Narratology

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.)

Title page from a 1620 printing of Decameron.

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.

Since the nineteenth century, “-ologies” have proliferated.

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.

Crooked Hillary Clinton's book tour (2017).

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.

Tzvetan Todorov on the rooftop of Casa Milà (La Pedrera), Barcelona, Spain, November 2014.

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 is 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 those 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 can be read as 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).

Azerbaijani folk art, following Layla and Majnun (1188), a narrative poem by the Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi (circa 1141–1209), printed in Morphology of the Folk Tale (1928) by Vladimir Propp.  In something of a Russian tradition, there are no known photographs of Propp smiling.

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).

An eleven-volume first edition of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (published originally in seven (1913-1927); in the the original French it contained some 1.267 million words.  By comparison, Leo Tolstoy's (1828-1910) War and Peace (1898) ran ran (depending on the edition) to 560-590 thousand.

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.

Roland Barthes (2015), oil and acrylic on canvas by Benoit Erwann Boucherot (b 1983).

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.

François Mitterrand (1984), acrylic on canvas by Bryan Organ (b 1935).

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).

Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (first edition, 1957).

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.

Intertwingle

Intertwingle (pronounced in-tur-wing-guhl)

(1) To confuse or entangle together; to enmesh, to muddle.

(2) As intertwingularity, in computing and systems analysis & organization (of documents, data etc), to interconnect or interrelate in a complex way which appears to a user simple and lineal.

Late 1800s: Thought to be a portmanteau word, the construct being a blend of intertw(ine) + (interm)ingle and of interest to students of linguistics because it appears independently to have been coined at different times in different places.  The prefix inter- was from the Latin inter- (between, amid), a form of the prepositional inter (between).  Twine was from the Middle English twyn, twine & twin, from the Old English twīn (double thread, twist, twine, linen-thread, linen), from the Proto-West Germanic twiʀn (thread, twine), from the primitive Indo-European dwisnós (double), from dwóh (two).  The construct of mingle ming (from the From Middle English mingen & mengen, from the Old English mengan (to mix, combine, unite, associate with, consort, cohabit with, disturb, converse), from the Proto-West Germanic mangijan (“to mix, knead”), from the primitive Indo-European menk- (to rumple, knead)). It was cognate with the Dutch mengen (to mix, blend, mingle), the German mengen (to mix), the Danish mænge (to rub), the Old English ġemang (mixture, union, troop, crowd, multitude, congregation, assembly, business, cohabitation)) +‎ -le (a frequentative suffix of verbs, indicating repetition or continuousness).  It was cognate with the Dutch mengen (to mingle, mix) and the German mengen (to mingle, mix).  Interwingle is a noun & verb, intertwingling & intertwingularity are nouns and intertwingled is an adjective; the noun plural is intertwingularities.  By implication, the nouns intertwinglism & intertwinglist should exist but seem not to have been used.

Lindsay Lohan, who has led an intertwingled life.  The publicity shot for Just My Luck (2006) was wholly serendipitous and did not come from a session.

Intertwingle was used by Manmatha Nath Dutt (1855–1912) in The Dharma Sastra (Volume 1, 1896), one of his collections of translations into English of ancient Sanskrit & Hindu texts; under the Raj, he was a prolific translator and author and his use appears to the first known coining.  As a comic device, it was used by Montgomery Gordon Rice of Bradley Polytechnic Institute in a performance of Esmeralda (a fictional character in Victor Hugo's (1802–1885) novel Notre-Dame de Paris. 1482 (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, 1831)) conducted during the April 1901 graduation ceremony and many instances of use have been jocular.  As a noun, the author Henry James (1843–1916) applied it as a nickname for a group of his Emmet female cousins (all of who were painters) and the use in that sense was in the vein of the way Admiral Lord Charles Beresford (1846-1919) would use “the souls” of some female acquaintances he thought discussed their feelings entirely too much.  For the US portraitist John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) it was his nickname for his early twentieth century genre paintings of his nieces, the Ormond sisters.  Sargent’s reference was to “element interchangeability”: his use of shawls as a motif and the easy substitution of one model for another, their artistic presence defined less by individual identity than the convoluted poses.  Coincidentally, as well as being one of Henry James’ “intertwingles”, the US artist Jane Emmet de Glehn (1873–1961) was one of Sargent’s muses. )

