and consequential. [ . . . ]
Were a catalyser purely redundant (in relation to its nucleus), it would nonetheless
participate in the economy of the message. [ . . . ] Since what is noted always appears as
being notable, the catalyser ceaselessly revives the semantic tension of the discourse, says
ceaselessly that there has been, that there is going to be, meaning. Thus, in the final
analysis, the catalyser has a constant function which is, to use Jakobson's term, a phatic
one: it maintains the contact between narrator and addressee. A nucleus cannot be deleted
without altering the story, but neither can a catalyst without altering the discourse.

As for the other main class of units, the indices, an integrational class, its units have in
common that they can only be saturated (completed) on the level of characters or on the
level of narration. They are thus part of a parametrical relation 13 whose second --
implicit -- term is continuous, extended over an episode, a character or the whole work. A
distinction can be made, however, between indices proper, referring to the character of a
narrative agent, a feeling, an atmosphere (for example suspicion) or a philosophy, and
informants, serving to identify, to locate in time and space. [ . . . ] Indices involve an
activity of deciphering, the reader is to learn to know a character or an atmosphere;
informants bring ready-made knowledge, their functionality, like that of catalysers, is
thus weak without being nil. Whatever its 'flatness' in relation to the rest of the story, the
informant (for example, the exact age of a character) always serves to authenticate the
reality of the referent, to embed fiction in the real world. [ . . . ]

Nuclei and catalysers, indices and informants (again, the names are of little importance),
these, it seems, are the initial classes into which the functional level units can be divided.
This classification must be completed by two remarks. Firstly, a unit can at the same time
belong to two different classes: to drink a whisky (in an airport lounge) is an action which
can act as a catalyser to the (cardinal) notation of waiting, but it is also, and
simultaneously, the indice of a certain atmosphere (modernity, relaxation, reminiscence,
etc.). [ . . . ] Secondly, it should be noted [ . . . ] that the four classes just described can be
distributed in a different way which is moreover closer to the linguistic model.
Catalysers, indices and informants have a common characteristic: in relation to nuclei,
they are expansions. Nuclei (as will be seen in a moment) form finite sets grouping a
small

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number of terms, are governed by a logic, are at once necessary and sufficient. Once the
framework they provide is given, the other units fill it out according to a mode of
proliferation in principle infinite. [ . . . ]

3. Functional syntax

How, according to what 'grammar', are the different units strung together along the
narrative syntagm? What are the rules of the functional combinatory system? Informants
and indices can combine freely together: as for example in the portrait which readily
juxtaposes data concerning civil status and traits of character. Catalysers and nuclei are
linked by a simple relation of implication: a catalyser necessarily implies the existence of
a cardinal function to which it can connect, but not vice-versa. As for cardinal functions,
they are bound together by a relation of solidarity: a function of this type calls for another
function of the same type and reciprocally. [ . . . ]

The functional covering of the narrative necessitates an organization of relays the basic
unit of which can only be a small group of functions, hereafter referred to (following
Bremond) as a sequence.

A sequence is a logical succession of nuclei bound together by a relation of solidarity: 14

the sequence opens when one of its terms has no solidary antecedent and closes when
another of its terms has no consequent. [ . . . ] The sequence indeed is always nameable.
Determining the major functions of the folktale, Propp and subsequently Bremond have
been led to name them ( Fraud, Betrayal, Struggle, Contract, Seduction, etc.). [ . . . ] Yet
at the same time they can be imagined as forming part of an inner meta-language for the
reader (or listener) who can grasp every logical succession of actions as a nominal whole.
[...]

However minimal its importance, a sequence, since it is made up of a small number of

nuclei (that is to say, in fact, of 'dispatchers'), always involves moments of risk and it is
this which justifies analysing it. It might seem futile to constitute into a sequence the
logical succession of trifling acts which go to make up the offer of a cigarette ( offering,
accepting, lighting, smoking ), but precisely, at every one of these points, an alternative --
-and hence a freedom of meaning -- is possible. Du Pont, Bond's future partner, offers
him a light from his lighter but Bond refuses; the meaning of this bifurcation is that Bond
instinctively fears a booby-trapped gadget. 15 A sequence is thus, one can say, a
threatened logical unit, this being its justification a minimo. It is also founded a maximo :
enclosed on its function,

-53-

subsumed under a name, the sequence itself constitutes a new unit, ready to function as a
simple term in another, more extensive sequence. [ . . . ] What is in question here, of
course, is a hierarchy that remains within the functional level: it is only when it has been
possible to widen the narrative out step by step, from Du Pont's cigarette to Bond's battle
against Goldfinger, that functional analysis is over -- the pyramid of functions then
touches the next level (that of the Actions). There is both a syntax within the sequences
and a (subrogating) syntax between the sequences together. The first episode of
Goldfinger thus takes on a 'stemmatic' aspect:

Etc.

