Emergent Narrativity
Propuesta de introducción al
libro sobre la narratividad que edito con John Pier para la serie
Narratologia (Berlín y Nueva York: Walter de Gruyter; saldrá en 2007).
El borrador de la propuesta, en español, aquí.
Why is a narrative a narrative? What makes a narrative more or less
narrative? Which properly narrative elements can be discerned in
narrative architecture? Which are the formal and communicative resources
a narrative can exploit or develop in specifically narrative ways?
Which elements or resources can legitimately be labeled "narrative" in a
text which is, nevertheless, not "a narrative"? These questions stake
out, at least in part, the issue of narrative specificity, or
narrativity.
These initial questions have some common ground,
but they also point out different dimensions of the problem and
directions for discussion. We might therefore distinguish (following
Gerald Prince) "narrativehood" (a matter of whether something is or is
not "a narrative") from "narrativeness" (the determination of how narrative it is, and in which ways)
—as different dimensions of narrativity. Or we might differentiate
diegetic narrativity from mimetic narrativity (with Ansgar Nünning and
Roy Sommer). We may address the narrativity of the lyric, or the element
of diegetic narrativity in drama; or analyze the narrative specificity
of interactive online games.
Two main approaches to the issue
of narrativity might be labeled the "structuralist" and the
"post-structuralist" one. Structuralist approaches tended to focus on
formal approaches to narrativity and on the narrativity of "narratives";
post-structuralism has favoured the fuzziness of reader-response, and
has explored the fringes of narrativity, or the narrative components of
non-narrative phenomena.
A typical structuralist approach to
narrativity might start from a structural analysis of the narrative text
into levels of analysis (for instance, story and discourse, or fabula
and siuzhet, or the three-level action, story and discourse). From
thence, we might analyze the narrative specificity of each of those
levels: e.g. which kind of actions will yield higher narrativity, or
which discursive strategies are specific to narratives, or favoured by
narrative representation. One might focus, for instance, on the varying
modes and aspects of diegetic narrativity or those of mimetic
narrativity; on the narrative logic of event sequences, or the different
meanings and modes of closure at the level of the action, of the story
structure, and of the rhetoric of narrating. Many of the constitutive
phenomena of narrativity are still insufficiently explored within the
tradition of mainstream or classical narratology, which therefore
remains a fruitful line of inquiry.
Following a
post-structuralist tack, on the other hand, one would stress the fact
that "some narratives are born narratives, some become narratives, and
some have narrativity thrown upon them". The (inter)active role of the
receiver and the multiple contexts and uses of narrative would be
emphasized. One remembers that in the heyday of formalism, literary
theorists tried to provide formal or structural definitions of
literature. These have been by and large discredited and now functional
definitions are preferred: few theorists would now question that "some
literary works are born as literature, some become literature and some
have literariness thrown upon them". Certainly, making a similar claim
about narrative is a much bolder and (arguably) questionable move. After
all, isn't narrative by definition a structure (e.g. "a structure of
events")?
However questionable when pushed to an extreme, this
relativization of narrativity is a fruitful line of inquiry for
poststructuralist narratology. Far from being dependent on universal,
context-free structures and traits, narrativity is largely tied to
pragmatic, functional, contextual, generic and cultural circumstances.
Classical narratology provided "grammatical" or structural definitions
of narrativity; but this phase of narratology has been succeeded by
poststructuralist or postclassical narratology. A useful contrastive
characterization of both phases can be found in Gerald Prince's article
"Narratologie classique et narratologie postclassique" in Vox Poetica.
Postclassical narratology favours definitions which are more
interdisciplinary and more tied to cultural contexts and debates.
Definitions—or perhaps problematizations, as when, for instance, the
very concept of narrativity is problematized, by being considered no
longer a neutral concept but one defined in relation to issues of genre,
of standard and nonstandard language, and generally speaking as an
issue of social semiotics (as in Beatriz Penas's chapter in this
volume).
According to the glossary of the recent Blackwell Companion to Narrative Theory
(ed. James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz; Blackwell, 2005),
narrativity is "the formal and contextual qualities distinguishing
narrative from non-narrative, or marking the degree of 'narrativeness'
in a discourse, the rhetorical principles underpinning the production or
interpretation of narrative; the specific kinds of artifice inherent in
the process of narrative representation." (P. 548) There is ample room
in this definition to consider that the narrativity of a text (or
"phenomenon") need not to be predetermined, but may rather be subject to
reinterpretation, or be jointly constructed through the interaction of
the narrator and the receiver or interpreter.
