Sternberg Telling in Time II

Telling in Time (II): Chronology, Teleology, Narrativity
Author(s): Meir Sternberg

Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Autumn, 1992), pp. 463-541
Published by: Duke University Press
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Telling in Time (II):
Chronology, Teleology, Narrativity
Meir Sternberg
Poetics and Comparative Literature, Tel Aviv
Yes-oh dear yes-the novel tells a story.

E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
Before I set out to examine the structure of fiction, I
feel duty-bound to confess to the reader that I do not
have a definition for "story" as such.
Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose
1. What's Become of Narrativity?

Reasons and Reasonings about Temporal Order
A poem, according to Coleridge, reconciles the delights of the whole
with those located in each component part. Delights apart, the present
series aims at a comparable balance in developing its argument, espe-
cially as we now turn from empirical coverage to logical and teleo-
logical cogency in accounts of narrative time. This turn-whereby we
approach the heart of the matter: narrativity in narrative, narrative
in its narrativity-involves a shift of focus amidst continuity. For we
have been puzzling over the logic (as well as the accidentals) behind
the exclusion of chronological practice by theorists from the map of
narrative, and our findings largely carry over to its dismissive men-
tion. It is a fine line that separates denials of chronology's existence in
narrative from denials of its value or efficacy as narrative: the latter,
normative belittling even sanctions and radicalizes the former, quan-
titative belittling. (Who, as it were, except possibly one who doesn't
know any better or cannot practice what he does know, would burden
himself with such a poor thing as an icon of clock-time?) But that line,
hence our crossing it, still makes a difference, if only because claims
about efficacy bring to the fore reasons and reasonings: arguments
for disorder and/or against order, which supposedly explain the facts
Poetics Today 13:3 (Fall 1992). Copyright ? 1992 by The Porter Institute for Poetics
and Semiotics. CCC 0333-5372/92/$2.50.
464 Poetics Today 13:3
of composition-relative frequencies included-or what are taken to

be such. Where an approach acknowledges the diversity of the field,
no matter how partially, we at least gain some idea why chronological
narrative does or must suffer invidious distinction.
Why, indeed? Of course, the strongest possible reason would be ge-
neric, and so absolute: namely, that chronological telling (like a char-
acter sketch or a syllogism) does not qualify as narrative by definition.
The next strongest ground, less categorical but more conceivable and
nearly equivalent, would be that such telling ranks lowest on the scale
of narrativity: that it makes poor narrative by the very form of its time
sequence (rather than by some norm of art or ideology, which would
at once mar the purely descriptive force of the judgment as universal
statement). But neither line of argument, so far from being demon-
strated, has ever been officially advanced. Quite the contrary, in fact,
as shown by the accord among otherwise divergent views of "minimal
narrative":
We define narrative as one method of recapitulating past experience by

matching a verbal sequence of clauses to the sequence of events which (it
is inferred) actually occurred .... With this conception of narrative, we
can define a minimal narrative as a sequence of two clauses which are tempo-
rally ordered: that is, a change in their order will result in a change in the
temporal sequence of the original semantic interpretation. (Labov 1972:
359-60)
Since any narrative, even one as extensive and complex as the Recherche du
temps perdu, is a linguistic production undertaking to tell of one or several
events, it is perhaps legitimate to treat it as the development-monstrous,
if you will-given to a verbal form, in the grammatical sense of the term. I
walk, Pierre has come are for me minimal forms of narrative, and inversely
the Odyssey or the Recherche is only, in a certain way, an amplification (in
the rhetorical sense) of statements such as Ulysses comes home to Ithaca or
Marcel becomes a writer. This perhaps authorizes us to organize, or at any rate
to formulate, the problems of analyzing narrative discourse according to
categories [i.e., tense, mood, voice] borrowed from the grammar of verbs.
(Genette 1980: 30; see also 1983: 14-15)
A minimal story consists of three conjoined events [e.g., "He was unhappy,
then he met a woman, then, as a result, he was happy"]. The first and third
events are stative, the second is active. Furthermore, the third event is the
inverse of the first. Finally, the three events are conjoined by the three con-
junctive features in such a way that (a) the first event precedes the second
in time and the second precedes the third, and (b) the second event causes
the third. (Prince 1973: 31; repeated in 1987: 53)
The first remarkable thing, too often played down and hardly ever
correlated with the time issue, is the absence of anything like an ac-
cepted definition of narrative. Our three accounts differ widely in
both the reference and the sense assigned to the common term. In
Sternberg * Telling in Time (11) 465
reference, they mark an ascending scale of coverage (and I have sim-

plified the picture by leaving out for the moment further variants). For
William Labov, "narrative" refers to a subclass of autobiography, just
"one method of recapitulating past experience" (1972: 359) in the ex-
periencer's oral retrospect. For Gerard Genette, the same term refers
to all telling of events in language. For Gerald Prince, as for Aristotle
or Seymour Chatman (1978) or myself, the reference extends to all
media, "language, film, pantomime, and so on" (Prince 1973: 12). So
the official scope of the term, and with it the discipline, ranges all the
way from the narrowly and idiosyncratically sociolinguistic, through
the traditionally verbal/literary, to the intersemiotic.
Likewise, although not always correspondingly, with the term's
sense, that is, the definitional features of the object that comes under
the narrative rubric. For the "recapitulation of past experience" to
qualify as narrative a la Labov, it must fulfill a variety of requirements:
"matching a verbal sequence of clauses"-two, at least-"to the se-
quence of events which (it is inferred) actually occurred" within the
personal experience of their oral recapitulator. Once properly broken
down into features of narrativity, this amounts to a sizable miscellany
of necessary or minimum conditions: on medium (language), channel
(speech, uttered within a social encounter), truth-value (factuality), ex-
tent (from two-part clause/event sequence upward), mode of narration
(autobiographical, or "first person"), center of interest (the narrating-I
doubles as experiencing-I, or hero), and temporal order ("matching").
With his far wider range, Genette lowers the threshold for inclusion,
a predictable gesture except for the bareness of the minimum: "a lin-
guistic production undertaking to tell of one or several events," down
to a single sentence ("I walk. Pierre has come").
In turn, Prince oddly breaks the norm of inverse proportion be-
tween the reference and the sense. The most wide-ranging and in-
clusive in media, his "minimal story" requires no fewer than "three
conjoined events," with their threefold conjunction, moreover, revert-
ing in effect to the Aristotelian standard of wholeness at its highest: a
chrono-logical change of fortune from one extreme (e.g., "unhappy")
to another (e.g., "happy"). Still odder is his attempt to distinguish be-
tween "story" and "narrative" minimum, since both the point and the
basis of the distinction remain elusive throughout his various struggles
with the topic. In Narratology, for example, we first encounter "nar-
rative . . . defined as the representation of real or fictive events and
situations in a time sequence" (Prince 1982: 1), which would accom-
modate Genette's "one or several events" minimum. A few pages later
comes "a redefinition of narrative" as "the representation of at least
two real or fictive events or situations in a time sequence, neither of
which presupposes or entails the other" (ibid.: 4): an ascent toward
Labov. But then the subsequent narrative grammar defines the "ker-
nel narrative" in terms that raise the threshold yet higher-up toward
"story" minimum, in effect (ibid.: 83ff.). The very sliding shows a
healthy awareness of difficulties but hardly a way to resolve them. One
wonders why the distinction between "story" and "narrative" needs to
be made in the first place, then remade or unmade, only to leave a
blur. Nor is it easy to see how the two patterns compare with the rest
of the definitions, any more than with each other, because the com-
mon term "event" includes or equals here what most theorists would
rule out or oppose, namely, "situations" (cf. Beaugrande 1982: 407). A
contradiction in terms, the very phrase "stative event" does not just
problematize any comparison of the event-units required. Its deviance
from usage (beside which Labov's "narrative" pales) is also a measure
of the extent to which it runs against our intuitive sense of storytelling
or narrating versus describing: the noun belongs on this, the adjective
on that, side of the representational fence. All very confusing, and
making the general confusion worse confounded.
Taken together, and even without adding either further inconsis-
tencies or other voices, these lines of divergence amount to a Babel,
with the most far-reaching implications. What are the limits of the
field as regards subject matter, and why draw them here rather than
there? The Labovian position even disallows the comfort that large
bodies of texts (e.g., canonical epic, novel, historiography) fall within
the narrative limits on all definitions, so as to enable theorizing from
the repository of best generic exemplars. But supposing that they did
so fall, their valorization would not yet settle the claim (or indeed, meet
the principled challenges) presented by the rest, especially the extra-
literary corpora and media. Still less would such an assumption make
it possible to dismiss the rival minimum narratives as an assortment
of limit-cases, too rudimentary to be typical of the genre at its best
and hardly worth quarreling about. For where does the narrativity of
narrative (hence also the key to its scope) lie, if not in the disputed
generic features of the minimum, and how does one decide among the
conflicting versions? After all, leaving them undecided sounds very
pluralistic, but doesn't it incur the risk of (dis)missing the generic
point-so that narratologists are then liable at best to do everything
indiscriminately together with, at worst to do anything except, narra-
tology? What, in short, are we supposed to study? For practitioners of
a discipline that claims to have come of age (and that adversaries re-
gard as having passed its prime), we seem neither very knowledgeable
nor very concerned about the foundations. Since everyone presum-
ably has an intuitive knowledge of what narrative is and is not, a sense
of what is and is not narrative, the discipline at large must have failed
to capture ("formalize"), or perhaps even to act upon, that universal
human competence. The results, as will emerge, do show, from Aris-

totle to the present, and not only in the delimitations of the genre,
often sharply if silently variant, almost at will. The results also show in
the extent to which views, agreements, or disagreements on compo-
nent features remain out of touch with overall generic workings and
priorities: with, ultimately, the temporalities of narrative as a whole.
Yet how time, or even telling in time, comes into the matter is not
always obvious, relative to other points at issue. On the face of it, for
example, the sharper the diversity, the rarer and more reassuring the
harmony about chronological ordering. Labov and Prince build their
definitions around it; Genette allows it by transparent implication (if
only because the more minimal the number of events told, "one or
several," the less room for disorder in the telling); and, even beyond
the minimum, most theorists would take it as working for, rather than
against, strong narrativity-certainly in chrono-logical form. So, on
all accounts, orderly telling in time counts as narrative.
'How could it possibly be otherwise?' you might wonder. A good
question, except that the impossibility it rightly presumes is not quite
self-evident, nor indeed always operative, in the arena of theory old
and new, literary and extraliterary. To take first our three cases in
point, again, they lay down and betray an assortment of dubious exclu-
sions from narrative. Not exactly the same ones, of course, yet always
involving some unreasonableness, often with a time-nexus. Whether
imposed by or counter to definition, the sociolinguist's limits push
to the verge of idiosyncrasy their equally arbitrary but less glaring
equivalents among the narratologists.
Why, for instance, confine "narrative" to language when the crite-
rial feature evidently bears less on the rendering medium than on
its accord with the events rendered? Does the confinement forced
upon the object of inquiry reflect anything except the inquirer's ow
horizons, priorities, ready-made tools, all due to his medium-specif
training in linguistics or literary study? Far from innocent, moreove
the monopoly given to the special case is always prone to blur t
line between verbal narrative's specifics and narrative's universals:
project the features distinctive of one generic sign system into the con-
ception of the genre at large, as when Labov insists on "a sequence
two clauses" in addition and conformity to "the sequence of events
(Such insistence also exemplifies how time rules may prejudice even
ostensibly independent questions: the heavier the constraints on na
rative temporality, as here, the less room is left for media other th
language.) Obvious in Labov, the pressure exerted by (sub)disciplina
on substantive limits-by accidentals or variables on essentials-resur
faces in Genette's appeal to the linguistic paradigm: "analyzing nar-
rative discourse according to categories borrowed from the gramm
of verbs." (That the verbal analogy proves even falser than usual in
Structuralism-e.g., "tense" having little to do with "order/duration/
frequency" and much to do with point of view-hardly improves mat-
ters.) Beyond medium, again, Labov attaches too many unnecessary
strings to narrative-such as orality, personality, factuality-where
he might detach them to the gain of inclusiveness and without detri-
ment to his basic requirements. But then why should Genette exclude
drama, say, as if it were not "a linguistic production undertaking to
tell of one or several events"? Or what would become of a stretch of
language, a fortiori of a painting, that "undertakes" to describe but in
effect "tells" of events between the lines? In turn, even Prince blocks,
in terms of required features, part of what his intersemiotic scope ad-
mits, such as episodic or otherwise less than "kernel" event-sequences;
nor is it clear, again, whether and how he could find room for visual
narrativity, in (say) the well-known form of Lessing's (1963 [1766])
"pregnant moment." So, for the third time running, a definition would
close even such spatial loopholes for narrative as are kept open amidst
the sharpest Neoclassical insistence on fencing off the arts by their
media. Why must signified and signifying temporality go together?
Considering the variety of exclusionary acts performed by theorists,
chronological ordering in language itself might well figure among the
excluded; and, despite the strong grounds along with the ostensible
consensus to the contrary, it actually does. In fact, by one move or
another beyond the official definitions of narrative given here, the ap-
parently free variable of telling in or out of time comes to suffer fixity
both ways.
On the one hand, although repeatedly introduced by Labov as "only
one way of recapitulating past experience" (1972: 359-60), the nar-
rative clause/event "matching" soon hardens into the only viable way.
For stories that "begin in the middle of things" are liable to remain
"ambiguous and obscure throughout," to produce "meaningless and
disoriented effect" (ibid.: 367). On the other hand, the early license
to chronologize issued by Genette's minimal narrative ("a linguistic
production undertaking to tell of one or several events") is likewise
quietly taken away soon thereafter: once "perfect temporal correspon-
dence between narrative and story" becomes a "zero-point" of "more
1. For the contradiction at its sharpest, see Genette (1983: 12-14). On the one
hand, he makes a point of defining narrative by the represented object ("acte ou
evenement"), against narrower definitions. On the other hand, he attacks the ex-
tension of the term "narrative," and the field of narratology, to all rendering of
such an object, the dramatic or the graphic included, pleading instead for the ex-
clusiveness of a certain representational manner ("puisque la seule specificite du
narratif reside dans son mode, et non dans son contenue"). That plea is theoreti-
cally indefensible as well as inconsistent.
hypothetical than real" existence vis-a-vis the noncorrespondences in

anachrony (Genette 1980: 35-36).
Polar extremes, the two approaches form mirror-images. Since each
excludes what the other privileges, not to say monopolizes, they would
between them virtually depopulate the land of "narrative." Nor is
the privileging on either side a matter of imbalanced descriptive pic-
ture or disciplinary preference alone. By the same force of contrast,
although less obviously, each brings out the other's real grounds for in-
clusion versus exclusion, centering versus marginalizing. Labov's slip-
page from "only one" to the only viable "way" reveals a bias toward
what I call the poetics of lucidity. Hence his (Trollope-like) attack
on beginning "in the middle of things," as if the plunge into the
middle were not an immemorial strategy designedfor "ambiguous and
obscure" narration. Conversely, hence also his approval of temporal
matching throughout. For instance, the opening "abstract covers the
same ground as the story" in advance (Labov 1972: 364); the "orien-
tation" follows at once to do whatever "is necessary to identify in some
way the time, place, persons" (ibid.); "a good coda," far from being a
"mechanical" signal for the end, "leaves the listener with a feeling of
satisfaction and completeness that matters have been rounded off and
accounted for" (ibid.: 365-66); clear "evaluation" is at a premium,
and its skills even provide the measure of human development (ibid.:
366-75, 393-96).
All this helps to throw light on the opposite theoretical extreme,
Genette's, where "beginning in medias res" duly comes to the fore as the
inaugural and paradigmatic anachrony of "our (Western) literary tra-
dition" (Genette 1980: 36). On the face of it, "perfect correspondence"
in ordering now gets ruled out of court simply due to its nonexistence
outside the folktale-a ruling oblivious to the entire tradition of his-
torical, along with literature's history-like, telling and clean opposed
to the definition's own insistence on the petite histoire of one-sentence
minimum.2 Genette's true grounds prove to be the mirror-image of
2. Most recently, Genette (1990: 756) has "confessed [his] own guilt" as an expo-
nent of a "fictional narratology" that "never properly explored but only silently
annexed" the factual domain. A handsome and promising confession, except that
it leads at once to a regression: the views on "factual" (or historical) ordering grow
only more extreme, more annexational than before. In retreat, Genette silently
abandons the criterion of "main articulations," still upheld in an earlier retreat
(1983: 21), as the key to the difference between genuine and incidental disorder.
We now find him, instead, embracing the wholesale denial of chronology by his
former antagonists. "I do accept the point that no narrative, including extrafic-
tional and extraliterary narrative, oral or written, can restrict itself naturally and
without special effort to a rigorously chronological order" (1990: 758; cf. Stern-
berg 1990a: 908ff.): so far from being explored at long last, the time-logic and
empirics of the factual get officially incorporated into the presumed rule of the fic-
Labov's: his deviation-based apparatus cannot handle chronological

narrative-not even the ordering measures and processes shared with
its opposite-as his deviation-based aesthetics cannot stomach it. Ac-
cordingly, within the Recherche itself, "one might prefer the subtle tem-
poral 'confusion' of Swann to the sobered arrangement of the Balbec-
Guermantes-Sodome series" (ibid.: 156): a nice, typical counterpoint to
the Labovian scaling of the obscure versus the lucid; much the same
pressure, only working in reverse below the surface and demanding an
impossible either/or choice. Taken seriously, they would between them
make the world of narrative not just uninhabited but uninhabitable
and hardly worth visiting. With their opposed exigencies, premises,
values impossible to take together, any more than to adjudicate within
reason, they must be left together.
As demonstrated throughout the first stage of my analysis (Stern-
berg 1990a), these poles are anything but uncommon. Rather, their
numerous equivalents or variants or derivatives belong to different
disciplines: Labov's to (socio)linguistic, as well as historiographic, ap-
proaches to narrative; Genette's to (literary) narratology, with its an-
cient roots and modern semiotization. (Roland Barthes [1977: 99]
even puts the cards on the table: "Analysis today tends to 'dechronolo-
gize' the narrative continuum"; and we have already seen him maneu-
vering to enlist Aristotle's authority and to impose the tendencies of
the Structuralist project on the time structure of the object.) On the
narratological side of the fence, however, the value-laden, polarized
dealings with order make even less sense or call for more acrobatics
where theory aspires to scientific descriptiveness and all-inclusiveness.
Nor is temporality the only, but rather the most basic, axis in need
of some appropriate polarization. Much the same double bind con-
torts the treatment of other strategies taken to image rather than
to manipulate, preferably subvert, the narrated reality: thus, omni-
scient narration (its God-like posture disfavored since modernism for
its supposed offenses against freedom, epistemology, opaqueness, in-
determinacy), or direct quoting (a "copy" of the original, hence pure
mimesis, world- rather than discourse-oriented). How to deal with
narrative modes so capable of encompassing the narrated reality-
turning the signifier into an icon of the signified-as to leave the ana-
lyst no (or no manifest) friction, disharmony, or arbitrariness on which
to operate? Predictably, both strategies get reduced to negativity, aes-
tional, with a view to salvaging the apparatus made for anachrony. In the process,
the fictional rule itself hardens, now wresting from the house of chronology even
the folktale corpus (earlier, the Poor Man's Ewe-Lamb) as well as absorbing all
"minor" nonchronological touches anywhere. Multiply regressive, therefore, the
account goes from bad to worse.
thetic or (if only by analytical fiat covering the samejudgment) generic.

For instance, omniscience counts as "nonfocalized narrative, or narra-
tive with zero focalization"; wherever directness appears, again, "one
cannot speak of narrative" (Genette 1980: 189, 169). Demonstrably
false, in its own terms as otherwise,3 such reduction is yet inevitable,
given the common Structuralist premise that formal deviance alone
enables and merits registering: you must then either push the non-
deviant out of narrative discourse-except as a zero-sign at most-
or go out of narratological business. But, compounding the grounds
for offense as nowhere else, chronology presents the rudest challenge
of all to method and value scheme rolled into one. How to reconcile
in its treatment the extremes of scholarship and partisanship-narra
tology with ideology, formalism with normativism, semiosis unlimite
with limitation to the congenial, the facts and forces of harmony with
the commitment to disharmony, if only for survival as distortion-based
approach?
To escape the dilemma, therefore, such theories would like nothing
better than to pile denial on denial against telling in time, categorical
principle on contingent practice: to validate and explain the desired
empirical picture of temporality by appeal to absolute generic law,
from which the data supposedly follow by necessity. The argument
from narrativity would be ideal, putting chronology in its place once
and for all: either anachrony or no (good) narrative. Indeed, it is
because this highroad cannot be taken, or not openly, that we have
found (and will continue to find) antichronologists driven willy-nilly
into the desperate paths of amnesia, non sequitur, shift of ground and/
or usage, equivocation between statement and judgment, or Barthes-
like mixtures of semiotic rigor with special pleading and outspoken
iconoclasm, in defiance of bourgeois values, scholarly as otherwise.
In what follows, we will observe how narrative logic as well as empir-
ics suffer, often together, under methodological, axiological, and ideo-
logical preconceptions-always involving some temporal form (dis-
order, above all) elevated and reified into artistic norm. Nor, I will
3. Arguments to this effect have already been developed in Sternberg (1978:

