1

1One of the most striking features of literary studies today, especially those related not to the genetic determinants, but rather to the mode of existence of literary works, is the significant distinction between analytical questions posed to poetry and to narrative prose. This statement does not necessarily presuppose an elementary differentiation between the questions, which pertain to the distinct subject matters, but a radical difference of their methodological styles. Undoubtedly, linguistic and semantic issues dominate the current theory of poetry. They determine activities not only of those scholars for whom “existence in the word” becomes the final reality of poetry, but also for those who attempt to interpret this “existence” as an indicator of another reality (psychological, sociological, etc.). In order to reach the deep structure of a poetic reality, the situation of a lyrical subject, or the “contents” of a work of art, the interpreter analyses lexical material used by a poet: syntax, sentence intonation, verse intonation, semantic clashes of words, the usage of metaphors and the like. This poetic world is treated as an interverbal reality; a semantic artefact that is the function of mutual relations between signifying segments of an utterance: relations both functional (relations of particular parts to a superordinate whole) and distributive (relations between parts).

2 By “segments” I mean linear units distinguishable at various utterance levels. A poetic utterance differs from other types of verbal utterances in that it actualises a series of different segmentation rules at the same time and occurs simultaneously at many levels of various linguistic units. In non-poetic utterances, there is an explicit hierarchical subordination of the lower-level segments to the higher-level segments. The meaning of a phoneme relies on its role in morpheme construction; the meaning of a morpheme becomes determined by a phrase structure, the meaning of which, in turn, is determined by the degree of its adaptation to its location in the syntactic order of a sentence. In a poetic text, however, the linguistic units work not only on behalf of the higher-level units but also on behalf of their own level. A phoneme is not only an element of a lexeme, but also a participant in a network of orchestrations (“speech sounds”) enveloping an utterance. A syllable co-creates a word, but at that same time it counts (positively or negatively) in an independent speech-sound “calculation”, which serves as an indicator of the verse arrangement. Words comprise sentences and, addi|tionally, entire poems. They also stand in mutual relations emblematic for dictionary structure, hence in non-sequential relations (e.g. alternations in word meanings in a metaphor or the oppositions of lexical or phraseological units in periphrasis). The world of a poetic utterance, being a highly organised semantic creation to be concretised one way or another in the reception of a given work, comes into being as a result of combining semantic portions borne by multifaceted segments, distinguishable both at a level below the word (phoneme, syllable, morpheme) and at a level above the word (sentence, line, stanza).

3In distinction to these studies of poetry, in analyses of narrative prose there is, apparently, a dominating tendency to perceive the narrated matter as an extraverbal reality. Activated by an utterance, the matter seems to exist in parallel with an utterance, in its own way, apparently divorced from the “linguistic layer”. Robert Weimann in his polemic with the New Critical theory of the epic, approvingly quotes Christopher Cauldwell’s well-known opinion (from Illusion and Reality), which states that as opposed to poetry, prose is not “essentially” built out of words, but out of scenes, plot, circumstances, literary persons, etc. (Weimann 1962 319-320). Expressed here with particular emphasis, this thesis frequently appears side by side with another thesis that allegedly supports it. Namely, a narrative utterance has a different linguistic function from a poetic utterance. In the latter, verbal signs refer to experiences and things and at the same time interpret their own location in the macrosystem of language and the microsystem of an individual message. Denotation (the relation between the linguistic sign and its referent) becomes in a way muted by the mutual relations of elements of the utterance and their references to the linguistic system. In poetry the referential function of language is consistently weakened, whilst the represented world “glimmers” from behind a thick net of relations between signs and meanings. On the other hand, in prose the referential function is brought to the fore. It is not uncommon to hear that prose is “transparent” with respect to what it tells about or describes, and that it is primarily a designation. It goes without saying that this understanding of prose stems from the absolutisation of the canon of the realist narrative prose, although even in reference to this specific historical and literary example it must seem a gross simplification.1 Yet we have no intention of discussing this issue here. It can be agreed that the referential function plays a significantly more substantial role in the narrative utterance than in the poetic utterance. It is the case, to a varying extent, of all known historical poetics. Obvious though it is, we need to simultaneously make it clear that this property is in no way logically bound to the contestation mentioned above; it does not assume that the world represented in a novel has a “truly” extraverbal dimension (onto|logical assumption), and that it should be described as such (methodo|logical postulate), but only that the novel, or more broadly, the narrative utterance, is made up of words that signify in a different manner than words in the poetic utterance The latter thesis by no means follows the previous formulation of the extra-verbal existence of the presented world (although they are formulated in one go). Quite to the contrary, it seems to open a window to a scientific landscape totally distinct from the one that can be seen from the position of that formulation. Pointing out the difference between a poetic utterance and a prose narrative utterance, the thesis also determines a field of their convergence: as two verbal types of communication and two types of language “usages”. A parallelism of scientific approaches, utilised respectively in the theory of poetry and the theory of the epic, serves as a consequence of this thesis (see Shorer 1960).

