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.

4. The Rhetoric of Narrative

• The rhetoric of narrative is its power. It has to do with all those elements of the text that produce the many strong or subtle combinations of feeling and thought we experience as we read.
• Causation - We are made in such a way that we continually look for the causes of things. The inevitable linearity of story makes narrative a powerful means of gratifying this need. Many of the greatest narratives (the Babylonian War of the Gods, the Book of Genesis in the Bible, the Aeneid, Paradise Lost) are narratives of causation on the largest scale, telling of the origin of a nation or of life itself.
  • Myths and epics are kinds of narrative that, among other things, explain the world for us in terms of cause.
  • We will read a causal connection whereby what comes after is triggered by what went before.
  • The sequencing of narrative works on us so suggestively that we often don't need the explicit assignment of cause to be encouraged to think causally.
  • Our minds inveterately seek structure, and they will provide it if necessary... we are inherently disposed to turn raw sensation into perception.
  • The presence of causation increases narrativity.
  • The post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy is described, by Barthes, as "the mainspring of narrative." Cause and effect work sequentially, just as stories do. The error lies in passing from the valid assumption that all effects follow their causes to the false one that to follow something is to be an effect of that thing.
  • We could say that scientists, conducting their experiments, are trying to write narratives that are so uncluttered by competing elements that cause and effect are genuinely demonstrable in the stories they tell.
  • Nietzsche: "It is the effect that causes us to produce a cause."
• Rhetoric of the real - narrative accounts for things - we don't really believe something is true unless we can see it as a story. Bringing a collection of events into narrative coherence can be described as a way of normalizing those events, rendering them plausible, allowing one to see how they all "belong".
  • In the Man Without Qualities, Ulrich finds that "he had lost this elementary, narrative mode of thought to which private life still clings, even though everything in public life has already ceased to be narrative and no longer following a thread, but instead spreads out as an infinitely interwoven surface."
  • Frank Kermode argues that we all believe that somehow, in some occult fashion, if we could only detect it, everything will be found to hang together.
  • People say "it's just a story". It is not narrativity in itself that persuades us that a story is true, but some subset of the qualities that convey narrativity. Perhaps it is "continuity" and "narrative coherence". If the story hangs together, it responds to a bias that favors order over chaos.
  • The Simpson trial, like any trial, was a contest of narratives, each seeking to bring the facts into conformity with a coherent narrative that favored its conception of the accused.
• Masterplots - are stories that we tell over and over in myriad forms and that connect vitally with our deepest values, wishes, fears. We seem to connect our thinking about life, and particularly about our own lives, to a number of masterplots that we may or may not be fully aware of.
  • Masterplots often work in secret, influencing us without our wholly realizing it.
  • Some masterplots, very loosely conceived, appear to be universal: the quest, the story of revenge, seasonal myths of death and regeneration.
  • All national cultures have masterplots. For Kermode, they constitute: "the mythological structure of a society from which we derive comfort, and which it may be uncomfortable to dispute." But no culture can be summed up in one masterplot. National culture is a complex weave of numerous, often conflicting masterplots.
  • Lawyers, politicians, and advertisers gain leverage by handling the narratives they use in such a way as to activate cherished masterplots of their audience.
  • In the Simpson trial, the masterplots of the unjustly punished black man, the battered wife, and the unjust privilege accorded to celebrity and wealth are all in competition.
  • Masterplots create an image of the world in which good and evil are clearly identifiable, and in which blame can fall squarely on one party or another. To the degree that one or another of these masterplots tends to shape our view of the world, we may find it difficult to weigh the evidence dispassionately. Some would argue that our identities are so invested in our personal masterplots, that when these masterplots are activated it is impossible to break out of the vision they create. But, then, others argue that there are too many cases of people changing their minds in the face of the evidence to believe that we are quite so imprisoned.
  • The apparent failure of taste, or lack of sophistication, has a lot to do with masterplots and our personal vulnerability to some of them.
  • Just as most narratives of any length work with our expectations of causal order, so too do they work either with or against masterplots
• Types - are recurring kinds of character. Cinderella is both a type and a masterplot. The battered wife is a type. A masterplot comes equipped with types and when they seem to formulaic, we call them stereotypes. Masterplots can be rendered stereotypically as well.
• In an article about a Khadafy speech:
  • The character/narrator "Khadafy" is working with the masterplot of David and Goliath.
  • The journalist's narrative works to undermine the orator's masterplot and to replace it with the ranting of a type: the tin-pot dictator.