254ff.; 1983b: 172-86; 1985: esp. 58-128); see also Yacobi (1981, 1987) and Stern-
berg (1982a, 1982b, 1985: 365-440; 1991). The two arguments converge on the
liberty of discourse to shuffle and reshuffle all clusters of features, a principle that
generates such mixtures as the nonauthoritative or nonfictionalizing (and so, if
you will, "focalized") omniscient narrator, or the indirections (hence the "narra-
tivizing") of direct quotation; and it is the same Proteus Principle that enables the
sense of disorder in apparent temporal order, and vice versa, our immediate busi-
ness. This convergence from all sides bespeaks a whole dynamic system at work
(no more like the "ad hoc" postulation in Dorrit Cohn [1990: 792-93] than like
older fixities).
argue, does the exposure of the old-new package deal merely lead to
its collapse (let alone, heaven forbid, to its replacement by another,
opposed or mixed). On the positive side, rather, disposing of it clears
the way for redefining narrative and narrativity, along with the appro-
priate theoretical reorientation to their generic workings: to narrative
rules as distinctive, universal roles of sequence which govern (at will
assimilate, "narrativize") all other elements and patterns found in dis-
course at large. These generic master roles (to be called, in shorthand,
"suspense," "surprise," "curiosity," each with its proper dynamics be-
tween the telling and the told) are alone constant as a threefold set;
everything else (including established favorites apart from time, such
as perspective, space, character, verbal medium, or linear form) turns
out to be variable, because nondistinctive by itself, if not dispensable,
yet always narrativizable in the generic process.
Either way, the negative or the positive, the claims here are accord-
ingly stronger than those made earlier (Sternberg 1990a). They are
also, I hope, sharper and more conducive to genuine debate than
a medley of recent complaints about "formalism" (or its supposed
equivalents) in the name of rival gods, all too often beyond or above
narrative (thus, the appeal to meaning, reading, deconstruction, his-
tory, sociocultural study). With few exceptions (e.g., Pavel [1988] on
Greimassian semiotics), such responses are apt to leave the tag itself
undefined; the method or bundle of methods in question, unexplored
(therefore unfalsified) from within; its gains and losses, unweighed-
if at all specified-against the allegedly better countermethod; and so
the issues, left undecidable by any rational standards, generate more
heat than light. It is worth trying to reverse that proportion by revers-
ing the procedure.
Accordingly, "formalism" will continue to bear throughout the sense
that I have already assigned to it, namely: anti-functionalism, whether
overt, hidden, or even disclaimed, rather than anti-contentualism and
the like, which may, but need not, be involved. And it is on this (to
my mind, the) question that the two prongs of the argument will con-
verge. On the one hand, illustrating from some classic, old-new models
of action and/or discourse in narrative, I intend to show how such
formalisms collapse under the weight of their own inconsistencies-
notably, the value judgments smuggled or built a priori into neutral-
looking classifications-on top of assorted shortcomings in a wider
perspective. If so, the divorce of the formal from the functional, of
rules from roles, of patterns at whatever level from purposes would
seem essentially untenable, as would their automatic coupling. Nor
have the boundaries drawn within, as well as around, the object of in-
quiry promoted interdisciplinary traffic, for example, between poetics
and inter-art, historical, cultural, or cognitive studies. On the other
hand, I will suggest how a proper functionalist alternative meets the

case, to the extent of dovetailing the generic with the general: the
constants of narrative in its narrativity, a law unto itself, with the vari-
ables of narrative in its textuality, where it must or may integrate
a range of extranarrative components, dimensions, parameters. The
latter, moreover, include both surface forms of representation, always
central to mainstream narratology, and large communicative/histori-
cal/ideological forces, which it would keep out of bounds-in nice
symmetry to its antagonists, who would centralize, but often denarra-
tivize, those forces. Hence, referring the two sets of variables to the
law of narrativity, within a single theoretical framework, presents the
supreme test.
When it comes to such matters, the empirics of the case no longer
suffice to distinguish, much less to decide, the points at issue. We need
to go further and deeper. Both the critical and the constructive thrusts
of my analysis must evidently take their reference from goals, values,
operations, pros and cons, whereby the narrative genre has been or
may be characterized: from teleologies, in short, which inform and
slant even our current formalist typologies, regarding (dis)order as
elsewhere.
This is what I meant by proposing to advance from the quantitative

to the normative, apparently reasoned, belittling of the undesirable.
On such ground, our paradigm case again widely suffers demotion,
but again not without resistance or reprisals. Where the judgment goes
against chronology, the closer one looks at the reasons and reasonings
on record, the less logical they prove to be. Nor does their inner co-
herence, let alone their explanatory force, improve over the ages. On
the contrary, it is the modern attempts in this line that least satisfy the
minimal requirements for any theory: being true to itself, if not to the
facts, making sense in its own terms, with premises kept stable and con-
clusions following from them. (To keep the issues distinct, the prem-
ises themselves-regarding effects, goals, motivations behind narra-
tive-will be granted as far as possible, if necessary even articulated
and interconnected for maximum value: it is not in them but in the
jump from them to imaginary formal rules about sequence, or what-
ever, that the trouble lies.) The very program implicit in the rise of
"narratology," combined with the increasing sophistication about ways
and means-and I would be the last to underrate either-only high-
lights the discontinuity of local expertise with reasonable, let alone
progressive, theorizing.
In the name of what, then, has anachrony been favored at the ex-
pense of chronology? Does the contrast or the scaling follow from the
effect named? Where does the alleged polarity touch or mirror axes
other than time? Above all, how does the logic of argument stand to
that of narrative itself? Such questions uncover an instructive story,

although not exactly a happy one, whose patterns have both recurred
and diverged over the last two thousand years, often in unexpected
places. Let us examine a few landmarks, each associated with some
influential concept, going from the ancient to the contemporary: the
logic of plot in Aristotle, of the Renaissance in medias res, of Victor
Shklovsky's defamiliarization, and of Joseph Frank's spatial form and
related modernisms. Apart from suggesting themselves by their appeal
and typicality, all of these concepts are also notable for the challenge
they pose to any alternative, since they bear on central narrative reali-
ties. No matter how faulty their traditional conceptualizing may prove
to be, they still demand reconceptualizing, if possible in coordination.
2. The Sense of Purpose: Aristotle in/and Narrative Poetics Today
2.1. Aristotle's Chrono-Logical Whole in Complex versus Simple Plotting: The Birth
of Functional Analysis
A founding text and enduring inspiration, Aristotle's Poetics offers
in some ways a lure, in others a mirror, in yet others a contrast to
present-day theorizing about narrative. In all of these capacities, if
duly recognized, the Poetics helps to propound, but also to resolve, a
puzzle of high importance, one charged with lessons for the future as
well as with historical and metacritical interest. How come a discipline
that got off to such an extraordinary start in antiquity and has made
such advances since its revival over the last few decades-often under
the banner of narrative poetics-is still in its infancy and already in
trouble? That many would deny one or several of the question's four
premises is actually a measure of the predicament. Here, as usual,
telling in time makes the best test case and the best ground for wider
appraisals, except that nowhere as in Aristotle does its treatment so
luminously, if unwittingly, mix the corrective with the pull to formal-
ism.
Of the various antichronological positions taken to date, Aristotle's
is the earliest (and least explicit) but still the least unreasonable, if only
by comparison. What makes it so is the reference of facts to effects:
the Poetics views the arrangement of events, like everything else, in
functional ("teleological") terms, as a means to an end. How ends
determine or explain means, so as to inform their form, can be traced
at different stages along the way from Aristotle's universals of art to
his plot rules and variables, silently including temporal (dis)order.
On the most general level of teleology, the very definition of art
as mimesis finds its rationale in the universal "pleasure felt in things
imitated," due to their unique significance and signification as well as
their craftsmanship. "To learn gives the liveliest pleasure, not only to
philosophers but to men in general .... Thus the reason why men
enjoy seeing a likeness is, that in contemplating it they find themselves
learning or inferring, and saying perhaps, 'Ah, that is he'" (Poetics
[Aristotle 1951 {1907}: chap. 4]). And as the ensuing argument de-
scends in generality-from art through literary narrative or fiction to
tragedy-it progressively refers specific forms and options of mime-
sis to their specific informing pleasurable effects, kinds of structure
to kinds of pleasure, such as unity, surprise, catharsis. At least two of
those steps, as I understand them, are of immediate concern to us: the
relation between chronology and teleology, first within the arrange-
ment of the "whole" (holos) and, second, within the disarrangements
open to "plot" (mythos).4
The classic analysis of action patterns in chapters 7 through 14 thus
starts by deriving the need for events to form a "whole"-marked by
its "beginning"-to-"middle"-to-"end" (chrono)logical concatenation-
from the law of poetic unity. Whether comic or tragic, whether moving
the process of change (metabasis) within the represented world "from
happiness to unhappiness" or the reverse, the whole will then cohere
as a "necessary or probable" sequence between well-defined poles of
human fortune. The strongest possible chrono-logical enchainment
results; and you just cannot say of weakly forwarded narratives, as
Labov does, that "they are complete in the sense that they have a
beginning, a middle, and an end" (1972: 362). Aristotle would deny
that they bear this sense, or indeed that they make sense: the differ-
ence in linkage assumes an evaluative edge. His "wholeness" favorably
opposes poetic structure to the mere alignment of events in history
writing (chronicle, biography), with its allegedly misguided equiva-
lents in history-like epic: they abandon the chrono-logic of action for
the chronology of an era, a life, or some other time-span covered in
serial fashion to yield a "sum" (or "total") of episodes. "They imag-
ine that as Heracles was one man, the story of Heracles must also be
a unity"; but "infinitely various are the incidents in one man's life,
which cannot be reduced to unity," except of the loosest, biographi-
cal kind (Poetics: chap. 8). Later versions and echoes of Aristotle,
whether they adopt this typology of sequence with, without, or despite
the value judgment involved, often omit the purposive reasoning be-
hind it. So one may easily forget that the law-giver doubles as a reason-
4. For complementary analyses, see Sternberg (1973a, 1990b), which also go into
the question of Aristotle's curious silences regarding the temporalities implicit in
his approach: especially his promotion of world-time at the expense of discourse-
time and their interplay. Here, my business is less to account for such imbalances
than to redress them, where possible, in the light of the overall theory, and to
explore consequences and alternatives, where not.
giver, never more intent on motivation than when he grounds causality

in the beauty and distinctiveness and memorability of the artifact. Nor
does his plea for this overall means stop here, with ends other than
meaning. Unlike the historical or history-like record of "particulari-
ties," the artistic chain of probabilities also makes for "universality,"
that is, for built-in consequentiality and, with it, the pleasure of infer-
ring ("learning," generalizing) cause from effect, effect from cause, as
between action and character. Instead of merely noting the given deed
as an item in a series, for example, we readers explain and integrate
it by appeal to the doer's personality type or to his customary doing
or even to some wider rule of human behavior. For Aristotle, then,
the opposition of "whole" to "sum" in event linkage is all the more
principled and value-laden because it ranges from the (tight vs. loose)
shape of chronology to its (universal vs. particular) intelligibility, from
formal and perceptual aesthetics to ontological sense and coherence.
Whatever the cogency of this law, or its specificity to event forma-
tion, it does have its reason-multiple at that, and, just like the well-
ordered whole itself, continuous with both earlier and ensuing links.
The very next step advances from "whole" toward "plot," no longer
uniform but multiform in sequence and, ideally, even disordered for
a time out of wholeness, yet again on poetic grounds. Here, the gen-
eral directive of connectivity must come to terms with specific affective
needs and choices that inform (and, at their best, reform) the finished
product, the plotted artifact.
Chrono-logic itself bends, temporarily at least, in response to a
stronger, more determinate teleo-logic. Given that tragedy and high
epic aim for pity and fear, then "such an effect is best produced when
the events come on us by surprise" (ibid.: chap. 9). And given the de-
mand for surprise, the "whole" action needs to be "complicated" (in
effect, as will appear, dechronologized) into "plot" by way of discovery
and/or reversal (ibid.: chaps. 10-11). For example, instead of mov-
ing directly from happiness to unhappiness, the "simple" and minimal
tragic way, the sequence will promise a happy outcome, only to turn
round with a vengeance: the mandatory change of fortune then com-
plicates its route, and compounds its impact, by a sudden change of
direction, unpredictable (for surprise) yet in retrospect probable (for
wholeness, if only after the event).5 Accordingly, plot sequences fall
into a hierarchy that assigns each its place in terms of a single regu-
lating generic function, rather than into a dichotomy where artistic
5. "Complex" versus "simple" are precise terms in Aristotle, distinct both from
their loose ordinary reference to plot types of varying intricacy and from their
otherwise technical usage in story grammars, where they indicate the (de)compos-
ability of an action sequence. That is, a tale with a complicated plot can be "de-
composed" into a number of tales with simple plots.
status is either granted or denied altogether by reference to some

formal marker of disarrangement. The "complex" plot (e.g., Oedipus
Rex or, for that matter, Absalom, Absalom!) outranks the "simple" (e.g.,
Euripides' Medea) not because it breaks or deforms the natural tempo-
rality that the other preserves, but because its broken temporality best
serves, indeed maximizes, the effect common to both types as tragic
plots, namely, catharsis. Like the fiat of chrono-logizing the action, the
recommended dechrono-logizing of the actual (dramatic, epic) presen-
tation serves a purpose beyond itself: the teleology remains in control
across forms and levels of sequence.
Poles apart, this, from most contemporary approaches to narrative
poetics. How far Aristotle is from offering a valuation of dechronolo-
gizing per se, much less at the expense of (chrono)logical continuity
and integrity, arises from a set of pregnant silences and statements.
Considering the role played here by the surprise twist, for example,
why is it so firmly attached to the overall tragic effect that it never
receives independent mention, as though it had no worthwhile impact
on its own? Where such turns do not intensify catharsis, it would ap-
pear, the plot may execute them en route to the end (discovery scenes
included) without modulating from simplicity into complexity proper,
hence without deserving theoretical notice. Nor does the Poetics even
touch on basic linear effects and devices other than surprise-whether
glancing backward in order to arouse curiosity or forward, for sus-
pense-apparently because these are likewise deemed irrelevant to
the thrust of tragedy. As with judgment by omission, moreover, so with
recurrent vocal commission. Observe especially the fact that Aristotle
ranks epic below drama-and not despite, but due to, epic's greater
temporal license. The comparison boils down to three variable points.
(1) Concerning duration: "Epic action has no limits of time," while
"Tragedy endeavours ... to confine itself to a single revolution of the
sun" (ibid.: chap. 5). (The difference, one might add, likewise applies
to the respective parts, and with even more force, because it shows in
them not as a matter of Greek convention but of generic principle:
drama's scenic uniformity, with its pressure for one-to-one correspon-
dence between represented and representational time, versus epic's
free alternation of scene and summary. The Aristotelian corpus, then,
actually doubles the constraint on drama relative to epic latitude.)
(2) Concerning extension beyond or even against the line of the
whole, the epic alone permits diversity by way of more or less indepen-
dent "episodes." While lesser poets abuse this scope for multiplicity, in
the form of overall episodic plot, Homer strikes a nice balance between
keeping the major line in focus and digressing into sidelines en route:
"He detaches a single portion [from the traditional material] and ad-
mits as episodes many events from the general story of the war-such
as the Catalogue of the ships and others" (ibid.: chap. 23). Note that we
modulate here from plot duration to direction because the "episodes"
may involve retrospectiveness on top of digressiveness, as indeed does
the Iliad's belated Catalogue of Ships (or the tale of Odysseus's scar,
introduced toward the end, but antedating everything else because it
looks back to the hero's youth). On the other hand, drama requires
such unilinear tightness that, if any part "is displaced or removed, the
whole will be disjointed and disturbed" (ibid.: chap. 8).
(3) Concerning maneuverability: "In Tragedy ... we must confine
ourselves to the action on the stage and the part taken by the players.
But in Epic poetry, owing to the narrative form, many events simul-
taneously transacted can be presented; and these, if relevant to the
subject, add mass and dignity to the poem" (ibid.: chap. 24).6 This
rendering of simultaneous occurrences-or this simultaneous render-
ing of occurrences (Else 1957: 601-14)-further widens the disparity
in temporal repertoire. No longer confined to episodic extras and
departures, it affects the (dis)ordering of the action proper and, ac-
cordingly, marks the highest liberty from time.
To Aristotle, however, liberty from time carries no automatic advan-
tage, no aesthetic plus sign, as it does to a Renaissance in-medias-res
enthusiast and his modern formalist counterpart. (Thus the supreme
value placed by Shklovsky [see, e.g., 1965] on deviation-as-emancipa-
tion from the fabula, a measure later echoed throughout Barthes
[1974] or Genette [1980], and even directly applied to the classical
kinds: "Drama is usually tied to the lockstep progression of clock and
calendar, while narrative can treat the human reality in time, dipping
into memory for the past... and imagining the future" [Martin 1986:
110].) In Aristotle's eyes, however, such extra latitude may constitute a
plus or a minus or a mixed blessing, depending on its results, especially
the balance of essential and additional effect. By this standard, epic's
impressive-looking capacity and bent for variation is found wanting-
if not just counterproductive, then at best liable to do more harm
than good, but never an asset. Epic, to his mind, simply got its artistic
priorities wrong, which is why, over-permissive temporality and all,
it had to be outgrown in the Aristotelian evolution of forms. Just as
it ranks below drama, so it arose before, and by the same measure
of generic perfection: synchrony and diachrony join forces in judg-
ment. Throughout, the increased (sub)generic license in arrangement
6. Developments since then (ranging from the balcony above the platform in the
Shakespearean theater to the split cinematic screen, as against the abortive ex-
periments in double-column writing, typically shortlived in John Barth's Floating
Opera) have modified or reversed the distinction. But the issue remains unaffected
either way: Does variability confer value?
supposedly comes at the price of diminished coherence; variety gains

to the detriment of unity and all that it entails. Such a loss to artis-
tic wholeness cannot therefore be fully made good even by Homeric
epic, which Aristotle so admires, and would be even less acceptable
in drama. For disordering in these mimetic genres to become viable,
indeed a virtue or a clear gain, it must involve the writer's twisting the
"whole" into complex "plot" movement (rather than branching into di-
gression and so forth) in the service of determinate and determinative
tragic ends (catharsis, above all, rather than general literary values,
such as length or multiplicity).
To be sure, this cathartic effect is itself vulnerable to challenge, cer-
tainly in the light of a corpus later and larger than Aristotle's. One may
question its range and centrality, to say nothing of its monopoly, vis-a-
vis other effects. One may ask whether it dominates and explains the
composition, temporal or otherwise, of tragedy and epic from their
origins in Greek literature onward-let alone, of narrative at large.
Such a challenge will therefore go much further than the kinds of dis-
course that Aristotle himself openly excludes; namely, comedy on the
one hand (no catharsis, hence no ground for comparison), and history-
telling (or rather chronicling, with no eye to causation, hence no poetic
value) on the other. Put to an empirical test, in short, this Aristo-
telian argument for the complex plot may well be found wanting-
but not its logic: certainly not the positive thrust of this (teleo)logic,
culminating in the recommendation of deformed-and-reformed se-
quence for intensity. Given the first premise, all the rest follows by a
long chain of reasoning from desired poetic end to necessary or con-
tributory means: from pity and fear to surprise effect, therefrom to
discovery (anagnorisis) and reversal (peripeteia), therefrom to the twist-
ing or "complication" of the chrono-logical "whole" (holos) into optimal
"plot" (mythos).
2.2. Teleology Arrested, Chronology Demoted, Narrativity Vanished: Lures and

Penalties of Formalism
More is the pity, therefore, that the final, and for our concerns vital,
link in this chain of deduction-the time-nexus-remains implicit
throughout the Poetics. So much so that it has generally escaped
notice ever since, as has the affinity of the Aristotelian "whole"-versus-
"plot" dichotomy to later pairings: the Renaissance opposition of the
"natural" to the "artificial" or "poetic" order; the Russian Formalist
fabulalsujet opposition, with its assorted Structuralist offspring, such as
Tzvetan Todorov's histoire/discours and Genette's histoire/recit. Contem-
porary narratology since Shklovsky, despite its revival of Aristotle as
the founder of the discipline, has somehow missed (or misread) this
anticipation of its key antithesis and, still more unfortunately, as will
appear, the underlying Aristotelian rationale.7 Taken together, the two

oversights have left their mark on the approach to narrative, including
concepts (of event linkage, action sequence, well-formedness, taxon-
omy) extrapolated from Aristotle and modernized in his name. Nor do
most scholarly commentaries on the Poetics have anything much to say
about the whole/plot issue. One of the best, by Leon Golden and O. B.
Hardison (1968: esp. 140-41, 145-50), goes so far as to neutralize the
distinction between the two sequences by associating the "whole" itself
with disorder in the finished work and thus also dissociating the logical
from the chronological beginning-middle-end movement to the point
of contrast. The logic of events must always go straight, as it were,
across or even against all variations on the events' temporal axis. This
not only impoverishes, but flatly contradicts, Aristotle's definition of
the whole, along with his insistence on reserving surprise twists for the
complex plot.
For example, if "'beginning' . . means the first incident of the
play" as actually unfolded (ibid.: 141), then the beginning of Oedi-
pus Rex consists in the outbreak of the plague. But this would make
nonsense of the theory in relation to the drama invoked by it as a
paradigm. Given that the Aristotelian "beginning ... does not itself
follow anything by causal necessity" along the whole (Poetics: chap. 7),
the plague hardly meets the definition since it does follow from earlier
causes-and in the most perceptible as well as chrono-logical manner
at that. Their absence at the actual beginning, so far from being dis-
cernible in retrospect alone, as they emerge with such surprising im-
pact on enchainment and development-the hallmark of complexity
vis-a-vis simple wholeness-must be feltfrom the actual beginning, the
7. Here even Chatman, who usually turns the Poetics to good Structuralist account,
matches the wrong pair of sequences. "For Aristotle, the imitation of actions in
the real world, praxis, was seen as forming an argument, logos, from which were
selected (and possibly rearranged) the units that formed the plot, mythos" (1978:
19, 28). In fact, "argument, logos" is a highly abstract event pattern, introduced by
Aristotle as late as chapter 17, under the heading of "general outline" or "plan":
a drastic summary, whereby the Iphigenia or the Odyssey get reduced to a few lines
each. Rather than providing the units "selected" from by "the plot, mythos," there-
fore, the "argument" itself needs to be provided with links and episodes in order
to form a coherent "whole"-which, in turn, is indeed "possibly rearranged" into
a "plot." The compositional scale thus goes from logos to holos to mythos, but the
last two alone concern us now. (These and related time-patterns receive a fuller
discussion in Sternberg [1973a].) That Aristotle and his followers have neglected
to bring out the temporalities involved may also account for the little attention
paid in narratology to the work done by the Chicago Neo-Aristotelians. Within
that school, for example, Elder Olson even associates "plot" with chronological
sequence (Olson 1966: 35-36; 1977: 383-86); while R. S. Crane, who applies the
whole/plot distinction to Tom Jones with notable success, regrets the lack of proper
terms (Crane 1952: 631-32 n.13). For downright misunderstandings, see below.
plague's outbreak, due to the opacity of the chrono-logical beginning.

