On Narrative Studies and Narrative Genres

Author(s): Gerald Prince

Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 11, No. 2, Narratology Revisited I (Summer, 1990), pp. 271-282
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1772616
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On NarrativeStudiesand NarrativeGenres
Gerald Prince
Romance Languages, Pennsylvania

In the past two or three decades, students of narrative have very much
consolidated and developed our knowledge by isolating, (re)characterizing, and (re)classifying a large number of features distinctive of or
pertinent to (verbal) narrative (see Adam 1985; Genette 1980, 1988;
Mitchell 1981; Prince 1987; Scholes and Kellogg 1966). In the area
of narrative discourse (that of the narrating rather than the narrated,
the representing and not the represented), for instance, Genette and
others (e.g., Bal 1985; Chatman 1978; Rimmon-Kenan 1983; Todorov
1981) have described the temporal orders that a narrative text can
follow, the anachronies (flashbacks and flash-forwards) that it can exhibit, the achronic (undatable) structures that it can accommodate.
Furthermore, they have characterized narrative speed and its canonical tempos (ellipsis, summary, scene, stretch, and pause). They have
investigated narrative frequency (the relationship between the number
of times an event happens and the number of times it is recounted),
examined narrative distance (the extent of narratorial mediation) and
narrative point of view (the perceptual or conceptual position according to which the narrated events are depicted), studied the types of
discourse that a text can adopt to report the utterances and thoughts
of characters, and analyzed the major kinds of narration (posterior,
anterior, simultaneous, intercalated) as well as their modes of combination (two different acts of narration can be linked through a simple
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1989 Eaton Conference on
Science Fiction and Fantasy (University of California, Riverside).
Poetics Today 11:2 (Summer 1990). Copyright ? 1990 by The Porter Institute for
Poetics and Semiotics. ccc 0333-5372/90/$2.50.

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conjunction, the embedding of one into the other, or the alternation of elements from the first with elements from the second). They
have, moreover, explored the distinctive features of first-, second-,
and third-person narrative. Finally, they have specified (some of) the
signs referring to the narrator (who may be more or less overt, knowledgeable, reliable, self-conscious) and to the narratee, and they have
delineated the respective functions of these two "actants of communication," the possible distances between them-temporal, linguistic,
moral, intellectual, etc.-and the distances separating them from the
characters and events in the story.
The investigation of story-of that which is narrated-has also
yielded notable results. For example, students of narrative have examined the minimal constituents of the narrated (existents and events,
goal-directed actions and mere happenings, states and processes), and,
following the insight of Roland Barthes (and the Russian formalists),
they have distinguished those constituents essential to the causal and
chronological coherence of the story from those not essential to it.
They have studied the relations (syntagmatic and paradigmatic, spatiotemporal, logical, thematic, functional, transformational) between the
minimal units and drawn attention to the mechanisms underlying narrative surprise and suspense. They have also demonstrated that narrative sequences can be said to consist of a series of minimal constituents,
the last one of which in time is a (partial) repetition or transformation
of the first; and they have proved that complex sequences can be said
to result from the linking of simpler ones through such operations as
conjunction, embedding, and alternation.
Moreover, apart from showing that situations and events, states or
processes, actions or happenings can be grouped into basic (functional)
categories and that participants in them can be categorized according to (actantial and thematic) roles, they have explored the nature
of characters and settings as well as the various techniques through
which they are constituted and described. Characters, for instance,
can be more or less textually prominent, dynamic or static, consistent or inconsistent, simple, unidimensional, and highly predictable
or complex, multidimensional, and capable of surprising behavior;
they are classifiable not only in terms of their conformity to standard
types (the braggart, the cuckold, the wise fool, the femme fatale) or of
their corresponding to certain spheres of action but also in terms of
their superiority, equality, or inferiority (in kind or degree) to other
(human) beings and to "nature" or in terms of their acts, words, feelings, appearance, etc.; and their attributes can be explicitly and reliably stated (for example, in a set-piece presentation by the narrator)
or they can be inferred from their (mental, emotional, and physical)
behavior. As for settings, they too can be textually important or neg-

