André Gaudreault,
From Plato to Lumière: Narration and Monstration in Literature and Cinema, trans. Timothy Barnard.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009
ISBN: 9 780802095 86 2
US$27.95 (pb)
224pp
(Review copy supplied by University of Toronto Press
http://www.utpress.utoronto.ca)

This translation of Gaudreault’s seminal French text, Du littéraire au filmique (1988) is of great significance to the English speaking population because the narrative theories it presents have profoundly influenced the emergent (post-1970s) field of cinema studies. Gaudreault’s From Plato to Lumière: Narration and Monstration in Literature and Cinema contributed to a narratological theory of film by engaging with the conceptual question: “Who is speaking in a film?” (p. 7). According to the late narratologist, Paul Ricouer, this theoretical text, which identifies and defines “the way or ways, in which film narrative[s] function” (p. 7) is “a remarkable tool with which to remove ambiguity” (p. xii). This occurs as Gaudreault disentangles – via the exegesis of his critical terms, monstrator and narrator – distinct narrative (textual, staged, filmic) modes and their agencies; this has demonstrated that there is “a difference of [the] kind of narrative within the genre of narrative” (pp. xi-xii).

Gaudreault re-evaluated early Greek narrative practices because he conceived Plato’s and Aristotle’s concepts as foundational to modern narratology and analogous to cinema. In this account, mimesis (imitation without a narrator) and diegesis (there is a narrator but no imitation), representation and narration do not belong to “conceptual systems whose respective terms can be freely interchanged” (pp. 38-9). In their original Greek context, these terms, which Plato and Aristotle applied to different concepts, weren’t contradictory; for example, Plato conceives of mimesis as a possible form of diegesis. For Aristotle, theatre isn’t narrative as it doesn’t recount (tell), but represents (it shows characters and actions). In Aristotle’s formulation, diegesis is the product of a narrator’s expression; this narrative concept is foundational to the historical reception of dramatic performances as theatre has traditionally been excluded from narratology on the basis that it lacks a narrator. In Gaudreault’s system, staged narratives are mimesis (they show), while textual narratives can be attributed to an underlying narrator (who tells), who is the sole or primary speaker. Mimetic diegesis is achieved via the agency of characters depicting actions, non-mimetic diegesis occurs via a narrator’s agency, while the storytelling agent behind a film’s visual representation corresponds to Plato’s version of mimesis as one possible form of diegesis.

By introducing the concept of intermediality (the correlation within literature, film and theatre of an underlying narrator) into cinema studies Gaudreault generated new vistas of thought and reconfigured a received dialectic, which opposed narrativity and theatricality. By situating film narrative in relation to textual and staged narratives he discovered “two basic modes of presiding over a narrative … [which] … is the product of the activity of an underlying agent that is responsible for this communication: the narrator and the monstrator.” (p. 71). These agents correspond to different mediums of verbal storytelling and theatrical presentation; a narrator’s role is to tell, while a monstrator’s role is to show. Textual narrators may facilitate first person perspectives on subjective experience, while the monstrator’s third person point of view primarily displays all experiences objectively.

For Gaudreault, only narration can communicate a narrative (p. 25) while every narrative “is simultaneously a discourse (the discourse of the storyteller) and the story (the story told)” (p. 58). A textual narrator can make their presence visible while a monstrator (itself a secondary agent) “can only make itself visible (or audible)” because it “presents (direct vision) while the narrator, to use the term very precisely, represents (indirect vision).” (pp. 75-6). The monstrator is constrained by the materials it uses to create meaning; it can’t say ‘I’ as a narrator can and it “can never communicate to the narratee … what one of its characters is thinking or feeling” (p. 78) but it can refer to other, intra-textual agents, as ‘he’ or ‘she’. As Gaudreault explains, the monstrator “is without a doubt the only ‘onlooker’ not, at the same time, being ‘looked at’ – the only teller not to be told” (p. 121). Gaudreault privileges the filmic narrator-monstrator over written and staged texts as this underlying agency, responsible for communicating film narrative is a ‘double agent’ that monstrates (via mise en scène, set design) and narrates (via diegetic language) at the same time. The filmic narrator-monstrator thus joins narrative modes. While not wishing to detract from Gaudreault’s theory, I would suggest this semiotic (science of signs) method could profit from a consideration of the role of memory images (imagines agentes, images of agents in action) in the art of memory (a visual art predating Plato). As memory images revivify the past in the present by triggering conscious and unconscious associations in memory, their theoretical integration could challenge Gaudreault’s idea of monstration as attached to an uncomplicated (as separate to the past) present (p. 84); understanding the dynamism of these images would expand the film narrator-monstrator’s temporal and conceptual range.

Rachael Cameron,
Melbourne University, Australia

Created on: Tuesday, 1 December 2009