The issue of
narrativization must therefore be considered together with narrativity.
Narrativization involves a structuring, narrativizing activity exerted
on non-narrative or material, or the reorganization of previous
narrative structures in order to produce a new narrative (cf. José Ángel
García Landa's paper on retelling in this volume). In Hayden White's
narratology of history, narravitization is a task effected by the
historian to impose a plot-like order on prenarrative historical data;
here it is the author who narrativizes. Monika Fludernik has emphasized,
instead, the reader's use of narrativizing strategies to naturalize
difficult texts—e.g. by reading them as as a sequence of events, or as
the focalization of an experiencing mind.
Gerald Prince, who
has distinguished the dimensions of "narrativehood" and "narrativeness"
within narrativity, has thereby drawn attention to the narrativity of
texts that we wouln't want to call narratives; these texts may show
different kinds of narrativeness (e.g. the representation of
experientiality, varying proportions between action and commentary,
between virtuality and actuality of the represented events… etc.)
without thereby qualifying for narrativehood. These degrees of
narrativeness are perhaps best classified by Didier Coste's mapping of
different traits which may be present in a greater or lesser degree (in Narrative as Communication). The main constitutive elements of narrativity according to Coste are: transactiveness/non-transactiveness, transitiveness/intransitiveness, causality/non-causality, specificity/generality, singularity/banality, and the presence/absence of alternative courses of action.
Apart from these scalar categories, Marie-Laure Ryan has noted the importance of the dimension of virtuality/actuality
in plots (and the varieties of its unfolding in the contrast betweeen
the "actual" narrative world and the private worlds of the characters;
she has also emphasized the relevance of different modalities of
narrativity: the simple narrativity of folk tales, the figurative
narrativity of genres such as the lyric, philosophy, or history; the
complex narrativity of canonical novels; the instrumental or subordinate
narrativity of exempla, sermons… etc.
The recent Routledge
Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory features articles on narrativity by
Prince, and on narrativization by Jan Alber, which address these issues.
But arguably other articles on narrative in this volume are just as
relevant to a discussion of narrativity: those addressing issues of
genres or text-types. Reflecting on narrativity along the lines of
text-type takes us back inescapably to the definition of narrative, and
(in Alexandra Georgakopoulou's article in the Routledge Encylopedia of
Narrative Theory) back to definitions such as Chatman's: narrative
necessitates a double chronology, the chronology of representing
discourse and the chronology of represented events in the story (—on
which more shortly).
Text-type approaches to narrativity may
address the specific differences in the narrativity of properly
narrative genres (e.g. kinds of plot-structures in drama vs. those of
novels; the Aristotelian contrast between the tragedy and the epic; the
narrative specificity of the short story, etc.). That is, different
kinds and modes of narrativeness. Issues of narrativehood have also been
prominent: the frontiers of narrative vs. those of other major text
types, such as exposition, explication, instruction, or non-narrative
conversation. Linguistic theories of discourse modes or speech-act
theory are also highly relevant to this discussion.
As noted
by Georgakopoulou, some theorists (Bruner, Swales, Virtanen; one might
add Ricoeur, Dennett, Turner, Fisher, etc.) have placed narrative at an
even higher structural level, beyond these text types. Narrative would
be a more encompassing cognitive operation or macro-text-type; such
approaches tend to emphasize the presence of narrativity (the narrative
ingredient) in each of these major text-types. Georgakopoulou finds that
by focusing on narrative at such a level of generality, one tends to
forget to keep a perspective on the specific differences between actual
narratives. Contemporary tendencies in analysis tend to focus less on
abstract formal elements, and emphasize instead the intricacies of
specific and situated uses of forms in localized generic or social
contexts. "One possibility would be to explore narrative as a dynamic
conglomeration of more or less prototypical textual, functional, and
contextual parameters" (596). She emphasizes the varying uses of
resources in different contexts and the and changing degrees of
attention users pay to these resources, as well as the appearance of
local hybrid modes in specific communicative contexts and communities.
Clearly, what is "a good story" in one community or under one set of
conventions may be sorely lacking in narrativity from a different point
of view. The eye of the beholder, therefore, must be taken into account
in any discussion of narrativity. One might also look to deliberate
parodies or anti-narratives, which deconstruct narrative conventions and
show a kind of negative narrativity, a narrativity by contrast.