And that absence is felt all the more because the riddle of chrono-logic
cries out for solution in so many voices: political (the duty of leader-
ship), ideological (retribution presupposing crime), psychological (the
king's character), on top of the cognitive challenge itself. Where does
the plague spring from? It is the imperative need to discover those
mysterious causes that launches and sustains Oedipus's inquiry into
the past, his detective-like obsession with pursuing antecedents all the
way back to the appropriate "beginning." Throughout the plot, he is
literally a tragic hero in search of a whole.
Nor will the epic, for all its greater looseness and license regard-
ing time, accord with an idea of the whole as a logical order amidst
chronological disorder. Take the claim that, in the Odyssey, "the initiat-
ing incident begins the processes that will eventually result in [Odys-
seus's] restoration to wife and kingdom" (Golden and Hardison 1968:
141); in other words, that the "beginning" lies in the first scene of the
first book, where the divine assembly orders the hero's return despite
Poseidon's enmity. In fact, this opening scene not only happens at a
later point in Odysseus's history than a good many events that unfold
after it, notably the early adventures told to the Phaeacians through-
out books 9 to 12; the assembly on Olympus-like the plague vis-a-vis
Oedipus's past-also "follows" some of those Odyssean events in the
fullest chrono-logical sense, that is, by causal as well as temporal se-
quence. Thus the origin of the Poseidon trouble and even the hero's
own share of responsibility for his delayed homecoming are both un-
veiled as late as the retrospect in Phaeacia (for details, see Sternberg
1978: 35-40, 56-128). In either generic exemplar, then, we find the
whole thrown out of order in the plotting-to meet Aristotle's highest
standard-not itself dechronologized in the first place.
Elsewhere, the difference implicit in Aristotle gets neutralized the
opposite way, through the reduction of the plot to the whole's chrono-
logic. One recent example from a survey of narrative theory:
To counterbalance Aristotle's assertion that plots begin at the beginning,

one can cite another classic authority, Horace, who says that epics should
begin in medias res, in the middle of things. Many narratives follow this
advice, supplying details about characters and anterior situation after start-
ing a story. (Martin 1986: 84; cf. Olson in n.7, above)
It is, rather, Aristotelian wholes that "begin at the beginning," not

plots, which may begin anywhere and, ideally, at a point later than
the chronological beginning, in the interests of complexity with com-
pactness. Further, although Wallace Martin goes on to impose on all
plots the option that Aristotle reserves for the complex variety, he
still misses its entailment of disordering: "For Aristotle, the crucial
elements of plot structure are recognition (involving ignorance and

knowledge) and reversal (of intention, or of situation)" (Martin 1986:
117), as if there could be recognition without earlier mis-cognition,
hence distortion. On top of it all, Horace's in medias res itself origi-
nally urges the epic poet to select a coherent action (e.g., the Iliad's)
from a loose extraliterary chronicle (e.g., the Trojan War): so the
Horatian advice bears on the ordering of the whole into unity, not on
its disordering into late-before-early plot, and actually derives, rather
than diverges, from Aristotle (for details, see Sternberg 1978: 35-41;
Genette 1983: 21).
All this is due in part to the Poetics' own neglect to spell things out at
the juncture most charged with modern themes, so that the chain of
deduction from catharsis to plot design apparently stops just before
reaching the variable of time (dis)arrangement. Still, once this tem-
poral nexus has been articulated, narrative theory might profitably
gather from the cryptic lines of Aristotle one or two hints about it,
sometimes even despite him. For his very lapses (as well as his limita-
tions and blind spots) might then serve to compound a negative with
a positive lesson.
Above all, that lesson concerns the need for a functional, means/
end approach to the forms of time: as options chosen or avoided or
brought together for a purpose, rather than as having any intrinsic
(de)merit or being otherwise amenable to ready-made classification.
Unless one denies narrative all sense of purpose8-and with it all
change, as well as all regularity and continuity of purpose-the forms
of sequence must derive from functions: the given surface from the
underlying goals and directives, mimetics from poetics, how's from
why's, whatever they may be. Where there's a way taken in discourse,
there's always presumably a will behind it-the writer's, the genre's,
the culture's, variously interacting-so that in coming together the
one fulfills and reflects the other (or, from the interpreter's side, the
one finds its unity and intelligibility in the other). If every narrative
multiplies this bond a hundredfold, according to its range and exer-
cise of choice, then narrative as a genre sets no limit in principle to
the multiplicity, except for those limits inherent in narrativity itself.
Having so many wills to accommodate, and even more ways in which
8. -Which nobody really does, for all the talk about failures of intentionality or
the liberation from goal-directedness in (modern) art and the like: I challenge
anybody to show the contrary. (On the subject of how nonpurposive, e.g., genetic,
sense-making itself interrelates with purposive operations, see Sternberg [1983b,
1985: esp. 7-23]; see also Yacobi [1981].) But acknowledging the principle, under
whatever name, is one thing; consistently practicing, a fortiori theorizing, its im-
plications is another and much rarer thing, in narrative as in all discourse study.
to express them, the system of narrative consists in a vast network of

many-to-many relations.
Theory, temporal or otherwise, can gain explanatory power only
by inferring and systematizing these protean teleological relations,
although not necessarily or even mainly along the lines favored and
codified in the Poetics. We may, that is, benefit from Aristotle's logic of
reasoning without endorsing the specific reasons (ends, values, func-
tions, teleologies) that he lays down as premises, still less his formal
repertoire. To a decisive extent, we must do so because his spectrum of
effects remains all too narrow (geared to the affective more than the
cognitive, to mimesis at the expense of language, to causal sequence
as against the episodic or the suprasequential); and, concerning time,
it even remains one-sided, so focused on complexity in plotting as to
forfeit narrative universality across plot types.
Here, in encoding this imbalance that will recur and worsen
throughout history, Aristotle fails to pursue his own teleo-logic to its
logical conclusion. Once invoked, the method should likewise apply to
the form of chronological ("simple") narrative, fictionalized or histo-
riographic, which is surely not without its reasons. Nor, again, does
it make sense for him to consign such reasons, least of all a priori,
to a minus or zero-degree: to an absence or loss of optimum effect, a
missed opportunity on the artist's part, through lack of insight or skill,
to exploit the operations of time by deforming the "whole" into a "com-
plex" plot. (Observe his negative definition of the simple plot as one
where "the change of fortune takes place without reversal and without
recognition" [Poetics: chap. 10]. An Aristotelian in the comic mode,
Fielding spells out the judgment in Joseph Andrews [1: 11]: "To indicate
our idea of a simple fellow, we say, he is easily to be seen through:
nor do I believe it a more improper denotation of a simple book," i.e.,
one with a foreseeable, unidirectional plot.) At this juncture, the rule
generalized during the first stage of our inquiry (Sternberg 1990a)
in opposition to modern Formalists and Structuralists-then equally
drawn, the other way around, from the excess zeal of some prochro-
nologists-does now extend to the Poetics' model of tragedy, catharsis
and all. What recommends deformation of time in the telling need not
disqualify or belittle straight ("simple") formation; an argument for
one (e.g., that leading from catharsis, through surprise and discovery/
peripety, to "complex" plot) does not automatically count as an argu-
ment against the other, on pain of dogmatizing the formal means and/
or reducing the calculus of narrative (generic, aesthetic, other, mixed)
functions to a single value or end. In turn, the penalty for such dog-
matism and reductionism includes a built-in obstacle to the definition
of narrative. Theory cannot dictate or freeze, much less ignore, the
play of teleology-to the loss or gain of chronology-without paying

the price in narrativity.
To see how and how far this principle comes to tell against Aris-
totle himself, we need not go outside his limited concerns, regarding
either means or ends. We need not rehearse, that is, the extra ordering
forms, measures, parameters equally available to telling in and out of
time, to "simple" and to "complex" plotting: shifts in duration, fresh
cut-offs, multilinearity, nontemporal mechanisms of sequence, supra-
sequential play of equivalence, and the rest (ibid.: 928ff.). Nor do we
need to appeal against complexity, any more than against catharsis, in
the name of rival values attached to the chronological extreme, such as
Gibbon's "higher delight," Trollope's "intelligibility," Graves's history-
like "thoroughness" (ibid.: 934ff.), or their variant in Labov (1972).
Leaving the empirics and alternatives aside for the moment, we need
only enter into Aristotle's logic to conclude that his means/end argu-
ment boomerangs here even on its own terms, on its own functional
specifics.
For example, if the complex plot heightens pity and fear through
the shock of discovery/reversal, as in Oedipus Rex, then the simple,
orderly plot may work to much the same heightening end through
its inexorable movement toward the catastrophe that looms ahead-
thus Medea's killing of her children. (A novelistic example would be
The Idiot, according to Edwin Muir: "Dostoevsky shows in what ways
the knowledge of something to come can change and at the same time
bring out the values of time. In the instance he describes [Nastasia's
threatened murder by Rogojin] the knowledge is certainty, and the
thing to come is death. ... It is the expectation of this event dreaded
and yet inconceivable that gives The Idiot its painful tension, and makes
the conclusion so powerful, at once an exposure and a fulfillment of
the whole action" [Muir 1960: 74-75].) The gain of either strategy,
or plot type, is the other's loss. Inevitably so, because you cannot
have at once the jolt of the unforeseen and the juggernaut of the ex-
pected, the abrupt ("complex") regression from effect to cause and the
tense, oppressive ("simple") progression from cause to effect (not, at
least, without mixing and modifying both forms in the process, which
only extends the range of choice). And although an artist or audience
might still favor one balance of gain and loss over another, the choice
always lies between alternative arrangements of action-with-impact,
not between a positive and a negative, or null, value. The logic of
goal-directed ordering cuts both ways.
It cuts both ways, moreover, regardless of whether the goals served
by the disordered versus the ordered form of time are variant or
much the same. If the goals are variant, such as surprise in Oedipus
Rex versus mounting dread in The Idiot, or Jamesian ambiguity ver-
sus Trollopian lucidity, then those polar forms cannot be referred to

any single shared function and thus remain apart, incommensurable
and ungradable. Each suits its own purpose, more or less, better or
worse-depending on skill and context-rather than best or not at all.
Again, if the goals are basically the same, as with Aristotelian catharsis
throughout tragedy, then the respective forms of sequence may always
deliver the goods by different, possibly opposed, routes, or what I
called balances of profit and loss: for example, the heightening of
pity and fear through the reversal or the relentlessness of expectation.
The choice then becomes a question of economy, novelty value, ge-
neric norm, individual and collective preference, all relative. In short,
where the ends are not comparable, neither are the means, regardless
of surface likeness; where the ends are comparable, so in principle are
the means, never mind how apparently unlike. In either case, there-
fore, to reify (freeze, privilege) any set of means, such as the form of
complex plot and its assorted offspring to this day, is not just to impov-
erish but to undermine the functional calculus of time, as of narrative
structure in general.
Exactly here, at a crossroads in the analysis of plot-making, Aris-
totle's functionalism lapses and hardens for once into sheer formal-
ism. So much so that, if we read this decisive stage in the argument
out of context, his approach could not easily be distinguished, ex-
cept in specifics, from what has since become standard critical prac-
tice-not least among Formalists and Structuralists, who often bear
the name of functionality in vain or in another sense. This lapse
from the spirit of his own poetics (along with the rest of his scien-
tific work) makes Aristotle doubly vulnerable to misunderstanding by
narratologists in search of ancestry and foundations for very differ-
ent projects. It is as if the Renaissance and Neoclassical history of
pseudo-Aristotelianism (Weinberg 1961) were repeating itself in mod-
ern guise, whether action- or discourse-oriented.
You thus often find Aristotle yoked together with Vladimir Propp,
as the fathers of modern narratology. Yet although (or because) Propp
himself actually draws on Aristotle far more than has been recognized,
theirs is a sorry mismatch. For Propp's (1968 [1928]) "morphology"
of the folktale has no reference whatever to artistic, still less to af-
fective or communicative, teleology. Instead, his model undertakes to
reduce the diverse-looking material "to a sequence of thirty-one func-
tions corresponding to the principal acts and events of the narrative:
Villainy, Mediation, Beginning, Counteraction, Departure, etc." (Bremond
1970: 247). As a common denominator, this morphological structure
also offers a typological principle, leading from the (Russian) folktale's
classification within narrative to its own subclassification, because its
instances all mark the same trajectory, but do not always go through all
or the same landmarks en route. For better or worse, then, the Prop-
pian event-line amounts to a "whole" logic of action, only specified
and de-poeticized, de-motivated, in effect de-"plotted." Here Aris-
totle's well-formed beginning-middle-end action sequence descends in
generality (always going now the "happy" way, always with "peripety/
discovery" and many further intermediate links newly extrapolated
from the folktale corpus) to match a particular subgenre.9 Defined as
"the study of forms" (Propp 1968 [1928]: xxv), by contrast, this mor-
phology lacks all sense of purpose behind the formalized what's and
how's: its very "functions" 0 exclusively adhere to the action unrolling
within the narrated world, in principled (and illusory) disregard of the
activity contrived by the narrative for the reader, namely, to mimetic,
as divorced from poetic, cause and effect. In a word, the tale's sense
or (teleo)logic of order shrinks to a single level, that bearing on the
framework of existence and occurrence inhabited by the dramatis per-
sonae: on Aristotle's holos, Shklovsky'sfabula, the Structuralists' histoire,
the domain of the told.
As a result, the features and forces of telling in or out of time dis-
appear from view, along with other relations between the telling and
the told. "The sequence of functions is always identical" (ibid.: 21-
23): this basic law does not apply to the actual narrative sequence,
where (it transpires in passing) the "functions" may change places,
for reasons left obscure (ibid.: 26, 97, 109, 145; see also Bremond
1970: 254-56). Far from describing such transpositions and explain-
ing their reasons-if only as part of the interplay between constancy
and variety, uniformity and multiformity, dramatic and artistic func-
tions-the Morphology does not so much as consign them in passing
to a different stage or even a tack of inquiry into the (folk)tale. The
complementary tacks mentioned include genesis, diachrony, religion,
9. By the rule we have already encountered apropos of "minimal narrative," formal

specificity (here imposed both on the direction of change and on its itinerary
throughout, running to no fewer than thirty-one stages or "functions") is inversely
proportional to empirical coverage. The more features required, the less the range
of inclusion. Predictably enough, Claude Bremond and Jean Verrier (1984) have
now established that Propp derived his model from a single type of fairy tale,
the "Dragon Slayer," harmonizing the rest of his corpus with it by violence. The
wonder is rather that Bremond himself still fails to draw the conclusion about the
hopelessness of the project as such, not least about his own ambitious efforts in the
same line. There, he actually outreaches Propp, claiming that his own improved
model "did not apply specifically to the French folktale, or to the folktale in gen-
eral, but was to be considered as an outline applicable to all types of narrative"
(Bremond 1970: 247): as though entangling the logic of action widened its scope,
to the point of universality.
10. "Function is understood as an act of character, defined from the point of view
of its significance for the course of the action" (Propp 1968 [1928]: 21).
and anthropology, but never the plot behind the action, the poetics
underlying and governing the mimetics.
Carried to such lengths, therefore, the one-level reductiveness be-
trays nothing less than a confusion, or at best a drive toward fusion,
of nature and culture. Aristotle was the first to draw the analogy be-
tween the natural and the man-made," the organic and the poetic, but
only so as to establish the unique duplicity of art, which operates by
and for its own logic (e.g., catharsis) under the action's lifelike guise.
The goal-directed process of change built into nature must be sup-
plied in and through the artful imitation of nature, the two-faced plot.
In revisiting the analogy from the first page onward, however, Propp
literalizes it (even more so later [Propp 1984: 68-69, 82-83]). He
speaks as though an artifact were not just equally describable, decom-
posable, classifiable, but also equally uni-functional with its analogue
in nature, the plant and/or the animal: as though narratology could
emulate biology in the object morphologized, on top of the morpho-
logical method itself. Whether or not the false analogy is dropped,
its consequences for the model of analysis have affected much of the
work done by Propp's successors, from professed morphologists to
story grammarians. A category mistake remains one, under any name
or variant.
The two approaches stand opposed even where their interests seem
most convergent, indeed continuous-regarding the "whole"-since
Propp feels no need to account, in aesthetic terms, for the whole's tight
unilinear concatenation, any more than for its possible disarrange-
ments or transpositions in the plot. As with his formal borrowings, so
with his thematic ones: what's and how's encoded in apparent isolation
from why's, actional from textual function, nature-like morphology
from socio-artistic value and ideology, except that the show of posi-
tivism breaks down at second glance. Characteristically, Propp does
not even see fit to explain why the fairy tale always moves in one of
the two directions considered and complicated in the Poetics, namely,
from unhappiness to happiness: that one-way movement toward hap-
piness simply remains for him a given to be described, as though the
morphological constant were not itself a product of teleological choice
among the variables of narrative. How can it be anything other than
a product, where the two directions are so thematically opposed all the
way from one cut-off point to another (and so reversible 2) that their
11. For an excellent discussion of functionalism in Aristotelian biology, see

Martha C. Nussbaum (1978). I owe the reference to Dr. Chava Yablonka, of Tel
Aviv University.
12. -Actually reversed, moreover, even outside tragedy. Within myth alone, con-
sider the "unhappy" ending of the master story traced by Lord Raglan (1956)
difference makes all the difference to the effect? And if the choice of
direction makes such a difference, then any model unable (or unwill-
ing) to incorporate its poetic reasons and results in communication
will get into trouble even in describing the action, to the ultimate
breakdown of its own logic. So the entire Proppian approach, I would
argue, is caught between two evils. Without a higher functional refer-
ence point, the one-level analysis must remain not just partial but ill
equipped even for the limited (morphological, taxonomic) jobs that it
does undertake; and with such a reference point built in, that analy-
sis would forfeit much of its spirit and many of its claims, in effect
transforming into something other (and, although not in its own eyes,
better) than a pure, objective morphology, comparable to the natural
scientist's, or to the linguist's grammar. The catch is inescapable.
For example, Propp typologizes the initial, preparatory situation as
one where "calamity" or "misfortune already hovers invisibly above
the happy family"-soon to be actualized through the villain's machi-
nations-or as one of "insufficiency or lack, and it is this that leads to
quests analogous to those in the case of villainy," its "morphological
equivalent" (Propp 1968 [1928]: 27, 34-35). Yet are they equivalent?
On what grounds, other than analytic convenience? How to meet the
objection that the resulting sequences "tell not one story but two"?
(Martin 1986: 94).
Certainly not by shifting, detailing, or otherwise revising the terms
of the comparison within their original, action-bound framework, a
la Bremond (1970). Having widened the range of "deficiency" to in-
clude "poverty, illness, foolishness, scourge, desire, etc.," Bremond
would bring them all under one definition as a state "which could be
improved," and their "satisfactory" opposites, correspondingly, under
that "which could deteriorate" (ibid.: 252). Yet his attempt to unify
the variations at either pole in fact renders the poles themselves inter-
changeable rather than well defined for a change, if only because rela-
tivized. Consider the fact that, short of absolutes (rare in human af-
fairs), every "deficiency" is liable to further "deterioration"-Edgar's
hard-earned lesson in King Lear, when suddenly confronted with his
blind father-as every "satisfactory state" is to "improvement." And
if the definitional features may change places, and the states change
poles, then the trouble already encountered by Propp only gets worse.
For the model can no longer distinguish even the basic opposition
across cultures. And as with actual reversal, so with potential. Even in Bremond's
(1970) revised morphology, fairy-tale action normally goes from either unhappi-
ness ("deficiency") or happiness ("satisfactory state") to happiness (achieved, re-
gained, improved), but not to unhappiness. Why not?
that every member of the fairy tale's audience will intuitively register:
the diametric cut-off points, along with the to-and-fro movements be-
tween them.13 Bremond himself comes to admit as much in blandly
observing that at times the initial "state of deficiency (= which could
be improved) corresponds functionally to A still relatively satisfactory
state (= which could deteriorate)" (ibid.). Where Propp equated "in-
sufficiency" with "misfortune," by uneasy fiat, Bremond's supposed
revisions end up by equating "deficiency" with comparatively good
fortune. On top of the old question as to the constant behind such
variant states as "illness" and "desire," then, you now wonder how
to draw such fundamental (because allegedly deep rather than sur-
face) contrasts as "improvement" versus "deterioration," or "ascen-
dant" versus "descendant" movement, or even "hero" versus villain"
or "enemy." Where, in short, can such narratology find the missing
sense of equivalence and difference (actional or otherwise) that goes
into telling/reading competence?
As it stands, I maintain, the answer is, nowhere-because that sense
is just not to be found anywhere within the narrated world, but only
in the coordinates of the narrative discourse. To capture it, therefore,
the scheme must extend its grounds from the allegedly self-contained,
nature-like (morpho)logical formation of the variants to their artis-
tic, sociocultural, or otherwise norm-bound determination, possibly
including polar transformation. As the functional frame of reference
for comparison grows double, to be sure, it also grows double-edged:
the equivalence/difference becomes proportionally less context-free
and more contingent, less governed by nature than by art, history,
ideology.
With respect to openings, for instance, can "the same be said about
the abduction of a bride as about the simple lack of a bride"? (Propp
1968: 35). Not necessarily, I would emphasize, but possibly, on a
double condition: provided that both openings have the same conse-
quences for (1) the hero (launched into a quest for his/a bride), and
(2) the reader (enlisted for the marriage). Failing (1), of course, the
13. CompareJonathan Culler (1975: 207) on the evaluation of approaches to plot:

"Without this intuitive knowledge, which we display every time we recount or dis-
cuss a plot, there is no way of evaluating a theory of plot structure because there
is nothing for it to be right or wrong about." Well said. But apart from going on
to credit Propp with an awareness of this standard, which the latter signally fails
to exhibit, Culler's generalization rather understates the ills involved and our
ability to evaluate them. Such "a theory of plot structure" not only remains arbi-
trary and empty, because lacking in explanatory power, but it may also turn
counterproductive, because counterintuitive, and even self-defeating, because at
odds with its own premises as well as with the facts.
variants would never amount even to "morphological" equivalents; but

(2) is no less necessary and far more subject to divergence, reversal
included. Thus, the "abduction of a bride" at least presupposes her de-
sirability, with the result that the bridegroom suffers misfortune and
understandably seeks, as "victimized hero," to retrieve his fortune.
The "simple lack of a bride," however, may always (and at times does)
count as a positive good, a fortunate state of affairs; in which case the
brideless youth cannot set out on the quest without forfeiting his title
to probability or sympathy or both: his very (psycho)logical incentive
along with his (typo)logical name and role of hero. Given the frame's
negative attitude toward marriage, the logic of events itself then loses
its propulsive force on pain of multifold incoherence, actional (unintel-
ligibility) as well as rhetorical (e.g., unattractiveness, undesired irony).
So even the formal cause/effect equivalence of the two variants hinges
on their pairability or interchangeability under some normative/af-
fective common denominator (as Aristotle's range of "unhappiness"
appeals to our "pity and fear"). And whether or not the fairy tale
empirically interchanges those variants is beside the theoretical point
since, even if yes, this would only mean that the tale knows better than
its analysts: that it does observe both aspects of the double condition
on narrative sense, referring the event-line's canonical form to the
appropriate socio-artistic norm from the outset.
Similarly with the final liquidation of the misfortune or lack. Either
"happy end" owes its happiness, including its very description as such,
not to any objective property or logical rule but again to the (sub)-
genre's normative, ideological choice to involve the audience in the
fortunes of the "hero" as against the "villain," whose (objectively) un-
happy end completes our sense of happiness for his adversary. From
opening to terminus, then, the norms are as canonical as the forms of
"whole" action that they generate and govern, bring together or divide,
move toward one state or its opposite through a variable number of
midpoints ("functions"), always for a double purpose.
As it is, especially given its immense appeal, Propp's case serves as
an object lesson, disabling both the union of incompatibles and their
equally facile relegation to "different approaches" to narrative. Its
straits expose the illusion behind the new positivism in the Formalist/
Structuralist camp, most immediately behind the one-level analyses
oriented to the narrated world. For our case brings home the prin-
ciple that there is no morphology, no taxonomy, no story grammar, no
logic of action, without a regulating discourse teleology: the more nar-
rativized, let alone reasoned and theorized, the better. Aristotle would
hardly associate himself with this pseudo-objectivity of facts without
effects, routes and routines without reasons; but he seems to invite
such associations by his (typo)logical concerns, his neglecting to articu-
late the whole/plot relation, his privileging of complexity, all features

that recur in Propp and his heirs.14
Likewise with the apparently opposite camp of theorists, oriented
to discourse ("plot") rather than to "action" in narrative: here we find
Aristotle's overhasty ranking of plot types by their effectiveness mis-
taken for an absolute artistic/inartistic dichotomy-if only through
the omission or exclusion of the "simple" kind from the repertoire-
and so brought into line with modern antichronologism. Typically,
for instance, having ruled chronology out of (artistic) existence in his
own name, Genette then does away with the simple plot in Aristotle's:
he describes the features of complexity, "surprising enchainment . . .
peripety . . . recognition," as "necessary" to the tragic effect (Genette
1979: 22-23 [my translation]). Otherwise hostile to the kind of nar-
ratology done by Genette-but, significantly, sharing its disbelief in
orderly narration-Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1978: 194) even gen-
eralizes these features beyond tragedy into "the basic or minimal plot of
every story (change, reversal of fortune, or peripeteia, as structuralists
from Aristotle to Barthes have maintained)": it is, of course, change of
fortune that really constitutes the minimal Aristotelian plot, while the
reversal of fortune (i.e., of direction of change) aims for the maximum.
She thus conflates straight with peripeteic metabasis, to much the same
effect as Genette. Likewise Frank Kermode, who has tried to steer a
middle course between Structuralism and humanism, not only locates
"peripeteia . . . in every story of the least structural sophistication,"
but also collocates it with its Aristotelian mate via "our wish to reach
the discovery or recognition by an unexpected and instructive route"
(1967: 18; cf. Kermode 1987 [1983]: 199). No more true of the Poetics
than of narrative practice, again, all these bids for universalizing the
form of twisted sequence (in other words, for attaching it to narra-
tivity) are typically modern, yet their convergence from such different
quarters also reveals something about the ancient authority to which
they appeal. "For our own reasons we habitually misread [Aristotle],"
Kermode (1980: 75) disarmingly observes. Yet certain "misreadings,"
like this one in regard to sequence, are not quite so groundless as
others, like the Propp connection. Rather, they mark a continuity of
sorts in the bias toward complex form, pushed over the ages to the
14. I leave aside the crosscutting, but less clear-cut, question of the Morphology's
"formalism," in the sense of anti-contentualism: a charge made by Levi-Strauss
and denied by Propp. (Both sides of the exchange have now reappeared in Propp
[1984].) My own discussion, rather, brings out a family resemblance between the
two sides, notably in the common, even escalating, disregard for generic teleology:
Levi-Strauss's focus on deep atemporal structure (itself part of modernism's con-
vergence on "spatial" form) amounts to denarrativizing myth in the action as well
as in the narration.
non-Aristotelian limit of monopoly on artistic status and value, often

