TOWARD A NARRA-TOPOGRAPHY - A PILOT-STUDY APPLIED TO DURAS,MARGUERITENOVEL MODERATO CANTABILE

Although lexical frequencies are familiar measures of stylistic and th ematic analysis, only recently have some stylostatisticians been tempt ed to investigate the relationship between the frequency and topograph y of repeated lexical items. In the present paper the authors have tur ned to the study of the four focal types of discursive narratology, us ing Marguerite Duras' Moderate Cantabile. Their intent is to uncover a spects of narratological performance which further elucidate the commu nicative strategies in the story. Part 1 summarizes the problematic be tween frequency and topography. It describes how a topographical index can be computed for any repeated item and how a Global Topography Ind ex (GTI) can summarize the major topographical characteristics of any text sequence. Part 2 presents a four-cell typology of narrational mod e: a segmentation of the verbal chain into narrating and narrated spee ch acts, with each text sequence tagged according to its discursive fu nction: overt sender intervention for story coherence or comment on th e focal level of a narrating present; representation of discrete or un localized events on the focal level of a mimeticized past. In Part 3 t he focal encodings are displayed in numerical and graphic form, first according to the eight surface chapter divisions and then according to twenty-six subsets of approximately equal length. The fluctuations of the topography indices are reviewed, with particular attention being paid to the manifestation of cluster effects. Although sender interven tions predominate, the relativized behavior of each focal type contrib utes to a climactic unraveling of the intrigue in the final chapters. In conclusion, the authors stress the dichotomy between the calm surfa ce of the chapters and the agitated tensions of the twenty-six subsets .