As the twentieth century progressed and in a number of fields there emerged a new literature exploring the concept of “everything being connected to everything else” and Tracy Baldwin Augur (1896-1974) found it handy (apparently as an eye-catching linguistic novelty) in a 1954 paper discussing urban planning, a discipline where truly there is much intertwingling.  Between 1933-1948 Augur had been principal planner for the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) and by the 1950s he was working for the URA (Urban Renewal Administration) and HHFA (Housing and Home Finance Agency), the proliferation of the alphabet soup of acronyms which had begun under the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR, 1882–1945, US president 1933-1945) not slowing in the post-war years.  In the discipline of town-planning the phrase “inextricably intertwined” was used in many contexts so perhaps the appearance of intertwingle was inevitable.

The use in IT and the analysis & organization of documents, data and such was in 1974 described as “intertwingularity” and defined as the deep and complex interconnection or interrelation of digital objects of any kind, and in a teleological sense the purpose was to make the connections permanently stable and accessible to users in a way which would seem seamless and lineal.  The noun intertwingularity was coined by US sociologist Dr Theodor Holm "Ted" Nelson (b 1937) and it appeared first in his book Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974) which discussed the complexity of interrelations in human knowledge.  Dr Nelson’s most enduring legacy is Project Xanadu which, remarkably, has been in development since 1960, the objective (which evolved eventually) being a kind of macro-network, unifying all data, accessible through a simple, intuitive user interface.  Conceptually, that does of course sound like the vision imagined when the www (world wide web) was bolted onto to the internet but Dr Nelson’s critique of that sprawling, ubiquitous thing is that its “web page” approach is inherently flawed because, as IRL (in real life) when pages can be thrown away, deleting a page means a dozen or a billion hyperlinks once active around the planet are rendered instantly “broken”; what’s lacking is global content management to keep track of it all.  The project’s roots in 1960 envisages what would later be understood as hypertext but acceptance of Dr Nelson’s ideas took some time because he was speculating about hardware and software which did not then exist and would not for decades attain critical mass and the landmark Computer Lib/Dream Machines, while fleshing out the details, did so in a discursive manner better suited to modernist experimental fiction.

Conceptual illustration of intertwingling from Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974).

Dr Nelson seems always to have liked the word “everything” (although he does allow that for some things, “most” is better”) and the most intriguing speculation, built on the notion of “everything being intertwingled”, was tied up with quantum entanglement which suggests connectivity need not be based on proximity or visible connection.  In this theory, what is now described as “dark energy” (the thus far undetectable stuff in the universe which the math of what has been detected suggests must exist) is thought potentially to be “time” itself, the universe’s most fundamental framework where it’s not so much that everything is “entangled” but that everything is (on a grand scale) a singularity and everything is happening at the same time with only the operation of (distance-based) relativity creating an observer’s perception of difference.

Applied Intertwingling: In fields like political science or organizational behaviour, the intertwingling of objects is often illustrated in ways which depict not only the existence but also the nature of a relationship.

Intoxicatingly simple in concept, the practical implications of the Xanadu resulted in something which became more complex as layers were implemented because each made obvious that more layers still were needed.  Lacking resources, Dr Nelson, cognizant of developments in computer networking, announced Xanadu should be thought a mechanism for handing information (regardless of physical location) as if existed in a unified repository.  While he didn’t use the phrase “virtual library” that seems to be how it would now be understood and in an interesting harbinger of how Facebook would in the twenty-first century describe its curated macro-space, he described Xanadu as a “docuverse”.  That was an interesting vision but development required cubic money and it wasn’t until the early 1980s when the adoption by business of the original IBM PC (1981) as a kind of corporate standard that funding was found, building on a file addressing system based on “tumblers” which were an implementation of transfinite numbers.  Transfinite numbers exist in the branch of set theory, a fundamental area of mathematical logic that studies collections of objects; set theory is the formal framework onto which infinity can be mapped.  For Xanadu to be scalable to an infinite number of documents, the numbers in use needed to be infinite but because one layer of the process was indexing, those numbers needed to be distinct in size and order, thus the utility of the transfinite.  Except in some vague conceptual sense, it’s really only (some) mathematicians who understand all this.

Xanadu’s original 17 rules

(1) Every Xanadu server is uniquely and securely identified.

(2) Every Xanadu server can be operated independently or in a network.

(3) Every user is uniquely and securely identified.