Obviously this representation is analytical; the reader perceives a linear succession of

terms. What needs to be noted, however, is that the terms from several sequences can
easily be imbricated in one another: a sequence is not yet completed when already,
cutting in, the first term of a new sequence may appear. Sequences move in counterpoint;
16
functionally, the structure of narrative is fugued: thus it is this that narrative at once
'holds' and 'pulls on'. Within the single work, the imbrication of sequences can indeed
only be allowed to come to a halt with a radical break if the sealed-off blocks which then
compose it are in some sort recuperated at the higher level of the Actions (of the
characters). Goldfinger is composed of three functionally independent episodes, their
functional stemmas twice ceasing to intercommunicate: there is no sequential relation
between the swimming-pool episode and the Fort Knox episode; but there remains an
actantial relation, for the characters (and consequently the structure of their relations) are
the same. [ . . . ] The level of functions (which provides the major part of the narrative
syntagm) must thus be capped by a higher level from which, step by step, the first level
units draw their meaning, the level of actions.

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III. Actions
1. Towards a structural status of characters

[ . . . ] Structural analysis, much concerned not to define characters in terms of

psychological essences, has so far striven, using various hypotheses, to define a character
not as a 'being' but as a 'participant'. For Bremond, every character (even secondary) can
be the agent of sequences of actions which belong to him ( Fraud, Seduction ); when a
single sequence involves two characters (as is usual), it comprises two perspectives, two
names (what is Fraud for the one is Gullibility for the other); in short, every character
(even secondary) is the hero of his own sequence. Todorov, analysing a 'psychological'
novel (Les Liaisons dangereuses ), starts not from the character-persons but from the
three major relationships in which they can engage and which he calls base predicates
(love, communication, help). The analysis brings these relationships under two sorts of
rules: rules of derivation, when it is a question of accounting for other relationships, and
rules of action, when it is a question of describing the transformation of the major
relationships in the course of the story. There are many characters in Les Liaisons
dangereuses but 'what is said of them' (their predicates) can be classified. Finally,
Greimas has proposed to describe and classify the characters of narrative not according to
what they are but according to what they do (whence the name actants ), inasmuch as
they participate in three main semantic axes (also to be found in the sentence: subject,
object, indirect object, adjunct) which are communication, desire (or quest) and ordeal. 17
Since this participation is ordered in couples, the infinite world of characters is, it too,
bound by a paradigmatic structure ( Subject/Object, Donor/ Receiver, Helper/Opponent )
which is projected along the narrative; and since an actant defines a class, it can be filled
by different actors, mobilized according to rules of multiplication, substitution or
replacement.

These three conceptions have many points in common. The most important, it must be
stressed again, is the definition of the character according to participation in a sphere of
actions, these spheres being few in number, typical and classifiable; which is why this
second level of description, despite its being that of the characters, has here been called
the level of Actions: the word actions is not to be understood in the sense of the trifling
acts which form the tissue of the first level but in that of the major articulations of praxis
(desire, communication, struggle).

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2. The problem of the subject

[ . . . ] The real difficulty posed by the classification of characters is the place (and hence
the existence) of the subject in any actantial matrix, whatever its formulation. Who is the
subject (the hero) of a narrative? Is there -- or not -- a privileged class of actors? The
novel has accustomed us to emphasize in one way or another -- sometimes in a devious
(negative) way -- one character in particular. But such privileging is far from extending
over the whole of narrative literature. Many narratives, for example, set two adversaries
in conflict over some stake; the subject is then truly double, not reducible further by
substitution. [ . . . ] If therefore a privileged class of actors is retained (the subject of the
quest, of the desire, of the action), it needs at least to be made more flexible by bringing
that actant under the very categories of the grammatical (and not psychological) person.
[ . . . ] It will -- perhaps -- be the grammatical categories of the person (accessible in our
pronouns) which will provide the key to the actional level; but since these categories can
only be defined in relation to the instance of discourse, not to that of reality, 18 characters,
as units of the actional level, find their meaning (their intelligibility) only if integrated in
the third level of description, here called the level of Narration (as opposed to Functions
and Actions).

