Narratology (pronounced nar-uh-tol-uh-jee)
The study
of narrative & narrative structure and the ways these affect human
perception (with some mission creep over the years).
1967: The
construct was narrate + -ology,
an Anglicization of the
French narratologie, coined by Bulgarian-French
historian, philosopher & structuralist literary critic Tzvetan Todorov
(1939–2017), it first appeared in his book Grammaire
du Décaméron (1967), a structural analysis of Decameron (The Decameron (1348-1353)) by the Italian writer
Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375). Although
once thought an arcane appendage to literature and a mere academic abstraction,
structuralism and narratology in the 1970s and 1980s became a very popular (and
controversial) field and while postmodernism’s historic movement may have
passed, the tools are an important part of the “learning” process used by
generative AI (artificial intelligence) to produce meaning from the LLM (large
language models.)
Boccaccio’s Decameron (literally “ten days”) was a collection of short stories,
structured into a hundred tales of seven young women and three young men who
had secluded themselves in a villa outside Florence, seeking to avoid the Black Death pandemic (1346-1353) then sweeping Europe. Although not too much should be made of this
comparison, the work in some aspects is not dissimilar to reality television,
being a mash-up of erotic scenes, set-piece jokes, suspense and unrequited
love. Todorov’s Grammaire du Décaméron was a literary analysis of the work but “grammaire” must be understood as meaning
“grammar” in the sense of the structural or narratological principles rather
than as its used in its “everyday” sense.
Historians and literary scholars have for centuries regarded Decameron as a valuable document
because, written in the Florentine vernacular of the era, although fictional,
it’s a kind of “snapshot” of life in what was one of Europe’s many troubled
times. It was Boccaccio
who dubbed Dante’s (Dante
Alighieri (circa 1265–1321)) Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy (circa 1310-1321))
“divine” (in the sense of “very good” rather than “holy”).
Narrate (to
relate a story or series of events (historically in speech or writing)) may for
years (or even decades) have been in oral use in English before the first known
use in print in 1656, etymologists noting that until the nineteenth century it
was stigmatized as “Scottish” (long a slur among the more fastidious) although
it’s thought it was derived from the “respectable” narration. Narrative ((1) a story or account of events
or (2) the art, process or technique or telling the story) was in use by the
1440s and was from the Middle French noun & adjective narrative, from the Late Latin narrātīvus
(narration (noun) & suitable for narration (adjective)), the construct
being narrāt(us) (related, told), past participle of narrāre (to relate, tell, say) + -īvus (the adjectival suffix).
Again, like “narrate”, narrative was once used exclusively of speech or
writing but in recent decades the terms have been more widely applied and not
restricted to describing the efforts of humans.
The suffix -ology was formed from -o- (as an interconsonantal
vowel) +
-logy. The origin in English of the
-logy suffix lies with loanwords from the Ancient Greek, usually via Latin and
French, where the suffix (-λογία) is an integral part of the word loaned (eg
astrology from astrologia) since the
sixteenth century. French picked up -logie from the Latin -logia, from the Ancient Greek -λογία (-logía).
Within Greek, the suffix is an -ία (-ía)
abstract from λόγος (lógos) (account,
explanation, narrative), and that a verbal noun from λέγω (légō) (I say, speak, converse, tell a story). In English the suffix became extraordinarily
productive, used notably to form names of sciences or disciplines of study,
analogous to the names traditionally borrowed from the Latin (eg astrology from
astrologia; geology from geologia) and by the late eighteenth
century, the practice (despite the disapproval of the pedants) extended to
terms with no connection to Greek or Latin such as those building on French or
German bases (eg insectology (1766) after the French insectologie; terminology (1801) after the German Terminologie). Within a few decades of the intrusion of
modern languages, combinations emerged using English terms (eg undergroundology
(1820); hatology (1837)). In this
evolution, the development may be though similar to the latter-day
proliferation of “-isms” (fascism; feminism et al).
A narrative
is a story and it can run to thousands of pages or appear in a few words on a
restaurant menu describing their fish & chips: “Ethically sourced, line-caught Atlantic cod, liberated from the frigid
depths, encased in a whisper-light, effervescent golden shroud of our signature
micro-foamed artisanal lager batter and served with hand-sliced, elongated
potato batons fried to a crisp perfection in sustainably produced vegetable oil.” In the age of every customer being able to
post from their phone a rating and review of a restaurant, wisely, some
institutions include a footnote along the lines: “These narratives are a guide and because natural products vary greatly,
there will be variation.” That’s an
aspect of narratology, a process which is not the reading and interpretation of
individual texts but an attempt to study the nature of “story” itself, as a
concept and as a cultural practice or construct.