(4) Every user can search, retrieve, create and store documents.

(5) Every document can consist of any number of parts each of which may be of any data type.

(6) Every document can contain links of any type including virtual copies (“transclusions”) to any other document in the system accessible to its owner.

(7) Links are visible and can be followed from all endpoints.

(8) Permission to link to a document is explicitly granted by the act of publication.

(9) Every document can contain a royalty mechanism at any desired degree of granularity to ensure payment on any portion accessed, including virtual copies (“transclusions”) of all or part of the document.

(10) Every document is uniquely and securely identified.

(11) Every document can have secure access controls.

(12) Every document can be rapidly searched, stored and retrieved without user knowledge of where it is physically stored.

(13) Every document is automatically moved to physical storage appropriate to its frequency of access from any given location.

(14) Every document is automatically stored redundantly to maintain availability even in case of a disaster.

(15) Every Xanadu service provider can charge their users at any rate they choose for the storage, retrieval and publishing of documents.

(16) Every transaction is secure and auditable only by the parties to that transaction.

(17) The Xanadu client-server communication protocol is an openly published standard. Third-party software development and integration is encouraged.

By the early 1990s it was clear Xanadu “worked”, at least at the scale existing hardware made possible but the emergence of the www (World Wide Web) diverted the industry’s attention and by 1995 when it was clear the Web had gained critical mass, the view seemed to be Xanadu might be a slightly better or slightly worse mousetrap and soon comparisons were being with the “OS (operating system) war” between Microsoft’s Windows NT and IBM’s OS/2.  Dr Nelson however was not deterred and successive releases of implementations of parts of the Project Xanadu model were in the twenty-first century released until OpenXanadu was in 2014 made available on the Web.  Explaining how it differed from hypertext as it was done on the Web, Dr Nelson claimed HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) was inherently flawed because, the metaphor being one of bound pages, it was so prone to broken links as one page was torn off, that meaning collectively an array of dozens (or millions, trillions etc) of dead links to other dead pages.  What tumblers did was provide an address able to maintain linkages to not merely a single object (which HTTP envisages as a “piece of paper”) but an infinite set of links, achieved because transfinite numbers can handle what can be visualized as a cascade of information, the linkages between which are unlimited; this was the inheritance of the “docuverse”.  Those impressed by both the potential and drawbacks of the Blockchain will be struck by the overlaps.

Knowledge Nation, which at the time seemed a good idea but wasn’t suited to the banality of modern politics.

For the 2001 federal election in Australia, a part of the opposition Australian Labor Party’s (ALP) platform was “Knowledge Nation”, a summary of its education policy, developed by polymath and former minister for science Barry Jones (b 1932).  During the campaign, what was substantive in Knowledge Nation was little discussed because the government immediately attacked the illustrative chart which was a representation of the many components connected within the education system.  Derided as “Noodle Nation”, it was an example of why it’s no longer wise for politicians to offer anything much beyond a TWS (three word slogan).  The reaction today to a political party circulating something like The Federalist (a collection of 85 articles and essays (1787-1788) advocating the ratification of the Constitution of the United States) would be something like the “noodle nation moment”.  These days, intertwingling is best neither seen nor heard.

Violin

Violin (pronounced vahy-uh-lin)

(1) The treble instrument of the family of modern bowed instruments, built as a small unfretted instrument with four strings tuned (lowest to highest) G-D-A-E and held nearly horizontal by the player's arm against the chin, with the lower part supported against the collarbone or shoulder; it’s played with a bow.

(2) In musical performance, metonymically, the position of a violinist in an orchestra, string quartet or other formation or group (sometimes as first violin, second violin etc).

(3) In musical composition, a part to be played on a violin.

(4) Any instrument of the violin family, always inclusive of violins, violas, and cellos and sometimes further including the double bass (used by certain musical specialists but a use derided by most).

