In the process, this corporeal theo

In the process, this corporeal theory of narrative hermeneutics as circulation helps to explain the connections between the various definitions that narrative has had in the past. I would note two competing definitions. The first, and most common, has been cited many times throughout this study: narrative is a change in state over time. It is Didier Coste’s expression of this definition that I drew upon in chapters 2 and 4: “An act of communication is narrative whenever and only when imparting a transitive view of the world is the effect of the message produced.”3 From this perspective, narrative describes how something becomes something else. The second, somewhat less common definition describes narrative in terms of the drama of narrating itself. As Patrick O’Neill remarks in Fictions of Discourse, “The most fundamental concept of modern narratology is that of narrative ‘levels.’ For the most naïve reader there is only one ‘level’ of narrative: how the narrative is recounted is only incidental to what ‘actually happened.’ . . . The fundamental discrimination upon which all modern narratological theory is founded, however . . . is precisely that between the two ‘levels’ of story and discourse, between ‘what really happened’ (the content of the narrative) and ‘how what really happened is told’ (the expression of the narrative).”4 That is, narrative is that form of discourse in which the act of telling is evident, and where we must constantly ask (unlike O’Neill’s naïve reader) both what we know and how we know it. Narrative from this perspective stages a number of textual “levels”—the author, narrator, narratee, implied reader—that are muted in other forms of discourse.