Lorsqu’on fait un conte, c’est à quelqu’un qui l’écoute; et pour peu que le conte dure, il est rare que le conteur ne soit pas interrompu quelquefois par son auditeur.

1This is an opening of Ceci n’est pas un conte by Diderot, written in the context of oral storytelling. Yet we need to consider whether his comment might in fact also refer to storytelling in general and, if so, this “interruption” pertains to a general condition of the recipient, even when he is a reader of a written narrative. Obviously, the “interrupting” acquires a metaphorical meaning here as it seems that we can identify the questions that the reader inevitably poses to the text when reading; to some extent they stem from his prior experiences, his (intellectual, ideological, literary, etc.) background with which he approaches the text. On the other hand, the text itself poses questions in the consequence of its underlying structure. Therefore, a reader’s active role is invariably, or potentially at least, part of a dialogue. I am not going to tackle this issue here, discussed often before, because what really interests me is a problem of a somewhat narrower range. It bears, apparently, on the structure and the reception of narrative texts. The issue at hand is that of the literary fiction, incorporated in a text as its ingredient, which functions as a specific proposition to a reader. He must take it into account if he is to receive the text properly.

2The problematic issues of prose fiction are usually approached in such a way as to address them as autonomous and independent of any other narrative issues. This peculiar disengagement possibly results from the fact that some representatives of analytical schools have been interested in fiction and others in narrative structure. Fiction has until recently been discussed as if it had nothing to do with language and language rules. This changed due to approaches inspired by Austin’s theory of speech acts. They come to treat fiction as specific modes of speaking with no equivalents to everyday language situations. Fiction has turned into a fiction of speech (Searle 1975).1

3In effect, the theory of fiction has entered a new terrain, which seems an important achievement. In this paper, however, I am going to deal with yet another aspect of the problem: fiction as an element of narrative structures. To emphasise this point, I will be talking about narrative fiction. Fiction understood as such is not within the bounds of phenomena that Roman Ingarden terms as a represented world. The represented world does not exist independently of and is always embedded in a given narrative structure. The represented world is specifically directed towards a recipient and equipped with meanings resulting not from its disparate properties but from the very fact of its existence in the narrative structure. Only thanks to it can the represented world function and be recognizable. From this context, the narrative fiction is included in the text structure and assumes a specific type of reception. As for reception, I do not take into account real readers but recipients whose role has been in a way determined by a text. Referring to the distinctions of communication levels in the narrative text, made by Aleksandra Okopień-Sławińska (1985),2 I will narrow down the analysis to the level that contains the subject of text and the addressee of text, thus to the level of a text’s fundamental communication roles.

4Understood as such the narrative fiction can be analysed in many ways. Here I will deal with a general semantic structure of fiction as it is generated in a given narrative structure. Literary fiction itself is not semantically autonomous and it acquires meanings only when combined with a particular type of narrating [opowiadanie]. As a result, it is the type of the narrating, imposing meanings on the narrated, that determines the semantics of fiction and a projected relation of a receiver to it. As a vehicle for meanings, the narrative fiction is the same element of contact between the sender and the receiver, and in this communication perspective I would like to present my argument.

5Before I actually do it, however, I need to introduce one more category: distance. Distance is coded in the relation between the narrator and the narrative fiction as well as with respect to a receiver presupposed by fiction. Both types of distance are intricately connected and the former, to a lesser or larger degree, determines the latter. Distance belongs to traditional categories in narrative theory such as point of view or multiple narrative perspective. Yet I would like to broaden its understanding: as a general (cognitive, moral, or ideological) relation to the narrative fiction. I make reference here less to the theory of the novel than to the theory of distance repeatedly formulated by Witold Gombrowicz (especially in his Diary). The formula of “distance to form” was for him a basic concept, one of the rudimentary aspects of his aesthetics. It also referred not to one element of utterance or another but to “form” in general: any narrative message with all its elements and the tradition it relates to. Gombrowicz’s distance to form was a programmatic concept mainly because it was expected to protect the writer from surrendering to any conventional and socially accepted patterns of making literature (traditional as well as avant-garde); it thus laid a theoretical groundwork for parody. Yet here I consider distance as an aspect of the communication situation established by the literary work. This distance does not mean opposition to identification. Identification, following Jauss (1974), is rather a specific manifestation of distance, a specific form of its shortening on both sides: of the sender and of the receiver (thus defined, I deviate from Gombrowicz’s view of identification according to which one identifies with a work, concept or tradition only with a view to negating and discarding it).