indeed on plotting at large. Such misunderstandings would perhaps
not arise, or not so widely and imperceptibly, if Aristotle himself were
more consistent in his teleology at this key juncture as well as more
explicit about chronology elsewhere. That the case turns out to be
otherwise suggests how the lure of surface form is hard to resist within
or without time, even where the logic of the theory points, and to some
extent actually goes, in the opposite direction.
Succumbing to this lure carries its penalties, and they typically reach
beyond the internal consistency of the approach to its scope and, fur-
ther, to its very heart, mimesis. In scope, like all distortion-elevating
theories since then, the first Poetics blanks out not only chronological
poetics, quite a hole by itself, but also all the resources and parameters
of deployment that it shares with the antichronological. Having suf-
ficiently outlined and crisscrossed this blank earlier (Sternberg 1990a:
esp. 928-45), let me recall just one measure of special weight, namely,
cut-off points.
In a treatise so directed toward action sequences as the Poetics, one
might predict the blindness to all nonactional (hierarchical, perspec-
tival, deictic, linguistic) mechanisms of sequence; nor could one expect
any glance at suprasequential development (even in the form of, say,
drastically "complicated" or reversed analogy between characters, e.g.,
Odysseus and Agamemnon as returners in Homer, first paired, then
opposed). For such axes and their linearities to be incorporated, or
so much as discerned, the theory (and not this theory alone) would
have to change its very premises about discourse, time-art, the making
and reading of plot. On the other hand, since Aristotle did introduce
the notions of beginning, middle, and end within the proper actional
whole, it is sad to find how little he has to offer about the two ex-
tremes as the strongest junctures along the finished plot. How little, I
mean, his account makes it possible to capture and explain their time-
features, beyond the yes/no registration of one surface variable: their
accord/discord with the whole's chronology. But do those plot limits
involve (dis)ordering in fact or in effect, in the line or in the sense of
time, or in both? Against what norm? Why?
As we go from formal to perceptible marking, the returns steadily
diminish. Within the complex plot, Aristotle could at most (though
he actually doesn't) register the deviation of these two cut-off points
from the "whole" order, but not their deviant force (always except-
ing surprise, as distinct even from novelty value between convention
and invention); within the simple plot, he could register nothing at
all, not (say) the sharpest departure from beginning/end conventions
beneath the surface of temporal harmony with the whole. This would
leave unregistered, for example, the multiple historic novelty of the
Bible's opening with the creation of the world ex nihilo by the word of
a single, disembodied, mysterious divinity; or the force of Thucydides'
choice to start with the causes of the Peloponnesian War, in opposition
to epic's (the Iliad's, most pointedly) jump in medias res. The orderly
looking cut-off goes with an unsettling sense of a new world order
and/or a newly motivated, reanimated historical order. Their salience
and significance outstripping any conventional surface disorder, in
shock effect as otherwise, such "simple" beginnings must therefore
be assigned a role by any temporal account, on pain of inadequacy;
and so must their "complex" equivalents in innovation. But Aristotle's
scheme reflects neither. Moreover, it is to the Rhetoric (1415a, 8-24)
that we owe his only glance toward the focus-building role launched by,
among other beginnings, Homeric invocation and dramatic prologue
("A foretaste of the theme is given, intended to inform the hearers of it
in advance"). This is a thematic, cognitive role of the first importance,
yet sadly out of the Poetics' reach, because it affects the processing of
all linear discourse and so eludes the chronological simple/complex
antithesis. He could not do better even if he would, once the forms
of time have lost or arrested their reference to operative norms and
processes of all (textual, contextual, intertextual) kinds.
If this seems little for a theory of sequence to offer by any mea-
sure, including its own, consider that hard-line formalism a la Genette
(which does not even theorize initiating/closural force, surprise effect,
or anything beyond deviation value per se) yields even less: descrip-
tive scope shrunk at best to a minimum, namely, anachrony; system-
atic explanatory power, to a virtual blank. The less reasoning there
is from the bedrock of generic ends-necessarily temporal(ized) in
accordance with narrativity-the less hope there is for encompassing
the arsenal and combinations of discursive means, or even for reason-
ably treating such means as happen to attract the analyst's notice.
The appearances to the contrary must not obscure the shrinkage.
Actually, the proliferation of terms bearing on "order" in Genette's
Narrative Discourse (e.g., analepsis/prolepsis, ellipsis/paralipsis, homo-
diegesis/heterodiegesis, reach/extent, often further ramified) singles
out for analysis the "complex" form of event-ordering elevated since
Aristotle; the artistic drives toward such complexity-other than the
taste for disorder per se, neither shared by Aristotle (or by many after
him) nor sufficient to explain specific choices within disorder itself-
emerge in piecemeal, ad hoc fashion, if at all; and the lack of any prin-
cipled cross-reference between how's and why's in sequence-making
compromises, as well as restricts, even the scheme of disorderly fea-
tures. Nor is this lack, with its costs, repairable from within Genette's
method (as is Aristotle's ranking of plot orders, by counterargument
from catharsis), but only against the grain. Either you settle for the bal-
ance of profit and loss-such as it is, and its unhealthiness does tend
to escape notice-or you must abandon the very basis for a higher
firmer ground: much in the same way that the missing reference poin
for difference/equivalence among Propp's variants has already been
found in the contextual teleo-logic, rather than in any immanent, de-
tachable chronologic, of folktale.
However elaborate (in part, new) the analytic apparatus, therefore,
it again marks a strategic, if not programmatic, regression vis-a-vis the
first Poetics; and in hands other than Genette's, or for texts less respon-
sive to wit and ingenuity, the apparatus itself visibly yields poorer (be
cause "purer") returns.15 In essentials, whetherjudged by the standard
of explanatory power or of testability or of enabling advance toward a
general narrative poetics, those two methods, the Aristotelian and the
Structuralist, are nothing like equally fruitful (any more than they ar
compatible, except in questions of detail): and I mean, as will soon ap-
pear, demonstrably, indeed predictably, unequal. If we have to make
a choice, and up to a point we do, then better a half-reasoned account
of complex plotting as art's optimum, yet without excluding the simpl
"whole" minimum, than an ostensibly self-justifying table of complex
("anachronic") plot elements, barely interrelated beyond their com-
mon opposition to a hypothetical, inartistic, unchanging zero-degree
of simplicity ("chronology"). Here narratology reaches the limit of
typology-equipped only to classify, and only what lends itself to being
classified as an "objective" (rather than a contextual, inferable, opera-
tive) violation of some fixed one-to-one correspondence (in order or
elsewhere) between the narrating discourse and the narrated world;
and only, as will appear, part of such violations at that.
This already looks like another revival of positivism, its old ideals
and illusions of pure objectivity now curiously wedded to a still older
aesthetic bias toward disharmony, under the name of Structuralism
"Another," I say, because Propp's "morphologism" on the level of th
narrated "fabula" or "story," allegedly immutable, finds its counter
15. This is why even his Structuralist followers tend to look for "enrichment" else-
where, not always with the same success, depending on the presence or absence of
a basis for integration. Thus, having placed the field in a semiotic framework tha
is wider than usual, Chatman (1978: 11) can indeed reasonably hope "to synthe
size the most powerful insights-Anglo-American, Russian, and French" as wel
as Aristotelian, while still finding others discordant with his idea of narratology
(see, e.g., Chatman 1990). By contrast, a survey like Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan
(1983) anchors one chapter on time in Paris (i.e., in Genette's Narrative Discourse
and another in Tel Aviv (especially in works by Menakhem Perry and/or my
self, beginning with Perry and Sternberg [1968]), in complete disregard for the
incongruity of the two source languages, the typological vs. the "processual": eclec
ticism carried to self-division. Genette's own views on the limits of compatibility
frequently emerge in the polemical retrospect (Genette 1983).
part here in the Genettean domain of freely manipulable "narrative"

or "plot"; and a very odd counterpart it is, too, because the more
manipulable the sequence (or, for that matter, the tempo or the view-
point) in relation to the happening, the less classifiable it becomes
without a sense of purpose in the telling and reading. Does not choice
imply (and its widening, underline) purposiveness, meaningfulness,
structuredness? As it is, this antistructural Structuralism boomerangs.
Against the very idea of structure as a network of relations, it omits to
generalize the structuring forces of narrative and accordingly misses
or mishandles the component elements in play: the forms or "figures"
that go (and, of course, integrate) into narrative discourse in protean
means/end combinations, irreducible to any ready-made linkages. The
enterprise of isolating parts (temporal or other deformities) without
principled reference to wholes (generic, subgeneric, individual) raises
foreseeable questions all along the line-foreseeable, yet strangely un-
noticed.
Why, for example, should texts or junctures along the same text so
vary in deployment, one devising anachrony by "analepsis," another
by "prolepsis," still another none at all? How, if not by their work-
ings in communication, are we to distinguish "major" from "minor,"
perceptible from negligible, stereotyped from innovative forms of
anachrony-or chronology? What in reason justifies the monopoly on
anticipation given to "prolepsis" by overt statement, such as a nar-
rator's foretelling or a hero's foreboding of death, at the expense
of established (if tacit) convention to the same effect, such as our
foreknowledge of the unhappy end in tragedy; or at the expense of
straight chronological development, inevitably generating and often
polarizing expectations about the future toward which it marches; or
to the loss of backward-looking ("analeptic") glances, themselves always
capable, reversely, of throwing attention forward-through, say, dis-
closures that affect for good or for ill the hero's chances of ultimate
success? (Thus the series of retrospects on Odysseus's lively career,
pointed and counterpointed by the fate of earlier homecoming kings
as well as by explicit divine scenarios, all working for suspense about
his imminent conflict with the Suitors: a typical variety of means, some
overt, others covert, some ahead of time, others behind time, others
yet across time, are deployed and orchestrated by Homer to a stra-
tegic forward-looking end.) Inversely, why tie retrospection to overt
"analepsis" after the fact? Narrative can surely evoke the past through
other measures altogether, all retrospective in force yet neither analep-
tic nor always overt in form. Such measures include prolepsis, whereby
anticipation itself impels us backward to figure out how the anticipated
event will come to pass; or an unforeseen turn, inviting resolution
in terms of what has gone before; or even nontemporal devices like
analogy, which may illuminate or ambiguate a character's anteced

ents by implicit comparison to some analogue in the present, hence
without any surface disordering whatever. Like the future, then, the
past hardly requires an official, least of all an ill-timed, visit from th
narrator to come into narrative play; just as such a visit, although a
departure from the event-line, would by itself hardly suffice to ener-
gize either time zone, let alone in a predetermined direction and to
perceptible extent.
The consequences variously reflect on other axes, such as reported
discourse and point of view. They also have their positive side, which
I theorized elsewhere as the Proteus Principle and will develop in the
next section. Meanwhile, they go far enough to disconfirm Genette'
entire sequence analysis, even on its own ground: by the logic of
typology, applied to the privileged types at that. Evidently, there is no
package-dealing of form (analepsis vs. prolepsis) and function (retro-
spection vs. anticipation) in narrative. But neither do the two forms
themselves cover all the resources for anachronic effect (from chro
nology to analogy), or even the subforms of overt anachrony. Take
the paradigmatic figure that "inaugurated our (Western) literary tra-
dition": Where does in medias res belong? Its late-before-early jump
can in no way fall under "analepsis"; but neither would it count a
"prolepsis" because it violates (or evades) the formal condition "of
narrating or evoking in advance an event that will take place later"
(Genette 1980: 40). This untimely and late opening yet evokes noth-
ing "in advance," nothing "later" than itself, nothing even otherwis
relatable to some antecedent mediatory juncture ("first narrative") in
the discourse, for there is no such preopening juncture here by defi-
nition.16 The maneuver just slips through another large hole in the
net, that is, the absence of any parameter that will immediately refe
discourse to story order-as concurrent beginning-middle-end pro
cesses running in and/or out of step (cf. Sternberg 1978: 33-57 e
passim). On top of everything else, Genette's scheme thus compounds
Aristotle's inability to register the finesse of "simple" beginnings by
leaving unmapped such a disorderly jump as no reader, from Homer's
onward, could possibly miss. Still less could the scheme handle the ter-
minal equivalent of in medias res-the abrupt or premature cut-off as
such, however otherwise orderly-because it lacks even an Aristote-
lian sense of wholeness, whereby to tell open from closed endings by
their push against or for chrono-logical conclusiveness. Never mind
16. In turn, since the "first narrative"juncture is assumed to orient the descriptio
throughout, its irrelevance to the issue of in medias res becomes symptomatic. I
indicates further lacunae in the coverage of order and then of "narrative levels,
so coming to tell against the orienting signpost as such, down to its very "firstness"
the chain reaction is easily traceable, but not here.
the ending's novelty value-screened out by the Poetics, too-here the

very question of its subversive plot value must fall into limbo, together
with the late opening. (At either plot extreme, as always, the facts of
discontinuity themselves will escape notation unless suitably related to
effects notable in interpretive practice-to felt ruptures, which acti-
vate gaps and invite closure by disturbing our experience of time.)
And so it goes, all the way to the dissolution of some major typological
parameters, such as the "ellipsis/paralipsis" or "homodiegesis/hetero-
diegesis" contrasts: the boundary drawn within each pair so wavers, for
lack of a firm reference point, that the opposed terms grow virtually
interchangeable.
Throughout, the trouble goes too deep to be cured, even by ad
hoc patchwork, and argues for a radical alternative. The assorted ills
invariably come down to the anchorage in the narrative's manifest dis-
ordering of story-time-rather than in its pointed (perceptible from
the reader's side, purposive from the teller's) ordering and reorder-
ing as well as disordering, which can all variously manifest themselves
on the narrative surface. Once objective disordering comes to figure
as a type and means of effective (re)ordering-in itself neither more
nor less viable, no weaker or stronger than the rest, because equally
subject to the overall forces at work-the picture and prospects of the
field undergo a sea change, and hardly, I think, for the worse. To go
only by the set of problems just indicated, they would already seem to
have found a reasonable (if not yet comprehensive enough) resolution
in such a framework, as others of the same family have done before.
Indeed, that the trouble with Genette's "figures" now reveals a
family likeness to the Propp formulas ("misfortune" equals "lack," the
"improvable" opposes the "degradable" state) is perhaps the ultimate
measure of its depth and typicality. In both cases, we have a bid for
taxonomy, whether actional or discursive, without an articulated tele-
ology to orient and (con)textualize the procedure, that is, to build into
it the (or a) sense of what differences make a difference, what regulari-
ties or disturbances count as such, what equivalences resist equation
in the telling/reading. Given the life of forms, better to have some
debatable or partial model of what animates their relations (in, say,
our narrative experience) than to have none offered, acknowledged,
or wanted. The Poetics at least went some of the way under the guid-
ance of one, first classing imitations together as uniquely pleasurable
and then dividing them by their proper pleasures: tragedy from com-
edy by its catharsis, the chrono-logical from the episodic formation by
its integrity and memorability, complex deformation by its surprise.
Our two modern projects of narratology, however, look for guidance
elsewhere, to supposedly harder rules, more "scientific" and less "sub-
jective." Otherwise so divergent, neither project has anything like a
repertoire of narrative and narrativizable ends (forces, norms) that

would coordinate-presumably also widen-its repertoire of means
(forms, variants) into a supple many-to-many system of relations; and
both pay accordingly in their respective domains.
Again, if the analyst's adherence to the chrono-logic of action still
leaves the sequence a measure of reality-like unity and continuity, even
without the appeal to artistic teleology, as in Propp et al., then the
shift to surface forms of dechrono-logizing must tear the discourse
into pieces: an analepsis here, a prolepsis there, now an ellipsis, now a
heterodiegesis, with nothing in the spirit of taxonomy to bridge, moti-
vate, or interlink them. No principle of coherence runs through the
bits and pieces of disorder themselves; much less, if possible, coher-
ence with their orderly neighbors or, for that matter, with disorderly
absentees and escapees, such as in medias res; least of all with the rest
of the elements and patterns distributed along the given sequence.
(Indeed, point of view apart, most of those elements-from character
to language to thematics-never come into the Genettean picture at
all, sequenced or unsequenced. The fragmentariness steadily rises in
inverse proportion to the coverage.) As with discursive wholeness, so
with actional: clean forgotten, apparently, is even the generic premise
that all those fragments are supposed to be reassembled into a more
or less continuous, early-to-late story. For how can they (re)form a
chronological line of happenings except by the progressive sense they
make together in actual linear unfolding, especially when deformed?
(We are in order, to quote the Bard, when we are most out of order.)
Or, if "the Odyssey or the Recherche is only . . . an amplification (in
the rhetorical sense) of statements such as Ulysses comes home to Ithaca
or Marcel becomes a writer" (Genette 1980: 30), where is the amplified
equivalent of such one-clause "minimal forms of narrative"? Where is
the all-important generic commonality between the nuclear and the
full-bodied, the accordant and the arbitrary, to come from? -Not
from analysis without power of synthesis. Little wonder that Genette,
despite frequent mentions of Proust's will to coherence and architec-
ture, ends by refusing to attempt any "final 'synthesis' in which all the
characteristic features of Proustian narrative noted [throughout] will
meet and justify themselves to each other" (ibid.: 266). Rationalize the
choice as he may, he cannot do otherwise than refuse, considering that
the most elementary unity involved in the simplest readings and texts
lies beyond his method's reach. The more anachronic in orientation,
as well as generally taxonomized, the more atomistic the narrative-
or, rather, the narratology.
"Traditional categories" were inadequate, one survey characteristi-
cally winds up, "until Genette pushed them to an Aristotelian extreme
by labeling everything" (Martin 1986: 126). "Extreme," yes; "Aristo-
telian," or "everything," hardly. In Aristotelian terms, such zest for

classifying stops exactly where poetic (like any other) science begins,
that is, with cause/effect reasoning, whereby to tell essentials from
accidentals, to generalize particulars into rule-governed patterns, and
to differentiate patterns by their relevant particulars: to obtain knowl-
edge, in short, motivated and comprehensive networks of taxonomy
included. Actually, failing such a rationale, Aristotle would not even
consider an inventory the product of "formalism" but, rather, of low-
level materialism, as he did the reduction of anything to a number
of constituents. (Nor is it for nothing that the same practice equally
offends against Structuralism's own articles of faith: for example, that
a langue entails combinatory rules along with basic units.) Much as
Aristotle would in principle deplore the "materialist" extreme, how-
ever, his own partial divorce of how's from why's anticipates it in a
milder way, to the cost of the apparently "simple," the formally non-
deviant sequence. The latter, as is so often the case, incurs and high-
lights in turn a still deeper failure, bearing on nothing less than nar-
rative in general. To put it baldly, the fact that Aristotle assigns a
distinctive function to the complex plot (surprise, intensifying pity and
fear) but none to the simple (demoted for lacking in surprise value)
reveals that he has no general theory of plot effect-of plot at work as
such, hence of narrative and narrativity proper.
Doubtless a far-reaching (and in Aristotelian eyes, also most em-
barrassing) conclusion, this, yet it is inescapable if you reconsider a
set of data already noted. To be sure, "narrative" in the wide sense
coincides with what the Poetics defines as mimesis, namely, the repre-
sentation of an action. But this epoch-making definition, although it
has persisted down through the ages in one guise or another, would
not by itself satisfy Aristotle's own criteria: not as long as it remained
mimetic without a poetic thrust to govern and distinguish the mime-
sis. (Leaving it representational, instead of appropriately teleological,
would be like defining tragedy as the mimesis of a "serious" action,
without regard for catharsis.) What, then, is the teleology of narrative;
where the power and sense of narrativity?
The harder we look, the more evident the conclusion that Aris-
totle, for once, nowhere supplies an answer, nor could he supply any
on demand within the existing framework. Recall that the effects he
does single out, and pairs with a form to match, belong to a quartet
of distinct though intersecting categories, or crosscuts, of representa-
tion: (1) art at large; (2) tragedy; (3) whole; (4) complex plot. None of
the effects behind the four, not even in combination, will do duty or
otherwise provide for our missing fifth term, narrativity.
The "pleasure" given by art as mimesis does not qualify here, con-
sidering its all-inclusive scope. It equally attaches to artworks that no-
body would consider narrative, such as paintings of "animals and of

dead bodies" (Poetics: chap. 4). Space, like time, is an object "we de-
light to contemplate" for the pattern and suggestiveness of its images;
the world at rest offers as viable a field of mimesis as the world in
motion. Therefore, art's paradox-that even what causes pain in life
gives pleasure in the rendering of life-holds across all representa
tional variables. But if so, it obviously cannot distinguish the literary
art of representation, least of all in its narrativity.
As "mimesis of a serious action," on the other hand, tragedy is, of
course, essentially narrative, whether in epic or dramatic manner-
and Aristotle would be happy to add the cinematic as well. But how wil
its rationale, catharsis, make any sense of other subgenres of narrative
beginning with comedy as the imitation of a "nonserious," and so non-
cathartic, action? (Not to mention corpora ruled out of art, namely,
historiography, or yet unborn, like melodrama.) If art's teleology is too
general for the purpose, then tragedy's is too specific.
Next in line, the pattern of "whole" promises to strike the required
balance. Distinctive of all (and only) literary mimesis, it brings together
tragedy and comedy under the law of Aristotelian poetics. Thereby,
"wholeness" forms the condition of plot as an artifact vis-a-vis the epi
sodic sequence; and it might accordingly appear to equate literariness
with narrativity carried to the highest degree. So it might, except that,
at this juncture, how's outshine and outrun why's. The analysis gets
too involved in the formal mimetics of whole-making to spare much
thought for the functional poetics below the surface. There they re
main buried: out of sight, not just because out of Aristotle's mind,
but primarily because outside his system's ken. The chrono-logic of
wholeness receives such, and so much, notice as will favor, first, its
own title to artistic dignity in arrangement-as against historical or
history-like chronology-then its "complex" disarrangement in th
plot. And the drive to invidious distinction within either pair of se-
quences (chrono-logical vs. chronological, complex vs. simple) comes
to obscure whatever features all the members may share as narrativ
sequences.
We thus find chapters 7 through 9 constraining the representation
of events into a determinate, well-formed ("beginning-middle-end"
whole, without likewise particularizing the goals and effects of suc
representation into something like a teleology of wholeness proper
The appearances to the contrary will not bear inspection, not even b
the argument's own logic. Aristotle does argue for a number of poet
effects-above all, representational unity and ontological representa-
tiveness-supposed to explain or rationalize the model. Once you look
closer, however, these turn out to have nothing particular to do wit
wholeness as such, that is, as a differential form imposed on an even
Sternberg ? Telling in Time (11) 501
sequence, among all objects of mimesis. Rather than duly specifying