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ligible, consistent or inconsistent, vague or precise, typical or unique,

lifelike or implausible; they can also be utilitarian (have a role in the
action), symbolic (of a conflict to come, of a character's feelings), "realistic" (mentioned simply because "they are there," as it were); and their
constitutive features can be presented subjectively or objectively, contiguously (a description is then said to obtain) or not, in an orderly
fashion (from left to right, top to bottom, inside to outside) or in a
disorderly one.
More recently, students of narrative have shown how a story can
be characterized as a universe consisting of one or more worlds (see
Pavel 1985; Ryan 1985). There are actual worlds, which have an absolute or autonomous existence, may or may not be similar to our own
"real" world, and comprise the current state of affairs, its predecessors, the laws defining the range of possible future changes from the
current state of affairs, and those changes that are actualized. These
actual worlds may be ontologically flat (governed by one set of laws) or
salient (split into two or more autonomous spheres-e.g., sacred and
profane-each governed by its own set of laws), and they may contain
beings with a flat or a salient private ontology. There are also relative
worlds (representations of actual or of other relative worlds, "idealized" models of them, and alternatives to them), each set of which
pertaining to the same character constitutes that character's domain.
For example, there are epistemic or knowledge-worlds (what a character knows or believes), wish-worlds, moral-worlds (specifying what a
character considers good, bad, or indifferent for all the members of a
particular group), obligation-worlds (specifying the values of a group
as opposed to those of an individual), and alternative worlds (creations
of the mind: dreams, fantasies, hallucinations, fictions, counterfactual
statements, and so on). In terms of this semantic characterization,
plot is a function of the relations between and within worlds in the
global narrative universe, and it moves from one set of relations to
another through events aiming for, producing, affecting, or resolving conflicts in these relations. Such conflicts (and their motivations)
vary in kind and can occur, for example, between the worlds of two
different characters (John wants X, but Mary wants Y), between the
worlds of one character's domain (Jane must not do X according to
society, but Jane wants to do X), or within one of the worlds of a given
character (Peter must do Y and must also do its contrary).
Finally, students of narrative have explored the story and discourse
relation in terms of their relative foregrounding and backgrounding
and their relative conformity to given realities and conventions (some
narratives give more importance to story than to discourse and some
do the reverse; some narratives try to conceal their constructed nature
and some do not); they have discussed various elements affecting the

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degree of legibility of texts (given a text X, its legibility can be equated

with how easy it is to make sense out of X; and this ease can be computed in terms of the number of operations it takes to make sense,
their complexity-how many elements constitute one of them-their
diversity, and their very possibility given X); they have also isolated
a number of factors affecting narrativity (degrees of narrativity depend partly on the extent to which a narrative fulfills a receiver's
desire by representing oriented, temporal wholes-prospectively from
beginning to end and retrospectively from end to beginning-involving a conflict, consisting of discrete, specific, and positive situations
and events, and meaningful in terms of a human(ized) project and
world); and they have even begun to take another look at the question of themes and motifs, their nature, and their categorizability (see
Bremond 1985; Prince 1982; Zavarzadeh 1985).
This rapid review of what we can be said to know that is distinctive of
or pertinent to narrative is, of course, very partial. For instance, I did
not address such topics as length of text (10,000 words or 200,000) or
size of universe (the universe of The Odysseyis much larger than that of
Malone Dies, and that of The Left Hand of Darknessis much larger than
that of Molloy). Nor did I address the ways in which narrative has been
shown to embody and mimic desire, to read time and temporality, or
to constitute a mode of knowledge. Still, this review more than suffices
to show the range of instruments available not only for characterizing
the specificity of any given narrative or for comparing any two (sets
of) narratives but also for doing what particularly interests me here,
that is, for instituting theoreticalclasses of narratives.
Let me define a narrative class as the set of all and only those possible narratives exhibiting one or more specified features: there is, for
example, the class of first-person narratives, the class of narratives
featuring posterior narration, and the class of narratives with fewer
actions than happenings; there is also the class of first-person narratives featuring posterior narration, the class of third-person narratives
with an omniscient narrator and fewer actions than happenings, the
class of second-person narratives featuring an anterior narration and
whose events are presented anachronically in terms of one character's point of view, and so on and so forth. Let me complicate my
definition by adding that if all narrative classes specify for their members a certain number of obligatory features (for a narrative to belong
to the class of first-person narratives, for instance, it must be a firstperson narrative!), some classes also specify a number of (favored or
disfavored) optional features, others specify a number of features forbidden to the membership, still others specify a combination of obligatory, forbidden, and favored and disfavored optional features, and so
on. For example, there is the class of first-person narratives that pref-

