3.19

Ricoeur's argument depends upon the parallels he traces between selection and calculation and between combination and creation.  For him calculation is barren.  In deploying this asymmetrically valorized dichotomy, he serves the preservation of the mystery of creation.  He also divorces the play of analytic and synthetic faculties from the act of creation.

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3.21

In Ricoeur's discourse logicity is not compatible with creativity:

[...] if it is true that the topological syntax of the transfers, which functions in conjunction with the trajectory of the logical operations of the semiotic square, "organizes narration as a process creating values".  How can this reduplication account for the passage from the syntactic operations, which in the taxonomic framework were "predictable and calculable" to "process creating values"?  Of necessity, logicity must somehow be inadequate in relationship to creativity, which characterizes narrative. ("Greimas's Narrative Grammar" 23)

In Greimas's order of presentation, Ricoeur reads an order of execution.  The syntactic operations are first the object of calculation and in the second instance they organize, they are the subjects of an action.  Ricoeur establishes a syntagm with a vector that runs from calculation towards creation.  The validity of the generative trajectory's conversions is made to depend upon whether calculation gives rise to creation.  Furthermore this condition, Ricoeur implies, is to be met with a logic purged of Hegel.

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3.22

It can be done.

3.22

3.23

Ricoeur's use of Frye discloses a way to a logic of the machine of the elementary structure of signification.

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3.24

Ricoeur construes the generative trajectory in terms of a movement from theme to plot, from dianoia to mythos.  Greimas's claim to progress ab quo ad quem certainly facilitates this.  However, Greimas is mainly interested in the via of the to and fro.  Nevertheless, Ricoeur finds no Aristotelian terms to name this middle.  The blame cannot be laid upon Frye, his referenced authority on the "systematically coupled" typologies of mythos and dianoia ("Greimas's Narrative Grammar" 23).

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3.25

Surely Ricoeur cannot fail to register that Frye's account is not dyadic.  Frye's exposition is strongly triadic.  Rhetoric is for him the middle term between grammar primarily understood as syntax or "right (narrative) order" and meaning or logic (n5) primarily understood "as words arranged in a pattern of significance" (Anatomy of Criticism 244-45).  Ricoeur represses any mention that, there, mediating between logic and grammar, meaning and narrative, is rhetoric.  In Frye's reading of Aristotle, dianoia and mythos are combined with ethos.  A very topological category, ethos is permeated with concepts of position and location.  The category of ethos consists of characters and setting.  It is "between and made up of mythos and dianoia which are verbal imitations of action and thought respectively" and it is "between event and idea" (Anatomy of Criticism 243).

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3.26

Frye's typology yields sites.  Frye's typology does not yield practices or processes.  Ricoeur operates according to a principle which assigns to different sites different processes.  He like Frye subscribes to a division of spatial and temporal arts.  This division presents itself in the alignment of eye/ear, static/dynamic and logic/story dichotomies.  But the polarity is not mobile.  This is most evident when he compares an anatomy and its discrete parts with a more "physiological" model of the process of signification.  Frye classifies products of sense;  Greimas models the production of sense.

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3.27

Ricoeur's comparison deserves revisiting from a process-centred perpspective.  Signification works on three senses of "sense,", three senses analogous to Frye's Aristotelian triad.  Signification produces meaning (dianoia).  Within the parameters of Ricoeur's contrast between mythos and dianoia, signification induces orientation which is commensurate with plot or mythos.  Ricoeur's analogies invite a third.  Comparable to ethos, set or setting, is the work of signification on an apparatus.  When sense is taken as equivalent to a faculty of perception, a machine made to perceive, the Aristotelian triad is most friable.

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3.28

It is the pressure point that Ricoeur avoids.  In his account Ricoeur abandons the sensory modalities.  Eye and ear do not appear.  Perception is precisely what is to be understood when Greimas discusses the production or apprehension of sense by a subject as the basis of a narrativization of the taxonomy.  This is anything but a passive sensorium.  Imprinting theories and passive sensoria upon which depend static/dynamic qualifications of visual and auditory acts of perception are alien to this conception of the productivity of perception (n6). 

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3.29

It is simple for Ricoeur to leave behind ethos.  There is nothing comparable to characters in Greimas.  The level of the actants comes closest.  But even if this Proppian-derived level of roles and functions were to correspond with the category of characters and setting in Frye's typology, Ricoeur would still be calling for an accounting of conversions.

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3.30

If one accepts the elementary structure of signification as a translation machine, it becomes easier to comprehend how it works.  With an apparatus, reduplication is creative.  Without one, reduplication remains mysterious and unaccountable.  Passages from one metalanguage to another remain inexplicable.  Answering Ricoeur's how-does-it-work involves refining the conception of what is imagined to be at work.  Ricoeur resists the machine.  For him, applications of the semiotic square represent "a more or less forced understanding of narrative which proceeds not according to the logical component, but according to the praxico- pathetic component" ("Greimas's Narrative Grammar" 23).

3.30