4This parallelism, however, does not occur (or, specifically speaking, occurs in a significantly limited degree) as a result of the fact that the seemingly banal truth about the narrative work usually comes to be reduced to the field of a narrowly understood “stylistics”. The largest units here are the so-called modes of discourse2 treated as verbal externalisations of specific events and states of affairs (narrative being defined as a form of presenting a series of events, whereas description as an indicator of the spatial setup of a situation). The category of mode of discourse presupposes an external and prior character of the representation plane with respect to the utterance plane. An object of narrative or description would be some pre-existing group of elements (characters, events, scenes, or narrative situation), and the process of verbalisation is only a means of their disclosure. A mode of discourse is derivative and functional with reference to what is narrated and its goal is to communicate some order of a profoundly different segmentation from itself. The segmentation rules of modes of discourse are describable in linguistic and stylistic terms (especially syntactic terms), whilst the characteristics of the represented world’s units are made up with events, characters, points of views, etc. The question of structure in an epic work falls into two categories: on the one hand, wording, narration, characters’ speech, ways of quotation, and on the other hand—plot construction, time organisation, creation of characters, narrator’s standpoint, and many other phenomena based on preferences and fashions of the literary theory of the time.

5What is striking is that the duplicity has turned out to be to a large extent neutral towards a substantial shift of interests that occurred in the contemporary theory of the novel: backgrounding the formerly dominating type of issues pertaining to the plot composition and a relation between characters and action (in a nutshell, the Dibeliusian tradition), and foregrounding the questions of the narrator and narrative situation.3 The shift from the object to the subject of the narrative, from the story told to the modes of telling, have muddled the understanding of the structure of the epic representation, facilitated the departure from a straightforward comprehension of the epic “objectivity” and approximation towards the dialectic nature of narrative fiction. As well as that, it made it easy to comprehend the oscillation between the sphere of characters’ actions and the sphere of the teller’s activities. Yet the dualism of narrative word–represented reality has yet to be overcome. In the narrative, the “disclosed” world has become complicated while the understanding of the narration, as a mode of discourse, has not changed. Between the narration and the narrator there still seems to exist the same boundary that separates the field of stylistics of a work and the field of objects represented in it.4

6Speaking of the most common theoretical model of prose, we shall not dismiss a series of commendable enterprises that stemmed from the disagreement with that very model and made it possible to move beyond its shortcomings. As often seen before, in literary studies an original impulse in this respect arose from the Russian formalists. In fact, within the formalist school two competitive theories of prose were formed. Viktor Šklovskij’s theory of prose has often been considered to represent one formalist school that relatively smoothly moved from the discussions on the poetic language to the investigations into the theme and the composition of a work of prose “with no possibility of grounding these categories in linguistics” (Hopensztand 1938, 192). The transition from the “transrational language” to the “theory of plot” (Šklovskij’s mental shortcut formulated in his memoirs) represented the leap from one discipline to another. For Šklovskij, the grammar of “syuzhet” in plotted works was not a substantial continuation of the issues of stylistics. Both of these fields were treated analogously; the creative procedure in the two fields was described as an art of montage of some specifically literary units that stay in systematic relations outside of the particular text. In both cases, however, two different types of elements come into play: the first type is of linguistic nature, while the second is thematic. That they were regarded in an analogous manner did not change the fact that they represented two distinct planes of a semiotic-literary reality.

7Within formalist studies there were attempts at integrating the interpretations of both realities. We have in mind, specifically, the works by Boris Ejchenbaum and his studies of “skaz” (Ejchenbaum 1924a, 152-156; 1924b, 171-195; 1927, 210-211). The problem undoubtedly was posed or imposed by literary history itself and referred to a particular type of narrative prose. However, the interest in it extended perspectives for the theory of narrative utterance. An analysis of “skaz” demonstrated how a given process of narrating determines a work’s plot order. It also revealed that the rules of stylistic montage of an utterance can be simultaneously the rules of the montage of a thematic development; that this development, in a way, results from the narrator’s speech, word games, and phonic figures; that it is constructed as a semantic correlate of the chosen way of speaking. In “skaz”, the narration generates the plot—explicitly and directly. In other types of prose (e.g. in the realist novel or, more so, in a novella) specific plot templates play a much bigger role and in a particular way “mediate” between the narrator’s words and an original plot emerging from them. In fact, we can observe this phenomenon to a varying degree in any form of epic utterance: what ostentatiously emerges from “skaz” in other types of narrative prose can be relatively inconspicuous. But the character of those relations is common basically in all cases. Looking into a particularly evident example, Ejchenbaum set into motion a scientific apparatus that bore upon the investigations of any other narrative possibility. It was he, not Šklovskij, who was the creator of a truly innovative concept of prose in Russian formalism. This concept can be referred to as semantic because it allows looking into epic representation with a terminology of semantic arrangements that evolve in the narrating. The caveat is that the elements of these clusters include both the meanings of words and sentences as well as the meanings corresponding to the employed methods of stylisation. Therefore, it was no longer necessary to use certain categories when describing the narrator’s speech progression and other categories when describing the very same narrator and the narrated world. When we say “narrator” or “plot” we think of some kind of semantic constructions of the narrative speech, with no other mode of existence than the one constituted by its progression. The epic work is not the sum of two different spheres—“stylistic” and “represented”—but one uniform whole that can be characterised as an utterance in each of its constituent elements.