6Departing from the theoretical assumptions delineated above I would like to present the four in my opinion most important types of narrative fiction. They are different from each other in their general semantic construction as well as in the construction-related type of distance (at the sender’s and receiver’s end).

Mythic fiction

7This type of fiction, when analysed from a specific perspective, is charac|terised by complete autonomy. It seems self-sufficient as it reproduces what the narrator and the recipient come to believe in. There is no need to explain the meaning of the fiction because it should be comprehended due to its references to a world of faith, common images and accepted values. Moreover, not only does the fiction refer to that world, not only does it reproduce it in its entirety but also, in one section or another, necessitates one’s existence in this world. This world belongs to the sender as well as to the receiver and, by principle, there is harmony between them. Mythic fiction in this sense has no persuasive goal: its function is not to convince of the value, significance, or truth of a given myth but to codify that myth, so to speak, verbalise and render it into a specific literary shape. In its original and simultaneously fundamental assumption, mythic fiction addresses those who concur with it and, to a certain extent, do not treat it as fiction. It is carried out in a language treated as valid and obligatory for both partners in literary communication. Bachtin made a very good point:

An absolute fusion of word with concrete ideological meaning is, without a doubt, one of the most fundamental constitutive features of myth, on the one hand determining the development of mythological images, and on the other determining a special feeling for forms, meanings and stylistic combinations of language. Mythological thinking in the power of language containing it—a language generating out of itself a mythological reality that has its own linguistic connections and interrelationships—then substitutes itself for the connections and interrelationships of reality itself (this is the transposition of language categories and dependences into theogonic and cosmogonic categories). (Bachtin 1981, 762-763)

8The binding language whose each element interfaces with a commonly acknowledged ideological meaning excludes distance. Mythic fiction has no use for it because the distance would question what is mythical about the mythic fiction. Therefore, it necessitates a complete and uncritical identification. It is complete because it fails to exhaust itself in identity with one or another element of mythic whole (e.g. narrator, specific characters or meanings of a particular episode); it requires unity with general meanings that consist in this fiction. To question even one element would cause questioning the myth as a whole. The fiction abides by a simple dialectic: all or nothing. When looked upon from some perspective, one can say that mythic fiction forces and requires the reader’s submission. Without it mythic fiction is no longer treated as mythic.

9The submission is taken for granted when mythic fiction functions in societies with strictly codified opinions and beliefs that completely determine its cognitive horizon (viz. in epic poetry). Yet mythic fiction is not only about archaic genres. It operates in any other historical context when it becomes saturated with ideological content taken to be obligatory and identifiable for the narrator as well as the addressee. The ideological content is not, or need not be, directly explicated because the fiction as a whole is to be its vehicle. Such forming of mythical fiction seems relevant for what Faye called ideological discourse (récit idéologique) (Faye 1972a; 1972b). A peculiar contemporary example is a socialist realist novel (interestingly, it has little to do with classical realist novels). Its ideological meanings are not formulated separately because they are communicated in the fiction as a whole and in its narrative construction. The reader is to accept them completely: this is the overriding rule of the reading that would comply with a text’s underlying assumptions. Frank Kermode argues that in some cases myths become a degenerated fiction (Kermode 1967, 39); it is hard to find a better example.

Parabolic fiction

10This type of fiction differs from the mythic fiction mainly in that it does not aspire to being complete and does not attempt to acquire autonomy. In a way, it continuously demonstrates its own non-autonomous character. I understand parabolic fiction rather broadly, not restricting it to parable in an exact sense. Parabolic fiction does not contain meanings in itself; rather, it is subordinate to meanings located “above” it. Susan Suleiman explains:

Our first hypothesis is that any parabolic story (and, more generally, any exemplary story) is indicative, sooner or later shows […] the necessity to interpret, that is to say, to refer to a sense different from the straightforward sense of the narrated events. An interpretation explains or “discovers” this sense that remained “in” the story but was concealed. The relation between the story and the interpretation is in consequence logically and axiologically hierarchical: the interpretation is “above” the story as the general is above the particular, and the truth above its manifestation. It is “above” in one more way: strategically, so to speak, because the interpretation “dominates” the story as the end dominates the means and strategy the tactics. In fine, the parabolic story exists only so that it can give rise to the interpretation. (Suleiman 1977, 472)

11Therefore, parabolic fiction may have a highly schematic character. It need not respect factors that in other types of fiction seem indispensable and functionally clear (e.g. verisimilitude). However, it does need to indicate or at least lead to certain meanings above it. Herein lies its non-autonomy, which affects distance. Seemingly, all parabolic fictions exclude a type of identification that is typical for mythic fiction and presuppose a substantial distance. This distance is possible with respect to non-autonomous ele|ments, presented in a rough way, deficient in detail and, when considered in isolation, lacking in final meanings.

