David Herman, "Existentialist
Roots of Narrative Actants" [partial draft]
(Forthcoming in Studies in Twentieth-Century
Literature [2000])
It seems that rumors of the death of narratology
have been greatly exaggerated. Recently we have witnessed a small
but unmistakeable explosion of activity in the field of narrative studies;
signs of this minor narratological renaissance include the publication
of a spate of articles, special issues, and books that rethink and recontextualize
classical models for narratological research; the evident success
of the journal Narrative (not founded until 1993); and the establishment
of a book series devoted specifically to "The Theory and Interpretation
of Narrative" at the Ohio State University Press. Thus a full account
of narratology--a complete story of our ongoing rapprochement with stories--remains
yet to be written. By the same token, narratology's history sometimes
gets told in ways that flatten it out into a monolithically (if not monomaniacally)
scientistic endeavor. Recounted too rapidly, the history of narratology
can work to decontextualize a method of analysis that is itself sometimes
charged with a lack of concern for context. In particular, it is
important not to sever links between models for narrative analysis and
surrounding critico-theoretical trends.
Here, in order to indicate ways in
which classical narrative theory was embedded in its cultural milieux,
I should like to reconsider one chapter in the history of structuralist
narrative analysis as it emerged in France in the 1960s. My concern
is with the genesis--and the genealogy--of the concept of narrative "actants."
In the narratological tradition, actants represent a new, linguistically-informed
approach to the very old problem of literary character. Actants are
typically defined as "fundamental role[s] at the level of narrative deep
structure." In other words, "actants are general categories
[of behavior or doing] underlying all narratives (and not only narratives)
while [actors] are invested with specific qualities in different narratives."
After investigating the lineage of this key narratological concept, I shall
go on to examine some philosophical contexts for the actantial model that
first appeared in its canonical form in 1966 in A. J. Greimas's Sémantique
structurale (Structural Semantics). Refined by Greimas in his 1973
essay on "Actants, Actors, and Figures," the model was widely influential,
adopted (and adapted) in much subsequent narratological work. My
claim is that, in what amounts to a series of disciplinary displacements,
existentialist theories of the self may have inflected the way structuralist
narratologists drew on linguistic theory to redescribe characters in stories
as actants. Further, a more historically particularized account of
actants may have significant methodological consequences for present-day
analysts interested in using actantial models to study narrative.
In a certain sense, structuralist
narratology began with the attempt to create a systematic framework for
describing how characters participate in the narrated action. In
his Morphology of the Folktale--a text first published in 1928 and one
of the works associated with Russian Formalism that would exercise such
a profound influence on Francophone narratology --Vladimir Propp followed
Aristotle in subordinating character to action or plot. Articulating
a descriptive vocabulary based on the "functions" performed by characters
in stories, Propp conceived of the function as "an act of character, defined
from the point of view of its significance for the course of the action"
(21). A function is thus a participatory slot in the syntagmatic
unfolding of a narrative, and "character" is a relatively loose (if traditional)
way of talking about kinds of slots and the relational networks linking
them together. Arguing that many seemingly diverse functions join
together to create a few, typifiable "spheres of action," Propp developed
a typology of seven general roles (the villain, the donor, the helper,
the sought-for-person and her father, the dispatcher, the hero and the
false hero) that correspond to the ways in which characters can participate
in the plot structures found in the genre of the folktale (Morphology 79-80).
Propp's subordination of characters
to the action--his shift from personalities to participatory roles--provided
the basis for structuralist accounts of actants. Rooted in contemporary
linguistic theory, these accounts were also resolutely anti-psychological,
displacing attention from the interior states to the manifest deeds of
participants in a story. The issue became not what characters are
but what they do; a character is nothing more than the sequence of (plot-relevant)
actions that it performs. To anticipate: From a broadly Proppian
perspective, as in existentialist theories of the self, characters' motivations
do not precede and explain their actions, but are rather born with the
actions themselves. "Interiority" or psychological essence is not
a cause but an effect of the way characters (and people) behave; it is
a hypothesis about behavior that can only be constructed ex post facto
and at the risk of what Jean-Paul Sartre would call bad faith. To
read characters in the traditional, familiar way--to construe them as psychological
beings instead of emergent behavioral profiles--is to live in narratological
bad faith.
