ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that, far from alienating narrative from itself, the active presence of the communicative act and indeed its dynamic interaction with the message must be recognized as vital aspects of all artistic narrative structure. Classical narrative and its modern popular derivatives are taken as a norm. The implied reader is of secondary importance for the discussion of the essential features of narrative: implied audiences play a role in the highly lyrical construct and in read or staged drama. Transformations of one combination to another take place in all narratives. Narrative transgression appears possible at both ends of the spectrum: as reduction to a minimum of the presentational process in natural narrative or as reduction of the presented world to a few items in the freeplay of experimental fiction. Positively seen, these are merely the two antithetic regions of all narrative of which the inexhaustible dialectic interplay always results in the synthesis of a specific, i.e. historical, narrative structure.
