Unspeakable Images: On the Interplay between Verbal and Iconic Narration in Benedetti's "Cinco anõs de vida"

doi:10.1353/NAR.2018.0002

HAL Id: hal-01678028

https://hal-univ-paris.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01678028

Submitted on 9 Jan 2018

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access

archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-

entic research documents, whether they are pub-

lished or not. The documents may come from

teaching and research institutions in France or

abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est

destinée au dépôt et à la diusion de documents

scientiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,

émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de

recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires

publics ou privés.

Unspeakable Images: On the Interplay between Verbal

and Iconic Narration in Benedetti’s ”Cinco anos de vida”

Sylvie Patron

To cite this version:

Sylvie Patron. Unspeakable Images: On the Interplay between Verbal and Iconic Narration in

Benedetti’s ”Cinco anos de vida”. Narrative, Ohio State University Press, 2018, 26 (1), pp.39-62.

�hal-01678028�

Sylvie Patron

Unspeakable Images: On the Interplay

between Verbal and Iconic Narration

ABSTRACT: This article deals with the relationship between verbal narrative and

images (iconic narrative) in the illustrated edition of a short story by Mario Benedetti,

“Cinco anos de vida,” taken from Historias de Paris. It forms a companion piece to an

article I published in 2013 on the relationship between (verbal) narration and fiction in

this short story, particularly its ending. The theoretical framework of the present article

is that of transmedial narratology. From transmedial narratology, I retain five major

propositions which are presented in the first section. There is one proposition, howev

er, which I cannot accept. It concerns the necessary presence of a fictional narrator in

every fictional verbal narrative. In my 2013 article, I tried to show that the analysis of

a fictional third person narrative like “Cinco anos de vida” could completely dispense

with the concept of a fictional narrator. What I would like to show here is that this ap

proach does not contradict the other propositions of transmedial narratology, nor an

analysis based on these propositions. My position is that there are fictional narratives

with and without a fictional narrator, but this opposition does not correspond to an

opposition between media, namely between (verbal) language and other media. The

two forms of fictional narrative coexist in some media, but not in all. The demonstra

tion also rests on the interview I had with the painter Antonio Segui in his workshop

in Arcueil, near Paris, on June 29, 2015.

KEYWORDS: verbal narration, iconic narration, transmedial narratology, fictional

narrator, Mario Benedetti, Antonio Segui

Sylvie Patron is a Lecturer and Research Supervisor in French language and literature at the University of

Paris Diderot. A specialist in the history and epistemology of literary theory, she is the author of Le Narra-

teur: Un probleme de theorie narrative (2009/2016) and La Mort du narrateur et autres essais (2015). She is

also editor of Theorie, analyse, interpretation des recits/Theory, analysis, interpretation of narratives (2011)

and co-editor, with Brian Schiff and A. Elizabeth McKim, of Life and Narrative: The Risks and Responsibil

ities of Storying Experience (2017). She can be reached at sylvie.patron@orange.fr.

in Benedettis “Cinco anos

NARRATIVE, Vol 26, No. 1 (January 2018)

40 Sylvie Patron

Preliminary Remarks

This article deals with the relationship between verbal and iconic narrative in the

illustrated edition of a short story by Mario Benedetti, “Cinco anos de vida” (“Five

Years of Life”).1 It forms a companion piece to an article I published in 2013 on the

relationship between (verbal) narration and fiction in this short story, particularly its

ending (“Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in Benedettis ‘Five

Years of Life”’). The theoretical framework in which the present article is set is trans-

medial narratology.2 This theory is based on the existence of narratives in various

media, with the aim of studying the influence of the medium in which the narrative

is transmitted on the narrative practice itself. It is concerned in particular with the

possibilities and constraints of (verbal) language in relation to still or moving images,

music or digital media.3 In this article, I will be looking at the interaction between

verbal print narrative and still images depicting characters at particular moments in

that narrative.

I am using the following five propositions from transmedial narratology:

(1) The language-based, or rather, speech-act based approach to narrative, which

defines narrative as an act of narration addressed by a narrator to a narratee,

cannot account for visual or musical forms of narrative, and also mistakenly

excludes verbal texts that are considered to have no narrator from the “narra

tive” category, namely dramatic texts.4

(2) Theoretical concepts can be either medium-specific or applicable to several

media.5 Among the narratological concepts that can be applied to several me

dia are: the distinction between story and discourse (in any case, according to

one meaning of discourse, referring to the presentation of events, especially

from the perspective of time), the concepts of character, event, fictional world

or storyworld.6

(3) Unlike classical narratology, which rests on a language-based, or rather,

speech-act based definition of narrative, transmedial narratology rests on a

definition of narrative in terms of a cognitive construction: “If the transmedial

identity of narrative lies on the side of the signified [i.e. story], this means that

narrative is a certain type of mental image, or cognitive template which can be

isolated from the stimuli that trigger its construction” (Ryan, “On the Theoret

ical Foundations” 4). According to Marie-Laure Ryan, the cognitive template

constitutive of narrative is defined by the following features:

—narrative must be about a world populated with individuated agents and

objects (spatial dimension);

—this world must be located in time and undergo significant transforma

tions; these transformations must be caused by non-habitual events (tem

poral dimension);

—some of the participants in the events must be intelligent agents, having a

mental life and reacting emotionally to the states of the world; some of the

On the Interplay between Verbal and Iconic Narration 41

events must be actions performed by these agents, whose goals and plans

must be clearly identifiable (mental dimension);

—the events must be part of a unified causal chain, leading to a closure; the

occurrence of some of the events must be asserted as fact in the story-

world; the story must communicate something meaningful to the recipi

ent (formal and pragmatic dimensions).7

Note the absence of the narrator. This is not an oversight but a deliberate exclu

sion, found in other narratologists or theorists of intermediality.8

(4) Out of all the media, (verbal) language is the best suited to narrative. Proof

of this is that every narrative can be summarized in language, but not every

narrative can be retold through pictures, for example.