A longer article on "Genre theory in narrative studies" by Michael Kearns in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory
necessarily covers some of this ground as well. We find here again a
conception of genre (narrative genre, in this case) as a set of
conventions "activated" by the reader: "To approach a text as *narrative
is to implement expectations about point, *narrative progression or
transformation, *actants, and *narrator (see narrativity; tellability);
in fact, any text containing a sequence of *events invites these
expectations" (201).
Kearns traces back to Aristotle the
classical or taxonomic conceptions of genre, and notes that in the
twentieth century these were displaced by functionalist concepts which
integrate literary genres within a wider linguistic framework. Thus,
Genette redefines narrative as a "linguistic mode" beyond the limits of
specific literary genres—a mode which can be used by any genre. And
Derrida's "law of genre" conceives of texts as partaking of genres
without belonging to them. This law is also relative to the act of
reading: thus, the narratologist must examine the ways in which readers
use narrative conventions together with those relative to other types of
discourse in dealing with a given text.
The influence of
hermeneutics, Kearns notes, has also put restraints on foundational and
absolutist conceptions of genre, since the hermeneutic circle
necessitates a two-way movement between text and reader and a
negotiation between the various elements and component parts of a
discourse. None of these strictures on "genre", however, limit the need
to study narrative as a specific cognitive, linguistic and cultural
phenomenon, with a distinctive status and requiring special study. But
present-day theorists prefer to approach genres and discourse modalities
with a multidimensional grid of scaled parameters, rather than with
absolute and exclusive categories—a fuzzier approach to the issue of
specificity both at the level of genre and at the level of the
individual text.
Issues of genre bear on the production, the
receiver's processing and the cultural reception of specific narratives.
On the pole of production, generic narrative patterns act as
guidelines, from the most general level of narrative configuration
understood as a basic cognitive process, through overarching cultural
master narratives, archetypal patterns, or myths—indeed all the
dimensions of Genette's architextuality—up to the concrete ideologies
located in a specific period or commmunity. The processing, reading or
interpretation of narratives likewise necessitates such architextual and
ideological patterns to allow communicative interaction. Cultural
institutions and ideological processes then reuse specific acts of
reception (and in turn condition them) so that certain narrative
patterns, genres, or certain specific narratives, are awarded a
privileged cultural status (e.g. "literature", "history") or are
otherwise associated to specific communities, communicative contexts,
functions. The social uses of narrative patterns at the levels of
production, of processing and of cultural reception feed back on each
other, so that, for instance, producers of narrative do not work in a
void but in a cultural context which receives certain kinds of narrative
in ways which are to some extent pre-established (while potentially
subject to change through individual action).
As we have
noted, many recent theorists have emphasized the role of narrative as a
natural linguistic mode and an ingredient present in many genres. This
"wider" conception of narrative as an overarching mode dissociated form
specifically narrative texts has recently come under attack by Shlomith
Rimmon Kennan ("Concepts of Narrative", in The Traveling Concept of Narrative).
Rimmon-Kenan takes issue with the generalized use of the term
"narrative" in psychoanalysis, in critical discourse analysis, and in
other humanistic disciplines. Although she recognizes the presence of
narrative elements in many of the phenomena these disciplines label as
"narratives", Rimmon-Kenan insists on the need of a double time sequence
(that of action and that of its representation) and of a mediating
instance (a narrator, etc.) in order to label a phenomenon as
"narrative".
(Although one wonders, alongside with proponents
of three-tiered narrative models, whether the triple chronology of (1)
action, (2) story and (3) narrative discourse may not be more adequate:
- The chronology of action, i.e. the narrated events not as they are narrated but as they are supposed to have happened.
- The chronology of story, i.e. the narrated events in the order, perspective, etc. articulated by the narration.
- The chronology of narrative discourse, i.e. the story plus the
narrating of the story, or the narrating as speech event, including
digressions, interactive moves towards the receiver, etc.)
While many (literary) narratologists may have found irritating the
anything goes use of "narrative" by social analysts or psychologists,
and to that extent agree with Rimmon-Kenan's strictures, one might also
object the following. When a (social, psychological, political, etc.)
analyst calls something a "narrative" and then goes on to analyze it,
s/he is not necessarily presupposing that the narrative has already been
articulated by someone. Quite often, the analyst is doing double duty:
at once constructing the narrative, articulating it out of disperse and
partially related elements in the discursive space being analyzed, and
immediately (or simultaneously) s/he articulates in addition a
counternarrative which provides an alternative account or helps
configure a more comprehensive argument (thereby showing that the
narrative which has been identified or brought to light in the
discursive space under consideration was one-sided or ideologically
biassed).