8All the above is not a summary of Ejchenbaum’s ideas but a generalising interpretation of his specific historical and literary practices, given from the perspective of the subsequent treatments of the issues he first tackled. Indisputably, Ejchenbaum’s examination of the “skaz” initiated a new tendency in the theory of prose developed later beyond the formalist school in the narrow sense of the term. We have in mind here especially the work of Viktor Vinogradov who introduced a rich repertoire of concepts from linguistic stylistics into the analyses of the narrative utterance, both at the plane of literary langue (stylistic systems constituting the context for a work of prose) and, what interests us most, parole (the morphology and semantics of the work). A particularly crucial achievement at this juncture was to locate the category of the speaking subject within the field of stylistics. “The problem of the narrator’s function is for stylistics an issue of semantics”, claimed Vinogradov in his study on “skaz” (Vinogradov 1978, 237–50) published in his 1930 fundamental book, which remains a persuasive explication of this thesis (Vinogradov 1930). His position on skaz is characterised with two factors: 1. the stylistic complexity of a work of prose is not understood as a static coexistence of the “forms” used in it, but as a dynamic overlapping of ways of speaking that generates distinct types of semantic clusters in an utterance: the way in which a writer uses specific types of monologic or dialogic speech concurrently shape the semantic composition of the work; 2. a departure from the “substantial” comprehension of the represented phenomena and an attempt at understanding them as specific semantic relations between utterance units (not only words and sentences but, most importantly, whole sectors of a stylistic message). In this way Vinogradov interpreted the category of the literary subject. He postulated the difference between the “writer’s image” and the “narrator”. These were intended to correspond to the opposition between particular forms of a narrative utterance that represent the language of literary-minded intelligentsia and forms alluding to some more specialised, socially or dialectically, types of speech and stylistic standards. From this perspective, the “writer’s image” and the “narrator” acquire an exclusively relational existence in the context of a work: they exist as sets of stylistic characteristics that generate a specific opposition in the flow of narrative speech. Now, we can present in an analogous way the relations between a narrative subject and a protagonist as well as the relations between other characters. Simultaneously, Vinogradov attracted our attention to another aspect of prose utterance: its rhetorical subject-addresee order. In parallel to the “writer’s image” we deal with the “reader’s image”: both defined as “semantic spheres” of an utterance. In his analyses (he considered utterances with an explicitly oratorical tinge), these spheres comprise dialectical antitheses that expressed themselves through lexical, syntactic, intonational, stylistic oppositions etc. However, antithesis is but the extreme possibility of the relation between a work’s two semantic spheres. In more moderate forms, such a relation is germane to all types of narrative prose, including naturalistic prose, which, according to Vinogradov, cannot be explained without taking its “rhetorical” aspect into account (Vinogradov 1930, 98-100; 174-175).

9Contemporaneously with Vinogradov, in Soviet literary studies appeared other equally important attempts at addressing the semantic structure of prose. Most important are the studies by Michail Bachtin and Valentin Vološinov (Bachtin 1984), which include a number of conceptualisations directly regarding the subject matter of this paper. In addition, they offer specific theoretical conclusions that we find exceptionally relevant, especially the description of the utterance in terms of mutual relations between various speech types; the “own” and the “alien” discourse, the “I” word and the “other’s” word, speaking “on one’s own” and “quotation”. These concepts, manifesting a dialogic nature of any utterance and directly referring not to language (langue) but to other utterances, shed a new light on a number of heterogeneous literary phenomena. It provided a basis not only for interpretations of a work’s location with respect to other works—as a sui generis replica enmeshed in the context of “other” replicas, and thus as the “dialogue” of the historico-literary process (e.g. phenomena such as the stylisation, parody, allusive references, a realisation of genre schemata), but also for interpretations of the internal organisation of a literary utterance that itself is to a larger or smaller degree a crystallisation of a dialogic situation in which it partakes. The work perceived this way is an area where explicit (that is, formally distinguished as replicas) and implicit reactions to the word of the “other” clash with one another. The narrative work which ex definitione combines the narrator’s speech and the quoted “alien” speech appears to be exceptionally intricate in this respect. Narrating is not a monologue moving in parallel to a character’s utterances, but a discourse characterised by its own attitude towards these other utterances and producing various relations with them. In multifarious forms of addressing the “alien” words, as Vološinov emphatically underlined, an active relation of utterance is expressed in respect to another utterance, a relation of not a thematic plane but grammatical and stylistic forms (Vološinov 1930, 114). It would therefore be a kind of “dialogue” albeit different from the one in which replicas are grammatically independent. Quoting the “alien” speech shapes specific semantic accumulations over the course of a narrative stream; the meaning material of words and sentences seems to lodge in a double subjective perspective and with reference to two contexts. An extreme case of interferences of various verbal progressions would be free indirect speech: a stylistic equivalent of the utterance’s dialogicity, a special convergent type of two, frequently unresolvable, semantic intentions, an intertwinement of various intonational actions.

10Bachtin explored this specifically understood dialogism in his study on Dostoevskij, especially in its main thesis, “polyphony” in The Brothers Karamazov. As he averred, Dostoevskij’s prose eliminates an authoritative authorial monologue that integrates the work’s semantic material. It is replaced with a multiplicity of coexisting voices of “others” (narrators, characters) that merge, intermingle, engage and disengage, actualising a number of simultaneous and equivalent semantic fields. The authorial subject is lodged in a dialogical situation: its voice does not dominate but appears on one plane with the quoted “alien” speech, polemicising with or complementing it. Bachtin’s style of analysis and interpretation complies with the dialectical peculiarities of Dostoevskij’s poetics and worldview,5 however any narrative message opens up an opportunity for analogous analytic strategies. Rarely do mutual interactions of voices produce so semantically complex an utterance structure as in Dostoevskij, but—irrespective of the degree of this complexity—the relations between the “quoted” and “quoting” speech constitute one of the basic indicators of a narrator’s position in the context of other elements of the epic world. A very instructive interpretation paradigm of these relations was a work by Hopensztand on free indirect speech in Black Wings [Czarne skrzydła] by Kaden Bandrowski (Hopensztand 1937, 371-406). In Hopensztand’s interpretation, specific reactions of “one’s” word to the “alien” word—to make reference to Vološinov’s formula again—turned out to be equivalents of the literary subject’s position with respect to the entire reality of the novel.

