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Tenses in translation: Benveniste's 'discourse' and 'historical narration' in

the first-person novel
Clara Mallier
Language and Literature 2014 23: 244
DOI: 10.1177/0963947014536507

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Article

Language and Literature

2014, Vol. 23(3) 244­–254
Tenses in translation: © The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0963947014536507
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in the first-person novel

Clara Mallier
University of Bordeaux Montaigne, France

Abstract
This article deals with Emile Benveniste’s theory of enunciation (see ‘Subjectivity in Language’
and ‘The Correlations of Tense in the French Verb’ in Problems in General Linguistics, 1971 [1966]
and ‘L’appareil formel de l’énonciation’ in Problèmes de linguistique générale, tome 2, 1970), in
particular his distinction between historical narration and discourse, and the way it applies
to the translation of first-person fiction. In French narratives, the main tense of discourse is
the passé composé, which is related to the time of enunciation, while the tense of historical
narration is traditionally the passé simple, which is related to the moment of the events reported.
The passé composé thus draws attention to the narrating I’s retrospective gaze, while the passé
simple reflects the experiencing I’s perspective within the story. This raises complex issues of
translation because the narrative use of the passé composé has no equivalent in English, so that
the distinction between the perspectives of the retrospective narrator and of his former self are
expressed differently in the two languages. This article explores the impact of this phenomenon
on four different French translations of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (Llona, 1926; Tournier, 1996;
Wolkenstein, 2011 and Jaworski, 2012).

Keywords
Benveniste, Carraway, discourse, enunciation, Fitzgerald, Gatsby, linguistics, narration, tenses,
translation, utterance

1 Introduction
This article will focus on the overlap between linguistic and narratological issues which
are relevant to the translation of first-person fiction. The conceptual framework of my
analysis will be the theory of enunciation, a branch of French linguistics founded by

Corresponding author:
Clara Mallier, University of Bordeaux Montaigne, 13, rue des Argentiers, 33000 Bordeaux, France.
Email: claramallier@gmail.com

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Mallier 245

Emile Benveniste through a series of articles published between 1946 and 1970, most of
which were reissued in Problèmes de linguistique générale 1 and 2 (1966 and 1974; the
first volume was translated into English in 1971). Benveniste emphasized the importance
of taking the speaker into account when analyzing language, as is reflected by the title of
a section of his Problems in General Linguistics, ‘L’homme dans la langue’ (literally
‘Man in Language’): ‘The individual act of appropriation of language places the speaker
in his/her own speech. This is a constituent fact of enunciation’ (1974: 81–82, my trans-
lation). One of the main signs of this appropriation is the phenomenon of deixis, through
which the speaker anchors his/her speech in the here and now of enunciation. Aside from
being a central concept of linguistics, deixis has also been studied in philosophy of lan-
guage, logic, psychology, and, more recently, in narrative studies with the model of deic-
tic shift theory (see Duchan et al., 1995). The reason why I deem it useful to revert to
Benveniste’s own theory is that it is rooted in his analysis of the French language and
more particularly his understanding of the French system of tenses. Indeed, in his articles
‘Subjectivity in Language’ (1971a) and ‘L’appareil formel de l’énonciation’ (1974),1
Benveniste shows that the ‘linguistic forms indicating “person”’ (1971a: 225) do not
only include personal pronouns and ‘the indicators of deixis, the demonstratives, adverbs,
and adjectives, which organize the spatial and temporal relationships around the “sub-
ject” taken as referent’ (1971a: 226), they also comprise certain tenses which implicitly
refer to the moment of enunciation (1971a: 226–227 and 1974: 83–84). I will first show
the importance of this observation for Benveniste’s theory, and explain why it is particu-
larly relevant for the analysis of first-person fiction. Then, I will examine a central dif-
ference between the French and English tense systems and study its impact on the
representation of narrative perspective in both languages, as well as the issues it raises in
the translation of first-person fiction.

