Modificaciones de las sociedades personalistas

The present study is closely linked to the preceding one. Its tone, however, is different. Up to now, narrative identity has been treated only polemi-cally and, overall, in a more defensive than constructive manner. Two posi-tive tasks remain to be accomplished.

The first task is to carry to a higher level the dialectic of sameness and selfhood implicitly contained in the notion of narrative identity. The sec-ond is to complete this investigation of the narrated self by exploring the mediations that narrative theory can perform between action theory and moral theory. This second task will itself have two sides to it. Returning to our triad — describing, narrating, prescribing — we shall ask first what extension of the practical field is called for by the narrative function, if the action described is to match the action narrated. We shall then examine in what way narrative, which is never ethically neutral, proves to be the first laboratory of moral judgment. The reciprocal constitution of action and of the self will be pursued on both sides of narrative theory, in the practical as well as the ethical sphere.

1. Narrative Identity and the Dialectic of Selfhood and Sameness The genuine nature of narrative identity discloses itself, in my opinion, only in the dialectic of selfhood and sameness. In this sense, this dialectic represents the major contribution of narrative theory to the constitution of the self.

The argument will proceed in the following way:

First, I shall begin by showing, in a continuation of the analyses in Time and Narrative, how the specific model of the interconnection of events constituted by cmplotmcnt allows us to integrate with permanence in time what seems to be its contrary in the domain of sameness-identity, namely diversity, variability, discontinuity, and instability.

Second, I shall then show how the notion of emplotmcnt, transposed from the action to the characters in the narrative, produces a dialectic of

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the character which is quite clearly a dialectic of sameness and selfhood;

returning, at this time, to the strategy of puzzling cases in analytic philoso-phy, I shall make room, within the space of the imaginative variations opened up by the dialectic of selfhood and sameness, for limiting cases at the point of dissociation between two modalities of identity, worthy of competing with Parfit's undecidable cases; a remarkable opportunity will thus arise to confront the respective resources of literary fiction and of science fiction concerning the eminently problematic character of personal identity.

1. When Dilthey formed the concept of' Zusammenhang des Lebens (the connectedness of life), he spontaneously held it to be equivalent to the concept of a life history. It is this preunderstanding of the historical sig-nificance of connectedness that the narrative theory of personal identity attempts to articulate, at a higher level of conceptually. Understood in narrative terms, identity can be called, by linguistic convention, the iden-tity of the character. This ideniden-tity will later be placed back into the sphere of the dialectic of the same and the self. But before this, I shall show how the identity of the character is constructed in connection with that of the plot. This derivation of one identity in relation to the other, merely indi-cated in Time and Narrative, will be clarified here.

Let us first recall what was meant in Time and Narrative by identity on the level of emplotment. It can be described in dynamic terms by the com-petition between a demand for concordance and the admission of discor-dances which, up to the close of the story, threaten this identity. By concordance, I mean the principle of order that presides over what Aris-totle calls "the arrangement of facts." By discordances, I mean the reversals of fortune that make the plot an ordered transformation from an initial situation to a terminal situation. I am applying the term "configuration"

to this art of composition which mediates between concordance and dis-cordance. To extend the validity of this concept of narrative configuration beyond Aristotle's privileged example — Greek tragedy and, to a lesser degree, epic poetry — I propose to define discordant concordance, char-acteristic of all narrative composition, by the notion of the synthesis of the heterogeneous. By this I am attempting to account for the diverse media-tions performed by the plot: between the manifold of events and the tem-poral unity of the story recounted; between the disparate components of the action — intentions, causes, and chance occurrences — and the se-quence of the story; and finally, between pure succession and the unity of the temporal form, which, in extreme cases, can disrupt chronology to the point of abolishing it. These multiple dialectics do no more, in my opin-ion, than make explicit the oppositopin-ion, already present in the domain of tragedy according to Aristotle, between the episodic dispersal of the

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rative and the power of unification unfurled by the configuring act consti-tuting poiesis itself.

It is to narrative configuration understood in this sense that one must compare the sort of connectedness claimed by an impersonal description.

The essential difference distinguishing the narrative model from every other model of connectedness resides in the status of events, which we have repeatedly made the touchstone of the analysis of the self1 Whereas in a causal-type model, event and occurrence are indiscernible, the narrative event is defined by its relation to the very operation of configuration; it participates in the unstable structure of discordant concordance character-istic of the plot itself It is a source of discordance inasmuch as it springs up, and a source of concordance inasmuch as it allows the story to ad-vance.2 The paradox of cmplotmcnt is that it inverts the effect of contin-gency, in the sense of that which could have happened differently or which might not have happened at all, by incorporating it in some way into the effect of necessity or probability exerted by the configuring act.3 The in-version of the effect of contingency into an effect of necessity is produced at the very core of the event: as a mere occurrence, the latter is confined to thwarting the expectations created by the prior course of events; it is quite simply the unexpected, the surprising. It only becomes an integral part of the story when understood after the fact, once it is transfigured by the so-to-spcak retrograde necessity which proceeds from the temporal totality carried to its term. This necessity is a narrative necessity whose meaning effect comes from the configurating act as such; this narrative necessity transforms physical contingency, the other side of physical neces-sity, into narrative contingency, implied in narrative necessity.

