Instances frontières et angélisme narratif

Abstract

Dominique Maingueneau : Borderline beings and narrative "angelism" This article, based on some concepts of discourse analysis and of the linguistics of enunciation, deals with fuzzy relationships between narrator and character in novelistic narration. The author studies especially two notions that he has already introduced in previous works: "generic character" and "witness- narrator", in order to give them a more precise definition. A distinction is made between "unidentifiable character" and "any member of a group", as enunciative positions in the narrative. The next step is the introduction of a new notion, "narrative angelism", which makes it possible to analyse some short passages beyond the scope of classical narration. Two examples (from Zola and Mauriac) are commented. It is argued that such phenomena, which are very few, are narrowly bound with the resources of a given language (for example, French writers can use the subject pronoun "on") and with the aesthetic universe of the works in which they appear.