2 Histoire and discours

In his seminal article ‘The Correlations of Tense in the French Verb’ (1971b: 205–215),
Benveniste remarked that French tenses can be grouped into two sets or systems, depend-
ing on whether they are related to the situation of enunciation or disconnected from it. In
the first group one finds the present, the future and the passé composé, and in the second
one the passé simple and the plus-que-parfait (i.e. past perfect), with the additional ‘pro-
spective’ use of the conditional to express the future from a past perspective; only the
imparfait belongs in both groups (1971b: 207–209). From these two sets of tenses
Benveniste inferred the existence of two different modes of speech or ‘planes of utter-
ance’ (1971b: 206) which he respectively called discours (discourse) and histoire (his-
torical narration).2 Discourse is related to the situation of enunciation in terms of
person, place and time, through the use of deictic tenses but also of first- and second-
person pronouns and adverbial and adjectival shifters; from a pragmatic point of view, it
is defined as ‘every utterance assuming a speaker and a hearer, and in the speaker, the
intention of influencing the other in some way’ (1971b: 208–209). Conversely, histori-
cal narration is disconnected from the situation of enunciation, which is manifested by
the absence of shifters, the use of the third-person pronoun and the aoristic tense passé
simple. It consists in ‘the narration of past events’ which ‘are presented without any
intervention of the speaker in the narration’ (1971b: 206).

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246 Language and Literature 23(3)

A note on terminology is necessary here. The noun histoire may seem to be an infe-
licitous choice in that it can mean both ‘history’ and ‘story’ in French, but this ambiguity
is revealing since Benveniste’s histoire may appear in historical accounts as well as nar-
rative fiction. The English translation of the notion as historical narration could be
questioned as well because of its oxymoronic quality; however, it has the benefit of being
different from any term already in use in linguistics or literary analysis. This is all the
more useful as a lot of confusion has arisen from the homonymy between Benveniste’s
discours and histoire and the notions designated by the same words, but with a different
meaning, in narratology. Indeed, narratologists are familiar with the story/discourse dis-
tinction introduced by Todorov (1981 [1966]) as an adaptation of the Russian formalists’
dichotomy between fabula and sjuzhet, designating respectively the events portrayed in
the narration (story) and their verbal expression (discourse). Todorov himself drew a
parallel between this pair of terms and Benveniste’s histoire/discours distinction, but
without explaining the difference between them (Todorov, 1966: 132). The issue was
further complicated by Genette’s references to both Todorov’s and Benveniste’s con-
cepts. Genette replaced Todorov’s binary story/discourse distinction with a ternary sys-
tem in which ‘histoire’ remained, ‘discours’ became ‘récit’, and ‘narration’ was added
to refer to the act and circumstances of narrating (Genette, 1972: 15). Unfortunately,
Genette also renamed Benveniste’s histoire as ‘récit’, presumably in an attempt to avoid
the aforementioned ambiguity between histoire as story and histoire as history, therefore
using the term ‘récit’ to refer to both Todorov’s discourse and Benveniste’s historical
narration (while keeping the noun discours to refer to the notion defined under this term
by Benveniste).3 For this reason among others, Danon-Boileau later reworked
Benveniste’s distinction by saying that discourse could be described as a ‘deictic’ mode
of speech and historical narration as an ‘anaphoric’ one, because in the latter temporal
and spatial determinations are made relative to landmarks internal to the text (see 1982:
95–107). To avoid any ambiguity I will here write the notions historical narration and
discourse in small capitals when I use them in their Benvenistian sense, alternating occa-
sionally with Danon-Boileau’s ‘anaphoric’/‘deictic’ pair.
Beyond the terminological issue, Benveniste’s theory requires clarification about two
points which have elicited debate. His central observation resides in the correlation
which exists between different tenses and the relation (or disconnection) of speech with
the time of enunciation. This fact has sometimes been confused with two other phenom-
ena: the expression of subjectivity and the difference between first-person and third-
person enunciation.
Concerning the first point, an apparent problem in Benveniste’s theory is that it
equates historical narration with objectivity and discourse with subjectivity, which
seems to conflate the deictic nature of speech and its subjective character. Benveniste
described historical narration as an objective and impersonal mode of enunciation.
Citing a passage from Balzac, he asserts: ‘As a matter of fact, there is then no longer
even a narrator. The events are set forth chronologically, as they occurred. No one
speaks here; the events seem to narrate themselves’ (1971b: 208). This assumption was
criticized by a number of authors (see McCabe, 1979; Nowell-Smith, 1976; Sternberg,
2005), especially since Benveniste’s quotation from Balzac contains a sentence in
which the narrator comments on a character’s costume by stating it is ‘somewhat more
ostentatious than the laws of good taste allow in France.’4 This shows the necessity of

