its ability to adequately explain how communication in the passage works. Far
better to say that characters are agents acting independently of the narrator.
The defense that the passage shifts from diegesis to mimesis fails because
it packages that shift with the concept of unmediated transmission. While
the scene of dialogue is itself an event in the storyworld, that dialogue is also
doing a lot of mediated telling (as much as any passage of narration), and that
mediated telling, as we have seen, is an integral part of the ethical dimension
of the passage. It’s hard not to conclude that the left hand wins the debate,
well, hands down: the standard model, with its omission of characters, dis-
torts our perception of the narrative communication here and in countless
other scenes of dialogue. Consequently, the model needs—at a minimum—a
substantial overhaul.
MULTIPLE CHANNELS OF COMMUNICATION AND
SYNERGIES AMONG THEM
Before I sketch my version of this overhaul, I want to reflect on why it has
taken so long for someone to argue that characters need to be part of the
communication model. The reason, I believe, is the story/discourse distinc-
tion and its powerful effect on the perception of those who buy into it—which
is to say the majority of narrative theorists. Because it has been bred in our
bones, we have come to accept it as capturing something essential about the
nature of narrative. Then, since characters fall on the story side of the binary
distinction, and since the communication model is about discourse, we find it
natural that characters are not part of it.
Once we recognize that their omission is a serious deficiency in the model,
we have some good reasons to question the explanatory power of its enabling
distinction. We need not renounce it, but we should replace the belief that it
contains some immutable truth about narrative with an understanding that
the distinction is a sometimes helpful—and sometimes not so helpful—heu-
ristic. From this perspective, we can recognize that Chatman’s model, though
designed to explain narrative communication in general, actually describes a
special case of it. More generally, reconfiguring the story/discourse distinction
as a heuristic rather than a foundational truth liberates us to recognize that
scenes of character-character dialogue often function simultaneously as events
and as narration by other means, that is, as story and as discourse. Trying to
decide which side of the binary such scenes fall on is like trying to decide
whether Wittgenstein’s famous figure (166) is either ultimately a representa-
tion of a duck (named Story) or of a rabbit (named Discourse).
AUTHORS, RESOURCES, AUDIENCES • 19