NARRATIVE THEORY

 INTRODUCTION

Shakespeare once wrote that "the play's the thing," but if you're a smarty-pants narrative theorist, well, the narrative's the thing. And why is that? Well, narrative theorists believe that narratives are so ingrained our lives that it's almost like they're invisible to us. Invisible or not, though, they're everywhere. Are you into books, movies, music, or TV? Then you're totally into narrative.

But just what is a narrative?

Well, first off, we need to draw a line between narrative and story. According to narrative theory, "story" refers to all the building blocks you start out with: you've got a bunch of events, people, and places. The thing is, you can put this stuff together in all kinds of different ways. There's where "narrative" steps in: it's how you weave the story material together and give it shape. Narrative is about organizing the story material and making choices about how to put it together.

It's not just about organization, though—narratives are also about being creative. When an author writes a novel, for example, there are all sorts of ways he or she can choose to tell the story. You're probably familiar with "happily ever after" Disney-style narratives but, as you'll see, there's a boatload of different forms that narratives can take. Not all narratives follow the usual beginning→middle→end template. In fact, writers can choose to play around with narrative for deliberate effect, keeping us guessing and challenging our expectations.

Think of it: two writers could start off with the same story but turn it into two completely different narratives. Just think of all those movies made from a single novel, like Dracula or Anna Karenina. If they were all identical, then things would get pretty boring and samey, right? But the thing is: they're all different—and you've got narrative to thank for that.

Why Should I Care?

Why Should Readers Care?

Narrative is like second nature for us—we barely even notice that it's there most of the time. It's not until we read a book or watch a movie that deliberately messes with narrative (think of something like Pulp Fiction) that we sit up and take notice. But it's narratives that shape our experience and make it possible for us to make sense of both literature and the wider world.

Narrative theory helps us to understand how texts work, and it gets us thinking about the choices that the author has made. After all, there's always more than one way of telling a story. It's by taking a look at narrative that we can get a handle on how the story is told—and that makes it possible for us to weigh in on what the story is all about and come up with our own opinions and interpretations based on that.

Why Should Theorists Care?

There are lots of different angles you can take when you're analyzing a text, but when it comes right down to it, what you've got in front of you in a good ol' narrative structure. "Structure" is a key term here, since narratology is totally a spinoff of structuralism. What structuralism and narratology have in common is an obsession with the nuts and bolts of how things like novels and movies (and even entire cultures) are put together.

Exploring narrative helps us understand and describe how texts work, how they create their effects, and how they relate to other texts in the same field.

Pinning down how narratives work helps you get to grips with texts on a critical level. Narratology makes it possible for you to not just analyze individual texts but also find patterns in them. Some of the most famous narratological studies, actually, are those that uncover the underlying patterns in familiar genres like folktales and detective novels. With the help of narratology, you can totally come up with a set of conventions for all kinds of narrative "types."

NARRATIVE THEORY BUZZWORDS

Story

This is the raw material of what you're reading, watching, or experiencing. Sure, stories can be about all sorts of things, but what they have in common is that they involve a series of events. You can't create a narrative if you don't have a basic story to tell in the first place; it's the story that gives you your starting point.

Narrative

Okay, so you've got your story; now it's time to turn it into a narrative. Basically, narrative refers to how the story is put together. Is it chronological? Are there flashbacks? Does the end come first? Which events are described in full, and which ones are kept in the background?

Narrative Voice

There are two main categories of narrative voice. If you've got a narrator who tells you all about his or her experiences firsthand ("I thought," "I said" etc.), then you're dealing with first-person narration. If, however, you've got a disembodied voice telling you all about what's going down ("he thought," "she said"), then you're dealing with a more detached, third-person narrative.

Focalization

While voice refers to who speaks, focalization is about who perceives. If your narrative is told totally through one character's perspective, you've got internal focalization. If your narrator is omniscient, you've got external focalization. (And yep, it does get more complicated than that.) Focalization and narrative voice work together to help create what's often known as a narrative situation.

Diegesis

One of the main things that narratives have in common in that they all create a worldwithin the narrative, and that's known as the narrative's diegesis. This doesn't have to be some fantasy realm: whether we're reading about Middle Earth or a more realistic setting, we're looking in on a world contained within the text.