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Mallier 247

distinguishing between two definitions of subjectivity, a narrow one which corresponds

to the deictic anchoring of speech in the situation of enunciation, and a broader one
which includes affective and axiological forms of expression such as modalization,
evaluative adjectives and adverbs, different registers of language, connotation, and so
on. Benveniste’s historical narration consists in the exclusion of subjectivity in the
narrow sense, not necessarily in the broader one. In this light, the controversial clause
in the sentence from Balzac turns out to be unproblematic since, despite its expression
of a judgment, it remains disconnected from the situation of enunciation. Although
Benveniste does not make this entirely clear in his own work, the distinction between
affective and axiological marks of subjectivity and the location, or disconnection, of
speech relative to the situation of enunciation is important to preserve the coherence and
relevance of his theory.
Another point that elicited some debate (see Danon-Boileau, 1982; Kuroda, 1975;
Simonin-Grumbach, 1975) is the association posited by Benveniste between his two
enunciative modes and the first and third persons respectively. In his definition, first-
person enunciation is necessarily correlated with discourse, and third-person enuncia-
tion with historical narration because the first person being deictic, it is incompatible
with the aoristic quality of the passé simple (1971b: 206–207, 210–211 and 214). Though
this view applies well to third-person narration, it denies the complexity of first-person
narration by assuming that speech is either related to all the coordinates of the situation
of enunciation at once (person, place and time), or to none. Obviously, this overlooks the
enunciative nature of much first-person fiction. Benveniste acknowledged it in a foot-
note, remarking that there indeed exist novels written in the first person and in the passé
simple (citing Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier as an example), and that his theory,
in this case, should be qualified (1971c: 309, note 14). He is of course right, as one of the
characteristics of first-person fiction is the fact that the subject of enunciation and the
subject of the utterance may be identical even as the time of enunciation and the time of
the utterance are disconnected. This phenomenon is familiar to narratologists who cus-
tomarily distinguish between two different narrative perspectives in first-person fiction,
that of the ‘narrating I’ and that of the ‘experiencing I’ (see Romberg, 1962: 96). It thus
appears that the crux of Benveniste’s distinction between historical narration and dis-
course is (again) the question of time, regardless of the issue of person. Concerning
first-person narration, the relevant question is whether the temporal locator of speech is
the moment of enunciation (discourse), or the moment of the events (narration). An
awareness of this fact helps to clarify the difference between the points of view of the
narrating I and the experiencing I, which is important for a critical appraisal of most first-
person narratives as these perspectives frequently alternate and overlap, creating a subtle
interplay between different voices belonging to the same individual at different stages in
his/her life.

3 Historical narration and discourse in the translation of

first-person fiction: An asymmetry between French and
English
The reason why these enunciative considerations can shed new light on the translation of
narrative perspective in first-person fiction, from French into English and vice versa, is

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248 Language and Literature 23(3)

