But if the emergence of narrative characters requires such social and historical preconditions, then the dilemmas of Propp and Greimas are themselves less methodological than historical ones; they result from projecting later categories of the individual subject back anachronistically onto narrative forms which precede the subject’s emergence when they do not unreflexively admit into the logic of their narrative analyses precisely those ideological categories that it was the secret purpose of later texts (for example, nineteenth-century novels) to produce and to project.