why whole-making should be so and not otherwise, qua event forma-
tion, the analysis actually recommends the formation by appeal to
constants of good world-making. The reasons given again prove to be
artistic universals, all-embracing in scope because coextensive (notjust
consistent) with "pleasure" at its most general-as Aristotle's earlier
and ongoing glances at other arts indicate.
Take the most promising of those reasons, the art constant that
appears to lend itself best to specification into properly narrative func-
tion:
It is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened but what
may happen-what is possible according to the law of probability or neces-
sity .... The work of Herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still
be a species of history, with metre no less than without it. The true differ-
ence is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen.
Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history:
for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular. By the uni-
versal I mean how a person of a certain type will on occasion speak or act,
according to the law of probability or necessity.... The particular is-for
example-what Alcibiades did or suffered. (Ibid.: chap. 9)
This famous opposition of "poetry" (whole, literary mimesis) to "his-
tory" (episodic chronicling) ultimately rests on a single ground. The
various pairs of terms in which it is drawn-"what may happen" ver-
sus "what has happened," "particular" versus "universal," more versus
less "philosophical"-can replace one another because all oppose the
presence to the absence of a strong logic of causality. Through tight
causal concatenation of what happens, poetry builds the general into
the particular, the rule or type into the enacted case, thereby afford-
ing us in turn the enjoyment of inference ("learning") from the given
case to the underlying generality by "the law of probability or neces-
sity." For example, where "history" settles for telling "what Alcibiades
did or suffered," poetry will also refer his doing or suffering to his
(recorded or invented, explicit or implicit) features as "a person of
a certain type." To use more modern terms, "wholeness" works for
ontological representativeness in the product combined with enjoyable
token-to-type suggestiveness in the process.
So far, so good-except that such an opposition of chrono-logic
to chronology leaves out of account the shared ("chrono") axis and
working of sequence itself. Granting everything else, therefore, the
argument here would amount to a necessary, but not at all suffi-
cient, condition of the "whole" as a temporal process and product.
Yes, if "philosophy" deals with universals and "history" with singulars,
"poetry" represents singularized universals, universalizable singulars;
but then so does art at large, across all media, objects, and patterns,
simply by virtue of its defining feature, mimesis. A portrait, we recall,

satisfies the human instinct for "learning or inferring" (as well as for
artistry, coherence, magnitude) no less than does a plot. So how will
causal (con)sequentiality be marked off from the otherwise equiva-
lent impact of spatial configuration: for example, from the inference-
making whereby the beholder of a portrait identifies the underlying
type and delightedly exclaims, "Ah, that is he"? (ibid.: chap. 4). To
respond that the one operates on sequents and the other on existents
is, of course, to beg the question: Where does the operational differ-
ence reside? For that matter, nowhere does the argument draw the
line between sequence and coexistence in mimesis, temporal and spa-
tial form, much less between narrative and descriptive force. As given,
then, the effects of wholeness are at most enough to set the event-
chain apart from the looser and allegedly inartistic chronicle series,
but not from the rest of art, however devoid of narrativity or even
opposed to it.
The specification becomes yet more conspicuous for its absence once
the Poetics goes on to distinguish the complex from the simple plot
by virtue of its surprise effect. Plots being either complex or simple,
what in turn distinguishes the simple variety? Why should we make,
stage, read it? And again, granting for the sake of argument that
the simple plot has nothing distinctive about it, except the lack of
complexity ("without peripety and discovery") which reduces it to the
minimum function of the "whole," then what is this function-taken as
the common denominator of complexity and simplicity in the tempo-
ral mimetic artifact? If an artwork is what an artwork does-Aristotle's
basic premise-what must an artwork do through(out) the whole, vari-
ably outdone or redone in the finished plot? It must render or enchain
a line of happenings, of course, but to what specifically linear effect in
the telling? And how do we go from telling effect to telling discourse,
from narrativity to narrative?
That the questions receive no answer, nor even a clue to one, pin-
points the major hole within the system, complete with the reason for
it (and we shall again find both paralleled in later versions, or rever-
sions). Hitherto admirably consistent, Aristotle's teleological analysis
breaks down as soon as it approaches chronological ordering, first in
the whole, then in the simple plot, only to resume with the positive,
but special, argument for disordering in complexity. Ergo, no generic
whole/plot/narrative function.
2.3. The Forest and the Trees, or: Where Do We Go from Here?
So much, I think, remains beyond doubt, but is it still retrievable?
No and yes, depending on one's commitment to the letter as against
the spirit of the founding text: to the Poetics vis-a-vis narrative poetics
within a general theory of literature and discourse.
No, if you want to retain the substance of Aristotle's argument

-however liberally interpreted, updated, or adjusted to empirics-
as the Chicago Neo-Aristotelians very much want to do. True, un-
like their Renaissance and Neoclassical predecessors, they would be
quick to disclaim idolatry or, with less justice, even the label of Neo-
Aristotelianism. For example, having made a list of our debts, R. S.
Crane (1953: 80; see also 1952: 17) goes on to profess allegiance to
nothing but the Master's critical "language." So do his fellow Chica-
goans, including his best-known pupil, Wayne Booth, himself author
of a Rhetoric rather than a Poetics: "The method, not any one of Aris-
totle's conclusions, is what is decisive" (Booth 1970: 115). Yet somehow
that powerful "language" or "method" never comes down to them
alone, empty-handed, as it were, and free to "speak" or inquire anew.
Rather, it carries over a legacy of special interests, predispositions,
even more or less ready-made "conclusions" about various substan-
tive issues that may and must be reopened, if only by its own deepest
premise. I mean the inquirer's (along with the artist's) right, indeed
duty, of appeal from ends to means, from practical to taxonomic and
teleological novelty. Despite important extensions and variations, how-
ever, manifold doctrinal attitudes persist, recur, often intersect in the
Chicago anthology Critics and Criticism (Crane 1952) and elsewhere:
not least suggestively where taken for granted. Such Aristotelian doc-
trines bear on the range of poetic effects, on the typology of genres,
on the status of medium versus object, on the comedy/tragedy division
versus the narrative/non-narrative, mimetic/nonmimetic, or literary/
nonliterary, or on the merits of complex relative to simple plotting.
Whether taken individually or together, these issues are all problem-
atic and all relevant to our concerns, if only because the more fixed
and numerous the subdivisions made after the Poetics, the less visible
the unity of the narrative field. But a Neo-Aristotelian will hardly
find it easy to challenge, say, Aristotle's sharp cut between literature
and historiography-although the one now includes numberless epi-
sodic works and the other has gravitated toward well-made plots-
because the chain reaction is liable to shake the entire inherited house
of mimesis. (If anything, we now find barriers erected within narra-
tive fiction itself, such as the "mimetic/didactic" polarity.) Nor, to my
knowledge, has the complex/simple hierarchy been levelled, despite
its being a more obvious and less dangerous target of functional re-
valuation. On the contrary, Olson (1966: 52) upholds "the superiority
of the complex plot"; Crane (1952) generalizes the makings of the
comic plot from Tom Jones, a fine companion piece to Oedipus Rex; both
Crane (1953: 172-73) and Booth (1963: esp. 188-90) would, typically,
invest Macbeth with the dignity of a complex "recognition" plot, or
would save it from the indignity of tragic simplicity, where Aristotle
himself might well have hesitated. In matters such as these, perhaps
only the Renaissance tradition, with its counterparts in Formalist and

Structuralist narratology, has a larger stake. For even more of their
enterprise stands or falls on the "artificial" (or "poetic") order's depar-
ture from the "natural" (or "historical"), the sujet from the fabula, the
discours from the histoire.
And, yes, I have nevertheless always believed, we can move from
the Poetics toward a grand narrative poetics that it otherwise blocks by
omission and commission, if we are willing to go back to the funda-
mentals and work our way upward again. By this I mean suspending
all commitments, large or small, other than to the functional spirit
of analysis, with the generic primacy of "action" as its corollary, and
proceeding from there. A bare start and a tall order, perhaps, but not
quite so bare or so tall as may appear, least of all nowadays.
Building on this minimum, after all, we have already drawn from
Aristotle himself (as well as from his supposed heirs and counterparts)
a set of positive and, especially, negative lessons about such a poetics;
and still more remain to be drawn as we go along. Nowhere do these
lessons throw into question the viability, any more than the value, of
the enterprise. On the contrary, even the most negative of them sug-
gest that (and, to some extent, how) the Poetics itself, given its method,
could or should reason better than it does. (In what ensues, it will be-
come still clearer how Aristotle, or an Aristotelian, might have gone
a considerably longer way toward a genuine narrative theory of the
limited "mimetic" kind he envisages, chrono-logical whole and all, by
adding a few essentials or simply by dispensing with nonessentials.)
And building on those lessons in turn, we should be in a position to
do even better today, by reference to the best that has been achieved
since then-and the best is fine as well as rich indeed, especially on
matters of relative detail and of large theory. In a sense, too fine and
too rich for its own health, even apart from the ills of interdisciplinary
noncoordination.
On the one hand, the refinements tend to come at the expense of
unity, the field's and the text's. Whatever variety happens to enjoy
privileged treatment (e.g., fiction, novel, verbal art, telling out of time,
limited and self-limited viewpoint, or the respective opposites) loses
touch in analysis with the rest of the genre, as even its own element
do with their overall structure. Knowing and caring so much about
specialized detail, we are now only too liable to neglect its relation t
the basics of narrative and hence to lose our bearings: the old story
of not seeing the forest for the trees. On the other hand, possibly
at the same time, we have become so involved in general theories
regarding signs, art, literature, language, discourse, reference, read
ing, culture, ideology-that the particular generic object of study will
often slip out of focus. Now as before, of course, some would defocus
Sternberg * Telling in Time (I1) 505
narrative in the first place-reducing it instead to a wider common de-

nominator of the kind just mentioned-and they are welcome to the
consequences of reduction. Odd as it may sound, however, much of
what counts as narratology (point-of-view analysis alone would supply
endless examples from all schools) is not particularly about narrative
either, because it is not anchored in narrativity: another old story,
dating back to Aristotle's curiously portrait-like "whole," of not see-
ing the trees for the forest. Unsought and unsuspected, the conse-
quences of divorcing how's from why's, narratology from narrativity,
are nonetheless unfortunate. A functional theory of narrative offers a
principled alternative-and-corrective to both extremes-the atomistic
and the reductionist-so that, once developed, the theorist could re-
view their achievements and turn them to the best account within an
integrated framework. But for ways of developing beyond the stage
in the argument that we have now reached, such a theory must look
elsewhere.
We have already seen enough of atomism (whether in the manner
of a Propp, divorcing the told action from the telling/reading activity
with a view to a pure morphology, or of a Genette, splitting and clas-
sifying the discourse into forms of deviance from the story with no
sense of generic purpose, hence no force for inclusiveness and con-
tinuity) to establish its fundamental hopelessness in this regard. Yet
much the same picture, down to the discrepancy between intention
and execution, unfolds at the opposite extreme: I do not mean just
among those who would assimilate narrative (or an aspect of it) to
some larger category, such as literature or writing or politics, but also
in less expected quarters, reductionist despite themselves.
Of these lapses into reduction, already anticipated by the Poetics'
skipping over narrativity, more later; for one modern counterpart,
however, we may now glance at the idea of "narrative point," intro-
duced by the sociolinguist Labov (1972) and recently imported into
literary study (beginning with Mary Louise Pratt [1977]).17 Labov
would seem poles apart from Aristotle in discipline, in subject mat-
ter (Harlem "natural narrative"), in valuation (chronology promoted),
in everything but the functional approach to storytelling, which he
actually claims to have originated. Most important of all, he asserts,
is "what we term the evaluation of the narrative: the means used by
the narrator to indicate the point of the narrative, its raison d'etre:
why it was told and what the narrator is getting at" (Labov 1972: 366).
Nevertheless, one finds Labov, in turn, oblivious to the generic point
or anything remotely like it.
If we reconsider his minimum definition (p. 464) in this light, the
17. See the recent evaluation in Chatman (1990: esp. 310-19).
idiosyncratic reference and features that he would impose on "narra-

tive" now pale beside the key element missing within the boundaries
imposed. That Labov comes close to depopulating the genre (with in-
medias-res telling singled out for invidious exclusion) would leave his
own project narrow but otherwise unexceptionable, if only he man-
aged to focus and coordinate the workings of what remains: to gen-
eralize "the point . . . the raison d'etre" for which the "means" of
"evaluation" operate within the one variety that still qualifies as nar-
rative. But he doesn't even try. What, for instance, makes chronology
so critical that it becomes criterial? Why does "narrative" invariably
look for its point to this of all orderings, and in sixfold Abstract-to-
Coda alignment at that? Far from being addressed, the issue does not
even arise, as though the six parts in their (sharply observed) linguistic
detail could make sense without regard to the function of the whole.
Nor does Labov so much as ask why any "point," generic or otherwise,
requires narrativizing in the first place. If the point happens to lie
in "self-aggrandizement" (ibid.: 368), for example, why shouldn't the
Harlem speaker in question make it by way of self-portrayal rather
than storytelling? As with the inferential pleasure given by Aristotle's
plot and portrait alike, what marks off narrative from descriptive self-
aggrandizement? Unthinkingly, and all too typically, Labov assimilates
narrative to an all-discourse function, irreducible tellability to cross-
generic representability.
Again, compared with self-aggrandizement and the like, Aristotle
has much better rationales ("points") to offer on either side of nar-
rativity: not only the (all-inclusive) pleasure in artistic imaging, but
also the (over-exclusive) surprise in complex ordering. Aristotle does
put a premium on surprise as a (or rather, the) contributing factor
to tragedy's catharsis; but although this valuation turns out to be too
high in terms of his own project, it remains a good plea for complexity
and, if anything, needs to be raised still higher within a more general
framework. Actually, as the horizon widens from tragic to narrative
plotting and temporality, we would do well to invert Aristotle's scale
of affective priorities between catharsis and surprise.
This is because pity-and-fear, so important to him and shared by
all tragic plots, has nothing special to do with time beyond its depen-
dence on the mimesis of an action, that is, the omnipresent change of
fortune. Any extras required by it, on top of this minimum "whole,"
concern and explain purely semantic features, such as a certain deed
(act of suffering) performed or contemplated between certain agents
(relatives, friends). Incorporated into the whole, these components
are enough to unroll Aristotelian tragedy's peculiar narrative: some-
one's injuring or being about to injure someone close to him, with the
appropriate impact on the audience as well as the parties directly in-
volved. So catharsis ultimately belongs to the represented matter in

the world (pitiful-and-fearful objects) rather than to any manner or
strategy of representation in the discourse: to the sphere of the told
rather than the telling, which can at best help where, and only where,
the whole gets "complicated" in the plotting.
On the other hand, I would argue, surprise is not only among the
few primary, universal narrative interests-together with curiosity and
suspense-but also among the still fewer effects that absolutely live by
temporal maneuvering. Aside from any intrinsic importance, I there-
fore believe, tracing its operations promises to throw invaluable light
on the temporality/teleology/narrativity crux, and especially on two
questions that have arisen all along. Methodologically, it provides a
standard whereby to distinguish true from false claims made for de-
chronologizing and, even more elusive, true claims for dechronologiz-
ing from false claims against narration by chronology. Theoretically,
surprise leads straight to the heart of narrative dynamics, uniquely
interrelating the communicative with the mimetic process.
The point is somewhat complicated, or so it may look in the present
state of affairs, as well as being central to my entire argument. I will try
to make and generalize it briefly, though, by drawing together some
threads from my earlier work on narrative interest as the key to the
genre's dynamics of ordering and reading (see, e.g., Sternberg 1973a,
1973b, 1974, 1978, 1981, 1985, 1990b; for a thoughtful extension to
film, see Bordwell 1985). Leaving the flesh there, the skeleton should
also become easier to trace from the twofold viewpoint required here:
the workings of narrative temporality and its still wider implications
for defining narrative/narrativity, for integrating narrative with extra-
narrative features, as for other tasks and challenges that cannot be met
except by the teleo-logic wanted in narrative theory. Finally, consider-
ing that Aristotle for his own reasons does privilege surprise, the first
and virtually the only one among poetic system builders to do so,18
it would be appropriate to conduct the initial part of the argument
in the closest possible relation to his own system, if mostly by way of
opposition.
18. A rare non-Aristotelian exception is E. M. Forster (1962 [1927]), where the

effect migrates to the domain of ethos: the line drawn between simple and complex
plot finds its equivalent in that between "flat" (therefore predictable) and "round"
(hence surprising) character. Despite Forster's hostility to Aristotle, reciprocated
in advance, the two notions and the two domains maintain close links, which would
repay study. A few hints about this plot/character nexus in its temporal context
will appear below. More entangled, theoretically and historically, is the question of
Shklovsky's "making strange": a near relative, as I called it, and a topic for another
"Telling in Time."
3. Narrative in Its Narrativity
3.1. The Narrative Dynamics of Recognition: Surprise as Interest/Gap/Plot be-

tween Times
Granting for the moment that narrative surprise manifests itself in

acts of discovery and peripety, then, where exactly does it come from?
Surely not from those acts as experienced by the characters within
the narrated world-whenever, according to Aristotle, ignorance dra-
matically turns into knowledge or happiness into unhappiness-be
cause here lurks their surprise, not necessarily ours. The two may,
but need not, run parallel: theirs derives from the living, ours from
the telling about their living. The action that the dramatis personae
go through is one thing; the plot that the artist makes (with "compli-
cations" superimposed on that action at will), and the reader makes
sense of, is quite another. Whatever the dynamics of happening in th
world-the shifts from one represented state to the next-all narra-
tive effects as such attach to the dynamics of its communication in th
text, as given, read, processed, from moment to moment.
The foregoing paragraph already repairs three of the Poetics' mis-
placed emphases, all of them doctrinal, fundamental, and widely re-
current ever since; and nowhere are they more concentrated and
symptomatic than in the treatment of surprise. These three emphases
bear on communicative power, partnership, and processing.
3.1.1. Communicative power. By "power" I mean the play (or balance)
of representation and communication: mimetics and poetics, world
and discourse, happening and telling, fiction and function, surface
and deep motivation, the referential and the rhetorical. These pairs
of terms are roughly, and usefully, interchangeable, all converging on
the two forces or faces of teleo-logic: the one lifelike (e.g., the advanc
from the hero's character as cause to his misfortune or surprise as
effect); the other born of art and going in reverse (the work's need fo
tragic misfortune or surprise effect to "cause" the hero's character, i.e.,
leading the tragedian to invest him with such features as will generate
the needed action or reaction in the guise of human probability). How
do the two rival teleo-logics stand in relation to each other? Can either
one operate independently, in (say) factual reporting versus nonobjec-
tive art? Which prevails when it comes (as it easily may outside realism
to a tug-of-war?
A major critical battleground over the ages, these and kindred ques-
tions can again be traced back to the Poetics, which exerts its usual
spell even where overtly resisted. (For details, see my study [Sternber
1983b] of the lines of divergence, with a proposal for an integrated
theory.) In narrative as well as other genres, therefore, it is imperativ
to establish the autonomous, indeed dominant, power of communica
tion because Aristotle (and many after him, from Renaissance criti-
cism, through the Jamesian theory of the novel, to present-day narra-
tology) brings it under representation. To his mind, that is, the poetics
needs building into or beneath the mimetics, with a view to a unity
in which the functional and the fictional chains of cause and effect
will run together-their inverse logics kept in peaceful coexistence
and concurrence. For example, while it is really tragic operations (ca-
tharsis, misfortune, heightening by peripety/discovery) that produce
Oedipus's character, hubris and all, the character in the finished work
will nevertheless appear to produce them naturally by his own psycho-
dramatic momentum; the art objectified, and so dissimulated, in the
life, the final in the formal cause. This would give mimesis something
like veto power, hence real if negative control, because everything else
must go through it and assume its guise, that of "necessary or prob-
able sequence," above all. The sequence of devices and pleasures and
effects must hide under the reverse sequence of events actually made
by and for it; the telling as plotted must find its motivation throughout
in the happening as lived and enacted; the dynamics of our experience
from start to finish, in the dramatis personae's. Aristotle, accordingly,
so focuses the common reference of "whole" and "plot" to the world-
in-motion, say, as to obscure their distinct force, true priorities, and
protean interplay within the discourse composed about that world.
But how else, if not through such interplay, would it be possible for
narrative to vary the relations between the hero's and our own ad-
ventures, all the way from identity in knowledge, understanding, dis-
closure (e.g., equal ignorance followed by equally astonishing enlight-
enment), to polar contrast (ignorant hero vs. knowing reader, or vice
versa)? Again, we may wonder, what else could motivate (i.e., deter-
mine for the author, explain to the reader) the choice made among
the range of variants, if not the end sought by the discourse (e.g., em-
pathy vs. irony) and manifested in the shaping of the whole into the
appropriate plot? And why should even plotted discourse confine or
slant its operations to manipulating the "whole," when it enjoys access
to both nondevelopmental elements (e.g., description) and nonrepre-
sentational resources (e.g., purely verbal, analogical, or intertextual
structure)? Indeed, what is to prevent such a work from minimizing
the role and salience of world- and whole-making in the interests of
discourse-making, so as to adjust the generic requirement of narrative
as action mimesis (answered in the plot) to its own dominant concern
with character, setting, society, ideas, language, abstract design, self-
reference, or whatever? Isn't it exactly here that the narrative point
may come to subserve the point of an individual narrative discourse
or discourse-type? All this goes to show, I believe, not just the power
but the priority of communication vis-a-vis representation: the one's
artistic teleology controls (and at will disturbs or demotes) the other's

mimetic ordering and much more besides.
That Aristotle weights the two forces otherwise has proved most
unfortunate. His own priorities originate in the very definition of art
as mimesis, whereby there is no communication without representa-
tion, no literary ("plot") activity without a lifelike ("whole") action to
start from and to operate on, no discourse line without story line,
so that the former gets mistakenly subordinated or even assimilated
to the latter. Mistakenly, because assuming that representation must
appear in art-and a represented action in literary art-why need it
appear throughout the artwork, much less in a central and constrain-
ing role? It is as if the definitional priority of the mimetic sequence
within narrative carried over to the workings and options of poetic
art: a beguiling yet discernible non sequitur.
As a typical consequence, the surprise elements get attached by
fiat to "the internal structure of the plot, so that what follows should
be the necessary or probable result of the preceding action" (Poetics:
chap. 10). One may get the impression that for surprise to erupt and
overtake the reader in the plot as actually communicated, it must be
enacted in the world itself by way of an abrupt change of fortune
(peripety) and/or awareness (discovery) that befalls the dramatis per-
sonae themselves (e.g., Oedipus, Rastignac, Strether, Gatsby). But why
need the discourse run parallel to the action, the art gear itself to the
(or a) life? The condition is gratuitous, for we may equally experi-
ence surprise about what the characters have long known, expected, or
undergone (just as their peripety/discovery may be our irony): Gene-
sis 20, in its last verse, thus springs the sexual plagues inflicted by God
on Abimelech, beginning with Sarah's captivity; and One Hundred Years
of Solitude lures us into presuming Colonel Buendia's death through
the reference to his being stood against the wall. The two options dif-
fer in the presence or absence, not of surprise along the narrative
(plotted, finished) sequence, but of mimetic motivation for surprise
in terms of the narrated (whole, chrono-logical) sequence. Aristotle
insists on such a linkage, or anchorage, because he will not grant com-
munication any principled independence from representation: poetic
teleology must work under the cover of mimetic teleology. Still less will
he recognize actionless literature or nonrepresentational art, where
surprise typically breaks free of all this bondage without relinquish-
ing its distinctive property, namely, the shock of the unpredictable.
Rather, the effect manifests itself there in forms, levels, and orders of
discourse other than those of the world-in-motion, such as the dynam-
ics of sound, style, theme, or counterpoint-all equally twistable out
of their expected deployment. Throughout, within or beyond repre-
sentation, the foiling of expectation is a peculiar sequential constant;
its locus and guise, a protean variable.
As always, the handling of surprise brings out even more general