IV. Narration
1. Narrative communication

[ . . . ] In linguistic communication, je and tu ( I and you ) are absolutely presupposed by

one another; similarly, there can be no narrative without a narrator and a listener (or
reader). Banal perhaps, but still little developed. Certainly the role of the sender has been
abundantly enlarged upon (much study of the 'author' of a novel, though without any
consideration of whether he really is the 'narrator'); when it comes to the reader, however,
literary theory is much more modest. In fact, the problem is not to introspect the motives
of the narrator or the effects the narration produces on the reader, it is to describe the
code by which narrator and reader are signified throughout the narrative itself. [ . . . ]

Who is the donor of the narrative? So far, three conceptions seem to have been
formulated. The first holds that a narrative emanates from a person (in the fully
psychological sense of the term). This person has a name, the author, [ . . . ] the narrative
(notably the

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novel) then being simply the expression of an I external to it. The second conception
regards the narrator as a sort of omniscient, apparently impersonal, consciousness that
tells the story from a superior point of view, that of God: the narrator is at once inside his
characters (since he knows everything that goes on in them) and outside them (since he
never identifies with any one more than another). The third and most recent conception
( Henry James, Sartre) decrees that the narrator must limit his narrative to what the
characters can observe or know, everything proceeding as if each of the characters in turn
were the sender of the narrative. All three conceptions are equally difficult in that they
seem to consider narrator and characters as real -- 'living' -- people (the unfailing power
of this literary myth is well known), as though a narrative were originally determined as
its referential level (it is a matter of equally 'realist' conceptions). Narrator and characters,
however, at least from our perspective, are essentially 'paper beings'; the (material) author
of a narrative is in no way to be confused with the narrator of that narrative. 19 The signs
of the narrator are immanent to the narrative and hence readily accessible to a
semiological analysis; but in order to conclude that the author himself (whether declared,
hidden or withdrawn) has 'signs' at his disposal which he sprinkles through his work, it is
necessary to assume the existence between this 'person' and his language of a straight
descriptive relation which makes the author a full subject and the narrative the
instrumental expression of that fullness. Structural analysis is unwilling to accept such an
assumption: who speaks (in the narrative) is not who writes (in real life) and who writes is
not who is. 20

In fact, narration strictly speaking (the code of the narrator), like language, knows only
two systems of signs: personal and apersonal. These two narrational systems do not
necessarily present the linguistic marks attached to person ( I ) and non-person ( he ):
there are narratives or at least narrative episodes, for example, which though written in
the third person nevertheless have as their true instance the first person. How can we tell?
It suffices to rewrite the narrative (or the passage) from he to I : so long as the rewriting
entails no alteration of the discourse other than this change of the grammatical pronouns,
we can be sure that we are dealing with a personal system. [ . . . ]

2. Narrative situation

The narrational level is thus occupied by the signs of narrativity, the set of operators
which reintegrate functions and actions in the narrative communication articulated on its
donor and its addressee.

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Some of these signs have already received study; we are familiar in oral literatures with
certain codes of recitation (metrical formulae, conventional presentation protocols) and
we know that here the 'author' is not the person who invents the finest stories but the
person who best masters the code which is practised equally by his listeners: in such
literatures the narrational level is so clearly defined, its rules so binding, that it is difficult
to conceive of a 'tale' devoid of the coded signs of narrative ( 'once upon a time' , etc.). In
our written literatures, the 'forms of discourse' (which are in fact signs of narrativity)
were early identified: classification of the modes of authorial intervention (outlined by
Plato and developed by Diomedes), 21 coding of the beginnings and endings of narratives,
definition of the different styles of representation ( oratio directa, oratio indirecta with
its inquit, oratio tecta ), 22 study of 'points of view' and so on. All these elements form
part of the narrational level, to which must obviously be added the writing as a whole, its
role being not to 'transmit' the narrative but to display it.

