Page 36 - Oswald Ducrot, Slovenian Lectures, Digitalna knjižnica/Digital Library, Dissertationes 6
P. 36
Slovenian Lectures
You are aware besides that this distinction between the producer and
the locutor is very close to the distinction made in the study of narrative be-
tween the author, who is on the side of the producer, and the narrator, who
is on the side of the locutor. When in one of Proust’s novels, you have sen-
tences in which there is the I pronoun, for example “For a long time, I went
to bed early”, the I who went to bed early is not Proust the author, the pro-
ducer of that utterance, but the character, the person who is telling the sto-
ry as being his personal story and who, of course, is not necessarily Proust
himself.
Let me take another example to bring out this distinction between the
locutor and the producer. You can certainly think of types of discourse that
have no locutor, that is to say types of discourse in which there is no I and
in which it would be impossible to bring in an I. You know that Benveniste
distinguished two ways of speaking: on the one hand, what he called dis-
cours, that one finds, for example, in conversation, in poetry, in debates, etc.
and, on the other, histoire, in which events, wholly disconnected from the
person relating them, are recorded. Benveniste said, and he put this point
perhaps too forcefully, that in historical narrative, there can be no marks of
the first person, there can be no I. When you write the history of Rome, you
cannot introduce an I into that history. That is perhaps putting the point
too forcefully, because there are probably certain passages of a historical
narrative in which the author can introduce an I (if he makes some person-
al commentary about that history of Rome) but on the whole, one can say
that historical narrative does not have a first person. When a historian, the
producer of the narrative, wants to write the history of a certain period, he
writes as if history itself were telling the story, as if there were no particu-
lar person responsible for it. In that case, the historian is the producer but
there is, properly speaking, no locutor.
You know that there are also other ways of speaking, in which the loc-
utor does not appear. Take the case of proverbs. In a proverb, you cannot
bring in an I. A proverb is always an impersonal utterance: it is the utter-
ance of no-one in particular. Now, proverbial speech is not an extraordi-
nary phenomenon. Perhaps in modern societies, so-called intellectual socie-
ties, one has a tendency to forget about proverbs, but in old rural societies (I
remember the society I was raised in as a child), peasants liked and perhaps
still like to bring in proverbs into their talk, and in societies like the Arabic
society, a very great part of what people say is made up of proverbs, which
give force to what is said. Now, a proverb is essentially something that has
no locutor, which does not mean that the utterance itself has no producer.
You are aware besides that this distinction between the producer and
the locutor is very close to the distinction made in the study of narrative be-
tween the author, who is on the side of the producer, and the narrator, who
is on the side of the locutor. When in one of Proust’s novels, you have sen-
tences in which there is the I pronoun, for example “For a long time, I went
to bed early”, the I who went to bed early is not Proust the author, the pro-
ducer of that utterance, but the character, the person who is telling the sto-
ry as being his personal story and who, of course, is not necessarily Proust
himself.
Let me take another example to bring out this distinction between the
locutor and the producer. You can certainly think of types of discourse that
have no locutor, that is to say types of discourse in which there is no I and
in which it would be impossible to bring in an I. You know that Benveniste
distinguished two ways of speaking: on the one hand, what he called dis-
cours, that one finds, for example, in conversation, in poetry, in debates, etc.
and, on the other, histoire, in which events, wholly disconnected from the
person relating them, are recorded. Benveniste said, and he put this point
perhaps too forcefully, that in historical narrative, there can be no marks of
the first person, there can be no I. When you write the history of Rome, you
cannot introduce an I into that history. That is perhaps putting the point
too forcefully, because there are probably certain passages of a historical
narrative in which the author can introduce an I (if he makes some person-
al commentary about that history of Rome) but on the whole, one can say
that historical narrative does not have a first person. When a historian, the
producer of the narrative, wants to write the history of a certain period, he
writes as if history itself were telling the story, as if there were no particu-
lar person responsible for it. In that case, the historian is the producer but
there is, properly speaking, no locutor.
You know that there are also other ways of speaking, in which the loc-
utor does not appear. Take the case of proverbs. In a proverb, you cannot
bring in an I. A proverb is always an impersonal utterance: it is the utter-
ance of no-one in particular. Now, proverbial speech is not an extraordi-
nary phenomenon. Perhaps in modern societies, so-called intellectual socie-
ties, one has a tendency to forget about proverbs, but in old rural societies (I
remember the society I was raised in as a child), peasants liked and perhaps
still like to bring in proverbs into their talk, and in societies like the Arabic
society, a very great part of what people say is made up of proverbs, which
give force to what is said. Now, a proverb is essentially something that has
no locutor, which does not mean that the utterance itself has no producer.