tendencies. Observe that Aristotle's repertoire of poetic effects is much
smaller than that of mimetic patterns and is also conceptualized ac-
cordingly: assimilated to the representation, as though undefinable,
because unrealizable, in its own communicative terms. For instance,
to take a crosscut seemingly far removed, note how he translates (and
so narrows) the entire issue of aesthetic discourse length to objective
event duration. He begins with some sharp, groundbreaking insights
into the constraint on the upper and lower limits of extension from
the side of coherent retention; yet he does not finish by specifying the
"length that can be easily embraced by the memory" in the same per-
ceptual, psycho-poetic terms or the like (as when Poe finds the ideal
tale to be one that is readable at a single sitting). Instead of the artis-
tic cause, the conclusion specifies and encodes the mimetic result in
the form of the whole: an innocent "metonymic" switch, you might
think, even commendable for replacing psychology with hard textu-
ality. Except that the two terms get so conflated in the switch as to
exclude everything outside the whole's chain of events, from descrip-
tive segments (a fortiori texts) to all nonrepresentational elements,
patterns, and linearities. Don't these have their own constraints and
resources of assimilability in discourse-time-such as my nonchrono-
logical mechanisms of sequence-which must somehow integrate with
the represented chain along the dynamics of overall communication?
For all that, Aristotle defines the limits of the artwork's "proper mag-
nitude" by appeal not to our temporal perception of an object, but to
the temporal object of perception: "The sequence of events, accord-
ing to the law of probability or necessity, will admit of a change from
bad fortune to good, or from good fortune to bad" (ibid.: chap. 7).
As with duration, of course, so with direction. If Aristotle likewise ob-
jectifies and channels surprise into discovery/peripety, he has no term
whatever for the effect of a simple plot on the audience. Instead of
describing its course as predictable, let alone suspenseful, he says that
it moves in a single direction of change (ibid.: chap. 10).
This mimeticism has persisted down the ages in numerous shapes
and schools, some even more extreme than the original. Renaissance
and Neoclassical dogma would have the playwright, in Aristotle's
name, superimpose the unities of time and place on that of action,
with a view to maximizing the art/life concordance to the point of illu-
sive verisimilitude. By a similar rage for lifelike motivation all over,
only geared to internals here, the Jamesian school canonized the unity
of perspective: the focus of interest (e.g., Strether) then doubles as
the focus of narration; the narrator's maneuvering for effect (e.g.,
sequential play of ambiguity), as the reflector's groping for enlighten-
ment. Differently but hardly less representation-minded, Propp sees
nothing except the logic of action, whereby narrative no longer merely
appeals or even conforms, but returns, to nature. As a consequence, to

reformulate our earlier findings, his one-track analysis screens out the
corresponding track that all his predecessors would only dissimulate in
its guise: the mimetic line of "functions" takes over the artistic. Propp
thus incorporates discovery into his folktale sequence (1968: 60-62,
71-73) and with it, presumably, surprise value, but without so much
as glancing at any correlation between story and text, cast and audi-
ence. Why bother with such variable cross-references where discovery,
like all "functions," supposedly has its invariant existence, causes, and
effects in the world alone? The attachment of "function" to the logic
of action is among Propp's most unhappy bequests to narratology
(above all, when mistaken for an updated Aristotelian doctrine). The
very limited reference of the term has proved a conceptual liability
ever since, and the results show in the analysis of "high" as well as of
"low" or folk narrative, their opposition included. Here arises all the
loose, often complimentary talk about "nonfunctional" or "nonteleo-
logical" details, characters, incidents, even plots-meaning, in fact,
that those reality units are irreducible to a Propp-like actional logic,
mimetic role, etc., yet ostensibly alleging their principled resistance to
any design, direction, or teleology, as befits some modern credo. Evi-
dently, the narrated world may be without end in either sense of telos,
limit or purpose; but the narrative discourse is always end-directed in
both senses, if only with a view to narrating the "endlessness" of the
world: its circular time, say, or its absurdity. To escape the teleology
of communication altogether, such an ontology would have to remain
untold.
Nor do the recent slogans against mimesis, as opposed to the play of
discourse, always manage to loosen the hold it has maintained on criti-
cal theory and practice since Russian Formalism. Thus Genette (1980)
would base analepsis, prolepsis, etc., on the supposedly objective facts
of anachrony vis-a-vis story-time, to the detriment of all indirections
structured into the same effects (e.g., analepsis transformed into pro-
spective working, prolepsis into retrospectiveness, or chronology into
either), as though the favored departures from the story were not
themselves all (and many demonstrably nothing but) constructs of and
from the discourse. Bakhtin (1981 [1934]), on the "chronotope," even
fails to mark off the reader's surprise from the hero's, dramatized
from purely discursive recognition; nor is it an accident, seeing that
his vigorous critique (Bakhtin 1985 [1928]) of Formalism's excesses
overreaches itself in turn by dismissing the sujetlfabula antithesis.19
19. It is therefore odd to find his editor, Michael Holquist, attributing to me of

all people the belief that the novel "might lend itself to tree diagrams and Freytag
pyramids" (Bakhtin 1981 [1934]: xxx): the latter have been specifically rejected, in
Likewise, the early Barthes's (1977) three-level program for Struc-

tural Analysis compromises its improvement over the Proppian single
level by yoking together actional with narrational units under the term
"function," which Propp himself kept for the former; and the post-
structuralist Barthes's (1974) "hermeneutic code" appears to mix up
afresh our own problem-solving exigencies, operations, and adven-
tures in the reading with those of the agents in the living. On the
highest level, the continuity with the first poetics shows in the mimeti-
cist definition of the subject matter, narrative itself. Modern theory
generally follows Aristotle in defining narrative as a represented given
(one or several events, change of state, and the like) rather than as
the product of communicative/interpretive moves, interests, strategies
(discourse forces, in short) brought to bear on representation. The
difference is radical, as I have already suggested and will soon bring
to a point in and through the temporalities of narrative interest.
3.1.2. Communicative partnership. On top of the (im)balance of power

between mimetic and discursive teleology, moreover, comes that found
within the latter itself as a two-sided affair transacted between author
and audience, telling and reading. Of the two parties to communi-
cation, Aristotle as a rule centralizes the producer's viewpoint and
work at the expense of the receiver's. Typically, although founded on
effects or affects, his account follows the route of their production,
moving from whole (the chrono-logical point of departure for narra-
tive arrangement) to plot (the finished narrative structure), never the
other way. With poetics defined as an art of making, small wonder his
theory addresses itself to the plot's construction by the artist out of
some whole, not to its reconstruction, much less its interpretation, by
the reader into some whole.
To Aristotle, for example, the main issue is how the tragedian, given
a suitably whole action, devises a complex plot in the interests of sur-
prise; but it would not occur to him to ask how the audience, once
caught by surprise, works back from the given plot to the underlying
whole that has been perceptibly complicated out of order and how the
audience motivates the discordance by appeal to tragic effect. That
such motivation on our part remains hypothetical, if not downright
ambiguous (e.g., in the face of the unexpected, have we been misdi-
rected before or just inattentive?), will suggest that the two activities,
the constructor's and the reconstructor's, are not simple mirror-images
but complementary engagements with discourse. Whatever their com-
mon ground, each party to the transaction has its own set of givens,
the very essay (Sternberg 1974) he cites, for perpetrating and all but perpetuating
the same confusion between levels to which Bakhtin is liable.
problems, means/end resources and choices: their distinctiveness only

sharpens in the art of sequence, which keeps it alive and may even
twist it anew, down to the last word. Then, and then alone, does the
dissymmetry built into temporal communication straighten out, so
that plot as the author's making and plot as the reader's sense-making
ideally come together.
Here, I trust that Aristotle's followers and fellows in one-sidedness
throughout history, down to the present, spring to mind so readily
that one example will do. Those acquainted with Russian Formalism
may recall how firmly, often flauntingly, its seminal analyses have been
anchored in the producer-as-maker. The best and most programma-
tic of these include Boris Eichenbaum's (1965: 119-42) "How Gogol's
'The Overcoat' Is Made" and Shklovsky's (1990 [1929]: 72-100) "The
Making of Don Quixote" or, in practice if not in name, "The Novel as
Parody: Sterne's Tristram Shandy (ibid.: 147-70). Their ties to Aristotle
are closer than one would gather from these poeticians' objections to
being identified with the first poetics. Besides quoting extensively from
Aristotle in The Theory of Prose, Shklovsky incorporates the two devices
of surprise, peripety/recognition, as well as enthroning their near
relative: making sujet as "making strange."
By the same token, however, reversing the Aristotelian focus, as
in much "reader response" criticism, just incurs the corresponding
loss-or worse, when performed on doctrinal grounds ("the death of
the author") rather than for new emphasis. To tip the balance on the
other side is to substitute interpretation for production, yet still at the
expense of the realities of communication in time. No matter how lib-
erated or creative our reading of The Ambassadors may be, we cannot
help experiencing surprise in the face of the pivotal river scene; our
surprise necessarily opposes James's foreknowledge and highlights the
art of crooked disclosure that he has practiced on us, as on his hero;
therefore, slogans apart, the interpretive extreme offers no more of
an escape from correlating the two viewpoints than does the produc-
tive extreme. Indeed, the undeniable (because factual, epistemologi-
cal) dissymmetry of such effects and relations, built into the twofold
sequence of narrative, may explain why "reader response" criticism
tends to avoid or marginalize them-in favor of extranarrative do-
mains (language, world-picture, configuration, "meaning" in general)
where readers can exercise their freedom with more plausibility. The
last counsel of despair is to attack the sequential principle itself: as
when Barthes preaches the free "reversal" of all given linearities-
especially the "proiaretic" and the "hermeneutic," both encoded in
narrative-so that the reader can himself turn writer, or "writerly,"
in producing signification at will. Ironically, having taken every imag-
inable liberty with the narrative under analysis, as he has in S/Z with
Balzac's "Sarazine," he still never quite manages to overthrow the ge-

neric constraints on time, hence on our reading under authorial di-
rection.
3.1.3. Communicative processing. The art of sequence, then, radicalizes to

varied effect both the dissymmetry between the parties in communi-
cation and the gradual, if zigzag or retrospective, movement toward
symmetry, on the way to the last word. The more controlled the route,
the more meaningful the play en route from start to finish-and in
narrative, of all sequential arts, as meaningful for the implied as for
the dramatized players. This in turn brings to the fore the process of
telling/reading in relation to that of happening. Or rather, it should
bring, since the Poetics' defocusing of communication, even from the
maker's side, leads to a highly selective regard for the step-by-step
march of discourse, plot routes included. The result here is the ab-
sence of a plot analysis comparable and complementary to the whole's
all-embracing logic of action: an extreme change of fortune propelled
in either direction (happiness to unhappiness or the reverse), from
determinate beginning through middle(s) to determinate end, by a
necessary or probable sequence. While the Aristotelian represented
whole expands into a global process, the higher communicative force
or teleo-logic of plot shrinks at its "complex" best into two midpoint
junctures in glorious isolation, namely, the surprise turns of peripety
and/or discovery. As officially defined, both form sudden, hence local,
intensifying twists, at the expense of plot scope; both also relate to the
middle, and without exhausting it at that, since they constitute two
among many intermediate links. Even given a sequence with those star
turns duly mid-posed, therefore, what keeps the plot going (if only on
its way toward, through, between, or beyond them) and us with it?
Further, among the master strategies of twisting in time, Aristotle
knows no more than one, and he localizes the one he does know. To use
terms I shall soon refine, this is the one where the unperceived twisting
of antecedents sets us up for their abrupt untwisting, in the interests of
surprise. But an equally strategic mate remains to be explored, where
the initial twisting is perceptible and the eventual untwisting expected,
with a view to the play of "curiosity": we readers know that we do not
know and proceed accordingly, looking back to the past for clues and
forward to the future for rounded closure. Aristotle might well have
ranged both interests or strategies under the complex plot, even on a
rigorous definition. For one thing, each unfolds a discontinuous late-
before-early sequence; for another, they join forces as early as his own
paradigms in Homeric epic and Sophoclean tragedy.
As it is, the movement of the complex plot itself remains largely
untraced and undetermined, as if it had neither resources nor work-
ings other than the two surprise highlights-indeed, as if it could not

even expand them from points (acts, scenes) into processes (activi-
ties, scenarios) with beginning-to-middle-to-end trajectories of their
own, such as the all-encompassing discovery ordeals of Oedipus Rex,
Tom Jones, Ghosts, or The Ambassadors. And in regard to patterns other
than the complex, this drastic selectiveness modulates into silence. The
simple plot, enacting a unidirectional change of fortune in conformity
with the "whole," does not receive from Aristotle even local affective
features, devices, choices. Surprise is out of its reach by definition, and
suspense value, let alone a work-length suspense strategy, by notable
omission-an omission all the more notable, as I have already argued,
for precluding any functional common denominator of narrative, any
teleology of narrativity across plot forms.
Outside tragedy, in short, Aristotle's plot teleologies fall between
overgenerality and overspecificity: either diffuse artistic universals
(pleasure, coherence, magnitude) binding on all formations-across
the entire field of mimesis, the visual included-or pinpoint extras
(e.g., shock effect) kept for certain event deformations. And if the
entire middle, that is, the properly narrative range on this axis, re-
mains bare, discourse axes other than plot are left yet barer, since the
approach excludes them altogether from temporal development and
impact. What keeps those discourse lines going, whether with, across,
or against the line of plot?
Nothing, apparently, and for a doctrinal reason: about the workings
of nonrepresentational sequence-above all, language deployment in
or out of narrative-the Poetics has almost nothing to say, because it
grants representation an absolute monopoly on sequencing. There-
fore, the Poetics does not (and cannot) address the surprise twists, or
the movements from tension to release, executed by poetry on the
levels of sound and syntax and sense as well as of reference. Nor
would any other process-building measures be addressed, including
the repertoire of nonchronological (scalar, deictic, thematic, supra-
sequential, etc.) ordering, unless these measures operated strictly by
and for the logic of events-no matter what their influence on the
event's own deployment or on the work's overall structuring in or out
of time. How could it be otherwise, if the theory would in principle
allow such orderings neither a discourse momentum of their own nor
a route to integration with the plot's?
Here also lies the answer to the queries raised by Chatman (1978)
about Crane's (1952) Neo-Aristotelian typology among plots of action,
of character, and of thought, according to the locus of change. For
example, "Whose 'thought,' the implied author's, character's, narra-
tor's?" Chatman asks (1978: 87n). The answer should now be obvious:
the character's thought may form a plot, but not the author's, which
remains outside the field, and so the line, of mimesis, and not the
narrator's, if left undramatized. "And why," Chatman goes on to ask,
"stop with the first three? Why are there not plots of diction too ...
or plots of spectacle and melody?" (ibid.). Surely, the answer is that
the first three Aristotelian elements are all objects of imitation, hence
by nature developmental and plottable, whereas the second three are
not, belonging rather to the means or the manner of imitation. With
regard to either question, then, the element must supposedly entail
(as does action) or enable (as does character or thought) mimetic pro-
cessing in order to qualify at all for artistic processing: either twofold
sequential dynamics or (as with diction, melody, spectacle, authorial
thought, even in the more flexible, Neo-Aristotelian scheme) nothing.
Once again, we find a narrow thrust and an awkward choice, pos-
sibly more disappointing than ever because most removed from the
genre's peculiar life in time. But then who can afford to throw stones?
For all the advantages that have accrued since Aristotle-his own
achievements and shortcomings to learn from, millennia of experi-
ment and experience with narrative upon which to draw, an unprece-
dented command of detail with which to back an advance-his mod-
ern successors have, on the whole, done still less to generalize the
rationale, the workings, the coordination of the processes involved.
If anything, fragmentation has instead become the rule-a leading
method, at times doctrinal, among narratologists of otherwise vary-
ing interests, such as Proppians versus Shklovskians. One or another
of the multiple sequences composing narrative thereby gets isolated
from the rest, only to be broken down into its components and often
left at that: decomposition with no visible way, or even generic title, to
recomposition.
Recall how Propp does not quite manage to deploy his small and styl-
ized corpus along a uniform chrono-logic, despite the liberty to keep
so much out of the one level he would sequence: the world in action,
minus character or setting. Conversely with others' dismissal of such
action as artless beside its wrenching into a "sum of devices" in the
finished narrative: Shklovsky himself would marvel at the lengths to
which his early iconoclasm (1990 [1929]) has since been carried. Thus
discourse narratology a la Genette comes down at best to a deviation-
favoring analysis without the power of synthesis; and Barthes (1974)
would make an ideology of such dismemberment by appeal to an ideal
of modernist writing, admittedly unachievable in the face of narra-
tive's will to unity, chronological and otherwise formative. So either
enterprise, to put it mildly, "involve[s] neglecting textual energy and
movement" (Pavel 1990: 350). But elsewhere that neglect arises from
preconceptions and priorities much different, even diametrically op-
posed, to both. Thus, if a narratology centered on verbal narrative
(as story or discourse) oddly makes no provision for the line of wor
among other absentees, you might almost expect to find a counterpa
that brushes aside story line and anachronic discourse themselves f
the glory of the turns of language. An example would be Stanley Fis
(1971: 22ff., 340ff.) Surprised by Sin, which locates the meaning a
true form of Paradise Lost in the reader's (surprise-full) experience
the poem, as opposed to its "outer or physical form": the "Aristot
lian superstructure-beginning, middle, end," the flow of events, t
epic plunge in medias res, all are deemed "incidental and even irre
vant." This amounts to denarrativizing the narrative: if "there is
plot except the plot of reader's education," then the epic might as w
have been a piece of tortuous description or argumentation concer
ing "sin," to the reader's equal "surprise." (So might the gospel tal
sermonized by Lancelot Andrews in Fish [1973].) We have come bac
by a different route to Aristotle's or Labov's portrait-like action, except
that this time the narrativity would be considered well lost; indee
the Fish-type analysis must lose it somehow, or else the epic (or t
gospel) would resist the practice of "affective stylistics" modelled
alien kinds of writing, non-narrative surprise included.
Beyond any other single measure, all of these exercises in decom
position go to show that the discipline, pronounced mature by pr
ponents and moribund by opponents, is actually in its infancy. No
amount of specialized detail will offset, or even camouflage for lon
the escape from the most basic realities of narrative at work to wh
ever happens to suit one's tastes or tools. "Growing up" accordingl
hinges, above all, on inverting the point of the exercise: learning to live
and deal with the composite world/discourse sequence that the ge
variously, yet invariably, unrolls before us as a condition of being
becoming, sense-making, even of decomposability.
My own theory, as will soon emerge, not only keeps the two omn
present (world vs. discourse) dynamics apart in principle and their v
satile interaction necessary and peculiar to narrative; it also sugge
how every extranarrative (intrinsically unplottable) component le
itself to narrativizing. But for such a theory to develop, we first need
redress the three strategic and persistent Aristotelian imbalances
garding communication, namely: power, partnership, and processi
Put to the test of surprise, their common representational bias is u
mistakably exposed, for better and worse, producing the most sem
account of what happens in the narrated world, while localizing or
the most part blanking out its relation to what happens in narrat
discourse as such.
As such, I emphasize, because it is the relation between the two forces
(sequences, processes) that holds the key to narrativity-not the Aris-
totelian imbalance or its reversal. To be sure, communication by way
of sequenced discourse is all that we actually encounter and progres-

sively experience. Yet this would be equally true of whatever presents
itself in time, including the least narrativized description that unfolds
a static object piecemeal or, for that matter, the least "objective" music.
What distinguishes narrative effects as such from all others is less their
play over time than their interplay between times. For it is the interplay
of the represented and the presented dynamics, whether in "iconic"
concordance or "arbitrary" tension, that sets narrative apart as a dis-
course with a double time-pattern. And among narrative effects, sur-
prise evidently lives on tension, because a sequence communicating
the events in their proper order of occurrence would reveal all and so
leave nothing unexpected.
To begin with, therefore, we must supply the missing link in Aris-
totle by referring the surprise values and elements of the "complex"
plot to its divergence from the orderly "whole" (or "fabula" or "his-
toire," the logic holding regardless of label). But even such divergence
does not by itself generate surprise; in the form of anticipation, say,
it may instead work for suspense. So we must proceed to mark off
this surprise-generating temporal divergence from other varieties by
appeal to its peculiar dynamics of presentation.
The bare essentials of the process will do for a start. What makes
the difference is the covertness whereby the text manipulates sequence
for the purpose of withholding and distorting antecedents in the tell-
ing, until the time comes to spring (and, at will, to repair) the fact of
misdirection. There is no shock of discovery without a hidden gap in
plot continuity for the reader to discover behind time, no reversal of
narrative expectation without a more or less imperceptible reversal of
chronology in the narrative: late before early, effect before cause, deed
before doer's (real) motive, world-stuff before world-picture, always
secretly distributed to give a first and false impression-persuasive
yet at best partial-before full and true knowledge is attained, if only
knowledge of the trick played by art on our ignorance, credulity, stock
responses, habits of reading and thinking.
By this "dynamics of recognition," as I call it, Oedipus Rex or Tom
Jones or Light in August twists our route to the hero's origins, as does
Njals saga to the unyielding pride in the heart of the peaceable Gun-
narr, Emma to the exposition of the secret engagement, A Raw Youth to
the awareness of the fateful letter and its purpose, Ulysses to Bloom's
sexual oddities, the detective story to the identity of the murderer
("the least suspected person"), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold to
the triple cross behind the spy's defection. Whether from the author's
or the reader's side, the process of twisted communication remains
determinate throughout, and all is grist that comes to its mill.
To appreciate how much so, consider a set of key variables against
the background of the Poetics. If Aristotle overlooks some of these

