The Story/Discourse Distinction

Abstract

The Story/Discourse Distinction Emma Kafalenos (bio) James Phelan is the best reader of first-person fiction I know. But in his work on character narration he deprives himself of a major resource: the story/discourse distinction. Further, in his essay on character–character dialogue and probability to which this issue of Style is devoted, he proposes that the story/discourse distinction blinds theorists to the role of character–character dialogue as narration. "Characters," he says, "fall on the story side of the binary distinction" ("Multiple Channels of Communication"). He is wrong about this; characters fall on both sides of the distinction. Character narration and character–character dialogue are aspects of discourse. Probability (probable impossibilities and improbable possibilities), in contrast, is an aspect of story. [End Page 39] Story is the content plane: who does what, when, and where. Discourse is the expression plane: a representation of story in language or some other medium. The section headings in Gérard Genette's Narrative Discourse (note the word "discourse" in the title) name aspects of discourse: order, duration, frequency, focalization, and voice.1 The Russian Formalists (c. 1915–30), who were the first to describe the two trajectories, were interested primarily in discourse—including character–character dialogue. According to D. W. Fokkema, the Formalists devoted most of their attention to the formal aspects of literature. In the field of narratology they investigated the way in which the various episodes of a story are connected; they examined the technique of the frame-story and the relations, often family relations, between characters. Their primary interest was to discover the technique of how a story was made. The conversation between characters is not interpreted in isolation, but seen as a means for advancing the action by introducing new material. (160) The character–character dialogue that the Formalists recognize can forward the plot is an aspect of discourse, as is the intermingling of the golfer's, Luster's, and Benjy's voices that Phelan perceives is complex communication. The Formalists seem to have conceived of story as preexisting discourse. In some of the examples they studied, story even had a prior existence as a folktale, which was then retold in a new, presumably more interesting, more aesthetically pleasing discourse. That is not the case for the French Structuralists for whom story and discourse are synchronic. In Seymour Chatman's description, for instance, Structuralism "does not assume that either telling or told 'precede' each other: they are coexistent, cotemporal parts of the model" ("On Deconstructing Narratology," 14). And now that we have seen the repeated questioning of the possibility of communication by twentieth-century thinkers Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and others,2 theorists can now argue, as I do, that discourse precedes story. When I read a narrative, what I perceive is the discourse. In the process of reading the discourse, I construct the story. One reason that the temporal position of story in relation to discourse matters is that it affects the communication diagram. For me, the communication diagram has two parts, text and reader. For Phelan, "the two constants in the communication [are] the somebody who tells and the somebody who [End Page 40] listens," author and reader ("Authors, Resources, Audiences"). His diagram begins with the author and ends with the reader. And he is right that "theorists who want to reject the implied author as the constructor of the text have far more in common with rhetorical theorists than those who want to reject the implied author [as I do] because they believe meanings arise primarily out of text-audience interactions" (#4 in "Chart"). At issue is the epistemological status, in the story a given reader constructs, of the elements that are not specifically stated in discourse. Among these unstated elements are the rhetorical intentions of the author, the implied author, and (with exceptions) the narrator. In much of his published work, Phelan analyzes unreliability by comparing what a narrating character says to what Phelan claims that the author or the implied author intended readers to understand. Poetics is the study of how works achieve the effects they do. Famously, Aristotle determines the effects of plays he admires...