11All the initiatives in the theory of prose described above can, it may seem, be related to a common goal to pull down a barrier between the verbal construction of an epic work and the phenomena represented in it; a goal to work out a language that would facilitate investigations into both of these realms together—and in homogeneous terms. These attempts foreground an interest in highly organised word complexes (monologic and dialogic in character) and their relations within an utterance. A linguistic and literary reality was discovered; a reality mediating between semantic events, occurring at the level of word combinations in a sentence (events attributable to traditional stylistics), and the general construction of the work. The intermediary reality that was thus unveiled extensively expanded the field of stylistic analysis of work, forcing analysts to ponder over what types of semantic facts are responsible for such highly organised verbal complexes and their interconnections. It became apparent that there are three semantic contexts in a work of prose: above the context formed by word meanings in a sentence, there is the context of the very sentences comprising stylistic units—monological or polyphonic – which, in turn, belong to a higher context whose boundaries are the boundaries of the whole work. The middle context underpins conditions for a methodologi|cally appropriate transformation in a description of a narrative work from an “analysis of linguistic aspects […] to the morphology of literary genres, which would not have to refer to extra-linguistic reality” (Budzyk 1937, 446). According to Budzyk, who presented a clear (albeit too schematic) typology of linguistic forms of a prose novel, this transformation would be a shift from stylistics to what Oskar Walzel described as “a more complex mathematics of style”, that is the plane of a work’s compositional units (the plane of the represented).

12In what follows, I will formulate some propositions regarding the semantic interpretation of these units. Of course, considering a theore|tical or literary concept as appropriate (here: a concept addressing a work by means of terminology drawn from linguistic poetics) should not entail indifference to other concepts. If categories such as a motif, theme, plot, character, point of view, narrator, or narrative situation are viable and helpful in conceptualisations different from ours, but capable of describing specific properties in a given work, one should not hasten to dismiss these properties as unrelated to our interests. On the contrary, it is worth endeavouring to include them in a language considered as “ours”.

2

13In what follows, I am referring to the third chapter of Henryk Markiewicz’s Main Problems of Literary Studies [Główne problemy wiedzy o literaturze], where Markiewicz introduced a concept of “complex semantic arrangements” [wyższe układy znaczeniowe] of the literary work. The term on the one hand denoted the work’s “plane” located side by side other planes: the plane of language signs as well as one of the meanings of words and sentences, and on the other an internally differentiated “sphere” of the work (Markiewicz 1965, 78). This interpretation, being in fact a re-interpretation of Roman Ingarden’s four-layered model of a literary work, became a subject of dispute between both scholars, over the course of which a substantial deficiency in Markiewicz’s argument became explicit.6 It turned out that, essentially, between the plane of words and sentences and the so-called “complex semantic arrangements”, there runs a demarcation line of identical type as between the layer of semantic formations and the double layer of represented objects and schematische Ansichten, schematic views, in Ingarden. “Complex semantic arrange|ments”, for Markiewicz, are not configurations of semantic units corres|ponding to words and sentences or aggregates “comprised of meanings”, but entities “projected by meanings”. It is commonly known that Ingarden also speaks about the “projecting” of represented objects by a work’s sentence senses but from his perspective the relation of projecting is explicated in the entire theory of “intentional objects”. However, Markiewicz rejects this theory without elucidating what he means by the relation of projecting. As a result, it is difficult to say what is the mode of existence of what he characterises as “complex semantic arrangements”. The adjective “semantic” is at any rate deceptive insofar as Markiewicz’s formations have no semantic being and do not exist among meanings of words and sentences but in some other way. The quality of being semantic could be ascribed to these formations—to any formation—on the condition that they be understood as combinations of more elementary semantic units, and they “comprise meanings” analogously to a text’s comprising sentences. Polemicising with this eventuality (in spite of the fact that Markiewicz’s conception is far from it), Ingarden quoted the formula “Wołodyjowski comprises meanings” as a negative example. Such a sentence is, at first glance, ridiculous and if we embraced this impression we would need to accept any attempt at a semantic interpretation of a category at the level of, say, a literary character as ultimately compromised. Yet we can face the grotesqueness of the above formula with a chin up and conclude that it is, indeed, far from being senseless, albeit badly formulated. We can even argue that, if put better, it can acquire a status of a debatable thesis. By saying “better”, we mean, for example, “Wołodyjowski comprises meanings (1) of all sentences from Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Trilogy with ‘Wołodyjowski’ in them or any other name equivalent in this context to him (name, appropriate pronouns, etc.), (2) of sentences that in Trilogy appear as quotations aligned with Wołodyjowski”.

14The fundamental argument of this essay can be put in the following way: in a literary work of art, complex semantic arrangements and their combinations can be described as a sort of concentrations of meaning without recourse to the layers other than the layer of meanings derived from a text’s linguistic segments. I believe it is possible to discuss several organization spheres of that “layer”, without going beyond its field. Therefore, there is some type of continuum of semantic units, allowing us to shift from very simple particles of sense to more complex sense structures, which we usually describe as represented “events”, “motifs”, “objects”, “persons”, “narrative situations” etc.

