My second remark touches on the concept "narrative" itself. Indeed, some definitions of the genre are less restrictive than mine, insofar as they blur the distinction I have made and assume that all texts are narratives in their deep structures. Algirdas-Julien Greimas and the Paris School of semiotics, for example, posit a "generalized narrativity" that they regard as the "organizing principle of all discourse" (Greimas and Courtes 210). According to them, even the "cognitive discourse" of the social sciences must be viewed as a narrative, because it describes a transformation, in this instance, the shift from a state of "lack," of "non-knowledge," to the elimination of that lack and a "conjunction with knowledge" (Greimas and Landowski 12). This homogenizing scheme allows Greimas and his disciples to regard as narratives texts as diverse as Georges Dumezil's preface to Naissance d'Archanges [Birth of Archangels], Claude Levi-Strauss's "Overture" to The Raw and the Cooked, Lucien Febvre's polemical article "Vers une autre histoire" [Toward a Different History], and philosophical essays by Gaston Bachelard and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (these texts are analyzed in Greimas and Landowski). Employing Greimas's wider, more inclusive definition of course would lead to charting my corpus in a different manner: "synchronic descriptions" and "arguments" would lose their identities, for they would not just include or discuss narratives, but "be" narratives themselves. From the perspective of literary theory, however, I do not think that there is any empirical or theoretical gain in merging the categories of narrative and argument. With Thomas Pavel, I would submit that Greimas's definition is too "powerful": emptying the category "narrative" of any significance, it provides that category with so many members that it becomes "trivial" (5). In other words, we literary theorists probably should recognize that the temporal shift which for us is the main feature of narrative can refer to the steps in the knowledge process. But it is not obvious why this admission should eliminate the distinction between the mythos and the logos: between the narrative, conducted along temporal lines, of how something was "discovered," and the account, given along logical lines, of the structure of what was discovered.

Philippe Carrard (carrard@polygot.uvm.edu) teaches French and literary theory at the University of Vermont. He has published Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier (Johns Hopkins UP, 1995), as well as several essays on twentieth-century fiction, literary theory, and the rhetoric of historiography.

Notes

(1.) This does not mean that historians are not interested in identifying regularities. They sometimes turn to "normic statements," like "Power corrupts" and "Other things being equal a greater number of troops is an advantage in battle" (Scriven 465). But such statements belong to the category "guarded generalizations," and--unlike Hempel's "complete" explanations--they do not constitute "predictions" of future events (Scriven 468).

(2.) These minimal definitions of narrative sidestep the issue of the causal connections between the "events," the "propositions," or the "states" to which they refer (Genette does not specify the nature of the "transformation" leading from an "earlier state" to a "later and resultant state"). "Temporal ordering" (the only criterion I need to distinguish among the texts in my corpus) can be regarded as a "necessary" condition for narrative; whether it is also a "sufficient" condition is open to debate. For further discussions, see Richardson's Unlikely Stories (esp. 1331 and 89-107) and White's "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality" (esp. 4-6).

(3.) I am aware that Todorov was not trained as a historian. But he has published several studies of an historical nature (including the celebrated The Conquest of America), and A French Tragedy is documented in the most scholarly manner.

(4.) In 1998 alone, two detailed studies about Resistance leader Jean Moulin were thus published: Pierre Pean's Vie et mort de Jean Moulin [Life and Death of Jean Moulin] and Jacques Baynac's Les Secrets de l'affaire Jean Moulin [The Secrets of the Jean Moulin Affair].

(5.) On this subject, see my book Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier, especially chapter 2, "Dispositions."

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