It is understandable that, in the process, sometimes
straw targets may be set in order to be demolished, or open doors may
be closed so that the analyst may crash through them (no doubt depending
on one's viewpoint vis à vis the door). Yet there is possibly no other
way in which the analyst's work may be done. For instance, if we speak
about "the Left's narrative of the Spanish War" we create to a large
extent a fiction, which will have to be much more closely argued and
articulated in detail if we want to avoid simplistic a simplistic
perspective. Be as it may, we will be effecting a selection,
structuring, interpretation, etc., both of the discourse on the Spanish
War (extracting a narrative from them) and of the narrative subject to
whom we attribute that narrative ("the Spanish Left", for instance). And
that work of narrative structuring will be done, quite possibly, with a
view to effecting a critique of the narrative we have just articulated.
Therefore, from an interactional, postclassical, or
socio-semiotic perspective on narrativity, the analyst is not a neutral
analyst. It is not just that the process of analysis is ideologically
articulated: the very object of such analysis is constituted in part by
the analysts themselves. It is the analist who must bring to light the
narrativity of the object under study, in order to deconstruct that
narrativity.
To be sure, good analysts do not produce that
narrativity out of a top hat; instead they offer a clear,
well-structured, convincingly argued formulation of phenomena which are
socially active, making us see clearly for the first time (ne'er so well
expressed) the relationships between phenomena whose mutual relation,
we now sense, was on the tip of our tongue or of our minds. To go on
with our example, the analyst will offer a perspective on "the Left's
narrative of the Civil War" which is better argued than that of "the
Left" itself (which is, to be sure, a fuzzy Narrator). Then the analyst
will subject to a critical analysis or deconstruction this narrative
which has been articulated in good measure thanks to his/her own
analytic work.
The essential issue here is that both the
narrative which is extracted and the critique to which it is subjected
are narrativizing performances which must have a hermeneutic value, and
help interpret the phenomenon under analysis, first in its existing
social manifestations, then in the critique thereof. Both steps must
manifest the emergent and interpretive value of narrative, constituting
objects of knowledge where nothing but unconnected phenomena existed
before. The social analyst, therefore, does not face the situation
Rimmon-Kenan's critique would lead us to surmise, with well-articulated
narratives, with a narrator, and a double temporal sequence, ready for
analysis. Before they deconstruct a "narrative", social analysts must
construct it. Such an activity may involve much self-serving and
navel-gazing argumentation. Nonetheless, it cannot be done otherwise.
Ideological debate is made of narratives and counternarratives.
There remains to mention yet another crucial issue in the analysis of
"perceived" and emergent narrativity, one which opens a metatheoretical
dimension in narrative analysis. Different theories of narrative (and
different theories of narrativity), and the practice of different
narrative analyses, may be considered to be different perceptual
instruments which capture narrative "wavelengths" which escape other
theories (or, as Kenneth Burke would put it, other "terministic
screens"). Therefore, theoretical investigation and practical analysis
of narrative alike help to develop, in an emergent way, new dimensions
of narrativity—an interaction between narrative text and narratological
metatext which in turn feeds back on the development of new modes of
narrative which exhibit new dimensions of narrativity.
Several chapters in this book thus bring into clearer focus the
narrativity in phenomena which are not obviously narrative—an instance
may be Meir Sternberg's chapter on the narrativity of legal statutes, or
Marie-Laure Ryan's analysis of the peculiar narrativity of online
videogames.
To take another instance, recent cognitivist
analyses have emphasized the psychological narrativity of action
sequences, plans, etc., in subjective experience. One might argue that,
according to classical definitions, there is no narrativity here, since
there is no communication from one subject to another, there is no
identifiable text, there is no representation… although maybe we should
draw the line here and concede that there is, of course, a process of
representation involved here. And we might as well concede that there
is, too, a process of self-communication. As a matter of fact,
consciousness, in an emergentist conception such as George Herbert
Mead's, is a process of self-communication. The notion of
"self-indication" addressed by an organism to itself is crucial here.
A narratology which is able to include this narrativity of
consciousness among the phenomena analyzed is an instance of the kind of
theory that contributes to the perception of narrativity where none was
to be seen—which almost (though not quite) amounts to saying, where
there was none before theory came along, to bring emergent narrativity
to the surface.