12But what happens when we ponder on this issue not from the perspective of the conventionality of parabolic fiction but its narrative construction, that is, in relation with what Suleiman calls the interpre|tation? First of all, things vary a lot because the fiction’s subordination to some general meaning does not necessarily determine the distance; and it cannot because the amplitude of possibilities in parabolic fiction is substantial: from fictions subjected to didactic means where the general meaning has been directly and frequently forcefully formulated (as in the exemplum) to fictions free of any didactic assumptions in which the general meaning is formulated in an unimposing manner or even constitutes a specific textual potentiality and goes unmentioned (as in Kafka’s parabolic masterpieces). In his essay about Kafka, W.H. Auden noted that the meaning of parable was essentially reliant on an individual reader (Auden 1962, 160). This observation obtains only in one type of the parabolic fiction; it does not obtain in the exemplum or other didactic tales. The fact that a general meaning varies significantly and can pre|suppose a reader’s exclusive reactions leads to the conclusion that parabolic fiction does not determine a type of subordination or distance beforehand. Herein lies the radical difference between parabolic fiction and mythical fiction, which leaves no room for manoeuvre in this respect.

13To digress, this understanding of parabolic fiction questions the tradi|tional opposition between allegory and symbol common since Roman|ticism. The reason is that it is impossible to say whether fictions that became subjected to a univocal interpretation are allegoric while those that lack the univocal interpretation are symbolic. Both types in fact belong to the realm of allegory.

Mimetic fiction

14Mimetic fiction differs from the mythic fiction in that it does not presuppose a complete identification. It differs from the parabolic fiction in that it is not subjected to meanings located “outside” of it, which could be formulated individually. However, it does presuppose some overlapping of ideas regarding the real. At its base lies the idea that words can imitate things that are not words. This idea seems naïve today because it is now acknowledged that words can imitate words exclusively.3 Yet this idea used to underpin a type of literature that has been around for hundreds or even thousands of years, at least since Aristotle. Mimetic fiction relies on the notion that some type of speech is specially predisposed to give justice to reality, that in some way it is appropriate for this task. Some sort of social contract underlies such an understanding of fiction: it is made clear in that the concept of reality has undergone transformations for centuries and that when seen from a broad historical perspective, the boundaries between reality and non-reality are fluid and relentlessly changeable. Mimetic fiction requires the recipient to accept as real what is treated as real within the text. This is a rudimentary requirement but one that allows an excessive extent of freedom; apart from this one requirement, nothing else is necessary.

15This is possible because mimetic fiction, for example in its realist version, accepts a number of vantage points from which reality can be seen, it is not limited to a single point of view. Mimetic fiction allows any type of distance: from a complete identification to an ironic negation. The novel gives this property its fullest form. Phenomena such as point of view, shifts in narrative perspective and the like are its constitutive elements. They are something more too: they are an assumption concerning reception. Mimetic fiction does not constitute a uniform distance from which it must be perceived; the distance can be flexible, according to changes within this type of fiction. It is not only the question of the recipient perceiving the represented world from a certain protagonist’s or narrator’s perspective, depending on how the points of view change in narrative. He has every possibility, at least in some cases, to decide about it on his own. This point also holds in axiology that somehow participates in forming the distance. In mythic fiction values are a given and the recipient is required to completely embrace them; in parabolic fiction values vary but invariably rely on the general sense; the mimetic fiction is not isolated from the value problem yet values crystallize in specific utterances and this type of fiction refrains from imposing them in any absolute way. Within mimetic fiction values are a matter of choice and, with more or less significant limitations, this prerogative is handed over to the recipient.

16 If mimetic fiction is accepted to rely solely on a social contract referring to what is real, a contract that resigns from the faith in the magical power of words, capable of imitating the extra-verbal, it must be understood quite broadly. By broadly, I mean going beyond what the nineteenth-century theoreticians of realism called “external reality”. Within the range of mimetic fiction, I would include accounts of the internal world, for instance in the stream of consciousness form, on the condition that they respect at least some of the social understanding of it. There is no need, arguably, to limit the range of mimetic fiction. Rather, one should take into account the existence of different types of mimetic fiction, varying in their structure and history. I would also highlight the fact that mimetic fiction provides a sort of negative criterion that facilitates judgment of what it excludes. Such a negative equivalent of mimetic fiction seems to be fantasy, which in fact appropriates a number of mimetic properties but violates the fundamental contract of what is believed to be real.

