When talking about narration, Zhao Yiheng once concluded: "Narratology is actually a fairly well-organized discipline... In the humanities, such good things are almost unique. Although in his later writing, because of the complex mutations involving huge and complex characters, people, and personnel, Zhao Yiheng shouted that "the original judgment is probably too optimistic", but narratology is still comfortable because it is in a world of thousands of novels, but it can extract an analysis method close to "formula".
Zhao Yiheng believes that a story is a collection of symbols, and that symbols constitute a text that can be read by the recipient to unify the meaning and temporal dimension, so that it can be interpreted and analyzed, and the narrator interpretation of the novel also allows readers to jump out of the bizarre individual text and gain a macroscopic perspective.
When the Speaker Is Spoken: An Introduction to Comparative Narratology was written in 1998 and recently republished by Guangxi Normal University Press, Xinmin Shuo. This book mainly introduces the narrative behavior, narrative subject, narrative level, narrative time, narrative orientation, language behavior in narrative, plot, meaning of narrative form, etc. When it comes to narration, non-professional researchers will always feel very complicated at first glance, but because narratology mainly focuses on the study of artistic textual narratives, that is, literary narratives (mainly including novels and narrative poems), this makes the study of narratology full of concrete and perceptible analytical cases, which can quickly arouse the interest of readers.
"When the Speaker is Spoken"
The following is an example of the interpretation of "narrator" in the book "When the Speaker is Spoken: An Introduction to Comparative Narratology" to see how narrator in text is understood in narratology.
The narrator in the text of the novel
As the main title "When the Speaker is Spoken" suggests, Zhao Yiheng argues that not only the narrative text is narrated by the narrator, but also by the narrator himself. The first concept to be clarified in narratology is that the narrator is not equal to the author, and Zhao Yiheng used the main body of the narrative of "Reminiscing Like Water" as an example to say:
The first volume of "Reminiscence of the Watery Years", "The Road of the Swanjia", was published in 1913, and the last volume, "Time Lost and Regained", was compiled after the author's death (1922). According to the plot in the work, the narrator Marcel did not decide to sit down and write until five or six years after the end of the world war, that is, about 1924. The narrator Marcel "decides" to tell the story of Marcel, which began to be narrated ten years ago, two years after the death of the author Marcel (Marcel Proust).
Therefore, in the text of "Reminiscence of Water" alone, Marcel can be divided into three "people": the narrator Marcel, the protagonist Marcel, and the author Marcel Proust. The narrator, Marcel, is not the author, Marcel Proust; The narrator Marcel is also not the protagonist Marcel (the narrator Marcel is mature, deep and good at observation and analysis, and the narrated protagonist Marcel is passionate, impulsive, and instinctively acting; The narrator Marcel begins to narrate the act at some point after the end of the entire plot, and the narrated Marcel begins to experience all the events narrated in the novel from a young age).
"Reminiscing Like Water" 2022 new edition
Thus, when defining "narrator", Zhao Yiheng said: "In oral narration, the narrator is concrete, the listener (the narrator) directly perceives his material existence, he is a flesh-and-blood person. In artistic narrative texts, the narrator becomes an abstract personality, a link in the act of dramatizing the narrative. The narrator is by no means the author, and the author writes with the assumption that he is transcribing the narrator's words. Throughout the narrative text, every word comes from the narrator and never comes directly from the author. ”
In short, regarding the narrative subject in the text, it is necessary to clarify the relationship between several concepts such as author, implied author, narrator and novel characters.
The implicit author is a hypothetical personification inducted from the text, just a certain part of the author's personality, or a variant of that part. We should infer or choose the author's personality from the implicit author, and not define the implicit author by the author's personality; The narrator is the practical application of the implied author, and the narrator can be the author himself, the fictional character, or the implicit author.
The characters, narrators, and implicit authors in the novel may agree, may disagree, or may completely conflict, thus dramatizing the process of meaning of the narrative and straining and complex internal relations of the narrative.
Illustration of Lu Xun's short story "On the Restaurant", Lu Xun's novel text often has a foreign or returning observer "I" as the main narrator, and this "I" is not necessarily the author Lu Xun himself.
On the contrary, it is also necessary to distinguish the relationship between the concepts of reader, implicit reader, narrator and novel characters: the implicit reader is the recipient and echo of the set of values inferred from the analysis and criticism of the content form of the narrative work, and is the object of the presumed author's assumption that he will respond to his opinion; The reader is not necessarily an implied reader; The narrator can be a fictional character, an implicit reader, or even a reader when the author speaks up.
The only reliable "implied author"
In the "Implied Author and Implicit Reader" section of When the Speaker is Spoken, Zhao Yiheng uses many concrete cases to illustrate the importance of understanding the differences between these concepts in understanding the text.
Zhao Yiheng believes that the so-called author related to narrative analysis is a personality summarized and inferred from the narrative, this personality represents a series of social and cultural forms, personal psychology and the value of literary concepts, and the author of narrative analysis is a collection of these moral, customary, psychological and aesthetic values and concepts, and this personality that can be called the author's "second self" is a personality created by the author through the writing of the work.
For narratology, only this author's "second self" is a real, reliable, palpable, critical, analyzable personality. If we are not friends with the author, we as readers can only deal with this second personality. The second personality of this author, which modern literary theory generally calls the "implied author", is inferred from the content and form of the work.
