5 - Comic strains

Summary

In a study of the fundamental principles of narrative – ‘succession’ and ‘transformation’ in his view – Tzvetan Todorov argues that there are consequently two fundamental types of narrative organisation. The first, which he calls ‘mythologique’, combines a logical development of succession with the most straightforward kind of transformation, from one state to another, or, as he succinctly puts it, from A to non-A. In the second type, the emphasis is less on the transformation than on the apprehension of that change: ‘la logique de succession est secondée par le deuxième genre de transformations, récits où l'importance de l'événement est moindre que celle de la perception que nous en avons, du degré de connaissance que nous en possédons’. He calls this second type ‘gnoséologique’ (or ‘épistémique’).

These very general categories are a useful guide to the essential differences between the model described in the previous chapter and a second type of naturalist work to which I wish now to turn. In the first, as we have seen, mythos, plot, the fortunes of a protagonist, of an active participant in life's struggles, are the directing features in a set of ‘romances’ that go terribly wrong (if indeed it could ever be said that they had a chance of going otherwise). In the second type, the protagonist is more a spectator on life who draws back from any active – and thereby potentially ‘tragic’ – commitment into a more reflective posture of refusal, resignation, cynicism, despondency. There is thus a shift from action to attitude, from physiology to philosophy, from the dynamic, teleological kind of plot to a less decisive, repetitive, unresolved organisation.