The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative

1. Narrative and Life

• Given the presence of narrative in almost all human discourse, there is little wonder that there are theorists who place it next to language itself as the distinctive human trait. Frederic Jameson, for example, writes about the "all-informing process of narrative," which he describes as "the central function or instance of the human mind." Jean-François Lyotard calls narration "the quintessential form of customary knowledge."
• Narrative capability shows up in infants some time in their third or fourth, year, when they start putting verbs together with nouns. It's appearance coincides, roughly, with the first memories that are retained by adults of their infancy.
• The gift of narrative is so pervasive and universal that there are those who strongly suggest that narrative is a "deep structure," a human capacity genetically hard-wired into our minds in the same way as our capacity for grammar (according to some linguists) is something we are born with. The novelist Paul Auster once wrote that "A child's need for stories is as fundamental as his need for food."
• Narrative is the principal way in which our species organizes its understanding of time. As we are the only species on earth with both language and a conscious awareness of the passage of time, it stands to reason that we would have a mechanism for expressing this awareness.
• Of course there are clocks and, before them, other dependable non-narrative ways of organizing time: the passage of the sun, the phases of the moon, the succession of seasons, and the season cycles that we call years. Like the clock, these modes of organizing time are abstract in the sense that they provide a grid of regular intervals within which we can locate events.
• Narrative, by contrast, turns this process inside out, allowing events themselves to create the order of time. Ricoeur: "Time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal existence."
• Clock time always relates to itself. Narrative time, in contrast, relates to events of incidents. And while clock time is necessarily marked off by regular intervals of a certain length, narrative time is fluid, and not necessarily any length at all. We can slow a narrative down by adding details and thus expand time.
• Both these kinds of time have been with us as far back as history can trace. We commonly mix narrative and clock or calendar time by such phrases as "many months later" or "after a few minutes", or "when she was much older".
• Narrative is so much a part of the way we apprehend the world in time that it is virtually built in to the way we see. Brian de Palma: "People don't see the world before their eyes until it's put in a narrative mode.
• The human tendency to insert narrative time into static, immobile scenes seems almost automatic, like a reflex action. We want to know not just waht is there, but also what happened. We may never know who is being depicted in a painting or photograph or what story they may be a part of. But we do, nonetheless, have narrative formulas stored in our memory that quickly fill in certain elements of the story so far. We also have an expectation of how the story will develop, but here we have a range of possibilities, just as we do in the middle of any good story.
• In Bacon's Triptych, the experience of indeterminacy, of wanting to know and not being allowed to know, is itself a kind of pain and dimly echoes the terrible pain that the pictures express.
• Wherever we look in this world, we seek to grasp what we see not just in space but in time as well. Narrative gives us this understanding, it gives us what could be called shapes of time. Our narrative perception stands ready to be activated in order to give us a frame or context for even the most static and uneventful scenes. And without understanding the narrative we often feel we don't understand what we see. We cannot find the meaning. Meaning and narrative understanding are very closely connected.
• The word "narrative" goes back to the ancient Sanskrit "gna", a root term that means "know," and comes to us through Latin words for both "knowing ("gnarus") and "telling" ("narro")

2. Defining Narrative

• Narrative is the representation of an event or a series of events.
• Narrative is a contested term, a "fuzzy set defined at the center by a solid core of properties, but accepting various degrees of membership."
• Narrative can be used to describe:
  • Compact and definable building blocks of events that will be assembled into larger narrative structures.
  • Loose and generally recognizable structures, which may contain much non-narrative material. Generally, we will expect some kind of narrative coherence and continuity.
• A narrator is one of a number of instruments in narrative, but need not be explicitly formulated.
• Narrative is the representation of events. It consists of:
  • Story (fabula) - the event or sequence of events. We never see a story directly, but instead always pick it up through the narrative discourse. The story is always mediated, so that what we call the story is really something that we construct.
    • Jonathon Culler talks of the double logic of narrative, where the story appears both to precede and to come after the narrative discourse.
    • A story is "neither words, nor images, nor gestures, but the events, situations, and behaviors signified by the words, images, and gestures.
  • Narrative discourse (sjuzet, plot)- how the story is conveyed. This is infinitely malleable. It can expand and contract, leap backward and forward, but as we take in information from the discourse we sort it out in our minds, reconstructing an order of events that we call the story. The story can take a day, a minute, a lifetime, or eons. It can be true or false, historical or fictional. But insofar as it is a story, it has its own length of time and an order of events that proceeds chronologically from the earliest to the latest. The order of events and the length of time they are understood to take in the story are often quite different from the time and order of events in the narrative discourse.
  • Events and entities. Entities are necessary for causing events, and when those entities have human qualities, we call them characters.
  • Narrative world - Which grows larger and more complex as we absorb the narrative
• Can a story go backwards? No. All stories, like all action (except possibly at a subatomic level), go in one direction only - forward in time. Narrative discourse, by contrast, can go in any temporal direction its creator chooses.
• Even in a play that seems to eliminate the difference between a story and narrative discourse, we are almost always called upon to sort out a story from the narrative discourse, because the characters talk and as they talk we learn about events in which they are involved and which extend way beyond the boundaries of what we see on stage.
• What is necessary for the story of Cinderella to be the story of Cinderella? When does it stop being that story and start being something else? There is a distinction between:
  • Constituent events (nuclei, kernels) - Necessary for the story to be the story it is. The turning points, the events that drive the story forward and that lead to other events.
  • Supplementary events (catalyzers, satellites) - Not necessary for the story. They don't lead anywhere. They can be removed and the story will still be recognizably the same. But...
• We are always called upon to be active participants in narrative, because receiving the story depends on how we in turn construct it from the discourse

3. The Borders of Narrative

• Framing narratives - In Frankenstein, readers make their way in and then out of a succession of at least six different narratives, each with its own narrator, nested like Chinese boxes. This succession of embedded narratives has a high degree of narrativity in that they have a narrator and a complication of related events and other qualities that give us the strong sense that we are reading a story. but actually any narrative of any length is studded with embedded micro-narratives as well.
• Paratexts - material that lies somehow on the threshold of the narrative. Paratextual information can completely transform our experience of a narrative. Where narratives actually happen is in the mind.
• Narrative coherence - Is based around a common entity or set of entities and a recoverable chronological order of connected events. But, up to a point, confusion and narrative coherence can coexist (eg Faulkner's Absalom Absalom!). How much frustration is too much? And what do we call this kind of writing when it is no longer called narrative?
• All of us have head the very natural experience of recalling earlier parts of a narrative as we read, or imagining what might come next, and this is like hypertext linking backward or forward in the narrative. Non-linearity has been common to narrative discourse from the earliest recorded instances of story-telling. But story, by definition, is linear!
• If things are happening right now for the first time, do we call it narrative? Do we refer to our lives, for example, as narratives? Role-playing games, like theater improv, are like life itself. As in life, we are aware of something happening that has not been planned or written or scripted in advance - something making itself up as it goes along. This is maybe the seed-ground of stories that then could be rendered in narrative.