that the French and English systems of tenses are not symmetrical. The difference that
matters here concerns the way both languages articulate the relationship between the
time of the utterance and the time of enunciation—which, following a tradition inherited
from Antoine Culioli’s Theory of Enunciative Operations, I will symbolize respectively
with a Roman T and a French script T (see Culioli, 1999: 49–52). This relationship can
take three forms: identification, disconnection and differentiation. The terms are again
borrowed from Culioli but, following Jenny Simonin-Grumbach (1975: 87), I will use
them with a Benvenistian rather than a Culiolian perspective.
Identification [T = T] means that the time of the utterance coincides with the time
of enunciation. It is expressed by the présent in French and the present simple and
continuous in English,5 but also by some usages of the passé composé in French and
by the present perfect in English. Though these tenses are different from an aspectual
point of view, from the point of view of temporal location they are all instances of
identification between T and T: indeed, even though the present perfect refers to events
which occurred or at least began in the past, its focus is on the time of enunciation.6 For
example, in the statement ‘I have lost my watch’, the important information is that the
speaker doesn’t have a watch anymore—not the circumstances in which the loss of the
watch happened, nor the moment when it occurred. If the speaker wants to specify that
the event happened the day before, s/he will have to use the preterit: ‘I lost my watch
yesterday’. The preterit is mandatory here because the present perfect, in which only
the resulting state matters, would be incompatible with the temporal adverb ‘yester-
day’. The present perfect corresponds to one of the two values of the passé composé in
French: ‘I have lost my watch’ translates as ‘J’ai perdu ma montre’. French linguists
describe it as a ‘présent accompli’, which clearly underlines the fact that it represents
a resulting state.
At the other end of the spectrum, there is disconnection, symbolized by [T ω T ]. The
time of the event is then different from the time of enunciation, and it is not located rela-
tive to it. This configuration is particularly prevalent in third-person novels, but also in
first-person novels whenever the temporal locator is the time of the events reported. It is
expressed in English by the preterit, and in French by the passé simple: in a narrative
context (i.e., if it were clear the sentence did not express a resulting state but simply
reported a past event), ‘I lost my watch’ would translate as ‘Je perdis ma montre’.
Disconnection is marked by an absence of shifters and the aoristic mode; it corresponds
to Benveniste’s historical narration.
The asymmetry between French and English appears when it comes to expressing the
third configuration named differentiation, symbolized by [T ≠ T ]. In this intermediate
case, the time that is evoked is different from the time of enunciation but also located
relative to it. This belongs to Benveniste’s category of discourse: it corresponds to the
narration of past events with a retrospective perspective anchored in the time of enuncia-
tion. In French, it is expressed by the passé composé, whose value is then different from
that of ‘présent accompli’ and has been qualified either as ‘temporal’, because the passé
composé is here used as a narrative tense, or as ‘semi-aoristic’ (Wyld, 2002: 12), because
it is halfway between the fully aoristic passé simple and the deictic usage of the passé
composé which is akin to the English present perfect. Thus, the sentence ‘I lost my watch
yesterday’ would translate in French as ‘J’ai perdu ma montre hier’, with the passé

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Mallier 249

composé, because the presence of the shifter ‘hier’ (which corresponds to [T ≠ T ])

would forbid the use of the passé simple (which corresponds to [T ω T ]). This semi-
aoristic value of the passé composé has no equivalent in English because the present
perfect cannot be used with adverbs which situate events in the past, even if they are
shifters. There is thus no tense in English to mark the distinction between [T ≠ T ]and
[T ω T ]: both configurations are expressed by the preterit.
The consequences of this difference between the two languages are considerable for
the translation of first-person fiction, especially translations from English into French
because the preterit per se does not indicate whether the time locator is the moment of
narration or the moment of the events reported; it is only through clues in the immediate
context like the presence or absence of shifters, and of deictic tenses like the present or
the present perfect, that the reader can deduce whether any given statement in the preterit
is located relative to the time of enunciation, or disconnected from it. I will illustrate this
point by quoting from Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

4 The ambiguity of Nick Carraway’s perspective in The

Great Gatsby
Fitzgerald’s novel is an interesting case in point because the status of the narrative voice
is particularly ambiguous in the opening pages of the work, owing to the fact that Nick
Carraway is a witness, and not the main character, of the story he tells. Thus, when Nick
informs the reader about his past (reporting how his father gave him some advice that
contributed to shaping his temperament, how he went to college and was repeatedly
made the confidant of uninteresting young men, got involved in the Great War, came
back to the USA in a state of restlessness and decided, after consulting with his family,
to move and settle in the East), the reader is given no definite signs by which to deter-
mine whether this information about Nick’s background is already part of the story, or
whether it is only a preamble, a form of discourse or commentary before the story really
starts. In some cases, there are clues to orientate the reader’s and thus the translator’s
interpretation in one or the other direction, for instance in the following sentences from
the fourth paragraph of the novel:

… after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct
may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what
it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to
be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with
privileged glimpses into the human heart. (Fitzgerald, 1990: 7–8)