It is indeed precisely in a display of the narrative that the units of the lower levels find
integration: the ultimate form of the narrative, as narrative, transcends its contents and its
strictly narrative forms (functions and actions). This explains why the narrational code
should be the final level attainable by our analysis, other than by going outside of the
narrative-object, other, that is, than by transgressing the rule of immanence on which the
analysis is based. Narration can only receive its meaning from the world which makes
use of it: beyond the narrational level begins the world, other systems (social, economic,
ideological) whose terms are no longer simply narratives but elements of a different
substance (historical facts, determinations, behaviours, etc.). Just as linguistics stops at
the sentence, so narrative analysis stops at discourse -- from there it is necessary to shift
to another semiotics. Linguistics is acquainted with such boundaries which it has already
postulated -- if not explored -- under the name of situations. Halliday defines the
'situation' (in relation to a sentence) as 'the associated non-linguistic factors', 23 Prieto as
'the set of facts known by the receiver at the moment of the semic act and independently
of this act'. 24 In the same way, one can say that every narrative is dependent on a
'narrative situation', the set of protocols according to which the narrative is 'consumed'. In
so-called 'archaic' societies, the narrative situation is heavily coded; 25 nowadays, avant-
garde literature alone still dreams of reading protocols -- spectacular in the case of
Mallarmé who wanted the book to be recited in public according to a precise combinatory
scheme, typographical in that of Butor who tries to provide the book with its own specific
signs. Generally, however, our society takes the

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greatest pains to conjure away the coding of the narrative situation: [ . . . ] epistolary
novels, supposedly rediscovered manuscripts, author who met the narrator, films which
begin the story before the credits. The reluctance to declare its codes characterizes
bourgeois society and the mass culture issuing from it: both demand signs which do not
look like signs. Yet this is only, so to speak, a structural epiphenomenon: however
familiar, however casual may today be the act of opening a novel or a newspaper or of
turning on the television, nothing can prevent that humble act from installing in us, all at
once and in its entirety, the narrative code we are going to need. Hence the narrational
level has an ambiguous role: contiguous to the narrative situation (and sometimes even
including it), it gives on to the world in which the narrative is undone (consumed), while
at the same time, capping the preceding levels, it closes the narrative, constitutes it
definitively as utterance of a language [ langue ] which provides for and bears along its
own metalanguage. [ . . . ]

8 Types of Narration *

WAYNE C. BOOTH
Wayne C. Booth devotes chapter 6 of The Rhetoric of Fiction to an analysis of the
different types of narration theoretically available. As he explains, earlier classifications
of point of view, such as Norman Friedman "'Point of View'" ( 1955), are simplistic in
that they are exclusively based on the notions of first/third-person narration and the
degree of omniscence of the narrator. Although these notions are important, he contends,
further refinements should be made. He proposes a differentiation between real author,
implied author, narrator, characters and readers. The implied author is the real author's
literary version of him/herself. The narrator is the mediating instance between author and
reader, the one who tells. Figuratively placed between implied author and characters in
the narrative chain, the narrator may be closer to one or to the others. Impersonal or
'undramatized' narrators, who try to efface themselves from their narration, are often
difficult to distinguish from the implied author. 'Dramatized' narrators, that is, narrators
with a well-developed personality, are more easily perceptible in their own right. These
may choose to participate in the action as characters or 'narrator-agents', or to stand apart
as mere 'observers'. Narrators can participate in the action in different ways according to
the moral, physical and/or temporal distance separating them from the other characters
and/or from the author and reader. Thus, narrator-agents can be further classified as
'reliable' or 'unreliable' -- if their opinions and values coincide or clash with those of the
others -- and they can also be 'isolated' or 'supported' by other narrators in the story.
Finally, all kinds of narrators can choose to be omniscient -- including free access to the
minds of the characters, which is the most interesting kind of omniscience, according to
Booth -- or to limit their knowledge to what could be learned by natural means or
inference, thus producing a realism-enhancing effect.

____________________
*
WAYNE C. BOOTH, The Rhetoric of Fiction ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1961), pp. 149-64.

-145-

Booth's typology constituted a landmark in the analysis of the narrative instance.

Although some of his categories are not clearly defined and his terminology is often
tentative or misleading (for example, he often forgets his own distinction between real
author, implied author and narrator), he nevertheless coined key concepts, like 'implied
author', 'unreliable narrator' and 'distance', that would provide the basis for the more
systematic typologies of narratologists like Genette, Bal and Stanzel.