Yet the structuralists made explicit
appeal not to philosophical but to linguistic paradigms in elaborating
the insights they took over from Propp. Thus Greimas's Sémantique
structurale appeared in the same year that Roland Barthes recommended that
"the structural analysis of narrative be given linguistics as founding
model" ("Introduction" 82). Whereas Greimas (himself a linguist)
was the first to invoke the term actant in connection with stories, he
did not coin the word. Rather, in developing his actantial typology
Greimas drew on the syntactic theories of Lucien Tesnière.
In Éléments de syntaxe structurale (1959), Tesnière
had likened the sentence to "un petit drame" 'a small drama,' and written
that
Comme un drame en effet, il comporte obligatoirement
un procès, et le plus souvent des acteurs et des circonstances.
Transposés du plan de la réalité dramatique sur celui
de la syntaxe structurale, le procès, les acteurs et les circonstances
deviennent respectivement le verbe, les actants et les circonstants.
Le verbe exprime le procès . . . . Les actants sont les êtres
ou les choses qui, à un titre quelconque et de quelque façon
que ce soit, même au titre de simples figurants et de la façon
la plus passive, participent au procès . . . . Les actants sont
toujours des substantifs ou des équivalents de substantifs.
Inversement les substantifs assument en principe toujours dans la phrase
la fonction d'actants. (106; propositions 1-6)
Like a drama, it [the sentence or "noud
verbal" 'verbal node'] comprises necessarily an action and most often actors
and circumstances as well. Transposed from the plane of dramatic
reality to that of structural syntax, the action, actors and circumstances
become, respectively, the verb, the actants and the circumstants.
The verb expresses the action. . . . The actants are beings or things that
participate in the action--in whatever capacity and whatever style this
might entail, even if it is as mere walk-ons and in the most passive way
imaginable. Actants are always nouns or the equivalents of nouns.
Inversely, in a given phrase nouns always assume, at least in principle,
the function of actants.
Synthesizing Propp's and Tesnière's
ideas, Greimas reframed and radicalized one of the theoretical postulates
informing Morphology of the Folktale: namely, the assumption that
if characters are to be described in a systematic as opposed to an ad hoc
way, they should be viewed not as clusters of qualities or traits, but
rather as variables in a kind of behavioral calculus, or alternatively
units in a grammar of action, a syntax of doing. Adopting the
Barthesian view that "a narrative is a long sentence, just as every constative
sentence is . . . the rough outline of a short narrative" ("Introduction"
84), Greimas drew on Tesnière's work to interpret actants as syntactic
elements that are distributed in narrative "sentences" in patterned, predictable
ways. Thus, whereas actors are semantic units, actants
are syntactic ones, such that "An actor functions as an actant only when
it is put into play by either narrative syntax or linguistic syntax" (Greimas,
"Actants" 114). Further, actantial roles, like syntactic units, are
theoretical constructs pertaining to all narratives; they are part of the
very grammar of stories. By contrast, actors are the equivalent of
particular sentences realized within the grammar of a language; the output
of grammatical rules and operations located in the deep structure of narrative,
actors are surface structures specific to particular stories.
At stake, then, is the difference between examining the structure and the
content of a given sentence, its actantial scaffolding in contrast to how
it is used to characterize this or that actor. "Opponent" is an abstract
grammatical category that can be used to generate structural descriptions
of narrative sentences as diverse as those used to tell the stories of
Claudius in Hamlet, the Devil in The Brothers Karamazov, and Léonce
Pontellier in The Awakening. For the same reason an actor can embody
more than one actantial role (a character can be both opponent and helper
over the course of a story), and conversely an actantial role can be embodied
by more than one actor (several different characters can be helpers in
a narrative).
Subsequent narratological investigations
of the problem of character bear the impress of Greimas's model--in particular,
its reframing of Propp's ideas in linguistic (and more specifically syntactic)
terms. In his 1969 Grammaire du "Décaméron," where
the term "narratologie" 'narratology' was first proposed, even as Tzvetan
Todorov rejects Greimas's actantial typology he retains a grammatico-syntactic
approach to characters. For Todorov, "the grammatical subject is
always without internal properties; these can only come from its momentary
conjunction with a predicate." What we call characters are
the product of a quasi-syntactical operation--a reading procedure essential
for story comprehension--by virtue of which predicates are attached to
proper names to yield narrative agents. Narratological analysis
of characters should therefore work to discover the combinatory system,
the narrative langue, in terms of which subjects are assigned predicates
by the reader:
[In a narrative] certain characters are
placed in opposition to others. Yet an immediate opposition of the
characters would simplify these relations without coming any closer to
our goal. It would serve our purpose better to decompose each image
into distinctive features and to put these in a relation of opposition
or identity with the distinctive features of other characters in the same
narrative. We would thereby obtain a reduced number of axes of opposition
whose various combinations would regroup these features into representative
clusters of characters. (Todorov, "Methdological Heritage" 253).