Here, the use of the present tense (‘I come to the admission’, ‘I don’t care what it’s founded
on’) suggests discourse, so that it may seem natural to translate the preterit ‘When I came
back from the East last autumn’ by the passé composé (‘Lorsque je suis rentré de la Côte
Est à l’automne dernier’) rather than the passé simple (‘Lorsque je rentrai de la Côte Est
à l’automne dernier’). Conversely, in the sentence ‘And so it happened that on a warm
windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at
all’ (1990: 12), the time locator is ‘on a warm windy evening’: it is no longer the time of
enunciation. It is clear the enunciative mode is that of historical narration here, so that

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250 Language and Literature 23(3)

it makes more sense to translate ‘I drove over to East Egg’ by the passé simple (‘Je me
rendis à East Egg’) rather than the passé composé (‘Je me suis rendu à East Egg’).
But such clues are not always present. When they are missing, or unclear, the translator’s
task becomes more complex. The opening sentence of the novel, for example, presents con-
tradictory signs: ‘In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice
that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since’ (1990: 7). The time locator at first seems
to be T (‘In my younger and more vulnerable years’), but the end of the sentence raises the
question as to whether it is not actually T , with the present perfect and the adverbial locu-
tion ‘ever since’. Actually, in English there is no need to answer the question since the pret-
erit of ‘gave’ can accommodate both perspectives; but in French, the choice between the
passé simple and the passé composé will make the sentence resonate quite differently,
reflecting either the perspective of Nick-as-character or that of Nick-as-narrator.
More importantly, beyond the level of isolated sentences, it is the status of the whole
opening of the novel that is in question. After a few paragraphs which present several
signs of discourse (verbs in the present and the present perfect), the text seems to transi-
tion to historical narration in the sixth paragraph:

I never saw this great-uncle, but I’m supposed to look like him—with special reference to the
rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in father’s office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915,
just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic
migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back
restless. Instead of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the
ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go East and learn the bond business … Father
agreed to finance me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in
the spring of twenty-two. (1990: 8–9)

In this case, the beginning of the paragraph evokes discourse, with the use of the present
tense (‘I’m supposed’, ‘hangs’) which signals a [T = T ] location. Nevertheless, after the
second sentence, there are no longer any references to the time of enunciation, and the
time locator appears to be the time of the events (‘in 1915’, ‘and a little later’): the text
has abandoned the deictic mode of enunciation to enter an anaphoric one. That is con-
firmed in the ensuing paragraphs which relate Nick’s settlement in Long Island; it there-
fore seems to make sense to translate the preterit forms in this passage (starting from ‘I
graduated from New Haven in 1915’) by the passé simple. However, this does not
entirely do justice to the narratological subtlety of the text: as a matter of fact, it will later
turn out that Nick’s narrative hasn’t really started yet at this point—as will become clear
when Nick states in paragraph 15: ‘the history of the summer really begins on the even-
ing I drove over there [to East Egg] to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans’ (1990: 11).
This surprise effect, which suddenly and retroactively constitutes the whole beginning of
the novel and the information it has delivered about Nick as secondary to the main plot,
is produced by the ambiguity of the English preterit, which remains undetermined
between historical narration and discourse.
It would then seem to make sense for the translator to choose this pivotal sentence from
paragraph 15 to transition from the passé composé to the passé simple. But things are not
quite so simple because the passé composé, in spite of its semi-aoristic value, is difficult to