(5) To play on, or as if on, a violin (rare except in technical use),

1570–1580: From the Italian violino (a little viola), the construct being viol(a) (from the Italian viola, from the Provençal and of uncertain origin but there may be some link with the Latin vītulārī (to rejoice)) + -ino (the suffix used to form diminutives).  The sixteenth century word described the modern form of the smaller, medieval viola da braccio.  The violin and viola share similarities in terms of construction and playing technique but a violin is smaller.  A full-size violin has a body length around 14 inches (360 mm) while a viola typically extends to around 16 inches (405 mm) and the larger instrument tends to have a lower pitch range and different tonal qualities.  The violin is noted for a high pitch range (G-D-A-E low to high) while a viola is tuned to C-G-D-A, a perfect fifth lower which lends it a deeper, mellower sound.  In an orchestra, the violin usually plays the melody (the highest voice in the string section) and thus many solo pieces are written which attract the most virtuosic players.  Viola pieces are usually supportive , providing harmony, inner voices, or countermelodies although it does have its own solo repertoire.  Violin is a noun & verb, violinist is a noun and violining & violined are verbs; the noun plural is violins.

The Duce with violin.

As well as professionals, the violin has long attracted also those who enjoy music as a hobby, Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977), Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992), Albert Einstein (1879-1955) & Benito Mussolini (1883-1945; Duce (leader) & prime-minister of Italy 1922-1943) were all keen players and leader of the US Nation of Islam (NOI), Louis Farrakhan (b 1933), in 1993 even performed Felix Mendelssohn's (1809-1847) Violin Concerto in E Minor.  His skill aside (and the reviews were warm enough), the choice of a piece by Mendelssohn was interesting because of Mr Farrakhan's history of anti-Semitic rhetoric but even in that the interpretations of motive varied because although of Jewish ancestry, the composer was baptized and raised a Christian and while in recent years some scholars have made the case for the sincerity of his Christianity, others maintain that for most of his life he displayed an unalloyed reverence for his Jewish roots.  While the persistent legend is that Roman Emperor Nero (37-68) "fiddled while Rome burned" in 64 AD it probably isn't true; even if he "fiddled away" on some instrument, it wouldn't have been a fiddle because that device was 15 centuries away.  If he played anything mid-inferno it was probably a lute but historians think the phrase was intended to mean something like "twiddled his thumbs", suggesting he was negligently inactive or inept in his handling of the disaster.  Even this is now thought by many historians to be the fake news of its day, spread by his political enemies (of which justly he had many).

Lindsay Lohan backstage with guitarist Michael Isbell (b 1979) & fiddle player Amanda Shires (b 1982) at the Dylan Fest concert, Bowery Ballroom, New York City, November 2013.

The distinction between the violin and the fiddle is less about the actual instruments than the use to which they’re put although both words are replete with cultural baggage.  What is essentially the same instrument is thought a violin when playing from the classical canon and a fiddle if performing folk or country & western (C&W) music.  Of course there are many genres apart from these and when the instrument is used in other settings (jazz, pop etc), the use is up to the individual, influenced either by their own preference or some sense of adherence to the conventions describing whatever is being performed.  The fiddle (as a stringed musical instrument) has a long history and is a feature of much Medieval art depicting performances of folk music.  It was from the late fourteenth century Middle English fedele, fydyll & fidel, from the eleventh century fithele, from the Old English fiðele (fiddle) which was related to the Old Norse fiðla, the Middle Dutch vedele, the Dutch vedel, the Old High German fidula and the German Fiedel, all of which are of uncertain origin.  There’s never been anything to suggest there’s anything onomatopoeic in the origin and the most cited theory (based on resemblance in sound and sense) is there’ may be some connection to the Medieval Latin vitula (stringed instrument (source of Old French viole and the Italian viola), which may be related to the Latin vitularia (celebrate joyfully), from Vitula, the Roman goddess of joy and victory, thought to have been drawn from the Sabines.  That however remains speculative and it’s not impossible the Medieval Latin word was derived from one of the Germanic forms.

The Dallas-based Quebe Sisters (siblings Grace, Sophia & Hulda) are a triple fiddle trio who play what is described as "neo-traditionalist western swing".

Despite the snobbery of some, those who enjoy C&W music are not culturally inferior; it’s just a different form of sophistication.  In certain circles however there is a dismissive contemptuousness of “fiddle songs” and the fiddle’s reputation has suffered by association, relegated to colloquial use by the respectable violin, a process doubtlessly hastened and encouraged by phrases such as "fiddlesticks" (from the 1620s meaning “untrue; absurd”), "fiddle-de-dee" (from 1784 and a nonsense word in the sense of “contemptuously silly”) and "fiddle-faddle" (a mid-nineteenth century coining to convey the idea of “a statement worthy only of ridicule; blatantly untrue”).  The outlier of course is "fit as a fiddle" (robust; in rude good health), noted since the 1610s and apparently unrelated to music or the instrument, it being probably one of those English sayings which caught on because of the alliterative appeal and there are etymologists who suspect the original form was “fit as a fiddler” but the familiar version prevailed because it more easily rolled from the tongue.