Narratologists know that what to a narrator can be a narrative, a naratee will receive as spin. In What Happened (2017), a work of a few dozen pages somehow padded out to a two-inch thick wad of over 500 using the “how to write an Amazon best-seller” template, crooked Hillary Clinton (b 1947; US secretary of state 2009-2013) explained who was to blame for her loss in the 2016 US presidential election (spoiler alert: it was everybody except her).
Presumably not comparing what they’re doing with making “fish & chips” sound like something expensive, politicians and their operatives will often describe something they offer as a “narrative” although were mush the same stuff to come from their opponents it might be dismissed as “spin”. A political narrative functions as a cognitive schema intended to simplify complexity, motivate support and legitimizes particular courses of action. The concept has a long history but in recent decades the emphasis has been on “simplicity”, something illustrated by comparing a narrative like The Federalist Papers (1878-1788; a collection of several dozen essays advocating the ratification of the Constitution of the United States) with how things are now done (mostly fleshed-out, three-word slogans endlessly repeated). That descent doesn’t mean both are not narratives in that both are crafted interpretive frame rather than objective descriptions although the extent of the deception obviously had tended to change. Political spin can also be a narrative and should be thought a parallel stream rather than a tributary; variations on a theme as it were. Although the purpose may differ (a narrative a storyline intended to set and define and agenda whereas spin is a “damage control” story designed to re-shape perceptions. Given that, a narrative can be thought of a “macro-management” and spin “micro-management”, both providing fine case-studies for narratologists.
Narratology
is a noun; the noun plural is narratologies.
The derived forms are the noun antenarratology (the study of
antenarratives and their interplay with narratives and stories), the noun
antenarrative (the process by which a retrospective narrative is linked to a
living story (the word unrelated to the noun antinarrative (a narrative, as of a
play or novel, that deliberately avoids the typical conventions of the
narrative, such as a coherent plot and resolution)), the noun econarratology (an approach to literary
criticism combining aspects of ecocriticism (the interdisciplinary study of
literature and ecology) and narratology), the noun narratologist (one who (1)
studies or (2) practices narratology), the adjective narratological (of or
pertaining to narratology) and the adverb narratologically (in terms of
narratology). Remarkably (given the literary theory industry), the adjective narratologistic seems never to have appeared; it can be only a matter of time.
Although not a lineal descendent, what Todorov did in Grammaire du Décaméron was in the
tradition of Aristotle’s (384-322 BC) work, especially ποιητικῆς (Peri poietikês (De Poetica De
Poe in the Latin and traditionally rendered in English as Poetics). Poetics
is notable as the earliest known study of the structure of Greek drama and remains
the oldest known text written exclusively in the form of what now would be
called literary theory. To a modern
audience the word “poetics” can mislead because the author’s focus was ποιητική
(literally “the poetic art”, from ποιητής (poet, author, writer) and his scope
encompassed verse drama (comedy, tragedy, and the satyr play), lyric poetry,
and the epic. For centuries, Poetics
loomed over the Western understanding of Greek theatre; it was revered by scholars
of the late Medieval period and especially the Renaissance and their influence
endured. As far as in known, the Greeks
were the first of the tragedians and it’s through the surviving texts of
Aristotle that later understandings were filtered but all of his conclusions
were based only on the tragedies and such was his historic and intellectual
authority that for centuries his theories came to be misapplied and misused,
either by mapping them on to all forms of tragedy or using them as
exclusionary, dismissing from the canon those works which couldn’t be made to
fit his descriptions. However, as well
as being an invaluable historic text explain how Greek theatre handled mimesis
(imitation of life, fiction, allegory etc) Poetics genuinely was proto-critical
theory and in it lies a framework for structuralism.
Paintings of Claude Lévi-Strauss: Portrait de Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1991 (1991), oil on panel by Bengt Lindström (1925-2008) (left) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (undated), oil on other by Cal Lekie (b 1999).