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Mallier 251

sustain as a narrative tense in extended passages of text: in Weinrich’s words, it is rather fit
for ‘occasional retrospection’ (2012 [1964]: 311).7 Because of its vertical relation to the
time of enunciation, it lacks the fluidity of the passé simple which is horizontally linked to
the verbs before and after it, creating the seamless continuity of action that is characteristic
of narrative. Another parameter is that the passé composé is more oral, less formal (some-
times said to be less elitist) than the passé simple. All these factors come into play and
sometimes blur the sheer enunciative stakes of the choice between the two tenses. It is
therefore interesting to study different French versions of the novel to see how the transla-
tors have rendered the verbs in the opening paragraphs of the work. I will here sketch out
the way in which four of the existing translations have dealt with this issue.8
The first translator of Gatsby, Llona in 1926 (see Fitzgerald, 1946 [1926]), translated
virtually all foreground preterits9 with the passé simple. This is ascribable to the period
during which he composed his translation, when the passé composé was strongly associ-
ated with orality and was hardly ever found in French writing. As a consequence, the
enunciative mode is that of historical narration from the outset of the novel and it never
oscillates, except when there are clear signs of discourse such as the usage of a present
tense in the immediate vicinity of a preterit. Nick’s retrospective point of view is there-
fore almost imperceptible; it remains in the background while the perspective of Nick-
the-character is foregrounded.
In the second translation, by Tournier (Fitzgerald, 1996), the opposite phenomenon
can be observed: all foreground preterits are translated by the passé composé up until
late in the chapter, even after the pivotal sentence of paragraph 15, when it is indisput-
able that the enunciative mode has turned to historical narration. The first verb in the
passé simple appears in paragraph 27, to translate the sentence: ‘Then there was a
boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the
room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the
floor’ (1990: 13). The coincidence between the ‘boom’ of Tom Buchanan shutting the
windows within the diegesis and the shift from discourse to historical narration is
interesting; but to obtain this effect, Tournier maintains the passé composé much
longer than the enunciative mode in the original text warrants. The result is somewhat
awkward. Nick’s retrospective perspective is overwhelmingly present and the onset of
the actual story seems inexplicably delayed. However, for all the stylistic awkward-
ness of this choice, it is interesting to observe its consequences on the representation
of narrative perspective: it foregrounds Nick’s retrospective stance as narrating I, and
therefore seems to imply that the real focus of the novel is the growth of the narrator,
as a result not only of experiencing, but of telling the story. The focus of the novel
shifts in proportion away from Gatsby to Nick, and also from Nick-as-character to
Nick-as-narrator.
The third translation, by Wolkenstein (Fitzgerald, 2011), presents an intermediate solu-
tion. The translator chose to place the transition from the passé composé to the passé
simple in paragraph six, two sentences after the actual change in temporal location we
noted above: she keeps the passé composé for ‘I graduated from New Haven in 1915’ and
‘a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War’,
but she adopts the passé simple immediately after that, starting from ‘I enjoyed the
counterraid so thoroughly’ and so on. Thus, the account of Nick’s settlement in Long

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252 Language and Literature 23(3)

Island seems to be already part of the story. The pivotal sentence of paragraph 15 (‘the
history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with
the Tom Buchanans’) may therefore come as a surprise since the reader feels the narrative
had already started with the use of the passé simple from paragraph six onwards.10 But this
surprise effect is actually quite faithful to what the reader of the original text may feel.
Lastly, the fourth translation, by Jaworski (Fitzgerald, 2012), is different from the pre-
vious three in that it alternates the passé simple and the passé composé regularly until the
passage when Nick relates the evening at the Buchanans’ which marks the ‘official’ begin-
ning of the story, when the translation fittingly adopts the passé simple. Although Jaworski
says his choices were not consciously made with enunciative criteria in mind,11 this alter-
nation between the two perspectives may be seen as a way to approximate the indetermi-
nacy of the English text. Historical narration never seems entirely free from discourse
in Jaworski’s version of the opening of the novel, while avoiding the awkwardness of a
prolonged use of the passé composé. This creates a counterpart to the ambiguity of the
novel through a form of ambivalence (namely, the coexistence rather than blending of
Nick’s two voices), which is as close as French can come to the effect produced in English.
The translations of The Great Gatsby are particularly interesting to study because
Fitzgerald’s novel makes subtle use of the ductility of the English preterit. Nick’s per-
spective thus remains indeterminately poised between his statuses as observer and par-
ticipant, and between his identities as narrator and as character in the story. In French,
translators constantly have to choose between discourse and historical narration
through their use of the passé composé or the passé simple, which affects the degree to
which the novel will be perceived as the story of its eponymous hero or that of the com-
ing of age of its narrator. It is obviously only a matter of shifting the balance slightly one
way or the other, since ultimately the novel is both; but such small differences have far-
reaching reverberations. Thus, although each translator individually cannot help but
reduce somewhat the indeterminacy of the original text, their collective voices and dif-
ferent versions taken together enhance the complexity of the novel and constitute a trib-
ute to its richness. The convergence between translation studies and narratology
felicitously works both ways: a keen awareness of narratological issues may guide the
translator’s choices, but studying a work of literature in various translations can also help
the critic shed new light on the singularity and complexity of its narrative strategies. The
recourse to linguistics nourishes the dialogue between the two disciplines by helping to
chart a map of the multiple ways in which they overlap.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

