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")