Todorov thus follows the Propp-Tesnière-Greimas
tradition in viewing characters as the narrative equivalent of grammatical
subjects; in the same tradition he subsumes narrative participants under
a combinatory logic that regulates their functions vis-à-vis the
plot. Yet it is Barthes who, in his "Introduction to the Structural
Analysis of Narratives," offers the most searching discussion of the actantial
model, its conceptual bases, and its philosophical and ideological ramifications.
Couched in language that is reminiscent of existentialism, Barthes' account
suggests why Francophone structuralists may have been especially receptive
to Propp's action-centered approach in the first place. It also suggests
why the narratologists made character primarily a problem of narrative
syntax (how do we determine the units out of which stories are composed
and formulate their principles of composition?) and not narrative semantics
(how best do we describe stories' propositional content and/or their referential
properties?) or narrative pragmatics (what sorts of world-knowledge do
readers bring to stories and how does such contextual information get paired
with narrative form to yield nonrandom, predictable inferences about the
meaning of stories?).
In his "Introduction" Barthes remarks
that, whereas in Aristotelian poetics "the notion of character is secondary,
entirely subsidiary to the notion of action,"
Later the character, who until then had
been only a name, the agent of an action, acquired a psychological consistency,
became an individual, a "person," in short a fully constituted "being,"
even should he do nothing and of course even before acting. Characters
stopped being subordinate to the action, embodied immediately psychological
essences; which essences could be drawn up into lists, as can be seen in
its purest form in the list of "character parts" in bourgeois theatre .
. . . From its very outset, structural analysis has shown the utmost reluctance
to treat character as an essence, even merely for purposes of classification
. . . . Structural analysis, much concerned not to define characters in
terms of psychological essences, has so far striven, using various hypotheses,
to define a character not as a "being" but as a "participant." (104-106)
This passage does have the ring of a structuralist
manifesto. It is in part the programmatic statement of a method of
inquiry that focuses not on timeless and enduring meanings but on the semiotic
and cultural codes that constitute objects, situations, and events as meaningful
to those who interpret them. The same codes, of course, underwrite
human as well as literary identities; there is no bedrock or essence of
the self but rather signifying practices that traverse the individual and
make it readable as a self. But that is only part of the story.
Barthes's formulations can also be compared with some of the tenets of
existentialism presented by Sartre an essay written in 1946, "L'existentialisme
est un humanisme" ("Existentialism is a humanism")--originally intended
to be a précis of the major ideas of Sartre's L'être et le
neant (Being and Nothingness) (1943). Here Sartre wishes to dispute
the kind of humanism associated with philosophers such as Diderot, Voltaire,
and Kant. According to this earlier version of humanism, "Man has
a human nature; this human nature, which is the concept of the human, is
found in all men, which means that each man is a particular example of
a universal concept, man . . . . Thus . . . the essence of man precedes
the historical existence that we find in nature" (35). By contrast,
in the atheistic existentialism championed by Sartre,
there is at least one being in whom existence
precedes essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept,
and . . . this being is man, or, as Heidegger says, human reality.
What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It
means that, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and,
only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives
him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterwards
will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be.
For Sartre, the slogan "existence precedes
essence" adumbrates important ethical as well as metaphysical propositions.
It suggests that "there is no explaining things away by reference to a
fixed and given human nature"; and because "there is no determinism, man
is free, man is freedom." Thus humanity, "with no support and no
aid, is condemned every moment to invent [humanity]" (Sartre 41).
In response to critics who charge the philosophy with exempting people
from responsibility for their actions, the existentialist says: "'There
is no reality except in action.'" Even more tellingly, Sartre paraphrases
existentialist doctrine as follows:
Man is nothing else than his plan; he exists
only to the extent that he fulfills himself; he is therefore nothing else
than the ensemble of his acts, nothing else than his life . . . . What
we mean is that a man is nothing else than a series of undertakings, that
he is the sum, the organization, the ensemble of the relationships which
make up these undertakings. (47; 48)
Mutatis mutandis--with the philosopher
focusing on human selves, the narratologist on narrative identities--Sartre
and Barthes offer strikingly similar accounts. Both writers define
identity as an ensemble of actions; both suggest that no psychological
or moral essence precedes the acts (and choices to act) that make one become
what one is. Indeed, the distinctly Sartrean overtones of Barthes's
"Introduction" suggest the existential roots of narrative actants.