We have seen that the author cannot choose to avoid rhetoric; he can choose only the
kind of rhetoric he will employ. He cannot choose whether or not to affect his readers'
evaluations by his choice of narrative manner; he can only choose whether to do it well or
poorly. As dramatists have always known, even the purest of dramas is not purely
dramatic in the sense of being entirely presented, entirely shown as taking place in the
moment. There are always what Dryden called 'relations' to be taken care of, and try as
the author may to ignore the troublesome fact, 'some parts of the action are more fit to be
represented, some to be related.' 1 But related by whom? The dramatist must decide, and
the novelist's case is different only in that the choices open to him are more numerous.
If we think through the many narrative devices in the fiction we know, we soon come to a
sense of the embarrassing inadequacy of our traditional classification of 'point of view'
into three or four kinds, variables only of the 'person' and the degree of omniscience. If
we name over three or four of the great narrators -- say Cervantes' Cide Hamete
Benengeli, Tristram Shandy, the 'I' of Middlemarch, and Strether, through whose vision
most of The Ambassadors comes to us, we realize that to describe any of them with terms
like 'first-person' and 'omniscient' tells us nothing about how they differ from each other,
or why they succeed while others described in the same terms fail. It should be worth our
while, then, to attempt a richer tabulation of the forms the author's voice can take.

Person

Perhaps the most overworked distinction is that of person. To say that a story is told in
the first or the third person 2 will tell us nothing of importance unless we become more
precise and describe how the particular qualities of the narrators relate to specific effects.
It is true that choice of the first person is sometimes unduly limiting; if the 'I' has
inadequate access to necessary information, the author may be led into improbabilities.
And there are other effects that may dictate

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a choice in some cases. But we can hardly expect to find useful criteria in a distinction
that throws all fiction into two, or at most three, heaps. In this pile we see Henry Esmond,
"'A Cask of Amontillado,'" Gulliver's Travels, and Tristram Shandy. In that, we have
Vanity Fair, Tom Jones, The Ambassadors, and Brave New World. But in Vanity Fair and
Tom Jones the commentary is in the first person, often resembling more the intimate
effect of Tristram Shandy than that of many third-person works. And again, the effect of
The Ambassadors is much closer to that of the great first-person novels, since Strether in
large part 'narrates' his own story, even though he is always referred to in the third
person.

Further evidence that this distinction is less important than has often been claimed is seen
in the fact that all of the following functional distinctions apply to both first- and third-
person narration alike.

Dramatized and undramatized narrators

Perhaps the most important differences in narrative effect depend on whether the narrator
is dramatized in his own right and on whether his beliefs and characteristics are shared by
the author.

The implied author (the author's 'second self'). -- Even the novel in which no narrator
is dramatized creates an implicit picture of an author who stands behind the scenes,
whether as stage manager, as puppeteer, or as an indifferent God, silently paring his
fingernails. This implied author is always distinct from the 'real man' -- whatever we may
take him to be -- who creates a superior version of himself, a 'second self', as he creates
his work.

In so far as a novel does not refer directly to this author, there will be no distinction
between him and the implied, undramatized narrator; in Hemingway 'The Killers,' for
example, there is no narrator other than the implicit second self that Hemingway creates
as he writes.

Undramatized narrators. -- Stories are usually not so rigorously impersonal as 'The

Killers' ; most tales are presented as passing through the consciousness of a teller,
whether an 'I' or a 'he.' Even in drama much of what we are given is narrated by someone,
and we are often as much interested in the effect on the narrator's own mind and heart as
we are in learning what else the author has to tell us. When Horatio tells of his first
encounter with the ghost in Hamlet, his own character, though never mentioned, is
important to us as we listen. In fiction, as soon as we encounter an 'I,' we are conscious of
an experiencing mind whose views of the experience will come between us and the event.
When there is no such 'I,' as in

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'The Killers,' the inexperienced reader may make the mistake of thinking that the story
comes to him urumediated. But no such mistake can be made from the moment that the
author explicitly places a narrator into the tale, even if he is given no personal
characteristics whatever.

Dramatized narrators. -- In a sense even the most reticent narrator has been dramatized
as soon as he refers to himself as 'I,' or, like Flaubert, tells us that 'we' were in the
classroom when Charles Bovary entered. But many novels dramatize their narrators with
great fulness, making them into characters who are as vivid as those they tell us about (
Tristram Shandy, Remembrance of Things Past, Heart of Darkness, Dr. Faustus ). In
such works the narrator is often radically different from the implied author who creates
him. The range of human types that have been dramatized as narrators is almost as great
as the range of other fictional characters -- one must say 'almost' because there are some
characters who are not fully qualified to narrate or 'reflect' a story ( Faulkner can use the
idiot for part of his novel only because the other three parts exist to set off and clarify the
idiot's jumble). *

We should remind ourselves that many dramatized narrators are never explicitly labeled
as narrators at all. In a sense, every speech, every gesture, narrates; most works contain
disguised narrators who are used to tell the audience what it needs to know, while
seeming merely to act out their roles.