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erably exhibit simultaneous narration and the class of first-person narratives that preferably do not exhibit anterior narration; there is the
class of third-person narratives that must not adopt an omniscient
point of view; there is also the class of third-person narratives that
must not adopt an omniscient point of view, preferably exhibit posterior narration, and preferably do not exhibit beings with a salient
private ontology; and so forth. Let me add one further complication:
some features or feature specifications (involving, say, conjunctions or
disjunctions) are more formally complex than others. For instance,
there is not only the class of first-person narratives and that of secondperson narratives but also the class of first- and second-person narratives; and there is the class of narratives with posterior and anterior
narration, the class of narratives preferably exhibiting internal or external point of view, the class of narratives preferably not exhibiting
flat characters or characters superior in kind to nature, and the class of
narratives which must use either free direct or free indirect discourse.
Note that the number of features and, a fortiori, the number of
classes are indefinitely large. Note, too, that both the list of features
and the list of classes are open-ended. After all, it is quite possible that
certain features have been overlooked and will come to light through
further investigation. It is just as possible that certain other features
will be invented by certain future texts. In the case of motifs, for example, it is not only conceivable but practically certain that new ones
will appear in narratives as our world and our literature change. If the
list of features is thus (always) to be completed, it is also to be refined
(or reduced): some of the features may, for instance, prove to be redundant (say, if they are always uniquely implied by other features),
and some may require a more accurate and detailed characterization.
Many of those I have mentioned so far can be said to be "fuzzy"
or "relative" as opposed to "precise" or "absolute": compare, for example, "conforming to situations and events in our own 'real' world"
or "exhibiting many anachronies" with "adopting posterior narration"
or "using external point of view." In certain cases, the fuzziness (or
relativity) is easily disposed of: nothing prevents us, in principle, from
replacing a feature like "exhibiting many anachronies" with a set of
features like "exhibiting ninety, two hundred, or three hundred and
seventy anachronies." In other cases, however, the fuzziness or relativity constitutes a more integral aspect of the feature: "conforming to
situations and events in our own 'real' world," for example, depends
to a great extent on our conceptions and perceptions, and two different readers or the same reader at two different times may judge the
degree of conformity to the world of the same given work very differently. Likewise, at least some of the canonical tempos of narrative
speed are (often) a function of our own view of the world (as well as a

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function of one another). Suppose I read something like "John fought

an exciting fifteen rounds": I may speak of summary because I know
that a blow-by-blow account of the fight could have been given (and
I feel that it could have been interesting). Or again, suppose I read a
hundred pages describing Peter drinking a cup of coffee: I may speak
of stretch because I know that the same activity could be described in
a few words (and I feel that it should). In other words, when we speak
of summary or stretch in narrative, we may actually be referring not
so much to an exact relationship between narrative length and narrated time but rather to the relationship between the former and what
we know or feel it could or should be: we know or feel that things
worth mentioning must have happened during an exciting fight, and
we know or feel that the drinking of a cup of coffee can and should
be presented in much less detail. Naturally, the narrative text itself
may often create or reinforce this knowledge or feeling in a number
of ways: think of the many novels that stress their ties with the "real"
world or consider a story in which ten exciting fights are described in
detail and one is not.
Note, moreover, that the list of features could be (partially) ordered.
Some features are modal, some are structural, and some are contentual
or thematic. Some features subsume others and are not subsumed by
them (compare "anachrony" with "flashback"and "flash-forward" or
"internal point of view" with "fixed, or multiple, or variable internal
point of view"). Besides, obligatory (or prohibited) features are (presumably!) more determining (they could be weighted differently) than
optional ones; and, more generally, some features may be coded as
more or less dominant with regard to other features in the same text:
two narratives may both exhibit a flashback, but this flashback could
be far more important in one than in the other. It goes without saying (or should) that whatever characterization of features is ultimately
adopted, it should not be evaluative or be taken as such (showing is
not, in itself, better than telling; chronological is not better than anachronic; plausible is not better than implausible, though individual
receivers may, of course, value one more than the others).
Finally, note that nothing in my description requires classes of features to be internally consistent (noncontradictory). There are, for
example, classes requiring both "technical jargon" and "high legibility" and there are actual narratives-realist ones-corresponding
to these classes. Furthermore, many other actual narratives exhibit two
or more contradictory features (the setting of Robbe-Grillet's La Maison de rendez-vousis Hong Kong and it is not Hong Kong) or satisfy two
contradictory descriptions (is Robbe-Grillet's LaJalousie chronological
or achronic?). Indeed, lack of consistency may be an important trait
of (some) fiction (and perhaps of some nonfiction as well!), and, besides, inconsistencies in narrative representations are considered im-