1. Cf. the discussion of Davidson in the third study and that of Parfit in the fifth study.

I am not contesting what these theories have established, namely that, as occurrences, events have the right to an ontological status at least equal to that of substance, nor do I contest that they can be the object of an impersonal description. I am saying that, by entering into the movement of a narrative which relates a character to a plot, the event loses its impersonal neutrality. By the same token, the narrative status conferred upon the event averts the drift of the notion of event which would make it difficult, if not impossible, to take the agent into account in the description of the action.

2. I find here something of Walter Benjamin's Ursprung, a surging forth that cannot be reduced to what is ordinarily understood by Entstehung, and even less so by Entwicklung.

And yet, even though the surging forth of the narrative event cannot be coordinated with some totality, it does not exhaust itself in its effect of rupture, of caesura; it contains poten-tialities for development that have to be "saved." This Rettung of the Ursprung — a central theme in Benjamin — is, in my opinion, the workings of the plot. The plot "redeems" the origin of the "fall" into mcaninglessncss. Cf. Jeanne-Marie Gagncbin, "Histoire, memoire er oubli chez Walter Benjamin" (unpublished text).

3. Concerning the necessity or probability that Aristotle attaches to the muthos of tragedy or of the epic, cf. the texts of Aristotle cited in Time and Narrative 1:40-41.

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From this simple reminder of the notion of emplotment, and before any consideration of the dialectic of characters which is its corollary, it results that the narrative operation has developed an entirely original con-cept of dynamic identity which reconciles the same categories that Locke took as contraries: identity and diversity.

The decisive step in the direction of a narrative conception of personal identity is taken when one passes from the action to the character. A char-acter is the one who performs the action in the narrative. The category of character is therefore a narrative category as well, and its role in the nar-rative involves the same narnar-rative understanding as the plot itself. The question is then to determine what the narrative category of character con-tributes to the discussion of personal identity. The thesis supported here will be that the identity of the character is comprehensible through the transfer to the character of the operation of emplotment, first applied to the action recounted; characters, we will say, are themselves plots.

Let us recall briefly in what way narrative theory accounts for the cor-relation between action and character.

The correlation between story told and character is simply postulated by Aristotle in the Poetics. It appears as such a close correlation there that it takes the form of a subordination. It is indeed in the story recounted, with its qualities of unity, internal structure, and completeness which are conferred by emplotment, that the character preserves throughout the story an identity correlative to that of the story itself.4

Contemporary narrative theory has attempted to give to this correlation the status of a semiotic constraint, already implicit in a sense in Aristotle's conceptual analysis of muthos into its "parts." Propp gave the impetus to this investigation on a level of abstraction which I discuss in Time and Narrative 2 and will not repeat here.5 The author of'Morphology of the

Folk-4. I began to underscore this primacy of emplotment (muthos) over character in Time and Narrative 1 (p. 37). In the series marking the six "parts" of tragedy according to Aris-totle, the plot comes first before the characters and the thought (dianoia), which, with the plot, constitutes the "what" imitated by the action. Aristotle pushes this subordinate status to the point of declaring: "Tragedy is essentially an imitation not of persons but of actions and life, of happiness and misery. All human happiness or misery takes the form of action;

the end for which we live is a certain kind of activity, not a quality. . . . Besides this, a tragedy is impossible without action, but there may be one without Character" (Poetics [De Poetica], trans. Ingram Bywatcr, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. McKeon, 7.1450a 16-24). This last hypothesis will concern us later on, when we discuss the disappearance of the character in some contemporary works.

5. In Time and Narrative 2, I am careful to underscore the kinship of meaning between narrative intelligence, immanent in the competence of the spectator, the listener, or the reader, and narratological rationality, which I take to be derived from the former. This problem of preeminence does not concern me here. I am instead looking to narrative theory for a

confir-tale begins by distinguishing a series of "functions" — recurrent segments of actions and characters — allowing him to define folktales in terms of the sequence of functions alone. However, when he is about to consider the synthetic unity of this chain, he has to take into account the role played by the characters. He is thus the first to attempt a typology of these roles, established solely on the basis of their recurrence.6 The list of roles is not independent of the list of functions; they intersect at a number of points, which Propp called spheres of action: "Many functions logically join together into certain spheres. These spheres in toto correspond to their respective performers" (p. 79); "The problem of the distribution of func-tions may be resolved on the plane of the problem concerning the distri-bution of the spheres of action among the characters" (p. 80). Quoting these statements of Propp in Time and Narrative 2:37,1 ask whether every plot docs not proceed from a mutual genesis involving the development of a character and that of a story. I adopt Frank Kermode's axiom that developing a character is recounting more.7

