Two Levels, Then Three
Every narrative can be described on at least two levels. The Formalists called them fabula and sjuzhet: the events as they happened, and the events as arranged in the telling. Genette, in Discours du récit (1972), splits the second and gets three:
- histoire (story), the events in their own chronological order;
- récit (narrative discourse), the text you actually read;
- narration: the act of telling, which itself takes place somewhere in time.
The third level is not a luxury. A first-person novel has a narrator who is telling this at some point relative to the events, and that distance is often the whole subject.
Order
Anachrony is any discordance between the order of the story and the order of the narrative. Two kinds:
- Analepsis: narrating an event after later events have been told. (Flashback.)
- Prolepsis: narrating an event before it happens in the story. (Flashforward.)
Genette measures each anachrony on two axes. Its reach is how far back or forward it goes; its extent is how much story time it covers once it gets there. A novel that opens in 1940 and, in chapter two, returns to the hero's childhood in 1915 contains an analepsis of twenty-five years' reach; if that chapter covers a single afternoon, its extent is one day.
Anachrony is not a modern invention. Beginning in medias res is the ancient epic norm: the Odyssey opens in the tenth year and books IX–XII are Odysseus narrating four years of wandering to the Phaeacians, an internal analepsis, delivered by a character, covering most of the story. Horace prescribes the technique in the Ars Poetica.
Why the order matters
Change the order and you change what the reader knows when. That is the whole apparatus of suspense, irony and revelation:
| Device | What the order does |
|---|---|
| Suspense | Withholds an outcome the story already contains |
| Dramatic irony | Gives the reader knowledge a character lacks |
| Revelation | Supplies an earlier event late, rewriting what preceded it |
| Foreshadowing | A partial prolepsis, enough to prime and not to tell |
A detective novel is the pure case: the story is a murder followed by an investigation, the discourse is an investigation that gradually delivers the murder. The two orders are almost exactly inverted, and that inversion is the genre.
Counting disorder
You can measure how scrambled a narrative is. Number the story events, then write them in the order the discourse presents them. A narrative that tells event 3, then 1, then 2 has two pairs out of order — (3,1) and (3,2) — while the pair (1,2) is in order. Two inversions out of three possible pairs is a mildly reordered narrative; a fully reversed telling would have all three.
Common pitfall: treating every flashback as an analepsis of the whole narrative. Genette distinguishes internal anachronies, which stay inside the story's own span, from external ones that reach back before the narrative began. An external analepsis fills in background; an internal one revises something the reader has already been told, and only the second can genuinely change the meaning of what came before.