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pertinent (the result of authorial oversights, say) or, on the contrary,

regarded as significant, enriching, and ultimately consistent with or
even crucial to the raison d'etre of these representations. We know,
for instance, that in Sartre's La Nausee the breakup between Roquentin
and Anny is said by the protagonist to have occurred eight years (but
also six years and four years) before his starting to keep a diary: these
contradictory statements are taken to underline his utter detachment
from the past and his sense of loss in a shapeless present. We also know
that the inconsistencies in such postmodernist novels as LaJalousie and
La Maison de rendez-vousare taken to emphasize "fiction-making as a
trial-and-error procedure" (Dolezel 1988: 493).
If all the narrative classes I have been discussing are theoretical,some
of them do correspond to actual sets of narratives whereas others
do not. Consider, on the one hand, the class of first-person narratives-for which one could find many members-and, on the other,
the class of third-person narratives whose four narrators produce an
intercalated narration taking the form of a diary whose entries do not
follow chronological order: I do not know of any narrative that could
be a proper member (but perhaps there is one or perhaps one will
appear some day). Of course, an indefinitely large number of actual
narratives fulfill the requisites for membership in an indefinitely large
number of classes (or classes of classes!) and almost fulfill the requisites for membership in an even larger number of other classes (a given
narrative may, for instance, exhibit none of the forbidden and all of
the obligatory and optional features of a given class except for a single
optional feature). Of course, too, individual receivers may well vary in
assigning particular narratives to particular classes or in assessing the
distance between a certain narrative and a certain class definition (you
may think that the narrator of Camus's La Chute is his own narratee
and I may not; I may find an optional motif or mode of telling or
temporal pattern important and you may not).
In other words, the (potential) membership of theoretical narrative
classes is fluid; or, to use yet other terms, the relationship between
theoretical narrative genres and the sets of actual narratives taken to
constitute their appropriate members varies. I have-at last!-mentioned genre. For it seems to me that the set of theoretical narrative
classes I have defined can be considered equivalent to the set of theoretical narrative genres. It also seems to me that, should we give a
name to a particular class or a particular class of classes-should we
stick on a label such as "novel," or "romance," or "science fiction"and list some of its actual members, we could be said to be characterizing something like a historical genre.1
1. This kind of argument could, of course, be extended to non-narrative texts and
genres.