variables altogether, while imposing constraint or fixity on others,
their reduced play marks his own limits, empirical and doctrinal. As
usual, his limits have had considerable influence on the approach to
plot ever since, its very depreciation in modernism included. Aristotle
would thus keep surprise in a role that is localized (for pinpointed im-
pact), mimeticized (into fortune-reversing act), contributory (to pity-
and-fear), and otherwise dependent (on well-formedness), instead of
casting it as a universal narrative force in its own right.
As such a universal, for one thing, the surprise mechanism freely
extends in magnitude: from a single covert gap (favored by Aristotle),
for example, to an entire plot disordered into a series of revelations (a
mystery tale, a Jane Austen novel, any narrative based on round-and
so, unpredictable-character or existential instability, Kafka-fashion).
Along a related axis, the proportions of the distinctively twisted se-
quence may range from a sentence-length plot to an episode to what-
ever lies between an extended text's cut-off points, as when a novel's
surprise ending replaces a false with a true beginning. (Fielding's
comic reversals, in fact, operate on discourse-units of all sizes.) Again,
this flexibility of the surprise turn resists all attempts to define narra-
tive/narrativity in terms of the narrated world or the narrating text.
The appeal to the represented world can be traced back, of course, to
Aristotle's mimesis of action in beginning-middle-end enchainment,
a formula that has since been endlessly reiterated or recast into de-
mands for some event-line, change of state, or "problem-solving,"
with or without further mimetic specification. And just as this world-
oriented approach reaches its formal limit in conditions on the number
of events, so does its text-oriented counterpart in strings attached
to the number of sentences. (Recall the variants of minimal narrative
in my opening.) Yet both approaches fail a test as elementary as the
one posed by the exclamations "A fire!" or "A ghost!"-which instantly
trigger a surprise mini-plot, without formally representing any event
or running to a complete sentence. (For instance, startled by the excla-
mation, we operate on it accordingly: we fill out and extend the spatial
reference into an unforeseen development, whose own cause-objec-
tive or subjective-is now possibly inferable after the event, in still
longer retrospect. All with a view to the best contextual fit.) An ele-
mentary test, this, but therefore all the more decisive for establishing
the priorities between function (e.g., the shock of the unexpected) and
manifestation (as mimesis and/or medium): the sense comes before
the surface, operationally as well as hierarchically speaking, because
it alone has the power to shape the data into the appropriate nar-
rative design, if not into narrativity in the first place. As makers of
sense, accordingly, the author and the reader are at one here, so that
Sternberg * Telling in Time (II) 521
the definition (complete with the definitional priorities) holds from

either side. A surprise narrative, like all narrative/narrativity, is not
given in representation-much less in any predetermined form-but
(re)constructed in communication to produce the generic interplay
between times, abruptly twisted for surprise.
For another thing, such twisting of antecedents does not entail un-
twisting, or disclosure via full retrospective closure, one that makes
it possible to reconstruct with certainty the "original" order of events
("whole," "fabula," "story," or whatever). Instead, surprise effects vary
between sheer disruption and new resolution, according to whether
they only unsettle or also resettle the earlier course of events. Given
the necessity of imperceptible tampering with chronology to bait the
trap for the reader, is it followed by perceptible yet persistent dechro-
nologizing, or by belated rechronologizing? In short, our false sense
of continuity having once been undermined, do we look back to find a
permanent or a temporary gap? (For this distinction and its wider bear-
ings, see especially Sternberg [1973a] and [1978: 50ff.].) In this light,
the narrative corpus reveals systematic variations, both synchronic and
diachronic.
Aristotle, who inaugurated the tradition of "well-made" narrative

form, would thus not allow (nor even consider) anything but the latter,
temporary possibility. For "ignorance" to turn into "knowledge," his
complex plot must sooner or later unravel itself into the orderly whole
that it entangled; or, in my other terms, the gap secretly opened and
then disclosed for shock effect must thereafter be securely closed for
the sake of unity, as in the Oedipus Rex paradigm. Indeed, this dynami
so lends itself to reconciling opposed effects along the way-error and
learning, false and true certitude, novelty and recognition, sudden
inferential flurry of activity and ultimate well-formed rest, all with or
against the characters, our fellow interpreters-that no wonder it ha
since enjoyed wide appeal, especially among the branches of fiction.
Epic, novel, short story, tragedy, comedy, melodrama, high and low
art, written, staged, or filmed: all have not only manifested, but often
also privileged or encoded such complex plotting, with the march of
historiography alone (including the oral real-life story of the Labov
type) left to its own cause-to-effect, exposition-to-resolution devices.
Still, the alternative option-surprise for the purpose of forcing
an earlier stability or continuity into permanent ambiguity-is always
available, too, and has increasingly been realized in the history of nar
rative. The Bible's David, the saga's man, the Dostoevsky hero, any
character presented from the outside-whether by appeal to the con-
straints of the dramatic or cinematic medium, or to the self-limitations
of modernist storytelling-may always baffle expectation without nec-
essarily giving away his motive even after the fact. He then leaves
us forever guessing at his secret, caught among multiple hypotheses

(their play now having become its own recommendation, actually sub-
stituting for Aristotelian unity-by-closure as the poetic function of mi-
mesis). So do tight-looking chains of events abruptly entangled, down
to reversibility, or worlds thrown before our eyes out of one deter-
minate reality-model without ever finding anchorage in another. So,
nowadays, do even popular genres aspiring to "literary" respectability
by way of open-endedness, like the detective or spy story (but not the
joke, which lacks other resources than the surprise turn, hence would
be doomed, in the absence of a good return, to falling flat-to suicide
by generic pointlessness).
In the reader's as well as the protagonist's experience of time, then,
disclosure itself may come with or without closure, according to the
focus of the appropriate teleology. What we traditionally call "dis-
covery" bears two senses and ranges between two effects within the
dynamics of recognition. One is negative and subject-oriented, that is,
discovering one's initial ignorance (the latent gap or ambiguity now in
sight); the other positive and object-oriented, namely, discovering a,
or the, truth about the world (resolution with the benefit of hindsight).
Cumulatively, the two effects may well form stages along a (re)cognitive
process. But they nevertheless remain distinct in theory and practice,
even when thematized into the old-new epistemological paradox that,
in the human condition, awareness of ignorance is knowledge. ("That
is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.")
For still another thing, rather than being confined to any particu-
lar mental aspect or faculty singled out by this or that aesthetic-
or method of analysis-surprise freely ranges over the entire mind
brought into narrative play. Thus, Aristotle's is an affective poetics,
one as geared to impact and its formation (from pleasure in mimesis
to catharsis in tragedy) as twentieth-century Anglo-American trends
are to meaning and interpretation. His surprise effect is accordingly
designed (as is, say, the hero's ethical make-up) to sharpen the affective
states of pity and fear. Yet that peculiar thrust again limits the range
of the approach, not of surprise itself, whose workings embrace and
engage all components and levels of human "psychology," however we
may parcel them out. Recognition makes a twisted but otherwise all-
inclusive dynamics of cognition. Along with its affective force, it may
therefore play on such axes of response to discourse as the formal, the
perceptual, the referential, the otherwise semantic or semanticized,
the psychic, the aesthetic, the logical, the ideological, all variously
interpenetrating. Or, given that our impressions and inferences are
always in the making and can always be overtaken along the sequence
by the unpredictable, the operation of surprise cuts across the bound-
aries of pattern-making, world-making, address-making, theme-and-
judgment-making, and sense-making at large. Once unsettled, for ex-

ample, continuity reveals itself behind time as discontinuity, the whole
as at most a part, the univocal as ambiguous, the premise as a problem,
the established fact as an open gap covered with or in error, the flat-
looking agent as a mixture or a riddle, the straight face as an ironic
mask, the omnicommunicative teller as suppressive or himself limited,
ontological well-formedness as an epistemological trap and lesson for
the subject caught in it.
As with the mind activated by narrative discourse, so with the ele-
ments of discourse itself: only a literalist would follow Aristotle in
restricting surprise to plot externals, such as the discovery of mistaken
identities and the abrupt peripety of situations from, say, good to ill
fortune. For the distinctiveness of surprise relates to the manner and
point of disordering, not (like catharsis) to the matter disordered into
surprise-sequence. Accordingly, it subsumes and brings together all
of the elements that make for retrospective enlightenment-for some
hidden deformation of time and understanding, with a view to their
belated reformation under the pressure of unforeseen (dis)closures.
The object thus deformed and reformed in the telling can equally
well include motive (Jonah refuses to announce Nineveh's doom, not
out of pity, it transpires, but from fear for his prophetic image); or
character (the metamorphosis of the Golden Dustman in Our Mutual
Friend from paragon into miser and back again); or perspective (e.g.,
where earlier discourse shifts its bearing in retrospect from objective
to subjective reference, from one subjectivity to another, from au-
thority to irony, or from narratorial statement to free indirect style
and other modes of quoting); or interpersonal relations (a show of
love turning out to be a cover for hate and/or the reverse, Dostoevsky-
style); or a picture of society (as when the initial contrast between
the boardinghouse and the beau monde in Pere Goriot veers round
into correspondence); or the text's entire reality-model (e.g., with the
bursting of the supernatural, as in the grotesque or the ghost story,
upon a frame of existence previously remarkable for its naturalism).
The means accordingly recur as well: deferred and piecemeal expo-
sition, impressions made only to be unmade or remade in the sequel,
gaps first passing for continuities and then forced open into ambiguity,
gap-fillings that repattern and reevaluate all that has gone before, and
so forth.
The same principle holds for everything and anything within the
narrated world, because whatever belongs to the world is by nature
located in time and may therefore be dislocated by narrative out of its
proper time, then at will relocated back in time. (Leave aside for the
moment the consequences which the zigzags imposed on reality-items
in the process have for all other, nonmimetic elements and structures,
from thematic design to the meaning of a single word.) Hence "sur-

prise" is a useful shorthand for the dynamics of recognition, covering
whatever process the narrative launches by the secret twisting, and
springs on the reader by the abrupt questioning and/or straighten-
ing, of its chronology. Across all variations, such processing remains
essentially one and inescapable at that. For while overall surprise plots
are common and surprise mini-plots or key gaps numberless, sur-
prise interest is nothing short of universal. It must be so, teleologically
as well as logically speaking. Even a narrative which represents the
most banal world cannot dispense with this interest altogether-to
the exclusion of any new information, however unshocking-on pain
of utter predictability and redundancy.20 Nor, strictly speaking, has
any discourse ever arrived at this extreme of automatism-whether
through incompetence or for deliberate longueur, whether owing to the
reader's jaded sensibility or to history's process of familiarization-
because replicating the very same text in the very same context is a
contradiction in terms. And so, therefore, except again in a relative
sense, is the untellable tale. No matter how often the tale has been
told before, each retelling is in fact a unique, unprecedented event,
which logically always enables and pragmatically invites us readers to
make it, somehow, somewhere, new in effect. And no matter how sel-
dom the exigency arises in such drastic form, the principle yet needs
to be emphasized, considering the loose, often all-or-nothing talk on
the issue. As surprise extends from the shocking to the barely per-
ceptible-from fateful reversal, Oedipus-style, to nuanced rehearsal-
so do the degrees of tellability/readability where measured by novelty
value in time, between times.
3.2. From Recognition to Retrospection and Prospection: Three Master Strategies

In this absolute and exceptional dependence of ordering function on
disordered temporal form, surprise is almost unique among narrative,
as well as other, interests-almost, but not quite. It finds a mate and
rival in the workings of curiosity or, more technically, the dynamics
of retrospection. Let me quickly outline their family resemblance as
gap-dependent interests, sequences, hence forces for ambiguity and
hypothesis-making.
Where "curiosity" differs from "surprise" is in the initial percepti-
bility of the gap about the world and, with it, of the movement toward
closure. Rather than diverting attention from a missing antecedent,
the narrative signals or even focuses its absence and the resultant loss
in coherence; so belated recognition of disorder gives place to early
20. Or, from the receiving end of discourse: under the presumption of informa-
tiveness, we look around for novelty value even in apparent redundancy, including
literal repetition (as demonstrated in Sternberg 1977 and 1986).
retrospection on disorder, with the appropriate pressure for reorder-

ing. Who killed old Karamazov? Why does Iago victimize Othello?
How has Odysseus fared since leaving Troy? Are the ghosts real or
hallucinatory? What are we to make of the conflicting Rashomon ver-
sions? On our part, knowing that we do not know and may never
be told for sure, we must take immediate steps to repair the breach
in order and understanding as best we can at the moment-through
provisional reconstructions of antecedents from their consequences,
of the world from the discourse, of mimetic by appeal to poetic teleol-
ogy-in the hope of progressive enlightenment and ultimate closure.
Here, then, perceived discontinuity makes for its own continuity in the
reading, whereby we go forward with our minds on the troubled past.
(For analysis and examples of such operations, see Sternberg [1978:
56ff.] and [1985: 283ff.], with earlier references.)
Except for this strategic opposition in perceptibility, the equiva-
lence of curiosity to surprise is complete: it includes all the parame-
ters discussed in section 3.1 and by now readily applicable. Thus the
rich variability in magnitude, from an opaque sentence to a novel-
length detective plot; in the object (e.g., outer and inner life, detail
and reality-model) thrown into disorder; in the faculty of the mind
called into retrospective play, whether temporarily or permanently.
By the same token, moreover, where a surprise gap is disclosed with-
out being closed-the detective, say, shakes a perfect-looking alibi-
it necessarily modulates into curiosity: false assurance into a quest for
knowledge. Distinct, the two master interests are yet convertible.
With retrospection as with recognition, then, the narrative process
hinges, from start to finish, on well-defined chronological turns and
returns. Both dynamics of telling/reading look for their trigger and
maintenance to the disturbance, and for their stabilization to the re-
alignment, of the dynamics of happening; the quest for closure does
not get under way unless (and, literally, until) a breach in order makes
itself felt, nor will it come to a final rest, if at all, before arriving at
a solid filling; cognitive inference of antecedents presupposes narra-
tive incoherence, about and from which to make inferences; deforma-
tion of world-time operates for ambiguity, reformation for eventual
lucidity behind time, with intermediate trial-and-error movement on
our part. In this the two processes are at one, sui generis.
Even here, though, there is no automatic correlation (let alone equa-
tion) between form and effect. By the teleo-logic of narrative, temporal
displacement makes a necessary but not a sufficient condition for sur-
prise and curiosity. Given the workings of the mind in and on time, you
cannot indeed produce or experience either of these interests except
through an event-line unfolded out of its order. Yet such unfolding
need not by itself produce them because it may equally well arise from
other exigencies altogether, such as the jump over irrelevant matter,

the introduction of new faces, the resumption of a plot line that had
been suspended for a while, or looking ahead to key up expectancy.
So every effect of curiosity or surprise in narrative requires temporal
discontinuity between the telling and the told, but not every temporal
discontinuity involves curiosity or surprise. These will be generated
only where the form of discontinuity goes with a sense of disconti-
nuity, immediate or belated-only where the discontinuity of what has
gone before becomes relevant, perceptible, functional as such, in that
it makes a difference, for better or worse, to our understanding of the
world in time.
Even so, this bar to automatism still leaves the two master effects in a
class of their own, invested with an exceptional distinctive force which
no other effects share, not even other children of time-as-process.
So exclusive is this force that it is denied (although, here, with an
equivalent duly supplied) to the third primary narrative interest itself,
namely, suspense, with its dynamics of prospection. The prospective
bearing on time replaces, and freely dispenses with, the crooked tell-
ing out of time. Of course, suspense may well arise from a late-before-
early deployment, whereby a narrator or speaker anticipates an event
to come: God foretells the Hebrews' descent into Egypt; the Olympian
assembly votes for Odysseus's homecoming; Fielding warns that Tom
Jones will get himself hanged; Dostoevsky smuggles into his prelimi-
naries an advance reference to the murder of old Karamazov; Muriel
Spark looks ahead to Miss Brodie's betrayal by one of her own set.
But such overt foreshadowing, as a form of disordering, is no more
necessary than sufficient for suspense.
It is not sufficient, because matters can be anticipated to quite differ-
ent ends, including the very dissipation of suspense: thus the glances
forward to the afterlife, with which narratives may counterpoint some
ongoing development or bow a character out or wind up an entire plot
line. Further, consider why Trollope gives us his word that Eleanor
will not marry the awful Slope (in chapter 15 of Barchester Towers), a
reassurance provided ahead of time by a novelist otherwise wedded
to time, because doctrinally opposed to twisting, withholding, and
mystery-mongering. Doesn't he anticipate at this juncture for exactly
the same reasons (e.g., lucidity, present-orientedness, omnicommuni-
cative stance) that cause him elsewhere to go straight from exposition
through complication to unravelling? And just as the forms of straight
chronology and prospective anachrony will relate in context to the
same teleology, so will either form relate to variant teleologies, includ-
ing maximum versus minimum suspense effects. From suspension to
resolution of uncertainty about future issues: looking ahead may work
both ways, and other ways too.
Nor is overt anticipation essential to suspense, because the future

contrasts with the past (the focus of the two other interests) in being
naturally opaque. To direct (misdirect, redirect) notice to the nar-
rative past, already complete at the moment of narration, you must
gap and deform it out of time sequence. But to achieve the same
with regard to the narrative future-its expanses still open or veiled
by every (ontological/epistemological) definition, its secrets remote if
born at all, its conflicts yet to sort themselves out-nothing need be
done beyond following developments in their proper sequence. Here
the play between times, unique to all three narrative interests, requires
no more than the built-in discrepancy between what has happened
to the best of our knowledge and what will or may happen in the
still-dark sequel. And something may always happen, up to (if not
beyond) the last word, because while life goes on, in fact or fiction,
there is always room for changes, flukes, hitches, sequels, contingen-
cies of every kind. Owing to the pressure of these, narrative becomes
doubly end-oriented, always reaching for a chronological, along with
a textual, future and driven by a mimetic, as well as an artistic, tele-
ology. (And against their pressure, indeed, not even the strongest
assurance or firmest sense of an ending will really bring to an end
our tendency to wonder about what comes next, as writers of series
have always known and as Conan Doyle found out when his public re-
fused to accept the extinction of Sherlock Holmes.) So, while surprise
and curiosity arise from the untimely (dis)closure of the past through
artifice, suspense hinges only on the time-bound development toward
the future involved in the very reality-like logic of narrativity across
all variations in particular narrative ordering, such as between chro-
nology and anachrony. Will Hamlet act, Tom Jones hang, Raskolnikov
confess, Emma Bovary ruin herself, Isabel Archer learn her lesson,
Joe Christmas find peace, Dowell gain self-knowledge, the Ramsays
visit the lighthouse, Charles Smithson track down the French lieuten-
ant's woman? Will love prevail, the detective solve the crime; will the
victory fall to the hero or the villain, to the individual or to society?
The examples could be multiplied without end, especially if you
recall that such global conflicting scenarios find their expression and
equivalent in a host of small-scale questions which arise from moment
to moment throughout the reading process, down to the tiniest micro-
sequence ("What will the agents do/say/think next?"). And as with
surprise or curiosity, only more so, this equivalence between suspense-
units also holds for any minimal narrative, on any definition: a one-
clause event, say, is by nature alive with forked consequences, as well
as antecedents, equal (and in the reading, extendable) to a chain's.
Even a formally descriptive statement may well qualify for narrativity,
if not narrative, once it has been transformed into the appropriate
axis and kinesis. (For such projection, just imagine an Elizabethan

hearing, "The Queen is dead," or yourself hearing your flight captain
announce, "Our engines are stalled." Sophisticated variants would
be the descriptive shorthand or metonymy for action, or the code of
"proleptic epithets" [Sternberg 1981, 1985: 321-64] in literary art;
Lessing's "pregnant moment" in visual art; or "ekphrasis" as a plot
forecast [Yacobi 1990] in inter-art, word-to-image allusion.) Whatever
their level or range, all such future-oriented gaps may, and most of
them actually do, open and close in step with time. This also explains
their high frequency relative to the past-oriented varieties: they are
the most widespread in storytelling, the most universal of universals,
because they demand and betray the least manipulation on the teller's
part while making equal claims to the reader's interest and energy
in the processing of narrative. Consequently, it is not the suspenseful
play of hypotheses regarding the future but, on the contrary, its neu-
tralizing or minimizing that for once demands temporal manipulation.
Why else does Trollope break his cherished rule of chronology? The
breach occurs under the pressure of artificially anticipating by fore-
closure the outcome that his narrative would otherwise ambiguate by
nature: the novelist must tip the scales of hope and fear toward hope
for the heroine in order to counter what he views as the threat of our
expense of spirit on rival scenarios. This only perfects the contrast
with the two other interests. Optional versus necessary dechronologiz-
ing for play, necessary dechronologizing versus necessary chronolo-
gizing for playdown: this is where the suspense strategy differs from
surprise and curiosity, the dynamics of prospection from the dynamics
of recognition and retrospection.
The three remain allied in principle as well as infinitely meshing in
practice. They also exhaust the strategic possibilities of communicating
action in that they bring together its natural early-to-late development
in the happening toward a more or less ambiguous future and its ame-
nability to ambiguous disclosure in the telling: the focus on the one
makes for suspense, on the other for curiosity and/or surprise, on both
for compounded, multidirectional plotting of information, inference,
interest. As a set, accordingly, they cover among them all the work-
ings that distinguish narrative in any medium from everything else.
Those workings include the parameters already glanced at and easily
extendable: story elements, magnitudes, devices, patterns, activities,
skills, roles, effects, motivations, and experiences of various kinds-
emotive, formal, perceptual, cognitive-all involving or assimilated to
the play of temporalities between discourse and world.
4. A Functional Theory of Narrative: Basics, Powers, Implications
4.1. Narrativity and Narrative Redefined