Though disguised narrators of this kind are seldom labeled so explicitly as God in Job,
they often speak with an authority as sure as God's. Messengers returning to tell what the
oracle said, wives trying to convince their husbands that the business deal is unethical,
old family retainers expostulating with wayward scions -- these often have more effect on
us than on their official auditors; the king goes ahead with his obstinate search, the
husband carries out his deal, the hell-hound youth goes on toward hell as if nothing had
been said, but we know what we know -- and as surely as if the author himself of his
official narrator had told us. [. . . ]

The most important unacknowledged narrators in modern fiction are the third-person
'centers of consciousness' through whom authors have filtered their narratives. Whether
such 'reflectors,' as James sometimes called them, are highly polished mirrors reflecting
complex mental experience, or the rather turbid, sense-bound 'camera eyes' of much
fiction since James, they fill precisely the function of avowed narrators -- though they
can add intensities of their own. [...]

____________________
*
Benjy, in The Sound and the Fury [editor's note].

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Observers and narrator-agents

Among dramatized narrators there are mere observers (the 'I' of Tom Jones, The Egoist,
Troilus and Criseyde ), and there are narrator-agents, who produce some measurable
effect on the course of events (ranging from the minor involvement of Nick in The Great
Gatsby, through the extensive give-and-take of Marlow in Heart of Darkness, to the
central role of Tristram Shandy, Moll Flanders, Huckleberry Finn, and -- in the third
person -- Paul Morel in Sons and Lovers ). Clearly, any rules we might discover about
observers may not apply to narratoragents, yet the distinction is seldom made in talk
about point of view.

Scene and summary

All narrators and observers, whether first or third person, can relay their tales to us
primarily as scene ( "'The Killers,'" The Awkward Age, the works of Ivy Compton-
Burnett and Henry Green), primarily as summary or what Lubbock called 'picture'
( Addison's almost completely non-scenic tales in The Spectator ), or, most commonly, as
a combination of the two.

Like Aristotle's distinction between dramatic and narrative manners, the somewhat
different modern distinction between showing and telling does cover the ground. But the
trouble is that it pays for broad coverage with gross imprecision. Narrators of all shapes
and shades must either report dialogue alone or support it with 'stage directions' and
description of setting. But when we think of the radically different effect of a scene
reported by Huck Finn and a scene reported by Poe's Montresor, we see that the quality
of being 'scenic' suggests very little about literary effect. And compare the delightful
summary of twelve years given in two pages of Tom Jones (Book III, chap. i) with the
tedious showing of even ten minutes of uncurtailed conversation in the hands of a Sartre
when he allows his passion for 'durational realism' to dictate a scene when summary is
called for.[. . .] The contrast between scene and summary, between showing and telling,
is likely to be of little use until we specify the kind of narrator who is providing the scene
or the summary.

Commentary

Narrators who allow themselves to tell as well as show vary greatly depending on the
amount and kind of commentary allowed in addition to a direct relating of events in scene
and summary. Such commentary