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Note that the set of theoretical genres subsumes the various categories-types, species, aesthetic forms and natural forms, fixed forms,
subtypes, or subgenres-that have been taken to mediate between
texts in particular and literature or discourse in general. Given its
makeup, the set could even accommodate a Croce-like view according
to which each text (also) constitutes its own genre: the set of theoretical
genres includes an indefinitely large number of genres with a (potential) membership of one. However, the view I have been outlining is
much closer in spirit to that of theorists like Todorov (1973) or Hernadi (1972), who have called for or attempted to develop deductive
rather than inductive generic models and descriptive rather than prescriptive ones. The set which I have isolated is clearly deductive: given
a list of features pertinent to narrative, a class of possible narratives
that specifies for its members a number of these features constitutes
a theoretical genre and there are as many genres as there are possible specifications. The set is also clearly not prescriptive: Thus, it
does not specify which features a given work must possess in order to
qualify for a certain label; in fact, it does not use any labels. Rather,
the set is descriptive of possibilities (it simply describes possible classes
which narratives-extant or not-can be said to constitute or belong
to). Of course, the set can function as a companion to or basis for both
prescriptive or descriptive historical approaches to genre (only those
works conforming to theoretical class A or B can be labeled X or Y;
all works labeled X or Y correspond to theoretical class A or B).
Note, moreover, that this set of theoretical genres tends to correspond to or confirm our intuitions about, knowledge of, or practices
in generic classification. It is, after all, constituted by classes whose
natures are very heterogeneous and whose characterizations vary considerably in precision and detail. Some classes specify three hundred
features and others specify only two; some specify features such as
conformity to our world, while others concentrate on such traits as
posterior narration, external point of view, or anachronic presentation
of events. Likewise, genres have historically been defined and distinguished on the basis of a motley, and more or less constraining, collection of features. Some generic distinctions or taxonomies are based
(at least in part) on what is represented (novel and romance), whereas
some are based on techniques of representation (diary novel and memoir novel); some stress mode (epic, lyric, dramatic) and some stress
length (novel, novella, short story); some focus on motivation (marvelous, fantastic, realistic) and others on motifs (fox stories, dog stories,
detective stories); still others privilege degree of legibility, effects on
the receiver, or relations between various worlds in the narrative universe; and, in many cases, competing and contradictory criteria are
invoked or devised to characterize certain categories of texts.

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The case of science fiction, for example, is telling. Partly because students of the genre often mix evaluative measures with non-evaluative
ones (and speak of "real" or "good science fiction" as opposed to
"science fiction, period"), partly because they favor rather different
definitional criteria (sociopolitical or ideological ones in Suvin [1979],
say, and the nature of event motivation in Todorov [1973]), partly because they sometimes compare and contrast the science fiction corpus
with corpora that do not necessarily constitute the most appropriate
points of reference (for example, the corpus of realistic fiction), and
partly because of the remarkable range, diversity, and richness of science fiction (or of what has, now and then, been assembled under that
rubric: sword and sorcery but also Borges, Calvino, Pynchon, Lessing,
and even Kafka or Cicero), these students have arrived at divergent
and even contrary characterizations of their object of study. Todorov
(1973), for instance, views science fiction as a particular subtype of
the marvelous; Brooke-Rose (1981) sees it as a mixture of romance
and realism, as in some way belonging both to the marvelous and the
realistic; as for Suvin (1979), though he considers estrangement or defamiliarization crucial to myth and the marvelous as well as to science
fiction, he ends up situating the latter (because of its cognitive and
pluritemporal nature) very far from the former.
It seems to me that the theoretical class whose requisites for membership all and only those texts designated science fiction fulfill is a
class which specifies no features pertaining to the narrating as opposed to the narrated. Science fiction narratives-like love stories,
detective stories, or spy novels-are defined by the elements making
up their story and not by those constituting their discourse (cf. Scholes
and Rabkin 1977: 170). Thus, there is (or could be) science fiction
in the first, second, or third person, with internal, external, or zero
focalization, posterior, anterior, simultaneous, or intercalated narration, omnipresent or inexistent commentary, and so on and so forth.
Indeed, much science fiction comes very close to realist or naturalist
fiction (Brooke-Rose [1981] shows, for instance, that the former can
feature thirteen of the fifteen basic traits that Hamon [1973] associates
with the latter); much comes very close to romance and to (other kinds
of) fantasy fiction (soap opera, sword and sorcery); and much could be
included in avant-garde or postmodernist fiction (Brian Aldiss's Barefoot in theHead, Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren, or James G. Ballard's The
AtrocityExhibition).
As for the story features that science fiction narratives must or
must not exhibit-they are few and far between. Indeed, in the final
analysis, perhaps no more than two clusters of features (two dominant
features along with their positive or negative specifications, presuppositions, and consequences) are necessary to characterize them. First, in

