Engagements with Narrative

Janine Utell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317698319
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Balancing key foundational topics with new developments and trends, Engagements with Narrative offers an accessible introduction to narratology. As new narrative forms and media emerge, the study of narrative and the ways people communicate through imagination, empathy, and storytelling is especially relevant for students of literature today. Janine Utell presents the foundational texts, key concepts, and big ideas that form narrative theory and practical criticism, engaging readers in the study of stories by telling the story of a field and its development.

Distinct features designed to initiate dialogue and debate include:

• Coverage of philosophical and historical contexts surrounding the study of narrative
• An introduction to essential thinkers along with the tools to both use and interrogate their work
• A survey of the most up-to-date currents, including mind theory and postmodern ethics, to stimulate conversations about how we read fiction, life writing, film, and digital media from a variety of perspectives.
• A selection of narrative texts, chosen to demonstrate critical practice and spark further reading and research
• "Engagement" sections to encourage students to engage with narrative theory and practice through interviews with scholars

This guide teaches the key concepts of narrative—time, space, character, perspective, setting—while facilitating conversations among different approaches and media, and opening paths to new inquiry. Engagements with Narrative is ideal for readers needing an introduction to the field, as well as for those seeking insight into both its historical developments and new directions.

1 Story parts and purpose

One way to think about how narrative works is to consider the parts of the story—characters, actions, time—and how they work together. We can also look at how they all work in the context of the whole narrative, and we can look at how one individual instance of narrative, one particular story, works in relationship to other stories. In this chapter, we will take a look at how knowing something about the parts of a narrative can help us come closer to figuring out what it’s doing, why it’s doing it, and how it’s creating responses in us as readers.

Any discussion of how stories work and how they achieve their purpose should begin with Aristotle (384–322 BCE). Aristotle’s writing on poetics, ethics, and rhetoric have all proven to be immensely influential for twentieth- and twenty-first century readers of narrative. These readers have taken his ideas on tragedy and epic poetry, and applied them to narrative, especially prose fiction. In this chapter, we will focus on how readers of narrative apply more formal methods derived from Aristotle’s Poetics; this means studying stories from an objective perspective, focusing on form and structure. In Chapter 4, we will return to Aristotle, this time with a focus on his Ethics (the Nicomachean Ethics, to be precise) and his Rhetoric. The Ethics has had an influence on readers who see stories as developing in us a kind of “practical wisdom,” the imaginative capacity to understand others, make good decisions, and live in the world with meaningful purpose taking right action. Reading and understanding stories, in this context, then becomes a way to apply ethical reasoning based on working through narrative situations. The Rhetoric has had a major influence on readers who are interested in how audiences respond to stories, particularly the ways stories activate ethical thinking around practical wisdom (as opposed to the more abstract concept of virtue, or the idea of goodwill, which is more aligned with friendship). Readers influenced by the Ethics or the Rhetoric are concerned less with the formal properties and structures of literary texts, more so with the social nature of texts and what they do in the world. All of Aristotle’s texts are important to how we think about narrative, and I think an integration of the formal, the social, and the ethical is the best way to get at what stories do.

In the early and mid-twentieth century, readers who called themselves “formalists” and “structuralists” dedicated themselves to the study of the formal components of narrative: how the parts of a story work in relation to the whole, and how individual stories work in relation to “stories” in general. This impulse to classify and categorize comes from Aristotle’s Poetics, which proposed to systematically analyze tragedy, comedy, and epic poetry. According to Aristotle, these art forms are meant to imitate life and the world around us; this is called mimesis. Aristotle breaks these literary forms down into the six components he saw as necessary for mimesis and the effects mimesis creates in us, like pity or wonder: plot, characters, diction (including dialogue), thought (or the representation of a character’s thought), spectacle, and song.

For Aristotle, plot is the most important; in the 1920s, Russian Formalists would take this so seriously they would make every effort to catalog every kind of plot that appears in traditional Russian folk tales, or skaz. For Aristotle, plot is so important because

tragedy is essentially an imitation not of persons but of action and life. All human happiness or misery takes the form of action; the end for which we live is a certain kind of activity, not a quality. Character gives us qualities, but it is in our actions that we are happy or the reverse.

