Unspeakable Images: On the Interplay between Verbal and Iconic Narration in Benedetti's "Cinco anõs de vida"

Abstract

This article deals with the relationship between verbal narrative and images (iconic narrative) in the illustrated edition of a short story by Mario Benedetti, Cinco anos de vida, taken from Historias de Paris . It forms a companion piece to an article I published in 2013 on the relationship between (verbal) narration and fiction in this short story, particularly its ending. The theoretical framework of the present article is that of transmedial narratology. From transmedial narratology, I retain five major propositions which are presented in the first section. There is one proposition, however, which I cannot accept. It concerns the necessary presence of a fictional narrator in every fictional verbal narrative. In my 2013 article, I tried to show that the analysis of a fictional third person narrative like Cinco anos de vida could completely dispense with the concept of a fictional narrator. What I would like to show here is that this approach does not contradict the other propositions of transmedial narratology, nor an analysis based on these propositions. My position is that there are fictional narratives with and without a fictional narrator, but this opposition does not correspond to an opposition between media, namely between (verbal) language and other media. The two forms of fictional narrative coexist in some media, but not in all. The demonstration also rests on the interview I had with the painter Antonio Segui in his workshop in Arcueil, near Paris, on June 29, 2015.