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can, of course, range over any aspect of human experience, and it can be related to the
main business in innumerable ways and degrees. To treat it as a single device is to ignore
important differences between commentary that is merely ornamental, commentary that
serves a rhetorical purpose but is not part of the dramatic structure, and commentary that
is integral to the dramatic structure, as in Tristram Shandy.
Self-conscious narrators
Cutting across the distinction between observers and narrator-agents of all these kinds is
the distinction between self-conscious narrators aware of themselves as writers ( Tom
Jones, Tristram Shandy, Barchester Towers, The Catcher in the Rye, Remembrance of
Things Past, Dr. Faustus ), and narrators or observers who rarely if ever discuss their
writing chores ( Huckleberry Finn ) or who seem unaware that they are writing, thinking,
speaking, or 'reflecting' a literary work ( Camus The Stranger, Lardner 'Haircut,' Bellow
The Victim ).
Variations of distance
Whether or not they are involved in the action as agents or as sufferers, narrators and
third-person reflectors differ markedly according to the degree and kind of distance that
separates them from the author, the reader, and the other characters of the story. In any
reading experience there is an implied dialogue among author, narrator, the characters,
and the reader. Each of the four can range, in relation to each of the others, from
identification to complete opposition, on any axis of value, moral, intellectual, aesthetic,
and even physical. (Does the reader who stammers react to the stammering of H. C.
Earwicker as I do? Surely not.) [. . .]
1. The narrator may be more or less distant from the implied author. The distance may
be moral (Jason vs. Faulkner, the barber vs. Lamer, the narrator vs. Fielding in
Jonathan Wild ). It may be intellectual ( Twain and Huck Finn, Sterne and Tristram
Shandy on the influence of noses, Richardson and Clarissa). It may be physical or
temporal: most authors are distant even from the most knowing narrator in that they
presumably know how 'everything turns out in the end.' And so on.
2. The narrator also may be more or less distant from the characters in the story he
tells. He may differ morally, intellectually, and temporally (the mature narrator and
his younger self in Great Expectations or Redburn ); morally and intellectually
( Fowler the

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narrator and Pyle the American in Greene The Quiet American, both
departing radically from the author's norms but in different directions);
morally and emotionally ( Maupassant 'The Necklace,' and Huxley 'Nuns
at Luncheon,' in which the narrators affect less emotional involvement
than Maupassant and Huxley clearly expect from the reader); and thus
on through every possible trait.
2. The narrator
may be more
or less distant
from the
reader 's own
norms; for
example,
physically and
emotionally
( Kafka The
Metamorphosi
s ); morally
and
emotionally
(Pinkie in
Brighton Rock,
the miser in
Mauriac Knot
of Vipers, and
the many other
moral
degenerates
that modern
fiction has
managed to
make into
convincing
human beings).

With the
repudiation of
omniscient
narration, and
in the face of
inherent
limitations in
dramatized
reliable
narrators, it is
hardly
surprising that
modern
authors have
experimented
with unreliable
narrators
whose
characteristics
change in the
course of the
works they
narrate. [. . .]
The mature
Pip, in Great
Expectations,
is presented as
a generous
man whose
heart is where
the reader's is
supposed to be;
he watches his
young self
move away
from the
reader, as it
were, and then
back again.
But the third-
person
reflector can be
shown,
technically in
the past tense
but in effect
present before
our eyes,
moving toward
or away from
values that the
reader holds
dear. Authors
in the twentieth
century have
proceeded
almost as if
determined to
work out all of
the possible
plot forms
based on such
shifts: start far
and end near;
start near,
move far, and
end near; start
far and move
farther; and so
on. [. . .]

The implied
author may be
more or less
distant from
the reader. The
distance may
be intellectual
(the implied
author of
Tristram
Shandy, not of
course to be
identified with
Tristram, more
interested in
and knowing
more about
recondite
classical lore
than any of his
readers), moral
(the works of
Sade), or
aesthetic. From
the author's
viewpoint, a
successful
reading of his
book must
eliminate all
 distance
between the
essential norms
of his implied
author and the
norms of the
postulated
reader. [. . .]
3. The implied
author
(carrying the
reader with
him) may be
more or less
distant from
other
characters.
Again, the
distance can be
on any axis of
value. [. . .]

What we call
'involvement'
or 'sympathy'
or
'identification,'
is usually made
up of many
reactions to
author,
narrators,
observers, and
other
characters.
And narrators
may differ
from their
authors or
readers in
various kinds
of involvement
or detachment,
ranging from
deep personal
 concern (Nick
in The Great
Gatsby,
MacKellar in
The Master of
Ballantrae,
Zeitblom in
Dr. Faustus )
to a bland or
mildly amused
or merely
curious
detachment
( Waugh
Decline and
Fall ).

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For practical criticism probably the most important of these kinds of distance is that
between the fallible or unreliable narrator and the implied author who carries the reader
with him in judging the narrator. If the reason for discussing point of view is to find how
it relates to literary effects, then surely the moral and intellectual qualities of the narrator
are more important to our judgment than whether he is referred to as 'I' or 'he,' or whether
he is privileged or limited. If he is discovered to be untrustworthy, then the total effect of
the work he relays to us is transformed.