Zhao Yiheng believes in this:
The concept of implicit authorship is essential to modern literary criticism. At present, many of the confusing statements in mainland criticism circles stem from confusing authors with implicit authors, believing that the values in the work must be part of the author's ideology.
For example, there are two completely different Bai Juyi poems and idle poems, which have long been known to us, and the poems and words written by the Song people are often judged by the two. The implied author of the Eclipse trilogy is very different from the implied author of "Midnight" or "Lin Family Shop": the former is warm and sad, the latter is calm and observant. Wayne Booth once cited the example of the British writer Henry Fielding and argued that his three major works had three completely different implicit authors: the implicit author of "The Great Man Janneson Verde" was "very concerned with public affairs and worried that careerists might harm society if they seized power"; the implied author of "Amilia" was a preachy moralist, while the implied author of "Joseph Andrew" was a cynical optimist.
Mao Dun "Midnight"
Comparing authors and implicit authors, Zhao Yiheng believes that, generally speaking, implicit authors are nobler than authors, because implicit authors are affected by factors such as social morality, customs, aesthetic values and cultural forms, so compared with the author himself, implicit authors are inclined to morality and social values. But there are also works that intentionally or unintentionally show certain incorrect values of the implied author, so as not to be nobler than the real author.
Coming to the reader's side, the situation becomes more complicated.
Zhao Yiheng said that the reader is the most volatile factor in literary analysis and can never be fixed. If the "read meaning" is done by a specific reader, there is no possibility of generalization, and researchers can only try to summarize an abstract reader with the ability to read meaning. This reader, Belinsky called the "readership"; Richards called it the "ideal reader"; Yan Busun is called "a reader with legitimate ability"; Yaos calls it a "real reader"; Rifatel called it a "super-reader"; Fisher is called a "knowledgeable reader", Eco is called a "model reader"...
Start with the core concept of "narrator" in the text
Returning again to the "narrator", "narrator" is a central concept in a text, and the degree and manner in which this identity is represented in the text, as well as the implied choices, give character to the text. The first thing we have to face in a text is also the narrator.
When the Speaker is Spoken is roughly centered on the narrator, as in Chapter 3, it discusses that there may be many narrators in a text and different narrative levels that follow these narrators. Zhao Yiheng focuses on the most complex narrative work in classical Chinese novels, "Dream of the Red Chamber", and "Mirror Flower Edge", which brought "roundabout layering" to Chinese novels for the first time.
The narrative layering in "Dream of the Red Mansion"
In the text, there are only two ways for the narrator to describe himself, one is to let himself appear in the narrative as a character, which is the appearance narrator and character, for example, there are many places in "Blessing" to write the psychological activity of "I"; The second is to indirectly show one's thoughts through comments on the people and events in the narrative, such as the large number of narrator comments in "A Q True Story". In addition, the narrator has a privilege: he can point the finger at the narrative. The narrator's comments about the narrative are called interventions. There can be two types of interventions, interventions on narrative forms can be called pointing interventions, and interventions on narrative content can be called commentary interventions. This section is expanded in the second chapter of the book.
Understanding narrators and narrative layers is important for discussing a text, such as the narrator in Lu Xun's novels often presents interesting and diverse faces, with multiple narrative levels, such as Blessing, which has three distinct narrative levels:
The first level: "I" experience in Luzhen, "I" saw Xianglin's sister-in-law asking for food, and finally "I" heard the news of Xianglin's sister-in-law's death;
The second level: "I" recounts the memories of Xianglin's sister-in-law's life;
The third level: In the memories of "me", Mrs. Wei told the fourth aunt three times about the situation of Xianglin's sister-in-law, and Xianglin's sister-in-law herself told how her son died.
Related to the narrator's layering of narratives is the concept of "narrative time" in chapter 4 and "narrative orientation" in chapter 5. In general, any narrative is a flashback, and time can also be deformed, such as flashbacks, interludes, and so on; The narrative orientation is the narrative perspective, the narrator's narrative perspective in the text can be omniscient or restrictive, the omniscient perspective can be author's or implicit author's...
In addition, the narrator in the text, although heavily relied upon, is not necessarily reliable. The narrator Booth has listed six reasons for the unreliability of narratives: the narrator is greedy (such as Jason, the third narrator in "Hustle and Commotion"); dementia (such as Bangui, the second narrator in "Noise and Commotion"); gullibility (Dowling in Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldiers); mental and moral retardation (Marcher in Henry James' The Beast and the Jungle); confusion, lack of confidence (Marlowe in Conrad's "Master Jim"); Naive (Huck in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn).
Zhao Yiheng believes that this is only one of the criteria for evaluating the reliability of the narrative, and it is interesting that modern society is overly civilized, and those who are not culturally sufficient are more morally reliable, such as the animal narrator in Natsume Soseki's "I Am a Cat", the prostitute in Lao She's "Crescent Moon" and so on.
Natsume Soseki《My Heart Cat》
【Introduction】Zhao Yiheng, born in 1945, from Guilin, Guangxi. Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, he taught at the Oriental College, University of London, UK, and is currently a professor of semiotics-narration at Sichuan University, and a doctoral supervisor in comparative literature and world literature and semiotics. He is the author of "The Distressed Narrator: The Narrative Form of Chinese Fiction and Chinese Culture", "Principles and Deductions of Semiotics", "Generalized Narration", "Interesting Semiotics", "Desert and Sand" and so on.