(2320)

The writer of a tragedy or a comedy or an epic poem must create persons with agency who are capable of choosing to perform actions. This writer is also responsible for conveying the thoughts of characters in the appropriate diction, and for positioning the characters in relation to the audience, whether superior, inferior, or on the same level. Characters themselves should be good, appropriate, consistent, and life-like (2327). For example, “the character before us may be, say, manly; but it is not appropriate in a female character to be manly, or clever” (2327). (It might be unfair for me to call Aristotle out on that one, but I couldn’t resist.) Even a person who has spent only limited time around other human beings can see that Aristotle’s ideas about character do not necessarily give us equipment for dealing with people in our lives, nor do they capture the infinite varieties of personhood. It’s not that characters aren’t important in the stories themselves; they are the agents choosing certain actions which make the plot “go,” and they must have certain qualities in order to provoke the necessary response in the audience. It’s more that Aristotle takes these elements of character for granted. Aristotle’s privileging of plot over character would stay with us into the twentieth century. The authors of our novels often teach us how to read before our theories do, and it took a greater interest in depicting the inner life of characters, and a different understanding of psychology, to teach critics that character matters.

Plot, for Aristotle, has several constituent parts. It consists of reversals (changes in fortune) and recognitions (the gaining of knowledge), and the combination of reversals and recognitions can result in simple plots or complex plots. Complex plots have a good combination of both, whereas simple plots depend on one or the other. A well-constructed plot has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The actions of a plot should not appear to be random, and they should appear to have unity (2322–2324). Pitiable and terrifying events are also preferred, because these prompt emotional responses, or catharsis, in the audience. Plot can dwell in possibility; it can represent not what has happened, but what could happen. Aristotle’s terms, as you can probably see, make a lot of sense when applied not only to drama and epic poetry but to prose fiction as well, and what occurs in narrative overall. These terms are an important part of the history of narrative, and of how we understand it. Aristotle’s Poetics analyzes and categorizes the parts necessary for what we now call narrative, but it also makes some value judgments, determining that tragedies and epics that offer complex plots in a unified way with the right kinds of characters provoking the right kinds of responses are “good stories.”

Defining “good stories,” and the purpose of “good stories,” has been a matter for debate for centuries. While we’re focusing on Aristotle here because he defined a number of concepts necessary to the study of narrative that have stayed with us, readers in every era have tried to figure out what stories are supposed to do. For Aristotle, it was catharsis, the releasing of emotion like pity or wonder. For other writers, stories are meant to teach us something, a moral or political lesson. Another purpose might be the creation and sustaining of community, or the attempt to effect political change. Maybe stories exist to give us pleasure. Stories could take as their purpose the providing of an opportunity to enter into a different reality, or to transcend reality altogether. The purpose of stories could be the ways they allow us to reflect on our own experience and impressions.

For Russian Formalists in the early twentieth century, the purpose of stories is simply to be (see Box 1.1). Russian Formalists were drawn to the more objective study of literary texts in part as defined by Aristotle—first poetry, then novels—because they rejected the traditional ways of studying literature in Russia at the time. Formalists emerged from a context wherein literary study, at least in Russia, consisted of worshipping a select canon of authors, like Alexander Pushkin or Leo Tolstoy, and digging in the archives for details about their lives. Or, “study” was infused with a sort of mysticism, an otherworldly reaching beyond the work to something transcendent. The Russian Formalists were actually looking for a new way of doing literary study, a kind of science that would give their investigations a method (Erlich 87). A major writer within the Russian Formalist movement was Viktor Shklovsky. In his writing, particularly “Art as Technique” (1917) and The Theory of Prose (1925 and 1929), Shklovsky moved Formalism beyond mere classification to try to figure out how the examination of constituent parts, of elements, function to bring the literary work itself into being—including the responses on the part of the individual reader. Shklovsky argued that we read literature as having a value in and of itself, and that it presents a reality that exists alongside our own; formal elements like plot and perspective and description bring that reality into existence. Our understanding of the nature of literary texts is made plain to us in a process of “defamiliarization” (ostraneniye). Shklovsky writes of defamiliarization in “Art as Technique”:

Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war …. Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.