Notes
1. Literally ‘The formal apparatus of enunciation’.
2. For purposes of clarity, I will write the terms historical narration and discourse in small
capitals when I refer to Benveniste’s notions and in lower case otherwise.
3. Genette later acknowledged the problem (1983: 10). For a detailed history of this complex
overlap of notions see Patron (2011).

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Mallier 253

4. The full quotation from Gambara reads as follows: ‘Après un tour de la galerie, le jeune
homme regarda tour à tour le ciel et sa montre, fit un geste d’impatience, entra dans un bureau
de tabac, y alluma un cigare, et jeta un regard sur son costume, un peu plus riche que ne le per-
mettent en France les lois du goût.’ Genette, for instance, considered this as an exception to
the ‘historical’ mode of narrative in the passage, because it expresses judgment and is written
in ‘appreciative language’; he therefore saw it as an ‘enclave’ of discourse within historical
narration (Genette, 1966: 162).
5. I voluntarily overlook the aoristic uses of the présent, exemplified by statements like ‘l’eau
bout à cent degrés’ (‘water boils at a hundred degrees’), as they are not relevant for this
discussion.
6. My approach differs from Culioli’s theory of tenses and aspects here, in which the present
continuous is considered as a ‘location by identification’ [T = T ]and the present perfect as
a ‘location by differentiation’ [T ≠ T ], because it is the aspect of these forms (perfective
or imperfective) which is taken into account. I classify the present perfect as an instance of
[T = T ] to reflect the fact that, as is noted by Culiolian linguists themselves, the present
perfect is ‘not a past tense’: ‘Its fundamental value is that of a kind of stock-taking in the
present (resultative aspect) of something which occurred before the present. The locating time
is the moment of utterance … Of course the present perfect is never a past tense, not even an
indefinite past tense.’ (Bouscaren et al., 1992: 29)
7. Yet, more and more translations use the passé composé as their main narrative tense, especially
in the genre of the thriller, sometimes at the request of publishers who deem it more ‘mod-
ern’ than the passé simple. This contributes to blurring the enunciative stakes presented here
and it may lead to the ‘disappearance of the simple forms of the preterite’ which Benveniste
doubted would ever happen: ‘as the tense of historical narrative, the aorist holds its own very
well, and moreover it is not threatened at all and no other tense could take its place. Let those
who consider it to be on the way to extinction only try to replace the aorists by perfects in the
passages cited above. The result would be such that no author could be persuaded to present
history in such a way’ (1971b: 209–210).
8. Three more translations exist: see Fitzgerald (1991, 2013a, 2013b).
9. My analysis deals exclusively with ‘foreground’ verbs, that is, narrative uses of the preterit
which call for the passé simple or the passé composé, and leaves aside the iterative and sta-
tive uses of the preterit which form the ‘background’ of a narrative and are translated by the
French imparfait. For the foreground/background distinction concerning narrative verbs in
text linguistics, see Weinrich (2012 [1964]: 107–130).
10. I overlook occasional uses of the passé simple by Wolkenstein in the first paragraphs of the
novel for lack of space to analyze the text closely. For a more detailed study of these four
translations of the first chapter of The Great Gatsby see Mallier (2013).
11. I had the opportunity to discuss the matter with Jaworski during a symposium on translations
of The Great Gatsby in Europe (Université Bordeaux Montaigne, 26 October 2012).

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Author biography
Clara Mallier is Senior Lecturer in American literature at Université Bordeaux Montaigne (France).
Her research focuses on the representation of consciousness in first-person narration. She is the
author of a narratological analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (The Sun Also
Rises: roman holographique, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011) and has published
various articles on Hemingway, FS Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck and Jim Harrison.

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