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122 Seymour Chatman
places, as in plays and films; in drawings; in comic strips; in dance
movements, as in narrative ballet and in mime; and even in music, at
least in program music of the order of Till Eulenspiegel and Peter and the
Wolf.
A salient property of narrative is double time structuring. That is,
all narratives, in whatever medium, combine the time sequence of plot
events, the time of the histoire ("story-time") with the time of the presentation
of those events in the text, which we call "discourse-time." What is
fundamental to narrative, regardless of medium, is that these two time
orders are independent. In realistic narratives, the time of the story is
fixed, following the ordinary course of a life: a person is born, grows
from childhood to maturity and old age, and then dies. But the
discourse-time order may be completely different: it may start with the
person's deathbed, then "flashback" to childhood; or it may start with
childhood, "flashforward" to death, then end with adult life. This independence
of discourse-time is precisely and only possible because of the
subsumed story-time. Now of course all texts pass through time: it takes
x number of hours to read an essay, a legal brief, or a sermon. But the
internal structures of these non-narrative texts are not temporal but
logical, so that their discourse-time is irrelevant, just as the viewing time
of a painting is irrelevant. We may spend half an hour in front of a
Titian, but the aesthetic effect is as if we were taking in the whole painting
at a glance. In narratives, on the other hand, the dual time orders
function independently. This is true in any medium: flashbacks are just
as possible in ballet or mime or opera as they are in a film or novel. Thus,
in theory at least, any narrative can be actualized by any medium which
can communicate the two time orders.
Narratologists immediately observed an important consequence of
this property of narrative texts, namely, the translatability of a given
narrative from one medium to another: Cinderella as verbal tale, as ballet,
as opera, as film, as comic strip, as pantomime, and so on. This observation
was so interesting, so much in keeping with structuralist theory, and
so productive of further work in narrative analysis that it tended to
concentrate attention exclusively on the constancies in narrative structure
across the different media at the expense of interesting differences.
But now the study of narrative has reached a point where the differences
can emerge as objects of independent interest.
In the course of studying and teaching film, I have been struck by
the sorts of changes typically introduced by screen adaptation (and vice
versa in that strange new process "novelization," which transforms
Seymour Chatman, professor in the department of rhetoric at the
University of California, Berkeley, is the author of The Later Style of Henry
James and Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film.
Novels and Films
Autumn 1980 123
already exhibited films into novels). Close study of film and novel versions
of the same narrative reveals with great clarity the peculiar powers
of the two media. Once we grasp those peculiarities, the reasons for the
differences in form, content, and impact of the two versions strikingly
emerge. Many featu