5. Closure

• In almost every narrative of any interest, there is a conflict in which power is at stake. You might say that conflict structures narrative.
• The Greek for conflict/contest is "agon" and, the hero is the "protagonist" and their chief opponent is the "antagonist".
• The representation of conflict in narrative provides a way for a culture to talk to itself about, and possibly resolve, conflicts that threaten to fracture it.
• There are conflicts about values, ideas, feelings, and ways of seeing the world. And there is, of course, no culture without many such conflicts.
• Narrative may play an important social role for gaining support on one sides of a conflict, for negotiating the claims of opposing sides, or simply for providing a way for people to live with a conflict that is irreconcilable (such as the conflict between the desire to live and the knowledge that we have to die).
• Endings - When a narrative resolves a conflict, it achieves closure, and this usually comes at the end of the narrative. We expect stories to end. We talk about good and bad, satisfying and unsatisfying endings.
  • Closure does not have to come at the end of a narrative or indeed at all. Closure and ending are distinct concepts.
  • We want shape in our narratives, but we seem also frequently content with postponing the end - and therefore some final perception of narrative shape - indefinitely.
• Suspense and surprise: All successful narratives of any length are chains of suspense and surprise that keep us in a fluctuating state of impatience, wonderment, and partial gratification:
  • Closure is something we look for in narrative, a desire that authors understand and often expend considerable art to satisfy or to frustrate. It can't be satisfied too quickly, because we seem also to enjoy being in the state of imbalance or tension that precedes closure. In fact, narrative is marked almost everywhere by its lack of closure - this is suspense.
  • Surprise
• For Barthes, narratives arouse both expectations and questions and then either give us satisfaction or frustrate us:
  • Expectations (proairetic code) - we recognize by numerous signals, the kind of action or sequence of events that we are reading (revenge, falling in love, escape, murder, a bad dream). Once actions start in a certain way, we expect what follows to be consistent with the overall code. This is another way to look at masterplots: as coded narrative formulas that end with closure.
    • Half of what gives life to expectations in narrative is their violation, for which the common word is surprise
    • We have to imperfectly balanced needs: to see expectations fulfilled and to see them violated.
    • The surprise of a conclusion can casts a light backward over the whole narrative, giving it a new shape and tone as the sense of surprise wears away and the ending is seen to fit.
    • The key to suspense is the possibility, at least, that things could turn out differently. But for any audience, there is a range of what they will tolerate in the way of surprise.
    • Codes and formulas thrive on their inflexibility.
    • Without expectations in the first place we could not appreciate variations.
    • One of our expectations in almost all narratives of any complexity is that our expectations will turn out to have been anywhere from inadequate to completely wrong. We expect, in short to be surprised!
    • Narrative can succeed in many ways, not just by delaying the discharge (suspense) but by happily frustrating it altogether (surprise).
    • A child will want you to read her favorite story every night, though she knows exactly what's going to happen. Clearly narrative provides pleasures other than suspense and surprise.
  • Questions (hermeneutic code) - At the level of questions, we anticipate enlightenment.
• By not closing, the plays of Shakespeare, like so many other powerful narratives, don't tell us what to think but cause us to think. Narrative as such, to borrow a line from IA Richards, is a "machine to think with".
• We can say that closure is something we tend to look for in narratives. Closure brings satisfaction to desire, relief to suspense, and clarity to confusion. It normalizes. It confirms the masterplot. At the same time we don't want closure too quickly.

