The Monstrator, the Recitant, and the Shadow of the Narrator

Abstract

Abstract This article provides the base for a narratology that is specific to comics. It takes into account the irrefutable presence of an agent responsible for graphic enunciation, the monstrator, and on the basis of a case study (Franquin, Jidehem and Greg's album, The Shadow of Z) it deducts that the instance of the recitant is responsible for verbal enunciation. The necessity to distinguish these two instances from that of the fundamental narrator is collaborated by the different positions that can be adapted with respect to storytelling. In Systeme de la bande dessinee ['The System of Comics'] I consciously and deliberately put aside the question of the 'different enunciative instances' ['differentes instances de l'enonciation'] (see p. 187) and the elaboration of a narratology unique to comics.1 Some 11 years later I now take up the topic. Up to now, comics theory has not had much to say on the subject. This silence can be taken as a sign of the difficulty of this problematic when it comes to the Ninth Art, or it can be read as indicating that the question has not seemed to be of primary importance. The difficulty of a narratology of comics lies in its polysemiotic nature. It combines text and image in varying proportions. I postulate that both are fully engaged in narration. It is not a question of having, on one hand, a text that recounts (and therefore would be diegetic) and, on the other, images that display (therefore solely mimetic). In Systeme de la bande dessinee my aim was precisely to demonstrate that a substantial part of the narration occurs in and through the images and their different levels of articulation. In other words, there is undoubtedly a gap [une dissociation] between what is told [le dit] with words and what is shown [le montre] by drawings, but what is shown is in itself something that is said told [un dit]. Furthermore I had defined comics as an 'espece (au sein du genre narratif) a dominante visuelle' ['a predominantly visual species (within a narrative genre)'].2 The few critics who have attempted to elaborate a narratology of comics have examined to what extent the concepts of literary narratology could be applied to it,3 and have filled things in with borrowings from film narratology. For Gerard Genette, narratology has to address the questions of 'who is speaking' and 'who sees'. These questions define a perspective that Genette describes through the concept of focalisation. He speaks of zero focalisation, when the narrator is omniscient and gives us access to the thoughts and emotions of each character; internal focalisation, when the takes on a single character's viewpoint; and external focalisation, when the characters are presented from the exterior, with no access to their inner selves. The cinema theoretician Andre Gardies has approached the problem in slightly different terms, by recognising three possible types of polarisation: the polarity is on the character's side if, as spectator, I know as much about events as he or she does; it is on the spectator's side, on my side, if I have a feeling of omniscience; and it is on the enunciator's side if the person telling the story knows more than I do.4 Other cinema specialists (above all Andre Gaudreault and Francois Jost) have also underlined the necessary distinction between seeing and knowing. The question of the knowledge that is held respectively by the narrator, the character and the reader is indeed distinct from that of the perceptive focus [le foyer perceptif]. There is no zero focalisation in cinema because everything that is shown is seen through a lens and the camera always occupies a specific position. Francois Jost has formulated the concept of ocularisation to account for the camera's placement and the point of view that the placement translates or suggests.5 I take it as a given that the notion of perceptive focus is not restricted to cinema, even if the existence of camera movements gives it specific traits. …