Read against Sartrean philosophy, Barthes's account helps contextualize
the two-stage process by which the structuralists combined Propp's and
Tesnière's ideas to bring the "actant under the . . . categories
of the grammatical (and not psychological) person" (Barthes 109).
In a first stage, Propp's subordination of character to action paralleled--and
offered independent confirmation of--the existentialist subordination of
essence to existence, timeless "human nature" to the acts by which people
create their own contingent identities. To this extent, the narratologists'
redescription of characters as participants rather than beings was historically
overdetermined; as research strategies, actantial models are of a jointly
Proppian and Sartrean provenance. In a second, more explicitly grammatical
stage of research on actants, Greimas chose Tesnière's syntactic
model as a formalism for character analysis--a systematic notation for
documenting story participants not as essences with a meaning but as sets
of actions combined to create larger narrative structures. Again,
this "choice"--a confluence of ideas and methods that of course transcends
Greimas as an individual--was overdetermined. It is true that, in
hindsight, "Propp's analyses approach the object from a syntactic perspective;
each folk narrative belonging to the corpus is shown to manifest the same
abstract structure, independently of the particular motifs in the story"--just
as "syntax discovers combinatory patterns of abstract categories. . . independently
of the lexical units which may form the actual sentence." Sartrean
and more broadly existentialist theories of the self, however, may have
made theorists like Greimas especially predisposed to fusing Propp's scheme
with syntactic models. Emptied of content or essence, the Sartrean
self figures as a concatenation of acts and relationships to other, similarly
content-less actors. Likewise, viewed from a syntactic perspective,
narrative actants appear not as centers of meaning and value--not as a
part of the semantics of story--but as place-holders in the structure of
the ongoing action.
The existentialist bases of narrative
actants may compel us to rethink the future as well as the history of narratology.
Historically, the existentialist influence might help account for the preeminence
of certain kinds of grammatical models in the heyday of structuralist narratology.
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan points to "methodological considerations" as the
primary reason for the grafting of Propp's ideas onto Francophone structuralism,
and in particular Propp's subordination ofcharacter to action:
Like any scientifically oriented discipline,
formalist and structuralist poetics recognizes the methodological necessity
of reduction, especially in preliminary phases of an inquiry. Since
action seems more easily amenable to the construction of 'narrative grammars'
(often based on verb-centred grammars of natural languages), it is convenient
to reduce character to action. (34)
The more or less overt scientism of the
structuralists, however, does not suffice to explain their reduction of
character to action. The methodological imperative Rimmon-Kenan describes
was itself part of a larger complex of cultural and intellectual forces.
In the case of actantial models, the really interesting question is why
certain methodologies borrowed from the field of linguistics--e.g., those
associated with syntactic analysis--took hold while others did not.
In a different milieu, very different research hypotheses about actants
might have suggested themselves. Indeed, a better understanding of
narratology's past can help today's researchers envision new possibilities
for narrative analysis. Whereas the structuralists for the most part
drew on syntactic theory to develop their actantial typologies, more recent
research has indicated the relevance of pragmatic and cognitive models
for studying actants. Thus Monika Fludernik has outlined an
enriched narratology according to which readers "naturalize" stories--bring
them within the domain of the natural or comprehensible--in order to interpret
them as narratives in the first place. In order to naturalize stories,
readers typically use "frames" or pre-stored sets of expectations, and
for Fludernik expectations about action or behavior constitute one of the
most basic frames in terms of which people make sense out of narratives.
On this model, actants are not syntactic units built into narrative structure
but rather cognitive paradigms used to impute goal-directed behavior to
narrative agents. After all, a story is not just an assemblage of
discrete events; to be processed as a narrative, event-strings must also
involve a specific configuration of participants or actants whose doings
conform to known behavioral paradigms. Cognitively based inferences
about actants thus allow story recipients to recognize certain modes of
discourse as being narratively organized in the first place. More
generally, though narrative actants may have had existentialist roots,
and though those beginnings may have prompted narratologists to study characters
in reductively syntactic terms at first, the concept of actants is in no
way exhausted by the history of its uses.
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