The Kreutzer Sonata (1901), oil on canvas by René François Xavier Prinet (1861-1946).

The Kreutzer Sonata was inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s (1828-1910) novella of the same title (1889), which was named after Ludwig van Beethoven’s (circa 1770–1827) Violin Sonata No 9, Opus 47 (1803), a violin and piano composition dedicated to the French violinist & conductor Rodolphe Kreutzer (1766-1831).  Kreutzer never performed the piece but whether this was related to him being the “second choice” is unknown.  Beethoven originally dedicated the sonata to another violinist who first performed it but the two had a squabble about something and the bad-tempered composer instead conferred the honor on Kreutzer.  The work is a favorite among violinists because it can convey an emotional range from anger and despair to joy and in this vein, Tolstoy’s tale is one of a woman murdered by her husband because of his suspicion of her infidelity with a violinist.  In Moscow, the Tsar’s censor (a busy, full-time job) for a time banned the book because of concerns it might “stir the emotions”.

Viola is a genus of flowering plants in the violet family Violaceae.

The sonata certainly stirred something in Tolstoy who said he was “shocked at the eroticism” when it was performed by a man & woman and he wasn’t the only one affected by the instrument, both the Italian composer and violinist of the Baroque period Giuseppe Tartini (1692–1770) and Russian composer Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) referred to the violin as “the devil’s instrument”.  Tolstoy depicted the violin as something so evil in the eroticism it could summon it could drive a man to murder and infamously there was a violinist who murdered on a grand scale.  The roll-call of evil-doers among the Nazi hierarchy was long and it’s morally dubious to suggest which were worse than others but probably all agree Schutzstaffel (SS) Obergruppenführer (an SS rank then equivalent to an army general) Reinhard Heydrich (1904–1942; head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Main Security Office (including the Gestapo, Kripo, and SD 1939-1942)) was as repellently awful as any.  He was though a genuinely gifted musician and could have pursued a musical career; it was said when he played the violin, grown men could be reduced to tears.  Heydrich died before he could be tried for his crimes but such was the infamy his name remains a byword for evil, however contested that word; like Mussolini, Heydrich is an example of how a skill to make beautiful art is no guarantee of fine character.

Kiki in Le Violon d'Ingres.

One of the enduring images of surrealist photography Le Violon d'Ingres (Ingres's Violin) was taken by the US visual artist Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky 1890-1976) in Paris 1924.  The model was Kiki de Montparnasse (“Kiki of Montparnasse”: Alice Prin; 1901–1953) and the title was something of a play on words, the French phrase “le violon d'Ingres” meaning “hobby” and mademoiselle Kiki the photographer’s muse and lover (it was a tempestuous relationship). The French expression was derived from the habit of the neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) insisting on playing the violin to visitors who in his studio anxious to view his paintings.  The photograph references one of the artist’s most admired works, La Grande Baigneuse (The Valpinçon Bather) which focuses also on the female back.  Obviously, Man Ray worked in the pre-digital world when images were committed to celluloid but his post-production editing technique used layers in a way analogous with that of Photoshop and other image handlers: Wanting to explore the similarity in shape between the body of a violin and the pleasing torso of his model, he first printed a copy onto which he painted the f-holes of a violin, then photographed the modified image.  That became the famous work and in June 2022 it went under the hammer for US$12.4 million at Christie's New York, making it the most expensive ever to be sold at auction.

Kiki in a French postcard, circa 1920.

Mademoiselle Kiki was from the provinces and came to nude modelling in Paris only after a succession of dreary jobs, the last in a bakery from which she was fired by the baker’s wife for punching her in the face after being called a whore for wearing eye make-up.  Man Ray “discovered her by accident” (historians seem never to have gone into the details) and she found nude modelling both a pleasant occupation and more lucrative than the hard work of being a baker’s assistant but that view wasn’t shared by her mother who, tipped off by a neighbor, burst into the photographer’s studio and make it clear she agreed with baker’s wife, banning her from the apartment they shared.  The affair with Man Ray was thus immediately convenient but their feelings seem genuinely to have been sincere although it did end badly; at one point he was seen chasing her down the street, revolver in hand.

