James Sellers

North Carolina State University

The Genettean Model for Text Time: Differences Across Media

Genette’s model for analyzing the relationship between narrated text and story-time has been influential in narrative studies. However, there are media specific differences in temporal representation, requiring alterations to the model. These differences relate to the degree of semantic motivation of the medium. In film, the relationship between signifier and signified is usually motivated while in written texts this relationship is arbitrary. Whereas the Genettean model has been previously mapped onto both film and written narratives, my analysis applies the model to the same narrative adapted from a written text into a filmic text. Building on work by Chatman (1978), Rimmon-Kenan (2002), and Toolan (2001), I examine how aspects of narrative temporality are affected by the shift from a motivated to an arbitrary semiotic medium, exploring the degree to which Genette’s framework needs to be modified to handle text time across narrative media. Genette’s model for analyzing the relationship between narrated text and story temporality points to order, frequency, and duration as the primary aspects of temporal manipulation in the narration of a series of events.

In this paper I study temporal features of the written narrative “Killings” by Andre Dubus and compare them with those of the film In The Bedroom, which is a cinematic adaptation of the same narrative. I examine temporal markers of the same story-events in both narrations, revealing the greater complexity of the temporal markers in media with a mix of motivated and arbitrary signification as opposed to a media with only arbitrary signification. My overall claim is that Genette’s model needs to be adjusted so that it does not require a logical ordering of all story events, but only of a small number of core story events. Events that occur outside of the essential core need only be understood in (temporal) relation to the core, not necessarily in relation to each other.