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Asking a question is akin to telling a story.
Drawing a picture is like telling a story. Both,
drawing pictures and asking questions, are ways of
orienting. Both focus attention. Of course
telling stories is a way of orienting. The
circularity of these assertions depends not upon the
equivalency of the products, question, picture, story,
but the activities, asking, describing, telling.
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3.0 |
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3.1 |
As ways of orienting, all are moments of a relentless
semiosis, all rework representations, all participate
in some measure of transcoding. These ways of
doing are readily framed as the potential of an
object. What can be described becomes narratable
and open to interrogation; what is askable has a
story. Actions and objects correlate;
praxis bears on semantics.
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3.1 |
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3.2 |
This slippage between doing and meaning is the central
point of Ricoeur's critique of Greimas's narrative
grammar. At stake is the adequacy of
transcodings. Also at stake are the bases of
formalization: permissible degrees of
abstraction, legitimate limits to the role of reduction
and extrapolation in interpretation. In short,
hermeneutics confronts semiotics over the proper use of
tools.
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3.2 |
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3.3 |
Ricoeur expresses reservations about the equivalence of
metalanguages and about the conversions that turn an
achronic taxonomy of logical relations into the
syntactic operations of a narrative structure. In
short Ricoeur is troubled by the generative trajectory
traced by Greimas, a trajectory that according to
Ricoeur depends upon the mixed nature of its
fundamental structure.
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3.3 |
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3.4 |
For Ricoeur, this mixed nature of the model conditions its applicability and so he claims in his concluding statement to explain to readers of works stemming from this school why the semiotic square sometimes seems to have a true heuristic value, and sometimes to be simple transcription, which can be more or less elucidating but sometimes corresponds to a more or less forced understanding of narrative which proceeds not according to the logical component, but according to the praxico-pathetic component of the mixed model. ("Greimas's Narrative Grammar" 28)
What could be attributed to skill is vested by Ricoeur
in the appropriateness of the tool. However the
square is not for Ricoeur just an anthropomorphized
error prone machine. He takes great pains to
demonstrate that the machine part, the logical
component, cannot alone generate narratives; a
body needs to be imported into the model or must be
present from the outset. Machine and body are not
Ricoeur's terms. In his discourse, logic is set
against doing and feeling. This opposition is
temporally figured as the difference between static
taxonomy and dynamic narrative.
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3.4 |
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3.5 |
It is through this set-up that Ricoeur reads
Greimas. However, there is a glitch in Ricoeur's
motion detection device. Ricoeur introduces
alongside the Greimassian nomenclature two Aristotelian
terms, dianoia and
mythos ("Greimas's
Narrative Grammar" 23)
which are said to
conform to Greimas's "heterotopic
spaces". In Frye, who is Ricoeur's authority
here, the difference between the two Aristotelian terms
is related to a division of the senses, a division of
labour for the eye and the ear (Anatomy of Criticism
77). The ear is matched
with narrative or
mythos; dianoia or
meaning, with the eye. The coupling of this
sensory mapping with the dynamic/static binary affects
Ricoeur's evaluation of Greimas's model. In
particular, his judgement on its ability to bridge the
taxo-narrative hiatus is overdetermined by his yoking
of the static with the visual.
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3.5 |
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3.6 |
What A.J. Greimas designates as the elementary
structure of signification has come generally to be
known as the semiotic square. Greimas himself
does not reduce the elementary structure to its graphic
incarnation. He states that the square is a
visual presentation of a relational network ("Entretien" 21). In an
1984 discussion with Ricoeur, he states that "As
to the semiotic square, it could be a square or a cube
or a circle. The shape is of no importance
whatsoever. It was necessary to formulate a
minimum number of relational tools, and in this case, a
fundamental structure of discourse that was as simple
as possible" ("On
Narrativity" 554-555). The two criteria,
a minimum number of tools and simplicity, only appear
to be unrelated to shape.
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3.6 |
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3.7 |
Certain geometries are precluded from Greimas's
list. His enumeration contains aught but closed
figures. Furthermore each of the closed figures
is symmetrical. The range of choices is not
without consequences.
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3.7 |
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3.8 |
Simplicity can be quite complex. Semiotic
formalization, if it is like that of mathematics,
attempts to meet Hilbert's three basic
requirements: consistency, completeness, and
decidability. Ricoeur works the tension between
completeness and consistency. His critique
retraces the moments where elements are, he claims,
added or introduced at each subsequent level of the
generative trajectory. His critique terminates
with the declaration that Greimas's point of departure
must be heterogeneous. The model possesses a
mixed nature. One recognizes the dilemma: either
incomplete, in need of additions at every stage, or
inconsistent, mixed from the outset.
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3.8 |
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3.9 |
Ricoeur wishes to determine the consistency of the
procedures that guide the transformation of a semantic
binary into a series of narrative utterances.
Ricoeur's critique centres on the satisfactory passage
from a static morphology to a dynamic syntax. It
is the temporalization of taxonomy or the
narrativization of the fundamental structure of
signification that concern him.
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3.9 |