Model Adriana Fenice (b 1995) with viola and horsehair bow.

Modelling "in the buff" was at the time frowned upon by the more respectable of those engaged by Parisian fashion houses, something which endures to this day.  Even in 1946, the inventor of the bikini (not a new style but his cut was daringly minimalist and according to him inspired by his observation on a beach at St Tropez of young ladies "rolling up their bathing suits to get a better tan") couldn’t find a model on the books of the agencies willing to be photographed in such a thing so he hired a nude model; for her it was more fabric than usual.  The disapprobation of the middle-class towards non-conforming women persists and manifests in different cultures at different levels.  In India, nude modelling definitely is out but mothers will also tar occupations such as prostitute, flight attendant and call-centre worker with the same brush of un-virtue, apparently because they all sometimes work during the hours of darkness when respectable girls are in the home, cooking & cleaning.

Nicola Benedetti CBE (b 1987) with her "Earl Spencer" Stradivarius.

Violinist (one who plays the violin) dates from the 1660s and was an un-adapted borrowing from the Italian.  A violinist is thus a musician and not a “violin maker”: those practicing that profession are properly called luthiers.  A luthier is a skilled craftsperson who specializes in the construction, repair, and restoration of stringed instruments, particularly violins and the range of skills needed is wide because the artisan needs to select different types of wood to be cut & carved before being assembled and varnished, all processes which ultimately determine the instrument’s tone and aesthetic qualities.  In the traditional way of making violins, there is both artistry and craftsmanship.  Luthier has no connection with “Lucifer” (and there’s thus no link with the notion of the “devil’s instrument”).  Luthier was from the French luth (lute), a stringed instrument of great antiquity that was wildly popular during the medieval era and the Renaissance periods and the luthier's craft once focused predominately on the construction and repair of lutes.  As the lute faded from use and the violin gained prominence, luthiers adapted and changed, becoming specialists in the violin making, some branching out to include other stringed instruments such as violas, cellos, and guitars.  The French luth was from leutier, from the Latin luteum (yellow or yellowish), thought to refer to the honey-colored wood most suited to musical instruments.

Yehudi Menuhin on stage, 1943.

Still the most famous of the luthiers is Antonio Stradivari (1644-1737) whose workshop was in the norther Italian town of Cremona.  His violins, of which there were thousands, may or may not have been the product of his own hands because he had sons and pupils in his business but the survivors were anyway by the 1990s were selling for millions.  The familiar "Stradivarius" is the anglicized form and although some “blind tests” have suggested even experts can’t tell the difference in the sound from a genuine “Strad” and a good quality modern violin, they have become a collectable and now sell for even more millions.  The acclaimed virtuoso Yehudi Menuhin (1916–1999) for decades played on one of the rare Soil Stradivarius, crafted in 1714 during the luthier’s “golden period”.  During World War II (1939-1945), Menuhin sometimes played concerts to entertain troops and once found out that due to an army SNAFU, his waiting audience was expecting an attractive young lady to sing for them.  Undeterred, he walked on stage, telling the soldiers: “You won’t enjoy this, but it’s good for you”, proceeding to play Handel’s Violin Sonata No. 3.  It was well received.

The Joachim-Ma Stradivarius.

In February 2025 a Stradivarius violin, authenticated as having been crafted in 1714, sold at a Sotheby’s of Manhattan auction in New York for $11.25 million which disappointed some who had expected a new record for the instrument.  The 311-year-old artefact was known in the trade as the “Joachim-Ma Stradivarius”, a reference to one-time owners Hungarian violinist, conductor & composer Joseph Joachim (1831–1907 (who had been a friend of the German composer, pianist & conductor Johannes Brahms (1833–1897)) and violinist Ma Si Hon (1925-2009); in 2015 it had been donated to the New England Conservatory (NEC) with the proviso it would one day be sold to fund musical scholarships for youth.  That it didn’t set a new mark may be because, like many collectables, there is the power of celebrity association.

The Lady Blunt Stradivarius in case.