Our terminology for this kind of distance in narrators is almost hopelessly inadequate.
For lack of better terms, I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in
accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say, the implied author's norms),
unreliable when he does not. It is true that most of the great reliable narrators indulge in
large amounts of incidental irony, and they are thus 'unreliable' in the sense of being
potentially deceptive. But difficult irony is not sufficient to make a narrator unreliable.
Nor is unreliability ordinarily a matter of lying, although deliberately deceptive narrators
have been a major resource of some modern novelists ( Camus' The Fall, Calder
Willingham Natural Child, etc.). It is most often a matter of what James calls
inconscience ; the narrator is mistaken, or he believes himself to have qualities which the
author denies him. Or, as in Huckleberry Finn, the narrator claims to be naturally wicked
while the author silently praises his virtues behind his back.

Unreliable narrators thus differ markedly depending on how far and in what direction
they depart from their author's norms; the older term 'tone,' like the currently fashionable
terms 'irony' and 'distance,' covers many effects that we should distinguish. Some
narrators, like Barry Lyndon, are placed as far 'away' from author and reader as possible,
in respect to every virtue except a kind of interesting vitality. Some, like Fleda Vetch, the
reflector in James The Spoils of Poynton, come close to representing the author's ideal of
taste, judgment, and moral sense. All of them make stronger demands on the reader's
powers of inference than do reliable narrators.

Variations in support or correction

Both reliable and unreliable narrators can be unsupported or uncorrected by other

narrators ( Gully Jimson in The Horse's Mouth, Henderson in Bellow Henderson the
Rain King ) or supported or corrected ( The Master of Ballantrae, The Sound and the
Fury ). Sometimes it is almost impossible to infer whether or to what degree

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a narrator is fallible; sometimes explicit corroborating or conflicting testimony makes the

inference easy. Support or correction differs radically, it should be noted, depending on
whether it is provided from within the action, so that the narrator-agent might benefit
from it in sticking to the right line or in changing his own views ( Faulkner Intruder in
the Dust ), or is simply provided externally, to help the reader correct or reinforce his
own views as against the narrator's ( Graham Greene The Power and the Glory ).
Obviously, the effects of isolation will be extremely different in the two cases.

Privilege

Observers and narrator-agents, whether self-conscious or not, reliable or not, commenting

or silent, isolated or supported, can be either privileged to know what could not be
learned by strictly natural means or limited to realistic vision and inference. Complete
privilege is what we usually call omniscience. But there are many kinds of privilege, and
very few 'omniscient' narrators are allowed to know or show as much as their authors
know. [. . .]

The most important single privilege is that of obtaining an inside view of another
character, because of the rhetorical power that such a privilege conveys upon a narrator.
There is a curious ambiguity in the term 'omniscience.' Many modern works that we
usually classify as narrated dramatically, with everything relayed to us through the
limited views of the characters, postulate fully as much omniscience in the silent author
as Fielding claims for himself. Our roving visitation into the minds of sixteen characters
in Faulkner As I Lay Dying, seeing nothing but what those minds contain, may seem in
one sense not to depend on an omniscient author. But this method is omniscience with
teeth in it: the implied author demands our absolute faith in his powers of divination. We
must never for a moment doubt that he knows everything about each of these sixteen
minds or that he has chosen correctly how much to show of each. In short, impersonal
narration is really no escape from omniscience -the true author is as 'unnaturally' all-
knowing as he ever was. [. . .]

Inside views
Finally, narrators who provide inside views differ in the depth and the axis of their
plunge. Boccaccio can give inside views, but they

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are extremely shallow. Jane Austen goes relatively deep morally, but scarcely skims the
surface psychologically. All authors of stream-ofconsciousness narration presumably
attempt to go deep psychologically, but some of them deliberately remain shallow in the
moral dimension. We should remind ourselves that any sustained inside view, of
whatever depth, temporarily turns the character whose mind is shown into a narrator;
inside views are thus subject to variations in all of the qualities we have described above,
and most importantly in the degree of unreliability. Generally speaking, the deeper our
plunge, the more unreliability we will accept without loss of sympathy.

Narration is an art, not a science, but this does not mean that we are necessarily doomed
to fail when we attempt to formulate principles about it. There are systematic elements in
every art, and criticism of fiction can never avoid the responsibility of trying to explain
technical successes and failures by reference to general principles. But we must always
ask where the general principles are to be found. [. . .]

In dealing with the types of narration, the critic must always limp behind, referring
constantly to the varied practice which alone can correct his temptations to
overgeneralize. [. . .]