15Of course, this argument relates to a mode of existence of the complex semantic wholes and it fails to address the manner of their proper interpretation. It is precisely our goal to make distinctions, accurately if possible, between the terms used to determine the ontological status of the work’s elements and the interpretive terms determining relations between those elements and a system of explications used by readers and scholars alike. An appropriateness of interpretive activities can be appraised according to various criteria, yet one needs to ask what reality is the object of our interpretation. Watching analytic practices especially in the theory and history of narrative genres, one might conclude that a quite common phenomenon is a departure from the basic reality constituted by the very fact of its “existence in the word”. What frequently becomes an object of interpretation are wholes whose being is in a way extricated from the original matter of a narrative message; they are products of some prior interpretations and departures from semantic actuality of a given utterance. Such an interpretive strategy allows us to discuss, say, a narrator as if it substantially existed beyond the narration, and its position with respect to the represented world was a cognitive or moralistic relation, without taking into consideration the fact of its being, first and foremost, a set of semantic relations between specified units of a narrative utterance. Analogously, we can deliberate over any possible elements of an epic representation: time, space, characters, etc. Saying this we do not give the lie to some specific types of interpretive activities, but we point out that all too often these interpretations are simply interpretations of a secondary, tertiary or other level, that they treat as their object phenomena that are in fact above the level of the text and are constructed in the course of the readerly concretisation.

16In effect, the term “fiction” is overused (“fictional narrator”, “fictional plot”, etc.), which is supposed to emphasise the distinction between the objects and events existing in a literary work and real objects and events; in its many applications, it is as safe as it is opaque. It points out some sort of a quasi-reality, difficult to identify and located half way between what happens among the words and sentences of a narrative utterance, and what constitutes a consequence of a transfer from a text’s structure to the cognitive, social, psychological, ethical experiences of a reader.

17In essence, many of the novel theory concepts in question make reference to the summarised work, that is to say, one that is reduced to a condition where a unique “being in the word” becomes something neutral, interchangeable for other modes of being, including the extra-linguistic ones (e.g. film, theatre or graphic signs). One makes analytic operations on a novel treated as an object of possible translations, brought down to what it “says” in one way or another, because it does not say anything in any specific way. Such a treatment is motivated for obvious reasons by the theories of a literary work referring to the “layer” imaginary. Considering some other “layers” beside the linguistic “layer” (phonetic and semantic) in a work greatly facilitates such a reduction. Those other “layers” present the work from the perspective of its (not realised) translation possibilities, from the perspective of what remains once the “linguistic layer” is stripped off. An attempt at a semantic description of the narrative fiction must most clearly entail resignation from the layer model of work (which, to be honest, serves as a convenient tool for teaching purposes). This is the negative thesis of this essay. Now we will try and present the main positive theses regarding the semantic structure of the narrative utterance.

181. As opposed to the poetic utterance in which semantic portions co-creating complex arrangements are distinguishable at actually every level of linguistic units (see footnote 1), in the narrative utterance semantic portions are typically distinguishable from the sentence level upwards. The semantic units of sentences are elementary quantities that give rise to “complex semantic arrangements” over the course of an incrementally developing utterance. This positive reference of sentences corresponds to its negative reference: the suppressing of the autonomy of smaller semantic chunks. In other words, the semantic units of sentences realise themselves in narrative with respect to the context of coordinate units of the same level and their combinations, while at the same time neutralising events that could occur in more elementary semantic molecules—as they do not allow semantic wholes of a lower level to constitute themselves, these wholes are disallowed or marginalised to potentiality.

19A transparency of the larger linguistic units with respect to the smaller ones seems characteristic for the semantic dynamic of the poetic work. There emerge autonomous semantic values of words from behind a sentence; from behind word meanings—semantic particles connected with morphemes; from behind the poem line—its constituents: syllables or stress harmonies. A poetic sequence makes present in its development the molecular construction of linguistic elements comprising it, including the semantic plane. In a prose narrative utterance, a contradictory tendency can be observed: high-level segments absorb low-level segments, the latter are obliterated by the former and become transparent with respect to the larger semantic entities. If one can speak about some sort of difference in “the rules of meaning” in both types of utterances, it seems to rely on an opposition exactly thus formulated.

20To avoid misunderstandings, it needs to be stressed that these two tendencies, albeit opposed, are by no means absolutely mutually exclusive. Many examples can be adduced to demonstrate an independent role of low-level semantic units in a narrative utterance (a good case in point being, for example, character’s names7). Conversely, it might be difficult to aver that poetic utterance features no semantic units determined by complex multi-sentence entities (e.g. lyrical subject, addressee, circumstances of speaking, etc.). The opposition formulated above refers to specific semantic properties in the poetic utterance and the narrative utterance. Undoubtedly, these properties actually appear in the involvement of features of another type. Pure “poeticality” and pure “narrativity” would be simply radical (theoretical) possibilities within one scale encompassing very many degrees of actual co-existence of oppositional properties. A particularly interesting phenomenon is at this juncture the so-called poetic prose. Its differentia specifica seems to be grounded in a very intense dialogue of narrative-typical semantic tendencies with tendencies to actualise semantic properties of utterance segments found below the sentence level (especially lexical and intonational-rhythmic units).