Narratology as a distinct fork of structuralism does pre-date Todorov’s use of the word in 1967, the seminal work in the parameters of the discipline by Russian folklorist & literary historian of the formalist school Vladimir Propp (1895-1970) who doubtlessly never anticipated “formalism” would come to be weaponized by comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953). Indeed, by the late 1920s the school of formalism had become unfashionable (something which in the Soviet Union could be dangerous for authors) and their works essentially “disappeared” until being re-discovered by structuralists in the 1950s. In the West, the idea of narratology as the “theory, discourse or critique of narrative or narration” owes a debt to Belgian-born French anthropologist & ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) who defined the structural analysis by narrative as its now understood. His landmark text Anthropologie structurale (Structural Anthropology (1958)) suggested myths are variations on basic themes and that in their totality (which runs to thousands) their narratives contain certain constant, basic and universal structures by which any one myth can be explained. In that way, myths (collectively) exist as a kind “language” which can be deconstructed into units or “mythemes” (by analogy with phonemes (an indivisible unit of sound in a given language)). Although he didn’t pursue the notion of the comparison with mathematics, others did and that (inherently more segmented) field perhaps better illustrates “structural roles” within language in elements which, although individually standing as minimal contrastive units, can be combined or manipulated according to rules to produce meaningful expressions. As in formal language theory, in mathematical logic, the smallest units are the primitive symbols of a language which can be quantifiers, variables, logical connectives, relation symbols, function symbols or punctuation. Broken into the individual parts, these need have no (or only minimal) semantic meaning but gain much meaning when assembled or otherwise handled through syntactic combination governed by a recognized grammar (ie although conceptual primitives rather than “building blocks”, complex meaning can be attained by applying axioms and rules).
Levi-Strauss’s
contribution was that myths can be read in relation to each other rather than
as reflecting a particular version, thus the his concept of a kind of “grammar”
(the set of relations lying beneath the narrative’s surface), thus the general
principle of the “collective existence of myths”, independent of individual
thought. That was of course interesting
but the startling aspect was the implication myths as related to other myths
rather than truth and reality; they are, in a sense, “outside” decentred, and
possess their own truth and logic which, when contemplated in a “traditional”
way, may be judged neither truthful nor logical. In that, Levi-Strauss applied something of
the method of Propp who, in Morphology of
the Folk Tale (1928), “reduced” all folk tales to seven “spheres of action”
and 31 fixed elements or “functions” of narrative. In Propp’s scheme, the function was the basic
unit of the narrative “language’ and denoted or referred to the actions which
constitute the narrative while the functions tend to follow a logical sequence. The concept would have been familiar to
engineers and shipbuilders but genuinely there was some novelty when applied to
literature
Lithuanian
semiotician A. J “Julien” Greimas (1917–1992) was among the many academics
working in France who found Propp’s reductionism compelling and in Sémantique Structurale Recherche de méthode
(Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method (1966)) he further atomized
things, apparently seeking something like a “universal macro language”, a grammar
of narrative which could be derived from a semantic analysis of sentence structure.
That was as ambitious as it sounds and
to replace Propp’s “spheres of action” he suggested the “actant” (or role): a structural unit which is neither character or
narrative. To handle the mechanics of
this approach he posited three pairs of binary oppositions which included six actants: subject/object; sender/receiver;
helper/opponent. The interactions of
these binary oppositions served to account for or describe the three basic patterns
which are to be found
in narrative: (1) desire, search or aim (subject/object), (2) communication
(sender/receiver) and (3) auxiliary support
or hindrance (helper/opponent).
While Greimas didn’t explicitly claim his model
successfully could be mapped on to “any and every” narrative, he does appear to
have built his model as a general theory and while not all critics were
convinced, it seems generally to have been acknowledged his toolbox would work
on a much wider range than that of Propp which did break down as narrative
complexity increased. Another French literary
theorist associated with the structural movement was Gérard Genette (1930–2018)
and in choosing a case study for his model he described in Discours du récit est un essai de méthode (Narrative Discourse: An
essay in method (1972)) he selected Marcel Proust’s (1871-1922) À la recherche du temps perdu
(1913–1927) (originally translated in English as “Remembrance of Things Past”
and of late as “In Search of Lost Time”) which spans many volumes and narrative
streams. This time the critics seemed
more convinced and seem to have concluded Genette’s approach was “more accessible” (these things are
relative). Noting the distinctions made
in Russian Formalism between fabula
(story) & syuzhet (plot), Genette distinguished
between récit (the chronological
sequence of a narrative’s events), historie
(the sequence in which the event actually occurred and narration (the act of narrating itself); atop that framework, he
built a complex discussion. Being a
French structuralist, he of course added to the field some new jargon to
delight the academy, concluding there were three basic kinds of narrator: (1)
the heterodiegetic' (where the narrator is absent from his own
narrative), (2) the homodiegetic (the
narrator is inside his narrative, as in a story told in the first person) and the autodiegetic (the
narrator is inside the narrative and also the main character). Genene’s approach was thus relational,
envisaging narrative as a product or consequence of the interplay of its different
components, meaning all and all aspects of narrative can be seen as dependent
units (or, debatably, layers).