Given the theoretical senses just outlined, our three shorthand terms
yield a definition of the field that would seem to capture both its im-
mense variety and our intuitive knowledge of its unity as no other defi-
nition has done. I define narrativity as the play of suspense/curiosity/
surprise between represented and communicative time (in whatever
combination, whatever medium, whatever manifest or latent form).
Along the same functional lines, I define narrative as a discourse where
such play dominates: narrativity then ascends from a possibly mar-
ginal or secondary role (e.g., as a temporal force governed by the
space-making, descriptive function that always coexists with it [Stern-
berg 1981, 1983a]) to the status of regulating principle, first among
the priorities of telling/reading.
For narrativity, then, the discourse need not represent any, much
less any well-formed, "action" (or some mimetic equivalent) on its sur-
face; nor need theory waste any further energy on the impossible,
as well as misguided, task of specifying the represented action in ad-
vance by appeal to the minimum number or content or linkage of the
world-units involved-events, changes, causes, agents-let alone text-
units. Rather, the suspense/curiosity/surprise play, once launched, en-
tails and attests to our (re)constructing the given discourse into the
"actional" representation appropriate to narrativity (if only as one
force among others) or to narrative (as dominant). Quite simply, the
effect somehow finds or shapes or invents a cause to match-as when,
overtaken by surprise, you pack or read a twisted tale into the cry
"Gone!" Indeed, for any narrative effect to take effect (e.g., for surprise
to overtake the unsuspecting addressee), a suitable narrative cause
must have been found already, in whatever shorthand, and now at
most awaits further adjustments. How else would the effect arise if not
through the narrativizing of the available discourse materials, such as
they are? Beyond this constant, the rest is a matter of empirics. Across
the widest variations in practice, authorial or interpretive, the Proteus
Principle holds: the communicative dynamics map themselves onto
the lifelike; the ultimate end (from the teller's side) or the immediate
response (from the reader's) onto the mediating form; contextual role
onto textual surface; all part of the defining interplay between times.
Here, therefore, beats the heart of narrative-as against both non-
representational discourse and the representation of objects in de-
scriptive discourse, with their temporality (if any) mainly extending
along the communicative axis. And where the heart of narrative as
such beats, there should the study of narrative time be centered and
the theory of narrative in general find its bearings and its starting-
point, as well-defined enterprises. Only such anchorage enables a

reasonable advance from the genre's constants to the variables that
go into the making of the narrative text, or of the text peculiar to a
certain subgenre, medium, art form, culture, or writer. There could
not be a greater mistake than the standard practice of addressing nar-
rative in its textuality apart from narrative in its narrativity (or, what
amounts to the same thing, bracketing the two). For even textual com-
ponents and patterns that narrative texts share with non-narrative
ones or with discourse at large, such as spatialities, points of view,
language, themes, ideology, nontemporal ordering mechanisms, and
time of communication itself, assume a distinctive reference and force
where they are controlled and mobilized by the dynamics of narrative.
The power to mobilize (hence also to synthesize) the extranarra-
tive in and through the dynamics of presentation has already been
sufficiently outlined; so let me now bring into sharper focus how the
dynamics of events operate and cooperate to unique narrativizing
effect. The narrated space, for example, will then unfold, not accord-
ing to the narrator's designs alone, as in descriptive writing, but also
through the agents' movements, like the scene shifts centered on wan-
dering heroes from the Odyssey to Ulysses; its make-up may even change
under the pressure of the action, possibly to influence the action itself
in turn, as when Njall's house goes up in fire and, with it, the equi-
librium of Icelandic society. The same applies to the unique power
of unfolding character by the logic of its own (suspenseful) develop-
ment, as well as that of the temporal portraitist's (intriguing and/or
surprising) disclosure: if static character/characterization is the com-
mon property of all mimesis, and dynamic characterization of static
character is an extra resource peculiar to temporal mimesis, then dy-
namic character is reserved for narrative mimesis, along with every
other component of the world-in-motion. Likewise, narrative point of
view may shift not only its anchorage from one reflector to another
in mid(dis)course-a freedom equally available to, say, a philosophi-
cal treatise-but also shift its very outlook on the world as the old
reflector gains new insights in mid-reflection: the observing Strether
vis-a-vis the mysteries of Europe, or the narrating Dowell subjected
to the shocks of The Good Soldier. Here, again, language is exposed
throughout to the test of unstable realities; scalar ordering, to the
breakdown of the scale that motivated it; theme, to the existential
crises and conflicts among its carriers; every equivalence pattern (e.g.,
Odysseus = Agamemnon, Pension Vauqueur ? high society), to the
vicissitudes awaiting one-time equivalents, reversal of fortune (and so,
of pattern) included; ultimately, all textual sequence must refer to the
uncertainties built, sui generis, into the chronological future.
In short, the various elements or axes instanced (although all too

often taken as the property of narrative and its study) belong to dis-
course in general; yet no general theory of discourse (e.g., as reading,
or semiosis, or ideology) will by itself capture their behavior within our
discourse type, any more than will a narratology oblivious or hostile
to narrativity. Intrinsically anything but specific, let alone energetic,
those elements become so between the lines of movement. For the
common denominators themselves lead a different (because a doubl
life under the law of narrative, which uniquely superimposes devel
opment in mimetic time on disclosure in communicative time; thereb
everything must go through the process of happening as well as of
telling and reading-hence through the dynamics of surprise, curi-
osity, suspense. Their play between times can alone oppose to what
I called "atomism" a principled account of how narrative sequen
holds together its multiple levels, threads, components, and device
just as that play alone can oppose to "reductionism," on the same tele
logical grounds, an account of the irreducibly narrative difference o
their cooperation or coherence in the process.
That is why there is no escaping chronology, presupposed by a
three dynamics, if only as the manipulable (and accordingly, as bes
we can muster it, the reconstructed) direction of happening. That
also why I consider it so important to lift the three from the neglected,
or at best marginal and pejorative, slots to which they are usually co
signed, in a variety of guises, by defining and grouping them in term
of basic sense-making operations. I have no particular commitment t
the labels, except as handy abbreviations that reasonably accord wi
ordinary usage as well as with experience;21 but I do insist on t
distinctiveness, the inclusiveness, and the universality of the strategi
so labelled: recognition, retrospection, prospection. Surprise, whethe
mild or sharp, local or plot-length, actional or cross-level, is an inde
of false understanding and a belated call for realignment; the ri
of curiosity signals that the past has been deformed into alternativ
formations; suspense throws us forward to the opacity of the futur
Although different in thrust, all involve the construction of rival hy
21. The psychological reality of these mechanisms, as theorized in Sternber

(1978), has indeed been confirmed since: thus the experiments recorded in Brew
and Lichtenstein (1982: esp. 480ff.). A welcome support, this, but not really une
pected because the theory did develop along cognitive and otherwise experienti
lines in the first place-narratology's rage for formalism, Proppian or Shklovskia
notwithstanding. Hence, there is good reason to believe that further tests carrie
out directly on the overall sense of narrative/narrativity, as defined here in re
tion to those time mechanisms, would also yield positive results: all the more so
conducted in an interdisciplinary light.
potheses with which to fill in the gaps opened up by the sequence

about the world's affairs and whatever attaches to them by nature or
art, which in narrative means everything.
Thus defined, the three dynamics bring out the field's unity in
variety along with its variety in unity, and not only because they inter-
penetrate in practice. Taken together, they cut across all variations in
interpretive performance, expertise, community, and validity. How-
ever a reader may (mis)take a narrative sequence-whatever the gaps
and closures that he finds or values or misses or invents-he cannot
go forward without referring it to some teleology of sequence. This
commonality in variety, and well-defined variety at that, offers strong
support to the teleologies involved and reveals afresh their explana-
tory power: the more closed the set of options in principle, the more
open in practice to interpretive (as well as authorial) diversity within
the limits of the genre. Accordingly, the narrative principle cuts across
issues that are hotly debated today-and that are often thought to
militate against the very premises of narrative theory-such as the
alleged subjectivity, undecidability, politics, or culture-dependence of
reading. On my account, however, whatever may become of such ques-
tions, they all remain beside the generic point: the very lines of division
they would mark and multiply, in fact, speak for, not against, the law
of narrative. Here, different readers only make (or combine) differ-
ent choices within a strictly limited range of options; and the choice
having once been made, if only to be remade at a later phase, the
appropriate sense and response will follow. For example, the hidden
discontinuities that arouse one reader's curiosity-pulling his atten-
tion back to the narrative past and alerting him to the textual future
in the hope of closure-may so escape another's notice as to generate
a surprise plot. Correspondingly, when the sequence at last untwists
itself, the one reader's looked-for resolution (of causality, character,
world-picture, judgment) is the other's unexpected, and possibly un-
welcome, reversal. (Thus the disparity in the leading narrative inter-
est, hence in overall experience, between those who guess and those
who miss the secret engagement in Emma ahead of its final exposition.)
Both performances show themselves to be markedly narrative; how
one is to decide between them, if at all, remains, of course, outside the
jurisdiction of narrative theory proper. As with readers, so with read-
ings, notably including the shift in the balance of interest between the
"first" and the "second"-to the gain of retardatory suspense, above
all, which is now sharpened in rehearsal by the "ironic" foreknowledge
concerning developments and disclosures alike.
From yet another side, our three dynamics establish the family re-
semblance between supposedly "low" thrills and "higher" interests.
Given that world-making and discourse-making operate under the
Sternberg ? Telling in Time (11) 533
conditions of multiple flux, twofold at least, nothing separates in essen-

tials the play of ambiguity as to what happens or happened or will
happen in the story from the (re)construction of character or soci-
ety or perspective or reality-model. And how is the line to be drawn
between types of effect or response-affective versus semantic or cog-
nitive, perceptual versus ideological and rhetorical-where they all
undergo the same kinds of twofold processing from rise to resolution?
A shock of discovery sprung by the narrative is a shock of discovery,
no matter whether it bears on the emergence of a paragon's less at-
tractive side, on post-hoc tightening in retrospect into propter hoc, on
a humdrum world reversing into fantasy, on a long-past act's proving
not to have been enacted or not from the supposed motive, on a reli-
able narrator's exposing his fallibility, on a plain statement that turns
out to have been a cover for reported discourse, or on a likeness be-
tween existents shown up as a contrast: all depend on our recognizing
a gap where we earlier saw a fact and (re)acting accordingly. Likewise
with the sense of wonder about antecedents, or with suspense about
developments to ensue.
All of this goes to show that the generic universals energize and
unify variables of every imaginable kind to make narrative a discourse
type which combines singular power with singular flexibility. Given
the principle, we badly need detailed studies of how and why the
genre's universals interact with everything else in narrative practice:
texts, authors, periods, canons, subgenres, media, audiences, compe-
tences, and sociocultural frameworks. Apart from the light thrown on
each individual object of study as an intersection of narrativity with
textuality, such analyses promise to deepen our insight into the work-
ings of the principle itself, its synchrony and diachrony, its latitudes
and limits. They would also constitute the best argument for the two-
way traffic between poetics and hermeneutics, theory and history, text
and context, narrative and other forces or genres, the literary and
the extraliterary, verbal and nonverbal representation: all pairs whose
artificial divorce has not done much for either side, least of all in nar-
ratology. At the same time, demonstrating the gains of a principled
study of narratives as such-and correspondingly, the loss incurred by
its absence-might also give some food for thought to the odd alliance
ranged against the discipline, largely for its own sins (thus the attacks
on "formalism" as enemy to social and ideological life, to the arts of
ambiguity, to the generation of meaning, to cross-discourse or cross-
disciplinary bridges, or to practical criticism). One case study in this
line, regarding a narrative system of the highest and most inclusive
order, as of the closest possible interdependence with a revolution-
ary culture, may be found in my Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological
Literature and the Drama of Reading (Sternberg 1985).
4.2. Some Further Consequences

So we come to the most significant and intricate parameter of unity
and variety, the form/function crux. What I have been arguing, by
implicit reference to a body of earlier work, theoretical and empiri-
cal, amounts to this. Our suspense/curiosity/surprise trio constitutes
three master functions of narrative, as one process both disclosed and
developing in time, hence the arch-regulators of its assorted forms
of ordering, disordering, and reordering. Whatever the appearances
to the contrary, all other roles and effects operating in narrative are
either actually subsumed under them or shared by discourse (compo-
nents, genres, arts, media) outside the duality of time. In the former
case, where those other roles bear on the world-in-motion, they are,
of course, properly narrative; yet, as already argued, this only brings
them all the more immediately and inevitably under the three master
narrative dynamics, as variants or specifications of some kind, as tokens
of a communicative type. But even in the latter case, as also already
indicated, such nondistinctive, cross-discourse roles (e.g., involving
language, viewpoint, spatiality, or nontemporal order) may always be
dynamicized, and so narrativized, by assimilation to the regulating
forces. The nondistinctive element itself turns distinctive where curi-
osity, surprise, and suspense come to exert their pressure on its in-
telligibility and/or to hinge on its own, often ambiguous, implications
for the ongoing plot: on the meaning assigned by a character to some
key word, on the authority of a report as between objectivity and sub-
jectivity, on a reflector's change of view, on the thrust of an analogy,
on the dialectics of a theme, or on the bearing and timing of a de-
scription, complete with the twists and turns to which all these gaps
lend themselves en route to (possible) closure. Whatever the three
master regulators do not subsume by the nature of narrative is easily
subsumable in the narrative process.
If so-and I have deliberately put the claim at its strongest-a good
many consequences follow for a reconceived narrative theory. For our
immediate purposes, let me briefly draw together those that bear di-
rectly on the form/function nexus in or out of chronology.
First, there is no narrative sequence without narrative interest to
propel and channel our movement (complete with all sense-making
operations) through the discourse. Obvious, even tautologous? All the
better, then, considering how often the opposite has been assumed
since Aristotle, especially about chronological telling (or, for quite dif-
ferent reasons, modern "plotlessness"). The question is never whether
narrative interest arises, but which one(s), how, to what extent, as
well as where focused or diversified, raised or lowered, satisfied or
frustrated, and why.
Thus the historian or Trollope or Lawrence, or Aristotle's simple
plot or Propp's folktale or Labov's Harlem anecdote or the western,

favors suspense; Fielding or Jane Austen, surprise; the detective story,
curiosity; Dostoevsky or Henry James, the richest possible interrela-
tion of the three dynamics. Even a single genre, author, text (etc.) may
apply the favored strategy across all levels or may distinguish levels by
the strategies peculiar to each. Fielding's surprise plots extend from
the sentence level through episode to novel, as often do the mystery's
shaping of curiosity and the suspense narrative's ups-and-downs on
the way to the final showdown; the later Henry James aims for much
the same homology (e.g., through the delayed specification of refer-
ents), but geared to a compounding of these interests; while the Bible
combines them with a difference in level, so that its grand chronology
manipulates suspense and the component units surprise and curiosity
too. As with the range of interest between dominance and distribu-
tion, privilege and plurality, so with its focus on the narrated world: on
externals, internals, interpersonal or intercultural relations, ontology,
epistemology, being, becoming, etc., all amenable to diverse combina-
tions of strategies as well as thematics. (Just compare the handling
of psychosocial drama in, say, Trollope, Austen, James, and Proust.)
The same holds true for other major crosscuts that we have noted,
whether belonging to the integration of nontemporal (verbal, spatial,
perspectival, thematic, even independently linear) axes with the nar-
rative process or the variations between affective and cognitive impact.
Throughout, no matter how various and pregnant the choices, they
bear on the specifics, rather than the universals, of interest generated
in telling.
Correspondingly, any appeal made to the twists of narrative interest
always turns out to be a more or less special plea for a favorite pattern
or scale of interest (e.g., surprise with Aristotle or curiosity with the
champions of delayed, multigap exposition), never a principled argu-
ment against chronological telling, any more than against some differ-
ently twisted pattern of interest. And, of course, vice versa: recall how
the opposite party (Gibbon, Trollope, Graves, or Labov) may over-
reach themselves in advocating the "higher delights" of chronology,
with its orderly movement from cause to effect. As these are deter-
minate functional sequences, even the most valid recommendation of
one entails no principled grounds for objecting to the other two, still
less for their categorical rejection elsewhere. This by no means ex-
cludes comparisons and even value judgments, but rather places them
where they belong. To flesh out a bit the generalities of the preceding
paragraph a bit, for instance, we may well ask questions like: What,
given their common foiling of expectation, divides Fielding's surprise
endings from 0. Henry's? Whence comes the unbearable suspense in
Dostoevsky, unrivalled (if at all desired) by other projectors of the
future? Why, amidst retrospection on a past riddled with ambiguit

should curiosity in the detective tale flatten into an intellectual gam
of closure, but in James thicken to engage all our faculties? How
we to describe and explain the variations in interest between tigh
and fragmentary plots, chronology and chrono-logic, reworked an
original story-stuff, history and fiction, comedy and tragedy, strai
and parodic discourse, "first" and "second" reading, weak and stro
or visual and verbal narrativity? But then such inquiries would op
pose texts or methods on some well-defined basis in communicativ
experience, not by reference to some a priori scheme of "good" ver
"bad," deviant versus iconic ordering. Only where the ends remain
constant-not just compatible, nor even just members of the sa
family, like our universal trio-does it make sense to confront
evaluate the means.
Second, this rule assumes even greater force because the ordering
means themselves cut across the patterns of reading experience. Rec
that the surprise and curiosity dynamics exploit the very same repe
toire of discontinuous forms to opposite effect, in accordance with t
initial perceptibility of the gaps; so, to a lesser extent, does suspens
although diverging from both in its orientation to some future co
tingency. A measure of this apparently ill-assorted partnership (an
another nail in the coffin of taxonomy) is the fact that a single twisting
device may operate within each or all of the three dynamics.
Thus overt anticipation, as when Fielding threatens Tom Jones wi
the gallows, has the power to evoke suspense-or, where more re
able, the power to modulate genuine into retardatory suspense: "Wh
will happen?" into "How?"-and this is usually considered its proper
role. Why should the narrative run ahead of time, one might thin
if not to project our attention ahead? But then God's foretelling o
Abimelech's punishment in the Sarah affair ("thou art going to die
because of the woman that thou has taken" [Genesis 20:3]) generate
surprise by implying a crime against the matriarch where none, to o
knowledge, has been committed, still less with criminal intent. By a
artful switch of direction, the forward reference to the effect ("goi
to die") pulls us backward in quest of the cause ("the woman .
taken"): the unexpected future springs an unexplained past. Again,
the form of late-before-early ordering par excellence, the jump in m
dias res, functions to excite and sustain curiosity about the anteceden
jumped over. In yet other contexts, the glance forward may serve
three strategies at once or, for that matter, serve none of them esp
cially, as when the teller winks in passing at the aftermath ("In late
life, he would say thus and thus"): long-distance prospection for t
long perspective. The same vari-directional and multifunctional be
ing shows in the form of retrospection. As early as Homer and th
Bible, we find the narrative past riddled with gaps not, or not only, for
curiosity and surprise (e.g., about Odysseus's heroic figure), but also
for suspense (e.g., about his chances of victory, largely depending on
heroism); just as our anxiety about the outcome sharpens, in turn, the
need for antecedent data to be supplied or inferred with a view to its
resolution. So the Proteus Principle works both ways: there is nothing
like an automatic tie-up between the form and the focus, the reference
and the sense of temporal (dis)arrangement. Within narrative econo-
mies, the division of labor involves no division of working capital and
means of production but, quite the contrary, a pooling of resources.
Third, to the extent that the resources are divided among the three
strategies in a principled way, this applies only to the most basic work-
ing conditions and options. Suspense is the least conditioned of the
three, and accordingly the richest in alternatives, because it works
toward a temporal direction that is opaque (open, gapped, indeter-
minate) by nature: the future that darkens the resolution of conflict,
character change, personal dilemma, interpersonal entanglement, to-
ing and fro-ing between ideologies, or any other developing entity in
the world's arena. Alternative scenarios about the future, "hope" and
"fear" included, may therefore arise from the straightest deployment
as well as from the crookedest-always provided that the one should
not merely go forward in time and the other not merely look forward
ahead of time, but also throw our attention forward to some antici-
pated unravelling. Of the two polar arrangements, indeed, the straight
one heightens this interest most. For the more radical the twisting by
way of untimely prospection, the more moderate the ambiguity, and
so the suspense, about the future. Once the unravelling becomes a
foregone conclusion, as when Trollope reassures us about Eleanor, the
in-between suspense becomes purely retardatory-shifting our incer-
titude from "what" to "how"-whereas a perfect chronology combines
the ambiguation with the retardation of the outcome. So writers freely
range along the spectrum to coordinate suspense with their varying
focus or their general poetics.
With surprise and curiosity, on the other hand, the need for crook-
edness in the telling follows from their orientation to the relative past,
which is all over by the time it comes up for treatment. In order for
these two to arise, the discourse must ambiguate through twisting (i.e.,
leave the past mis-illuminated for surprise, half-illuminated for curi-
osity) what it otherwise might disambiguate at once, and what it very
often will disambiguate sooner or later through retrospective untwist-
ing. Short of telling in due time, the two strategies remain free to
shuttle all the way between disordering extremes (e.g., looking be-
hind and running ahead) as long as each maintains the appropriate
dynamics of ambiguity about antecedents.
In short, although open to all varieties of narrative interest, dechro-

nologization is neither necessary nor sufficient for suspense, while it
is necessary but not sufficient for curiosity and surprise. Considering
the fog that surrounds the workings of time, it is of the utmost impor-
tance to bear in mind these key distinctions and their rationale. If the
phrasing in terms of elementary logic sounds pedantic, so be it. No
substitute, I believe, captures nearly so well the elusive teleo-logic of
narrative at work.
Fourth, since this trio together covers the operations peculiar to nar-
rative-the universals of telling/reading attached to its multiple tem-
porality-all other effects supposedly reserved for (good) narrative
are either particulars or pretenders. Of the particulars we have already
seen enough to gain some idea of how widely they vary within the
strategic limits outlined, whether in regard to the object (dis)ordered
along the sequence, or the mental faculty called into play, or the com-
bination of means and ends, or indeed the terminology employed for
either. Our business is now with the pretenders, by which I mean
those claims about the workings of narrative (temporality) that prove
to be false because they are reductionist: too inclusive or too restric-
tive or both. Why have such claims been made (e.g., for in medias res,
defamiliarization, spatialism, point, or viewpoint) and been widely ac-
cepted? What proves them false? Where do they truly belong? And
how do they stand to the real forces of narrativity/narrative? To these
questions we come next.
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Sternberg Telling in Time II

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Telling in Time (II): Chronology, Teleology, Narrativity

Author(s): Meir Sternberg

Yes-oh dear yes-the novel tells a story.

1. What's Become of Narrativity?

of composition-relative frequencies included-or what are taken to

We define narrative as one method of recapitulating past experience by

reference, they mark an ascending scale of coverage (and I have sim-

human competence. The results, as will emerge, do show, from Aris-

hypothetical than real" existence vis-a-vis the noncorrespondences in

Labov's: his deviation-based apparatus cannot handle chronological

thetic or (if only by analytical fiat covering the samejudgment) generic.

3. Arguments to this effect have already been developed in Sternberg (1978:

hand, I will suggest how a proper functionalist alternative meets the

This is what I meant by proposing to advance from the quantitative

that of narrative itself? Such questions uncover an instructive story,

2. The Sense of Purpose: Aristotle in/and Narrative Poetics Today

giver, never more intent on motivation than when he grounds causality

status is either granted or denied altogether by reference to some

supposedly comes at the price of diminished coherence; variety gains

2.2. Teleology Arrested, Chronology Demoted, Narrativity Vanished: Lures and

appear, the underlying Aristotelian rationale.7 Taken together, the two

plague's outbreak, due to the opacity of the chrono-logical beginning.

To counterbalance Aristotle's assertion that plots begin at the beginning,

It is, rather, Aristotelian wholes that "begin at the beginning," not

elements of plot structure are recognition (involving ignorance and

to express them, the system of narrative consists in a vast network of

play of teleology-to the loss or gain of chronology-without paying

sus Trollopian lucidity, then those polar forms cannot be referred to

9. By the rule we have already encountered apropos of "minimal narrative," formal

11. For an excellent discussion of functionalism in Aristotelian biology, see

13. CompareJonathan Culler (1975: 207) on the evaluation of approaches to plot:

variants would never amount even to "morphological" equivalents; but

late the whole/plot relation, his privileging of complexity, all features

non-Aristotelian limit of monopoly on artistic status and value, often

part here in the Genettean domain of freely manipulable "narrative"

analogy, which may illuminate or ambiguate a character's anteced

the ending's novelty value-screened out by the Poetics, too-here the

repertoire of narrative and narrativizable ends (forces, norms) that

telian," or "everything," hardly. In Aristotelian terms, such zest for

body would consider narrative, such as paintings of "animals and of

sequence, among all objects of mimesis. Rather than duly specifying

simply by virtue of its defining feature, mimesis. A portrait, we recall,

No, if you want to retain the substance of Aristotle's argument

only the Renaissance tradition, with its counterparts in Formalist and

narrative in the first place-reducing it instead to a wider common de-

17. See the recent evaluation in Chatman (1990: esp. 310-19).

idiosyncratic reference and features that he would impose on "narra-

volved. So catharsis ultimately belongs to the represented matter in

18. A rare non-Aristotelian exception is E. M. Forster (1962 [1927]), where the

3. Narrative in Its Narrativity

3.1. The Narrative Dynamics of Recognition: Surprise as Interest/Gap/Plot be-

Granting for the moment that narrative surprise manifests itself in

artistic teleology controls (and at will disturbs or demotes) the other's

As always, the handling of surprise brings out even more general

appeals or even conforms, but returns, to nature. As a consequence, to

19. It is therefore odd to find his editor, Michael Holquist, attributing to me of

Likewise, the early Barthes's (1977) three-level program for Struc-

3.1.2. Communicative partnership. On top of the (im)balance of power

problems, means/end resources and choices: their distinctiveness only

Balzac's "Sarazine," he still never quite manages to overthrow the ge-

3.1.3. Communicative processing. The art of sequence, then, radicalizes to

ings other than the two surprise highlights-indeed, as if it could not

of sequenced discourse is all that we actually encounter and progres-

the background of the Poetics. If Aristotle overlooks some of these

the definition (complete with the definitional priorities) holds from

Aristotle, who inaugurated the tradition of "well-made" narrative

us forever guessing at his secret, caught among multiple hypotheses