17This violation demonstrates its dominant significance: in fantasy, generally speaking, speech forms, which are normally associated with mimetic fiction, are left intact. It is assumed that some narrative types seem to a certain extent predestined to serve as reality-imitating forms and that as a result of one set of qualities or another, these forms actually are appropriate for the imitating. After all, the use of inappropriate forms in a given literary culture is considered as a violation of mimetic fiction principles. Yet, in the end, one is not reluctant to concur with Philippe Hamon that we are obligated to “considérer le réalisme comme une sort de <<speech-act>> (Austin, Searle) défini par une situation spécifique de communication” (Hamon 1973). This statement refers not only to realism, one version of mimetic fiction, but to all its species.

Grotesque fiction

18Each of the three types of narrative fiction described above necessitated a specific construction of meaning, a specific sort of distance and, in consequence, a specific sort of recipient reaction. In the case of grotesque fiction it is hard to put a finger on a group of parallel rules as the one operative in grotesque fiction has a predominantly negative function. The function comes down to negation or even dismemberment of fiction’s construction principles that obtain in a given literary fiction. Moreover, it seems that grotesque fiction on purpose confuses various elements and combines them according to rules that cannot be reconciled in any previous fiction type. The construction actualizes through destruction. In consequence, grotesque fiction operates with a varying distance and presupposes a variability of distance also on the recipient’s end. But in contrast to mimetic fiction, the distance variability is not subordinated to any explicit rules, familiar prior to reading. With caveats I will shortly delineate, it can also be noted that principles of grotesque fiction are much more singular than in other types because they crystallize in particular works and this construction-through-destruction is not so much determined by general rules. It is so because grotesque fiction seems to require a recipient with few positive assumptions; indeed it requires one thing only: an acknowledgement of its polemic character and oppositional orientation to conventional modes of creating literary discourse as well as accepted and commonly approved beliefs, ideas, values, and worldviews. The reception of grotesque fiction becomes impossible only when the recipient overlooks the polemic element and reads the fiction as any other type of narrative fiction.

19At this juncture we need to make clear a very important problem. All types of fiction are specific literary conventions; they belong to the literary communication repertoire; they rely on certain assumptions that make the communication possible. Does grotesque fiction break this principle? This question seems all the more relevant when one bears in mind Bachtin’s theory of grotesque. Bachtin underlines the non-conformity of the grotesque and its critical attitude to all forms of official culture, solid and commonly accepted in the social structure. We have no desire to criticise this concept but we want to emphasise the fact that grotesque fiction, even if treated as a manifestation of the opposition to institutionalized forms of fiction, can become institutionalized itself. Hence it always loses its quality of novelty at some point.

20I would like to end this paper with several complementing remarks. By differentiating four types of narrative fiction, I am far from claiming that there are no other types of fiction in the history of literature. On the contrary, there is a myriad of intermediary forms as demonstrated by Susan Suleiman in the cited paper (the roman à thèse oscillates between parabolic and realist poetics; according to our terminology, it can also be described as an intermediary form between parabolic and mimetic forms). In addition, there are types of fiction that I have not discussed here; for example, fictional constructs that repeat fictions existing prior to them; the repetition is a basic means of their meaning as well as an assumed mode of reception (e.g. fictions that repeat myths). I call this type of fiction metafiction.

21In this essay I have not attempted to propose a classification of narrative fiction. The classification would have to take into account the entire narrative material and lead to a complete separation of its elements. My purpose was to address selected typical structures. This methodological procedure allows an existence of mixed and intermediary forms and does not necessitate exhaustiveness. It is to reveal some specific types and to make it possible to characterise the analysed object.4

22Returning to the quotation from Diderot, each type of fiction presupposes an “interruption” on the reader’s part: it is an ingredient of the reading process. Moreover, all fiction does not only presuppose but also determines the interruption. Yet to what extent and in what way it does so, rests on specific works, on how it is read, and on the style of reception.5

Notes

• 1 The same issues are discussed by Herrnstein-Smith (1974).
• 2 See also an important study by Bartoszyński (1986).
• 3 See Hamon (1973), I owe a lot to this excellent study. See also Politi (1976).
• 4 I’m making reference here to Ossowska’s discussion (1956). The scholar develops Weber’s, Hempel’s and Oppenheim’s concepts.
• 5 See my extensive work on this subject (Głowiński 1977).