Diegetic

Diegetic stuff is stuff that happens within the diegesis of a narrative. Basically, it's just the stuff that happens within the fictional world of a text. The word "diegetic" usually has some kind of prefix attached to it. For example, a direct, first-person narrator is known as "homodiegetic," while a third-person narrator is (take a wild guess) "heterodiegetic." You don't need to worry about learning all the varieties right away—just keep in mind that they define different positions in relation to the narrative world.

Fabula

This is a word that the Russian formalists used when discussing the chronological sequence of events in a story—you know, the beginning, middle, and end. Think of it this way: you know how Titanic is about some old dame telling the story of her trip on the ship? The fabula of Titanic would be how that story plays out in real time: girl gets on the ship, the ship sinks, girl gets old, girl talks about it. It's the story of Titanicbefore any of the fancy juggling with time and perspective happens. Which brings us to…

Syuzhet

The fancy juggling with time and perspective that happens to fabula when you actually make it into a work of art. It's sort of like this: fabula is the basic story, andsyuzhet is how the story is actually told.

Chronotope

If you think about it, the whole idea of a narrative centers on movement, and this includes both the passage of time and the physical movements of the characters. In a novel, for example, the passage of time may include days, weeks, even years, and characters probably spend a lot of time walking around, driving, flying places, whatever. The chronotope is the connection between time and space within a text. To go back to Titanic, the chronotope of the main action is a stretch of the North Atlantic ocean over the course of a few days in 1912.

Analepsis and Prolepsis

Though there are plenty of texts that present time as linear (as progresses naturally from point A to point B over the course of a narrative), some play around with the concept of time or interrupt it at certain points. We've all seen movies that have flashbacks or flash-forwards, and the same goes for written texts. Analepsis and prolepsis are terms that you'd think are totally complicated, but they're really just technical names: analepsis=flashback and prolepsis=flash-forward. Five dollar words for the win.

NARRATIVE THEORY BASICS

NARRATIVE THEORY BEGINNINGS

Lit theorists just love to quote them some classics, and this time, they've actually got a point, because big bad Aristotle himself was one of the first people to describe narrative theory. Sure, he didn't call it that, but if you dig on into his Poetics (especially the stuff on tragedy), it's clear that he was a pioneer in narratology.

Interest in this kind of thing came and went over the centuries. Henry James, for one, wrote an 1884 essay titled "The Art of Fiction" that focused on the topic—but still, it wasn't until the twentieth century that narratology started to be fully recognized and taken seriously.

As far as its origin story goes, narrative theory owes a lot to structuralism. Structuralism lives up to its name in that it looks at a text in and of itself—it's more interested in the internal laws of the text itself than in things like author, reader, or the social environment in which the text was produced.

Structuralists get their kicks out of digging beyond a surface reading to find the main narrative devices and character types that give the text its driving force. They also look for common threads. Think of it this way: if you analyze a bunch of texts, you'll probably be able to pinpoint some specific characteristics (or patterns) that you can expect to find in them. This can help you define, say, what makes a fairytale a fairytale, or what makes a detective story a detective story. You can also look for ways in which texts depart from these templates—often for deliberate effect.

So how did narratology get started? Well, to get our answers, we need to look to theRussian formalists, an influential set of literary critics who were on the scene from the 1910s to about 1930. Formalism hones in on the form rather than the content of texts, and, like structuralism, it isn't too bothered about all that outside stuff. In fact, you could say that that formalism tries to approach literature with more of a scientific outlook.

One of the earliest and most influential theorists to approach narrative in this light was Vladimir Propp, whose massively influential work, Morphology of the Folktale, was published in 1928 and made an even bigger splash when translated into English in 1958.

By the 1960s, narratology was flourishing in France—another place where structuralism was a big deal. Bridging the geographical gap was Tzvetan Todorov, who coined the term narratology (or, as the Frenchies insist, narratologie) in 1969. Todorov was Bulgarian but did his doctorate in France under the supervision of Roland Barthes.

Todorov and Barthes, along with Gérard Genette, talked about the need for a scienceof narrative. Yeah, sure: literature is often seen as an arts or humanities subject, but structuralists tried to bring a scientific angle to the whole thing.

We can't talk about the early years of narratology without mentioning one more theorist: Claude Lévi-Strauss. This guy was an anthropologist and so didn't just limit himself to literary criticism, but his focus was always the same: he was all about uncovering structures. Travelling around the world and getting familiar with the stories that people told in places as far-flung as the Amazonian jungle, Lévi-Strauss came to the conclusion that, despite some surface differences, these stories often shared a common structure and used the same sorts of narrative devices.

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