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lots of great narratological tools to look at how political novels tick

Notes:

A Roman a These is a novel written in the realistic mode (that is built on an aesthetic of verisimilitude and representation) which signals itself to the reader as primarily didactic in intent, seeking to demonstrate the validity of a political, philosophical, or religious doctrine.

 

Roman a these has an unambiguous, dualistic system of values, a rule of action presented to the reader, and a doctrinal intertext.

 

Sartre’s schtick is basically prose is meant to communicate and poetry meant to use language

“The way towards a man’s recognition of himself” – Lukacs, in a world without gods human individuality has ceased being organic  and so individuality becomes the object of a quest (like bildungsroman), coming to know itself is what makes it Hegelian. The “typical hero” is one who sums up, often without knowing it, the aspiration and contradictions of a social group (class) at a historical moment.

 

Greimas’ Actantial System

 

• The axis of desire: (1) subject / (2) object. The subject is what is directed toward an object. The relationship established between the subject and the object is called a junction, and can be further classified as a conjunction (for example, the Prince wants the Princess) or a disjunction (for example, a murderer succeeds in getting rid of his victim’s body).
• The axis of power: (3) helper / (4) opponent. The helper assists in achieving the desired junction between the subject and object; the opponent hinders the same (for example, the sword, the horse, courage, and the wise man help the Prince; the witch, the dragon, the far-off castle, and fear hinder him).
• The axis of transmission (the axis of knowledge, according to Greimas): (5) sender / (6) receiver. The sender is the element requesting the establishment of the junction between subject and object (for example, the King asks the Prince to rescue the Princess). The receiver is the element for which the quest is being undertaken. To simplify, let us interpret the receiver (or positive receiver) as that which benefits from achieving the junction between subject and object (for example, the King, the kingdom, the Princess, the Prince, etc.). Sender elements are often receiver elements as well.

 

Barthes – what makes a “readable text” from the modern plural texts is its “obsessive fear of failing to communicate meaning” whence its recourse to redundancy, “a kind of semantic babble” in which meaning is “excessively named.” Ecrivain works with multiple meanings, ecrivant works with certainties.

Philippe Hamon – the discourse of realist narrative is characterized by multiples redundancies on the level of characters and their functions, on the level of narrative sequences, of descriptions, of “knowledge” to be transmitted “the pedagogic desire to transmit information…and to avoid any kind of noise.

Russian formalists – fabula -suzhet.

 

Narrative Text

 

level of story

characters (and their qualities)

context (historical etc)

Events (meets up with characters, their doing)

level of discourse

narration (narrative function, communicative function, testimonial function, interpretive function)

Focalization (from whose perspective)

temporal organization

the extreme coherence of the roman a these turns against itself, becomes dysfunctional by an excess of “readability”

 

The roman a these fufills the reader’s desire for unity but it too risks becoming a threat, since the single reading it tries to impose is also a form of terrorism.