Narrator & protagonist: Lindsay Lohan as Cady Heron in Mean Girls (2004). What in literary theory is known as homodiegetic narration is in film production usually called “subjective narration” or “first-person narration”, realized usually in a “voice-over narration by the protagonist”.
In formulating his three
categories Genene nodded to Aristotle and Plato (circa 427-348 BC), the ancient
worthies distinguishing three basic kinds of narrator:
(1) the speaker or writer using their own voice, (2) (b) one who assumes the voice of
another or others and (3) one who uses both their own voice and that of
others. These categories need not be
exclusive for a story may begin in the voice of a narrator who may then
introduce another narrator who proceeds to tell the story of characters who
usually have their own voices and one or more of them may turn to
narration. Structurally (and even
logically), there’s no reason why such a progression (or regression) cannot
be infinite. Although it’s obvious the term “narrate”
denotes the person to whom a narrative is addressed, just because there is a
narrative, it need not be axiomatic a narratee is present or ever existed,
T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) in The Three Voices of Poetry (1953-1954)
discerning three modes (voices) of poetic expression: (1) the poet speaking to
himself, a personal, often obscure meditation, (2) the poet addressing an
audience, aiming to teach, persuade, or amuse and (3) the poet creating a
dramatic character, as in verse drama, something demanding complex
communication between imagined characters. Eliot argued that “good” poetry often was a blend
of these voices and distinguishing them helps in understanding a poem's social
and artistic purpose, beyond its mere self-expression. However, Eliot did note that in “talking to
himself”, the writer could also be “talking to nobody”. He was at pains also to point out that when
speaking in the third voice, the poet is saying not what he would say in his own person, but only what
he can say within the limits of one imaginary character addressing another
imaginary character. More than many, Eliot knew narrative was not always reliable but the techniques of narratology
(and structuralism generally) exist for purposes other than determining truth.
Layers
in narrative structure were identified by the French philosopher & literary
theorist Roland Barthes (1915–1980) and his work had great appeal, something of
an academic cult once surrounded him and, almost half a century after his
death, he retains a following. In Introduction à l'analyse structurale des
récits (Introduction to Structural Analysis of Narrative (1966)), Barthes presumed
a hierarchy of levels existed within narrative, suggesting that, up to a
point, they can be
discussed separately. Narrative (at
least for this purpose), he conceived as a “long sentence”, just as every
constative (in linguistics, pertaining to an utterance relaying information and
likely to be regarded as true or false) sentence can be the “rough outline” of
a short narrative. Barthes’ model was
more building block-like in that he selects basic units of narrative (such as “function”
& “index”, functions constituting a chain of acts while indices are a kind
of metadata containing information about characters.
On X (formerly known as Twitter), one tweeter analysed the
images on Barthes which exists and the indexed web, finding in 72% he was
smoking a cigarette or cigar. The
statistical risks associated with routinely inhaling a known carcinogen have
for decades been well-known but Barthes didn’t live long enter the age of “peak
statistical risk”. In February, 1980, having
just taken lunch with François Mitterrand (1916–1996; President of France
1981-1995) in a restaurant on Paris’s Rue des Blancs-Manteaux, Barthes was
using a zebra crossing on the Rue des Ecoles when knocked down by a laundry van;
never recovering from his injuries, he died a month later. The van’s driver was one Yvan Delahov, of
Bulgarian nationality who tested positive for alcohol, but his reading of 0.6
fell below the legal maximum of 0.8; admitting he was late delivering his
shirts, he claimed he’d not exceeded 60 km/h (37.3) mph.
At the time, Barthes was carrying no identity documents but was
identified his colleague, the philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984).
Finally must be acknowledged the contribution of Canadian
literary critic & literary theorist Northrop Frye (1912–1991) whose Anatomy of Criticism (1957) is regarded
still as one of the more “remarkable and original” (in the words of
the English historian and critic J.A.
Cuddon (1928-1966)) works of literary theory in the English-speaking
world. In the narrow technical
sense, Frye's theory is
not structuralist (something which doubtless burnished its reputation among
many) but it certainly contains strands which can be seen as
structuralist. Frye positioned literature
as an “autonomous verbal structure”'
unrelated to anything beyond itself, a world which contains “life and reality in a system of verbal relationships”. In this “self-contained literary universe”,
there were four radical “mythoi” (plot
forms and basic organizing structural principles) which corresponded to the
four seasons of the natural order and constitute the four main genres of comedy
romance, tragedy and satire. For those
non-postmodernists who still long for l'art
pour l'art (art for art's sake), Frye’s mythois
are there to be used and he proved their utility in a wide range of texts,
including the Bible.