6. Narration

• All narratives, however playful, carry meaning in the sense of ideas and judgements with them. Some narratives arrive at judgements - ie at closure on the level of intellectual and moral questions - and some don't.
• Narrators - Can be variably reliable:
  • When you narrate, you construct, but constructing is not the same things as lying. Narrative is always a matter of selecting from a great arsenal of pre-existing devices and using them to synthesize our effects. One of these devices is the narrator.
  • Does the narrator narrate everything?
    • Direct discourse/ direct thought - is when the narrator cites a character's own words/thoughts in quotation marks, and these could then be seen as outside the narration. Indirect discourse/thought dispense with the quotation marks and are clearly part of the narration.
    • Some modernist narrators experimented with interior monologue, basically forms of "direct thought" but words are probably inadequate for representing thought accurately.
• Voice - The two principle forms are first-person ("I woke up") and third-person ("He woke up"), though there are some experiments with second-person ("You woke up"). In second-person, is the reader really thrust in some way into the role of this unnamed protagonist or do we read it as someone talking to himself? Or do we get used to the strangeness and read it as virtual 3rd person?
  • Most third person is told by an external narrator situated outside of the world of the story, but there is often still the sense of a personality doing the narrating, processing the scene and presenting it to/for us.
  • There are many instances of 3rd person narration that are anything but omniscient.
• Focalization - The lens through which we see characters and events in the narrative. Flaubert was an expert at blending external 3rd person narration with moments of focalization through certain characters.
• Distance - Refers to the narrator's degree of involvement in the story she tells.
  • In order to create narratorial distance, Hemingway devised a narratorial voice that gives the impression of complete emotional noninvolvement in what it narrates.
• Reliability - To what extent can we rely on the narrator to give us an accurate rendering of the facts?
  • In the case of unreliable narrators, narration itself - its difficulties, its liability to be subverted by one's own interests and prejudices and blindnesses - becomes part of the subject.
  • Some unreliable narrators can be trusted for the facts but not for their interpretation, and some can not even be trusted for the facts.
  • Getting to the implied author (the voice and opinions that we believe animate the story and the level of unreliability of the narrator) is one of the central challenges of interpretation.
• Free indirect style - A fluid adaptation of the narrator's voice in a kind of ventriloquism of different voices, all done completely without the usual signposts of punctuation and attribution, while maintaining the grammatical third person. Sometimes we also talk about "stream of consciousness" or "interior monologue", but these remain three separate but related concepts.

7. Interpreting Narrative

• Judgement, in the sense that we are using it, is an attunement of feeling to its object.
• Readers and audiences are often trying to locate a sensibility behind the narrative that accounts for it is is constructed - a sensibility on which to base their interpretations.
• An implied author is that sensibility (that combination of feeling, intelligence, knowledge, and opinion) that "accounts for" the narrative. Insofar as we debate the intended meaning of a narrative, we root our positions in a version of the implied author that we infer from the text.
• Underreading:
  • We are vulnerable to narrative texts - given their rhetorical resources they seem to manipulate us and in general to exercise a good deal of power over our lives. Throughout our lives we are prisoners of these cultural texts - they even do a lot of our thinking for us.
  • But we also exercise a power over texts. We do not simply absorb the information in the narrative discourse but, almost invariably, we overlook things that are there and put in things that are not there. We underread and we overread.
  • Kermode: "The history of interpretation may be thought of as the history of exclusions, which enable us to seize upon this issue rather than on some other as central, and choose from the remaining mass only what seems most compliant.
  • Even at a high degree of richness or sophistication, interpretation is a form of closure in that it is an assertion of meaning within which the text can be accommodated.
  • Musil, in The Man Without Qualities, went so far as to argue that narrative itself can be a kind of underreading insofar as it is rooted in the desire (and necessity) to underread the complexity of life: When one is overburdened and dreams of simplifying one's life, the basic law of this life, the law one yearns for, is nothing other than that of narrative order, the simple order that allows one so say: "First this happened and then that happened..." It is the simple sequence of events in which the overwhelmingly manifold nature of things is represented, in a unidimensional order, as a mathematician would say, stringing all that has occurred in space and time on a single thread, which calms us; that celebrated "thread of the story," which is, it seems, the thread of life itself.
  • In life we have to act. In order to act, we need to know (or at least think we know) what the story is. Our survival as a species has probably depended on our doing this with sufficient speed and efficiency to get done what we need to get done in order simply to stay alive.
• Overreading - At the same time we overread, we find in narratives qualities, motives, moods, ideas, judgement, even events for which there is not direct evidence in the discourse.
  • Overreading is a phenomenon that is frequently cued by the masterplots in which our fears and desires are most engaged.
  • Our minds seem to abhor narrative vacuums. We try to fill them in.
  • Probably the most difficult thing about reading narratives is to remain in a state of uncertainty. If a narrative won't close by itself, one often tries to close it, even if it means shutting one's eyes to some of the details and imagining others that aren't there, underreading and overreading.
  • One way to define intentional interpretation is the effort to reduce both underreading and overreading to a minimum. It is a process perhaps best achieved by minds coming together in a mutual lending of perceptions.
• Gaps - Narratives by their nature are riddled with gaps.
  • Cruxes - Important gaps which hide critical information. In criticism, a crux is an oft-debated element in a work that, depending on how we interpret it, can significantly effect how we interpret the work as a whole
• Repetition - When you are having trouble interpreting, you can look for what is repeated:
  • Themes - Are abstract, and are implicit in motifs.
  • Motifs - Are concrete.
  • Eg, In Wuthering Heights, windows are motifs that support the themes of escape, exclusion, and imprisonment.
• We have little clear understanding of what exactly the mind does when it reads.

