In a novel, besides characters and action, there is also a portrait of the author, one that is assembled page by page: a person either ostentatious or discreet, with his own ideas, with a particular way of expressing himself, of loving long noses or pouty characters; someone who disguises himself and who shows you, beyond what he intends to reveal, his hidden habits and secret pockets. He is the character formed in the reader’s mind, a different one each time, yet easy to recognize. Someone who has decided to sit on your shoulder.
I mean to say that a text is, in a succinct and precise definition by Paul Ricoeur, any discourse fixed in writing. From his point of view, there are two principal modes of discursive expression: the narration of action, such as God created…, and the narration of speech, as in the example God said, and so it was. Ricoeur attributes a traditional role to the former, whereas the latter expresses the discourse of the narrator-interpreter. Explanation and interpretation oppose and reconcile one another indefinitely at the very heart of reading, through the direct involvement of the reader who gives value and name to a written text.
Every story is mediated, transmitted through a narrator who may or may not have witnessed the events, who sometimes claims to have listened to another storyteller, or who simply assumes the role of an omniscient narrator. When he assumes responsibility as the author of the story, he is also called an authorial narrator. Among the narratologists who have examined the role of the authorial instance in the production of a text, Claude Bremond seems to define this relationship best. In his view, the narrator transfers to the subject an autonomous organizing power over narrative material. The event itself is reduced to roles, and it is presented by instances that interpret a message about events. According to him, the act of narrating implies shaping the narrator according to the function held by the character within the story, which means that it is impossible to situate the storyteller outside the narrative. The famous Flaubertian remark (Madame Bovary, c’est moi), as well as the attempts of realist writers to substitute themselves for their characters by retreating into a neutral discourse, are merely escapes from the role of principal narrator. Thus realist writing, far from being objective, becomes burdened with the most spectacular signs of artistic shaping.
The narrator’s discourse is largely determined by the theme being treated and is sustained by the emotional state of the writer.
In literary prose, action refers to the evolutionary unfolding, in a sustained rhythm, of a narrative event. The sequence of events must display two essential traits: originality and unity, while the narrative itself consists of the plot and the communicative instances (author, characters, reader). In these conditions, the authorial narrator transmits a point of view complemented by other narrative voices, either polemically or through the addition of details and adjacent micronarratives. The author, in the posture of a total authority, may behave like an all-powerful creator who speaks about his characters as if they were subjects, expressing himself in this way: our man knew very well what he had to do, for he was not foolish by nature. At times the authorial narrator adopts the role of observer (detached or curious) and transforms the narrative into a conscientious account of facts. In such situations he approaches, in style and attitude, the journalist. At other times, the author’s attitude toward the character is reflected in the denotative expressions through which the character is constructed.
The relationship between author and reader also varies. Sometimes the author attempts to communicate through direct addresses (dear reader or I must tell you…) or through a deliberate involvement of the reader (but let us return to where we began). This explicit attempt by the author to establish communication with the reader, as well as all the narrative procedures that reveal the author’s opinion about characters, action, or reader, is known as rhetorical discourse. In modern prose the reader is almost ignored, and the author is most often discreet, ostentatiously withdrawn outside the writing itself.
An item of information such as a woman climbs the ravine leaning on a man’s arm may change according to the degree of involvement of the narrator. For the narrator who wishes to emphasize the vastness and emptiness of the landscape, the statement might become: beyond the road — the winding ravine and two slender silhouettes: a man and a woman.For the involved narrator (for instance, someone in love with the woman who is climbing), the information sounds different: From above, where I stood, I could not help noticing the pleasure with which she leaned entirely on him as they climbed the ravine and reached the road again, after the car had been repaired.
In the latter case we are dealing with an artistic statement, and the narrator-character in the novel by Camil Petrescu is an involved witness, emotionally affected by the event—an attitude sometimes adopted by journalists as well, particularly in literary reportage or essayistic commentary.
A similar relationship of involvement is also signaled by subjective denotatives, especially evaluative epithets.
The just tone of the discursive instance constitutes the essence of any writing, regardless of the genre or the era. And for this to happen, the narrator is himself a character; he plays a role.
See also: How a Story Ends, in Ficțiunea magazine.