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terms of general makeup and functioning, at least one of the possible

actual worlds in the narrative must not conform to our real world (or
to a real world having existed in another time or place). I say "actual
worlds," in the plural, because science fiction (especially in a postmodernist incarnation) can exhibit two or more worlds given as actual;
and I say "possible" because postmodernist narratives frequently offer
no clue as to whether a world presented is actual or not (cf. McHale
1987). Second, the configuration of this one possible actual world must
be given as natural or, more specifically, as the natural consequence of
historico-geographical, socio-politico-economic, and/or physical, biological, or social scientific conditions and transformations; or, perhaps
more correctly and cautiously, it must not be given as a result of supernatural laws, entities, or practices (this is basically what distinguishes
science fiction from the marvelous). Of course, some critics and historians may find that a class specifying only these two feature clusters
is far too broad to characterize science fiction adequately, and they
may prefer a class specifying, for example, the presence of at least
one (hard) scientific motif, the setting of the action in the future, or
the foregrounding of historical consciousness (this would restrict the
science fiction corpus by eliminating, for instance, certain utopias and
dystopias). Of course, too, critics and historians would find a number
of other pertinent classes, each specifying further story features (as
well as discourse ones) and each corresponding to a specific subset of
science fiction.
If the set of theoretical narrative classes helps to confirm our knowledge and intuitions about the heterogeneity of historical genres by
making clear the different levels of generality at which genres can be
and have been situated and the different criteria on which they can
or have relied (obligatory and constant versus optional and variable;
modal, formal, or discursive versus thematic, ideological, or even functional); if it is decidedly flexible (with its determined open-endedness
and its indefinitely large number of more or less heterogeneous, fuzzy,
complex, or dominant features); if it follows deductive and descriptive
rather than inductive and prescriptive lines and systematically avoids
giving labels, instituting norms, or making value judgments, the set
also helps to illuminate, facilitate, or encourage (in ways I have already
suggested) certain creative and critical practices or products in the
narrative domain. In fact, it is intimately related to practice. Thus,
the set defines possible horizons of expectations, possible sets of references in terms of which receivers orient their understanding and/
or appreciation of a narrative text; it supplies producers of narrative
messages with possible models to follow, virtualities to concretize, new
patterns to exploit or reject; and it can, of course, itself be transformed
by practices, the discoveries of critics, for example, or the inventions

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of tellers. Granted, the set has relatively little to say about genre as
a function of certain effects (laughter, for instance, or pity and fear):
though it does not entirely neglect pragmatic factors (such as conformity to certain realities and conventions or degrees of legibility and
narrativity), the set differs from the many generic classifications which,
ever since Aristotle, have partially defined the generic nature of texts
in terms of the reactions they evoke in the receiver. Still, it could be
helpful in establishing possible explanations for these reactions by providing characterizations of those classes that tend to evoke them and,
in principle, could incorporate effects in its list of features.
Besides, the set of theoretical narrative classes constitutes a powerful instrument for the systematic study of historical genres. It not only
facilitates or allows for their possible characterization or a systematic
comparison between them, it also permits the exploration of certain
basic problems pertaining to them: Why is it, for example, that some
classes would be considered generic and others not (or why is it that
some would be viewed as more generic than others)? What, historically, is the generic importance of different features? What are some
of the possible bases of generic hierarchies? Why do some theoretical classes have actual equivalents at certain times and places while
others do not? and so on and so forth. In other words, the set of
theoretical narrative classes can help define the literary or discursive
consciousness of various social groups and, more generally, illuminate
the history and geography of literature and discourse.
Finally, and perhaps above all, this set manages to characterize the
nature and respect the uniqueness of particular texts (by specifying
an indefinitely large number of classes to which they would belong,
including the class of one that they would constitute) while clarifying
and underlining the nature of genre. The latter is a configuration or
entity mediating (at various levels of abstraction) between the (more)
general and the (more) particular, between code and message, langue
and parole, discourse and text. Indeed, genre is a configuration or
entity through which the text can signify either its appurtenance to
the general (to many levels of generality, to many families of texts)
or its concretization and constitution of a particular. In other words,
through genre, a text is and makes sense.
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Bremond, Claude
1985 "Concept et theme," Poetique 16: 415-23.

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Brooke-Rose, Christine
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