8. Three Ways to Interpret Narrative

• Some would argue that, far from being whole, all narratives are necessarily incomplete, fractured, and even self-contradictory.
• Intertextuality (from Kristeva) - Narratives have no borders but are part of an immense, unfolding (and hence ever-changing) tapestry.
• Intentional Readings - The ideas and judgements that we infer from the narrative are understood to be in keeping with a sensibility that intended these effects.
  • Narrative is one way of creating order out of chaos
• Symptomatic Readings - Yours is an interpretation that the implied author would not agree with, but you are also maintaining that this is what is psychologically and culturally significant about the novel. The fact that the author may not agree with your reading, that he may in fact be shocked by it, could itself be taken as support for your position.
  • A deconstructive reading deconstructs the intentional reading to find in back of it a reading that the author had no conscious intention of constructing.
  • Authors who are read symptomatically are frequently conceived of as fractured - split between what they intend (through the implied author) and what they reveal.
  • Though they seem to be opposite ways of interpreting narrative, both intentional and symptomatic approaches are oriented toward a meaning that is presumed to lie behind the narrative.
  • A great deal (but not all) of Marxist, feminist, new historicist, and psychoanalytic criticism involves varying forms of symptomatic interpretation.
• Adaptive Readings - All interpretation involves some level of creativity in the sense that we are all active collaborators in making meaning out of narrative.
  • In reading or viewing or listening to any narrative, we are at once taking in and adding, tracing, and shaping. There is a continuum here, and at a certain point we find that what we call interpretation is looking more and more like what we call creation. And yet interpretation is still present, even if it is flagrant misinterpretation.
  • Bloom: all great works of art are necessarily powerful misreadings of great works of art that precede them.
  • To tell a story is to try to understand it.

9. Interpretation Across Media

• Adapters, if they are at all good, are raiders; they don't copy, they steal what they want and leave the rest.
• Dudley Andrew distinguishes between:
  • Borrowing - Intertextuality, the kind of casual appropriation of stories, ideas, situations that would appear to be inevitable in any creative act.
  • Intersecting - Trying to stick as close as possible to the original using the new medium (eg book to film)
  • Transforming - Use the full power of the new medium both to remain faithful to the original and at the same time to make a full transformation of it in the new medium.
• Novel readers tolerate a great deal of material unrelated or only peripherally related to the story line, while films tend to strip out this extraneous stuff and focus on the story's constitutive events.
• Retardation is one of the great pleasures of narrative. It allows us to settle in and think about what we are taking in; it also can play a key role in the development of suspense.
• When reading about a character in a novel, we draw upon pre-existing types that we have absorbed from our culture and out of which, guided by the narrative, we mentally synthesize the character or something that stands for it.
• Culture constrains all narrative. Audiences set limits on what is acceptable and what is unacceptable, and by their response they select which narratives get repeated and which fall away. Nevertheless, departures from cultural norms catch on and enter a culture's narrative pool. How this happens is as mysterious as it is exciting. But as culturally transgressive fads catch on they become in their turn cultural (or subcultural) norms.