This is what Claude Bremond has clearly shown in his Logique du recit;

according to him, a role can be defined only by "the attribution of some possible, actual, or completed predicate-process to a subject-person."8 In this attribution we sec the narrative solution to the problem of ascribing action to an agent, which was discussed in the preceding studies. The elementary sequences of a narrative already contain this correlation. In addition, the reference in the very definition of "role" to the three stages of possibility, of passing to action or not, of completion or incompletion, immediately situates the role within an action dynamics. On the basis of this definition of elementary sequence, it becomes possible to draw up a full repertoire of roles, by taking into account a series of enrichments bear-ing on both the subject-person and the predicate-process. It is noteworthy that the first great dichotomy is that of sufferers, those affected by processes of modification or conservation, and, in correlation with them, of agents who initiate these processes. Bremond thus takes into account our pre-understanding that stories are about agents and sufferers. For my part,

mation of the prcundcrstanding that we have, on the level of narrative intelligence, of the coordination between plot and character.

6. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 1st ed., trans. Laurence Scott; 2d ed., rev.

and ed. Louis A. Wagner (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968). Here is Propp's list: the villain, the donor (or provider), the helper, the sought-for person, the dispatcher, the hero, and the false hero. Cf. Time and Narrative 2:36.

7. Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 75-99.

8. Claude Bremond, Lopfique du recit (Paris: Ed. du Scuil, 1973), 134.

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I never forget to speak of humans as acting and suffering. The moral prob-lem, as we saw in an earlier study, is grafted onto the recognition of this essential dissymmetry between the one who acts and the one who under-goes, culminating in the violence of the powerful agent. Being affected by a course of narrated events is the organizing principle governing an entire series of roles of sufferers, depending on whether the action exerts an in-fluence or whether its effect is to make matters better or worse, to protect or to frustrate. A remarkable enrichment of the notion of role concerns its introduction into the field of evaluations through the actions which have just been enumerated, then into the field of retributions, where the sufferer appears as the beneficiary of esteem or as the victim of disestecm, depend-ing on whether the agent proves to be someone who distributes rewards or punishments. Bremond rightly observes that it is only on these levels that agents and sufferers are raised to the rank of persons and of initiators of action. In this way, through the roles related to the domain of rewards and punishments, the close connection between the theory of action and ethical theory which we evoked above is witnessed on the plane of the narrative.

It is with Greimas's actantial model that the correlation between plot and character is carried to its most radical position, prior to all sensible figuration. For this reason, one does not speak here of "character" but of octant, in order to subordinate the anthropomorphic representation of the agent to the position of the operator of actions along the narrative course.

The radicalization occurs along two different lines — on the side of the actant and on that of the narrative course. Along the first line, to the actual list of characters found in Russian folktales, according to Propp, Greimas substitutes a model based upon three categories: desire (the principle of the quest of a real object, a person, or a value), communication (the prin-ciple of all relations between a sender and a receiver), and action properly speaking (the principle of all oppositions between helpers and opponents).

This provides a model that, unlike Propp's, starts with possible relations between actants and then moves in the direction of a rich combinatory of actions, whether these are called contracts, tests, quests, or struggles.

Along the second line, that of narrative courses, I would like to emphasize the place occupied on a plane intermediary between that of deep structures and the figurative plane by a series of notions which have a place only in a narrative conception of the connectedness of life: first, that of a narrative program, then that of a polemical relation between two programs, from which results the opposition between subject and antisubject. We find again here what was precomprehended on the plane of simple narrative intelligence, namely that action is interaction and that interaction is com-petition among projects which themselves are by turn opposing and

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vergent. Let us also add to this all the translations or transfers of objects/

values which narrativizc the exchange. Finally, one would have to take into account the topology underlying the change of "place" — initial and ter-minal places of transfer — on the basis of which one can then speak of a

"sequence of performances."9

If we reconnect the two lines of analysis which I have just broadly out-lined (referring to Time and Narrative 2 : 4 4 - 6 0 ) , we see the mutual rein-forcement of a semiotics of the actant and a semiotics of narrative courses, to the point at which the narrative appears as the path of the character and vice versa. In concluding with this theme of the necessary correlation be-tween plot and character, I would like to underscore one category which Greimas's work on Maupassant stressed,10 although it was present in the earliest actantial model, namely the category of sender. The pair sender/

receiver is an extension of that of mandate in Propp or of inaugural con-tract in Greimas, the concon-tract by reason of which the hero receives the competence to act. The senders — who may be individual, social, or even cosmic entities, as we see in the short story "Two Friends" — stem from what in Maupassant Greimas terms a "proto-actantial" status (p. 45).n

It has not been unavailing to recall in what way the narrative structure joins together the two processes of emplotment, that of action and that of

It has not been unavailing to recall in what way the narrative structure joins together the two processes of emplotment, that of action and that of