Book: The Chinese Vernacular Story (2)

Patrick Hanan, The Chinese Vernacular Story (Harvard, 1981)

Chapter 1: Language and Narrative Model
Section 2/3 : A Scheme of Narrative Analysis (16-20)

A level is linear, sequential, extending in space to represent the sequential nature of speech and literature...no fixed hierarchy is postulated...one requirement of a level...is universality; it must consist of elements that are both discernible in the text and that run throughout any and all texts in the same manner as linguistic levels. Such intermittent features as character, image, and symbol therefore do not exist as levels but merely as constituents of one level or another. (16-17)

Every text (and so every story) has six major levels. There is the speaker; in the case of the story, this is the narrator. Another level is the focus, out of which we may determine scenes and sequences because the focus is both what the speaker is seeing and the speaker's perspective, the object and the subject as a common textual artifact. On the level of mode, we have scenes, close-up beats of action, and summaries, which combine beats, or else delve into commentary or description. As we read along switching modes here and there, the reader begins to put together the story at the level of meaning, first constructing a real-time, or serial, meaning, and then linking the serial meanings into a greater configurative meaning, which can both be the basis of an interpretive meaning. Finally there is the sound and/or graphic level, about which Hanan comments little here.

Among the four literary kinds, narrative belongs together with the drama as kinds that narrative events, which is to say they tell of events in time, and so remain close to time and experience, whereas the lyric and the exposition may leave behind the dimension of time to approach more closely the focus, either the lyrical subject or the theme. The idea of theme is abstract, and Hanan also likes Saintsbury's term "stuff-material," though he does not tell us why yet.

Reading list derived from these four pages alone (many, many more in the endnotes):

• Paul Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (1921)
• Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957)
• Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) 
• Genette, "Discours du Récit," Figures III, (1972) 65-282, 203-11, On the "focus"
• Roman Ingarden, The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art (1973) ; look for "stratum of created objects" to help understand configurative meaning
• Roland Barthes, S/Z (1974)