10. Character and Self in Narrative

• It is only though narrative that we know ourselves as active entities that operate through time.
• Characters have agency. As they drive the action, they necessarily reveal who they are in terms of their motives, their strength, weakness, trustworthiness, capacity to love, hate, cherish, adore, deplore, and so on. By their actions do we know them.
• Characters are, usually, harder to understand than actions. They are themselves some of narrative's most challenging gaps.
• External causes are usually easy to spot; it is the causative chemistry inside that is hard to figure. We cannot see inside character. We must infer.
• EM Forster distinguishes between flat characters (with no hidden complexity) and round characters, who have varying degrees of depth and complexity and "cannot be summed up in a single phrase"
• In Sartre's Nausea, Roquentin is unable to integrate the contradictory aspects of Rollebon's reported behavior in the biography he is writing. There is no character there, just a chaos of unreconcilable actions. Sartre argued that this is the condition that we all find ourselves in when we think honestly, or at least clearly, about ourselves and others. Character, for him, is an idea imposed on human beings.
• All cultures and subcultures have numerous types that circulate through all the various narrative modes. When applied to real people, types appear to flatten them or deny them their full humanity, but do we know how to think about people in a type-free way? It is very hard to exclude types in representing the human.
• Characterization by type can accommodate a great deal of human complexity, especially when the character is a synthesis of multiple types.
• Autobiography can be a matter of collecting or re-collecting from memory those crucial events in the story of one's life that conform to a particular masterplot and that allow you to fulfill the requirements of the type at the center of the story.
• Readers will underread and overread, they will find types where none were intended.
• Reading with an eye out for a text's performative status frequently involves passing back and forth between intentional and symptomatic modes of interpreting.

11. Narrative and Truth

• What most audiences expect in historical narrative is not the truth but the intent to tell the truth. Nonfiction narratives are, in some sense, falsifiable.
• Fiction, by contrast, is not falsifiable because the story it tells is neither true nor false.
• Unless we are told otherwise, we assume that the fictional world in the narrative is a simulacrum of the world we actually live in, and this assumption is one of the ways we fill many of the gaps of narrative.
• We will bring our own understanding of history into a historical (or fictional) narrative. Our ideas may be correct or incorrect or just plain nuts; our feelings may be justified or unjustified; but they are, nonetheless, important features of our "own experiential reality", and they can flood the gaps in the narrative.
• Genres are freighted with subcultural ideas on subjects like gender, what is knowable, the chance of happiness, freedom of choice, the existence or nonexistence of Bod. In this view, narrative fiction spends much more time confirming our illusions than opening us up to new knowledge.
• Facts don't speak for themselves. They must be interpreted. And interpreting facts as they proceed in time requires turning them into a story. You could say that history does not really happen in the past but must wait until some narrativizes the past.
• The fruit of our experience enters into our judgment of narrative fictions. There may be, for example, something like this sense of what constitutes wisdom when one says of a novel that it is "too sentimental".
• In the game of fiction, another world is created. It can look a lot like our own or it can look utterly different. But most fictional worlds, even the bizarre ones, are just like our own in this: that within their borders they also maintain the distinction between the factual, the false, and the fictional. Accordingly, characters in these fictional worlds can get things right or get them wrong. They do so according to the facts not of our world, but of theirs. What makes this even more wonderful is that we understand it so easily. Making fictional worlds is a gift most of us acquire as early as we acquire the gift of narrative. It allows us not only to play in another world but also to use it to think meaningfully about our own world, without ever confusing the two worlds. Indeed, to confuse them is to fall victim to a pathology.