The 1721 “Lady Blunt Stradivarius” which in 2011 passed under the hammer for US$15.9 million had been named for Lord Byron’s (1788–1824) granddaughter (Anne Blunt (1837-1917); Baroness Wentworth but styled usually as Lady Anne Blunt) and in artistic circles there’s quite an allure to Byron (emos and others also affected).  That said, the mid-decade downturn in other collector markets does suggest macro-economic conditions may have been a factor in the 2025 auction, especially if recent inflation and the massive increase in the money supply since 2011 are considered.  However, the official record for US$15.9 million may not be the highest paid because, something like the Ferrari 250 GTOs, Stradivarii do change hands in unpublicized private sales (the so-called “off-market” transactions) and there are (unverified) tales of sales in excess of US$20 million.  Many analysts are sceptical about the notion of US$20 million violins because the price achieved for the Lady Blunt (though one of the finest Stradivarii known to exist, almost unflawed and still with its presentation case by W.E. Hill & Sons of London) was in a charity auction conducted for the benefit of the Nippon Foundation's relief fund for victims of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.

Yehudi Menuhin playing the Lady Blunt, Sotheby's, London, 1971.

In a long career 75 years, Menuhin played a number of famous violins including the Lord Wilton Guarnerius (1742), the Giovanni Bussetto (1680), the Giovanni Grancino (1695), the Guarneri filius Andrea (1703), the Soil Stradivarius (1714), the Prince Khevenhüller Stradivari (1733) and the Guarneri del Gesù (1739).  Unlike racing car drivers who in their memoirs usually list the best (and, often more expansively, the worst) machines they handled, in neither of his volumes of autobiography (Unfinished Journey (1977) and Unfinished Journey: Twenty Years Later (1997)) he didn’t rate them although the one he played for almost four decades was the Soil Stradivarius, purchased in 1950.

Violin and Viola

Of the four instruments in the bowed string family (violin, viola, cello & double bass) it’s the larger and latter two which easily are distinguished, the double bass so big that when seeing a musician with their instrument, it will never be confused with a cello.  However, the violin & viola not only look similar but are much closer in size and unless seen side-by-side, it takes a trained eye to tell them apart.  The viola is the second highest-pitched instrument of the family and compositions in both orchestral and chamber music are so often written with it filling harmonies because it can be the bridge between the low-pitched cello and high-pitched melodies of the violin. There were solo compositions for the viola in the Baroque and Classical epochs but the instrument became unfashionable before the modern era when it was “re-discovered” and in recent decades, more have been written.  For those who want to stick to the classics and hear duets for violin & viola, there's Mozart (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's (1756–1791)), the #5 Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat Major an orchestral work while his #6 Duo for Violin and Viola in B-flat Major is unusual in being written for just the two instruments.

Standard size instruments: viola (top) and violin (bottom).

The violin is smaller than the viola, a full-size violin typically some 14 inches (355 mm) in length while a full-size viola is around two inches (50 mm) longer and there are variations (four “standard” sized violas and nine violins) with the smallest generally available viola at 12 inches (300 mm), ideal for very young students with smaller limbs and hands.  Apart from the niche products, a viola will tend to be longer and have a body both deeper and wider.  The difference in size may not seem great but it affects the sound tone, the viola’s ability to play the lower frequencies partly a product of it physical bulk. The two are also played with different bows, the violin’s longer and slimmer and some 10 g (.35 oz) lighter, a product of the viola’s heavier strings which demand a more solid bow to attain clarity of sound in the lower frequencies.

2018 Porsche 911 GT3 in (paint-to-sample) Viola Purple Metallic over Black Leather & Alcantara with grey accents.

A more subtle difference in the design of the bows is found on the frog (the part at the end held by the player, to which the horsehair is attached), that on a viola’s fitting chunkier and often curved compared to the straight edge on a violin bow.  This appears to have no direct effect on the sound but because it influences the way a player holds the bow, experienced musicians can exploit the variations in the shape and the differences in tone can be stark.  While there are five-stringed violins and violas, the standard is four (G – D – A – E (violin: E is highest, G is lowest & viola: A is highest, C is lowest)).  Like the violin, the viola is tuned in fifths but instead of having the high E, it has a low C, one octave below the middle C and a viola’s strings are thicker (and thus heavier).  What all this means is that the notes produced by a violin produces are higher-pitched, thus the attraction to composers for use in solos.  That’s a well-known part of the tradition but both instruments are best understood when the family of four are played in unison, producing what musicians call a “sound color” with each distinct yet when combined the four can in certain compositions be interpreted as a “single instrument”.