(5) The challenge faced by transmedial narratology is that of reconciling the su

periority of language with the recognition of the original contributions sup

plied by other media.9 Ryan presents an overview of what language, (still) im

ages, and music can do and cannot do (or can do only with difficulty, or can

do to make up for certain limitations), in the field of narrative transmission,

in a sort of table.10

There is one proposition of transmedial narratology, however, which I cannot

accept. It can be expressed as a sub-proposition of (1):

(6) The language-based, or rather, speech act-based approach, which defines nar

rative as an act of narration addressed by a narrator to a narratee, is able to

account for all verbal narratives apart from dramatic texts."

This proposition varies according to the type of narrative in question: when the nar

rative is a fictional narrative, the act of the real narrator (the author) is duplicated by

that of a fictional narrator, situated in the same fictional world as the characters. It is

he or she who is supposed to satisfy the felicity conditions for the speech acts corre

sponding to the sentences of the text.12

This proposition is false and contrary to the theory it is based on: John Searles

theory of fictional discourse.13 On the other hand, it can be considered as unnecessary

from the perspective of the cognitive definition of narrative given above.

In my 2013 article, I tried to show that the analysis of a third-person fictional

narrative such as “Cinco anos de vida” could completely dispense with the concept

of the fictional narrator. Modern, third-person fictional narrative that the dominant

language-based, or speech-act based approach, would attribute to a fictional narra

tor can be better explained as a structured collection of information, some of which

has no origin assignable in the fictional world (these might be termed narrative, or

narrative-zero, or again objective sentences or contexts, as opposed to subjective ones),

while others stem from one or more subjects of consciousness who belong to the

fictional world (and might be termed

subjective sentences or contexts). I will come

back to the characteristics of these types of sentences at the end of the present arti-

42 Sylvie Patron

cle. What I would like to show is that my approach does not contradict the five other

propositions of transmedial narratology, nor an analysis based on those propositions.

Moreover, I will go further and argue that the reasons why we can dispense with the

fictional narrator for the verbal narrative are similar to the reasons why we can dis

pense with such a narrator for the iconic narrative. More generally, my position is that

there are fictional narratives with and without a fictional narrator, but this opposition

does not correspond to an opposition between media, namely between (verbal) lan

guage and other media. The two forms of fictional narrative coexist in some media,

but not in all.14

The subject of this article is a type of narrative that could be called “plurimedial”

or more precisely “bimedial,” since two media participate in the structure and signifi

cation of the narrative. (Note however that “Cinco anos de vida” does not fit the stan

dard description of graphic narrative where the visual and verbal are interacting on

every page. Instead there are only six images, appearing intermittently.) The depen

dent status of the images in relation to verbal narrative should be highlighted. It is typ

ical of what we normally call illustrations; and it is acknowledged and even stressed

by the visual artist, Antonio Segui.15 We can also refer to what Ryan has written about

the illustrative or ancillary narrative mode (as opposed to the autonomous mode): “In

the illustrative mode, the text retells and completes a story, relying on the receivers

previous knowledge of the plot. The illustrative mode is typical of pictorial narratives,

for instance of medieval paintings of Biblical scenes” (“Introduction” 14 and “On the

Theoretical Foundations” 12).16

The story told in “Cinco anos de vida” takes place in Paris in the late 1960s. The

protagonists are Raul Morales and Mirta Cisneros. He is Uruguayan and she is Argen

tinian. He is a writer (of short stories) and she paints, or rather did paint before she

arrived in Paris. They meet one night in the Bonne Nouvelle metro station after the

exit doors have been shut. They talk, telling each other their life stories and unfulfilled

dreams. At a quarter to five, Raul says to Mirta;

“^Sabes una cosa? Daria cinco anos de vida porque todo empezara aqui. Qui-

ero decir: que yo estuviera divorciado y mi mujer hubiera aceptado el hecho

y no se hubiera matado, y que yo tuviera un buen trabajo en Paris, y que al

abrirse las puertas salieramos de aqui como lo que ya somos: una pareja.”

(“Cinco anos de vida” 30)

“You know something? I’d give five years of my life if I could start all over,

right here and now. I mean, if I were divorced from my wife, and she hadn’t

killed herself; and I had a good job in Paris; and when they opened the sta

tion again, we could walk out of here as what we really are: a couple.” (“Five

Years of Life” 103)

Mirta replies, “Yo tambien daria cinco anos” (“I’d give five years, too”) and adds “No

importa, ya nos arreglaremos” (“Don’t worry, we’ll manage somehow,” ibid.). At five

Unspeakable Images: On the Interplay between Verbal and Iconic Narration in Benedetti's "Cinco anõs de vida"

Summary (1 min read)

Preliminary Remarks

Another Unspeakable Narrative

Towards a Critical Use of Intermedial Comparison

Endnotes

Citations

References

Related Papers (5)