12. Narrative Worlds

• The effect of thinking of time in narrative is so pervasive that Bakhtin coined the word "chronotope" from the Greek for time (chronos) and space (topos), which would include both narrative time and space.
• We expect narrative to be spatial as well as temporal. We want to know where the action takes place, what kind of space it occupies, what else is present in this space, how vase it is, how confined, how it looks and feels. In short, action makes space, however impoverished.
• Alan Palmer argues that most of the action of any fictional narrative is in fact "mental action". Characters are constantly changing in both thought and feeling, often under the impact of physical events or in making physical events happen, but often independently of such action, one state of mind leading to another.
• All narratives of any length build worlds with all four dimensions of time and space, inhabited by characters who have inner worlds of their own, inner worlds that can, in turn, leech out into the shifting emotional and intellectual atmosphere that pervades and even extends beyong the time-space of narrative.
• Narrative can be called a thickening or layering of time.
• In Alice Munro's story, different strips of memory with different players, settings, and contexts, coexist in the narrator's consciousness. All three could not have come into being without the dimensions of time and space, yet in consciousness they take on a new kind of being, coming together in ways that exceed the coordinates of time and space:
  • This narrative world is saturated by the mind of its fictional creator and meant to work in part as a reflection of her troubling concerns in the present. In this sense, that mind is everywhere at once, rather like the way many religions see the mind of The Creator reflected everywhere in its Creation. It is a mind outside the time of this world and thus it can be, paradoxically, present in this world everywhere at once.
  • Going from point A to point B in almost any narrative is not just a matter of time, nor of space, but also something that can only be expressed figuratively as, say, a piling up of layer upon layer of awareness.
• Every day we hope, dream, fear, urge, hypothesize, fantasize, and in many other ways create worlds that don't come into being. They remain possible worlds, yet without them life would be hard to conceive.
• In all narratives there are already at least two worlds, not one:
  • The storyworld in which the characters reside and the events take place.
  • The world in which the narration takes place. This world is often invisible, especially if the narrator is not present in the story she is recounting.
• When the border between any two of these worlds is violated, for instance when someone grom one world enters the other, then you have a case of narrative metalepsis.
  • Perhaps the greatest impact of these mind-bending devices is what they tell us about ourselves: our reflexive need to naturalize what is strange, the degree to which we are willing to override that need, and what we might learn about ourselves in return.

13. Narrative Contestation

• Lizzie Borden's story is not really one story but rather a contest of stories played out in a contest of narratives. Here the agon is itself a conflict of narratives. Prosecution and defense are the antagonists and protagonists who, in their turn, operate like authors, challenged to narrate their stories so effectively that they win credence from their audience, which is either a judge or jury.
• A trial can be described as a huge, unpolished narrative compendium featuring the contest of two sets of authors, each trying to make their central narrative of events prevail by spinning narrative segments for their rhetorical impact. They fight this out in a tug of war in which the many discrete parts of their two narratives are alternately constructed and deconstructed as they work toward their final summations. As such, a trial is an immensely complicated narrative structure.
• Under US law, the heavier narrative task is placed on the prosecution, who must not simply tell a story, but tell one that is complete. It must have a central figure, fully equipped "beyond a reasonable doubt" with the motivation, opportunity, means and capability to commit the crime - that is, to engage in a complete action with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
• Reading narrative is a matter of filling in gaps. A shadow story is a story in which the gaps in the narrative are so great as to prevent the story from achieving some genera reader satisfaction that it is complete.
• The most challenging gap that we are called upon to fill in a narrative of criminal law is motive.
• The problem in criminal law of establishing motivation and the requisite personality for the deed makes the deployment of masterplots especially important. Used to invoke types, they can be powerful rhetorical tools when activated. They can absorb the complexity of a defendant's human nature into the simplicity of type.
• In non-fiction narrative, as a trial purports to be, the ultimate form of inexplicable motivation is madness.
• Given how thoroughly narrative forms saturate our thinking about the world, it would seem logical that stories of the disempowered would be excellent instruments of cultural transformation. See, for example, Critical Legal Studies and Critical Race Theory.
• In less regulated forms, narratives are in combat in most compartments of life, public and private: academic debate, scientific theoretical work, political contests, commercial advertising, and when neighbors quarrel, friends fall out, family members recall their grudges, or lovers recriminate, it is almost invariably a matter of people trying somehow to certify their narrative version of events against competing versions.
• Any well-written narrative holds us because there is a plurality of possible stories lying ahead of us as we read. In our minds, these stories jostle with each other. This is a good working definition of suspense.