212. We must further expound on the idea that the complex semantic arrangements in the narrative work consist of sentence meanings. Such an explanation can refer to observations of the internal order of the sentence because there is an indisputable analogy between the semantic phenomena that occur among the elements of the sentence and those that are typical for semantic inter-sentential relations. The chief issues of sentence semantics were formulated within Czech structuralism although they had been influenced by three other traditions: formalism, Roman Ingarden’s theory of semantic constructs in the literary artwork (Ingarden 1931), and linguistic semantics departing from the concept of isolated semantic units and revealing a relational character of meaning, both on the paradigmatic plane (relations within the semantic system of a language) and the syntagmatic plane (an active influence of an utterance context on deter|mining semantic qualities of its ingredients). In the 1940 study, referring to the prior works by Karcevskij and Vološinov, Jan Mukařovský described three principles of semantic sentence construction, understood as a set of inter-verbal relations other that purely formal syntactic relations (Mukařovský 1941, 113-121; see also Karcevskij 1931, 188-227; Volo|šinov 1930, 65-87). They are as follows:

1. The principle of the unity of a sentence meaning. The meaning of a sentence, as a whole, cannot be inferred from meanings of particular sentence elements. The unity exists potentially at the very starting point of a sentence. It is in a way preconceived and realised gradually with words accumulating in a sequence.
2. The principle of the meaning accumulation of a sentence. Its mechanism can be schematically presented as follows:

   a—b—c—d—e—f
   a b c d e
   a b c d
   a b c
   a b
   a
   

3. The first line of the above diagram presents a sequence of elements (words) in a series, a progression of sentence, its horizontal axis. However, the sentence does not present a simple sequence of its ingredients. The meaning of each new element comes into relation with the meanings of elements that have already emerged. When “b” appears, it is perceived in relation with “a”, which results in a semantic portion “ab”; when “c” appears, the result is the “abc” portion, and so on. The semantic information not only occurs one after another but also accumulates. The columns down the vertical axis (from left to right) present contiguity of the following stages of a sentence’s semantic crystallisation and an extent of its semantic units. A sentence is shown to be a semantic system.

22Following Mukařovský’s suggestions, we are prone to claim that analogous principles pertain to the making of entities of higher order that all correspond to developed multi-sentential complexes, such as a character, narrator, and plot. Such a claim, however, needs some clarification.

23First and foremost, the semantics of the sentence are shaped not by syntactic relations, but within the frames of these relations. A syntactic template (subordination, complexity, inversion) determines the process of semantic accumulation, particularly the boundaries of a sentence section in which the process is taking place. In short: the semantic structure of the sentence has no formal indicators, but it has its formal limitations. When we move beyond the sentence and try to characterise a broader context, we instantly lose sight of the formal, linguistic signals of an organisation of that context. There can be relations of a syntactic type, the “reference relations” [stosunki nawiązania] (Klemensiewicz 1950) as Zenon Klemen|siewicz put it, between adjacent sentences, but they have a limited range. Within larger sections of an utterance, it would be difficult to identify the presence of grammatical (or even lexical) indicators of inter-sentential relations.8

24The lack of indicators of this kind does not necessarily mean that sentence units cannot group into distinguishable sets within a message. There are conventionalised utterance patterns that are realised indepen|dently of relations between the sentences they are comprised of. Those sentences form sets not on the principle of syntactic relations but on the principle that they—each independently—adhere to specific conditions. Thus, the formal description, generally poor, does not address relations between sentences but a superordinate pattern.9 In a realist novel, for example, we can enumerate the following distinct features of the dominating type of narration: a) third person, b) past tense, c) no expressive-impressive signals, d) the suppression of measures referring to an extra-linguistic situation [in which narrating is taking place], f) no graphic cues. These features co-exist with an oppositional set of features that pertain to utterances of characters quoted in direct speech: a) possibility of alternate use of the first, second, and third person, b) the possibility of three tenses: present, past, and future, c) explicit expressive and impressive signals, d) the presence of signs referring to an objective speaking circumstances, e) stylistic diversification, f) graphic cues (Doležel 1960, 50-51).

25It is easy to notice that a juxtaposition of the above features (only the two first being formal and grammatical) has a mainly relational significance. The exclusiveness of the third person form or past tense in a narrative is a distinguishable signal insofar as it is opposed to a diversity of grammatical forms in the characters’ speech. A lack of one property (“morphological zero”) becomes, functionally speaking, a property because of a corresponding positive feature in the opposite set.10 Therefore, in a concrete work the utterance patterns of this kind can serve as a basis for the grouping of sentence complexes only if they do not function in isolation. If next to the sentences that conform to the “narrative” conditions there are no sentences corresponding to the “characters’ speech” condition, there are no formal criteria for distinguishing some kind of sentence sets smaller than a whole work. Of course, within the narrative and the character’s speech alike, some patterns can create subordinate oppositions, which in turn allow for the low-level sentence sets to constitute themselves. In modern prose, distinctive properties of this kind become opaque and, in some extreme cases, distinguishable sets situated between the sentence and the whole work disappear completely. Boundaries opened for the free movement of sentences, which are in a decreasing degree required to comply with ordering templates, while adding up directly to the work. In truth, the process has gone even further, leading (in the novel of the “stream of consciousness” and nouveau roman) to the “opening” of the sentence whose syntactic structure, extending over a very large verbal mass (the borderline case is “a sentence—a work”), has been loosened, freeing extra-syntactic segments of an utterance and thus actualising a condition proper of poetic text (see Dąmbska-Prokopowa 1967).

26 The occurrence even of clearly delineated and homogeneous utterance patterns in which sentence material of a work groups itself, does not form the foundation for distinguishing the above-sentence semantic wholes. One can say that these semantic wholes, in a way, “miss” the order of the patterns in a two-fold manner: sentences representing the same pattern shape different semantic constructions and vice versa—the same semantic construction (e.g. a protagonist) comes to life with elements of sentences representing various patterns. Complex semantic arrangements would not be identifiable, were we to wish to take them as equivalents of formally assigned sentence sets.

27 Generally speaking, the analysis of the prose utterance draws our attention in a much more persistent manner than the analysis of the poetic utterance to the fact that discussions on literary semantics cannot be treated solely as a special case of discussions on all linguistic creations. A work is conceived at the nexus of the selection and combination of units originating in two co-functioning systems: language and tradition (genre, style, versification, etc.). It goes without saying, in a specific work there is no boundary between the “layer” of linguistic elements and the “layer” of elements predicated on the norms of tradition. Each norm becomes verbalised in an utterance and thus externalised in the form of linguistic segments. On the other hand, any linguistic entity can be interpreted from the perspective of specific norms of traditions. The norms form no separate “layer” but multiply interconnections of linguistic units located on the same levels as in any other utterance, for example, on the semantic level. The role of the traditional norms, invariably indispensable when describing a work, becomes all the more explicit the further we move in the course of analyses of those meaning segments that account for language system units, and we enter an area of elements and relations typical for parole, that is, generally speaking, the area of inter-sentential relations. With the proportionate decrease in the pressure of the language system, there is an increase not so much of the pressure (as it can be equally strong on the lower levels), but of a relative independence of norms or traditions as fundamental factors for an utterance order.

28 Trying to properly understand the mechanism of generating the above-sentence semantic complexes, we need to take into account the func|tioning of the traditional norms in the semantic matter of an utterance. An identity and distinguishability of these complexes are guaranteed exactly by the fact that they refer, beyond a work, to some stereotypes or time-honoured patterns shared by the work’s addresser and addressee. These patterns can be imagined as ordered repertoires of norms, included in a superordinate repertoire emblematic of a specific subsystem of tradition (e.g. novel genre). In a particular literary utterance, they are actualised as forms imposed on semantic substance and imprinting distinguishable strata in its substance.11 As a result of their activity, semantic particles are grouped, consolidated, and hierarchised over the course of an utterance. In the prose narrative work, particular semantic portions of sentences emerge as if for the sake of the prescribed patterns, conforming with or rejecting them.12 What happens here is a mutual dependence: a specific pattern determines “direction” of assembling sentence meanings but at the same time it becomes actualised in a work only because of the developing suite of sentences.

29Thus, in the semantic material of the prose artwork, great semantic figures are shaped: the narrator, characters, or the person of the potential recipient. They undergo, what results from the discussion above, a two-fold description. On the one hand, they comply with the methods of a successive accumulation of meanings, and on the other, with the rules of the systemic concentration and arrangement of these meanings, the principles of producing their configurations. The linear sequentiality and gradual emergence of information that construct larger wholes are opposed by the rules that dismantle the linearity and sequentiality—the result being non-linearity and non-sequentiality. The meanings building up over the course of an utterance accumulate as great semantic figures, analogously to accumulating value of words in the syntactic template. Introduced sequentially, semantic elements not only add to but also reinterpret the previous ones: the new information can radically transform the value of the old information, what signals Mukařovský’s principle of oscillation between the static semantic units and their dynamic becoming, forced by the context of other units.

30The discussion on the bi-dimensionality of the great semantic figures, their sequentiality and, simultaneously, structural mode of self-realising in the semantic material of a work, can lead both to the description of the internal arrangement of a work and to the analysis of its location in the history of the-literary process. Should we desire to employ terms introduced and defined elsewhere (see Sławiński 1974) we would need to mention that the mode of accumulation of semantic units, which results in great semantic figures, is characterised by a phenotype of a given work, whereas the principles of non-sequential arrangement, grouping and hierarchisation belong to the genotype of a given work.

313. It can be assumed that the exceptionally contentious issue of the so-called autotelic function (resp. poetic function) of a narrative work can be posed again, when looked at from the perspective of the questions that arose in previous points. The autotelic function in the poetic utterance is reflected in its special super-organisation. The elements of the utterance, including the most elementary ones, smaller than words, play a myriad of simultaneous roles and are engaged in a series of simultaneous responsibilities; they are, if one may say so, used many times in the same place in the sequence. The super-organisation (that is, “an excess of organisation”) presupposes that the location of particular utterance segments is motivated simultaneously by a number of “programmes” (phonetic, lexical-semantic, syntactical-intonational, verse-intonational etc.). There is, therefore, the interference of various levels of employment of the very same means. The fact that in a narrative prose utterance this phenomenon is absent, that, as we know, there is a tendency to suppress smaller segments by larger segments, typically leads to an interpretation that applies “planimetrics” and brings about thinking of flat surfaces and images of verbal texture devoid of any “thickness”. In this situation, the category of the autotelic function seems useless in the theory of a narrative utterance. Cautious remarks that the function is present in the novel “to a lesser degree” than in the poetic work are essentially mistaken insofar as we simultaneously assume that there really is no actual possibility of proving this presence.

32However, in my view this presupposition is faulty. In the narrative utterance, the autotelic function is expressed by a specific super-organisation of the complex semantic arrangements; it is, to put it differently, equivalent in the structure of an utterance to the interference of great semantic figures. The same accruing sentences shape different figures, they belong to various wholes. An arrangement of semantic figures does not consist in sequentiality, which is characteristic for sentences, whereas high-level semantic complexes made by them are concurrent. A series of sentences sets in motion a multi-perspectival semantic action whose particular motifs get developed simultaneously, present at the same time. The most typical is the interference of two fundamental planes of semantic units: those that together create “the narrated world” and those that shape the “situation of narrating”. An explicitness of one plane or another can vary: certainly, the more condensed the structure of the narrated world, the more suppressed the situation of narrating, and vice versa; a manifest clarity of the latter entails a relative reduction of the explicitness of the sphere of presented objects. This basic duality of the narrative utterance becomes somehow objectivised in its very shape, when the direct speech, which in a way embodies the narrated world, appears amidst narration. Undoubtedly, mutual relations between the narrative sequence and the “alien” sequence extracted from it express in the most reliable way the dialectic of both semantic planes, their approximation and distance, and the possibility of no distance and suspension of alternative, so to speak (in the case of free indirect speech). However, the semantic two-step quality of the epic utterance is a phenomenon more extensive than the opposition of “one’s discourse” and the “alien discourse”. That opposition is but one of the manifestations of that two-step quality, the key one perhaps, but often, and at times predominantly, it manifests itself simply in the narration. The interference of great semantic figures is present also in each of the two main semantic planes. The same units constitute, on the one hand, the narrator and the hypothetical recipient, and on the other, the character and the plot. Hence the narrative utterance is by no means deprived of stereometrics, which characterises the poetic utterance on other levels.

334. We have been talking about the great semantic figures in such a way as if every one of them constituted a non-differentiated entirety. In truth, they are sets that comprise more elementary ingredients. Specifically speaking, each figure can be defined as an assembly of relations in which it co-exists with other semantic figures in a message. Pinpointing one figure is therefore coterminous with stating its location among all other figures. Take the category of the narrator. It seems that the investigation of the narrative subject is complete with the five following references:

1. The relation to the narrated world (characters, plot);
2. The relation to the recipient;
3. The relation to the author (subject of creative actions);
4. The relation to the methods of narrating and means of narrative speech;
5. The relation to some canonical personal models of the narrator.

34Each of these relations is equivalent to specific semantic information in an utterance. We should differentiate between two classes of this information: thematised and indirect (implied by the utterance construction). Constructing a pool of references of one figure, we distinguish “pigeonholes” where incrementally accumulating semantic units, which form a given figure, are lodged. These relations create a hierarchy and its concrete shape has always a historical-literary character. Therefore, the varieties of the narrator in historically diverse genres of the narrative prose can perhaps be attributed to a number of different combinations within the basic, “grammatical”, system of its references to other semantic wholes.13 The set of relations, arranged in given poetics, becomes, obviously, specifically interpreted in every other work. Yet it always operates as a system even if some of its elements make for only a pure possibility in a specific combination. This paradigm functions in the literary message beyond the order of succession. Over the course of an utterance it is realised in instalments, partly: it exists in a metonymic partitioning, insofar as a particular actualised reference inevitably points out to other components of a superordinate whole. A character in a work, for example, appears in the sequence either as “I” (in its own statements) or “you” (in the dialogic partner’s speech). However, at all times, from behind each of these versions, an entire system, the complimentary aspects of which are “I”, “you”, and “he”, is visible (what should be clear at this juncture is that these abstract grammatical categories correspond to specific lexical and sentential equivalents in an utterance).

35All these remarks are entirely preliminary and provisional formulations that could acquire the status of theoretical-literary conclusions, if we managed to propose a sort of “algebra” of great semantic figures in the narrative utterance, following a way outlined above. Without a systematic inquiry of at least the most important of these figures and their mutual relations, it is difficult to make valid statements on the holistic semantic structure of the epic utterance. One can, at most, follow one’s intuition that this structure is as complex and singular as a poetic “image”.

December, 1965

Notes

• 1 The “transparency” of realist narrative is, indeed, a complicated semantic phenomenon, one that opens up an extensive range of analyses of “non-transparent” poetic text. I try to present a small part of this problematic issue in an essay (Sławiński 1963). Another problem is that the template of realist narrative intrudes in most theoretical discussions on the novel because, as David Littlejohn claims, the tradition of the realist novel has somehow been identified with and become a part of the definition of the novel itself (Littlejohn 1963).
• 2 In Polish literary theory, “formy podawcze”, translated here as “modes of discourse” are defined as stylistic and linguistic forms that correspond to specific verbal structures in a particular literary work and comply with elements of represented reality, e.g., in a novel: narration, description and characters’ speech (dialogue, monologue, etc.). [translator’s note]
• 3 Żmigrodzka (1963) is a perceptive and detailed account of the contemporary consciousness of theory and the history of literature.
• 4 See Jasińska (1962, 101-120) where the scholar methodically separated “an outline of the problems of studies” on narrator from stylistic issue of narration. Jasińska in a clear and manifest way formulated a supposition that many authors had taken for granted.
• 5 It is worth pointing out that this analytical style developed in relation with studies on narrative prose fiction approximates (not genetically but typologically) particular concepts that would later emerge from American New Criticism with respect to discussions on the properties of poetic utterances, e.g. paradoxicality, irony, ambivalence. See Brooks (1948, 358-366: 1962, 729-741).
• 6 Here are the following stages of the dispute: (Markiewicz 1961, 266-277); (Ingarden 1962; 1964a); (Markiewicz 1964); (Ingarden 1964b).
• 7 They are very particular terms because they constitute equivalents of entire sentence sets in the narrative. They, therefore, function analogously to terms in scientific or philosophical utterance.
• 8 Such indicators are easy to identify in the poetic text. We deal with a number of phenomena here, e.g. syntactic parallelism, anaphora, or the repetition of identical word blocks in different sentences.
• 9 See Lubomír Doležel’s discussion on this issue (Doležel 1960, 13-15).
• 10 Certainly these complexes should be characterised as statistic tendencies, and not constant features.
• 11 I touched upon these issues in Sławiński (1966).
• 12 A more detailed description of accumulation of sentence meanings because of presupposed entirety of higher level would need to make reference, despite significant differences in the generalities of literary theory, to relevant parts in Ingarden (1960, 212-213).
• 13 Such a group of relations is likely to be interpreted by means of terminology drawn from sociology and psychology. The term “role” would correspond to one specific relation, while the narrator’s “personality” to the entire group of relations.