(12, emphasis in original)

The goal of the Formalist method was to define what makes a literary text “literary,” to identify the parts of the text that led to that judgment, and to look at how all those parts created a complete whole. To their mind, the purpose of a narrative was not to create an opportunity for catharsis, as Aristotle might say; nor was it to teach a moral, social, or political lesson, as their contemporaries in Russia might say. It was instead simply to exist as a work of art, and through its existence to defamiliarize the reader’s apprehension of reality. Representing a world in narrative destabilizes our sense of the real world. Shklovsky saw this happening in stories that, as he put it, “lay bare the device” (Theory 147)—these kinds of stories exist like any other story, with a narrator communicating the events of plot to us, but while they are doing that they are also showing us how the narrative, the work of art, is put together in a very self-conscious way. We see this happening in movies or television shows, for example, whenever a character pauses the action and turns to talk directly to the camera. Such an action draws our attention to the ways art is made, and breaks the illusion of mimesis, breaks the illusion that the work of art is merely a version or imitation of reality and makes us see it as art. The Netflix series House of Cards, starring Kevin Spacey as politician Frank Underwood, makes excellent use of this to show us not only the inner workings of Underwood’s mind but also the ways the show deliberately seeks to defamiliarize our understanding of the “real world,” in this case, the cutthroat arena of D.C. politics and our relationship to those in power.

Box 1.1 Viktor Shklovsky, Opojaz, and Russian Formalism

In 1914, St. Petersburg was home to one of the leading, and largest, universities in the world. Russian academe in the years immediately preceding the 1917 Revolution was rife with tensions around the nature of the university itself. New universities were being created with private funds and concentrating on practical skills and vocational or professional training, and these institutions were met with resistance by those who believed the university should maintain a more traditional model based on scholarly research within classic disciplines and “pure learning” (Kassow 369). The Russian Formalists were an important—and interesting—part of this moment for a variety of reasons. First of all, they were young, barely twenty years old, and they wanted to take on not only their professors but the entire Russian literary tradition. The Formalists existed in healthy competition and alliance with the Futurists, led by the poet and playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky, and together they embodied a kind of modernism in early twentieth-century Russia, each taking aim at Realists and Symbolists and the literary establishment in general. They shared the belief that literary art is a kind of language that talks mostly about itself, and they sought to formulate a system that would account for poetic language, specifically how poetic language is a kind of communication that is primarily communicating about itself.

Russian Formalists were concerned with art and purely aesthetic questions, rather than with a social or political agenda. In an interview with Serena Vitale, Viktor Shklovsky, one of the founders of Russian Formalism and its most well-known writer (and most intriguing character) said:

We were aggressive, very. We certainly weren’t gentle with our elders …. It [Russian Formalism and its society, Opojaz] made the first, violent impact. An impact that had to be made, with all its extremes. Art, like a clock that’s stopped ticking, has to be shaken up. We provided that jolt. We were attacked, the pressure was strong, very strong, but we planted many seeds.

(Vitale 80, 98–99)

The Formalist group Opojaz, or The Society for the Investigation of Poetic Language, was founded originally as a student association in St. Petersburg around 1916, and Fernande Degeorge describes how the young scholars (or part gadflies, part scholars) targeted Realists and Symbolists, each for the same reason: both of those earlier, more establishment movements imagined that the purpose of literary art was to reach beyond the work itself (to the world or to something transcendent and mystical, respectively) (22). The members of Opojaz, on the other hand, saw the purpose of criticism to be the study of form itself, and the purpose of form to have no other purpose but the manifestation of literary art.

We can place Opojaz within the wider context of student organizations (studenchestvo) around 1914. Students were politicized in the decade between the 1905 Revolution and the First World War, but the tradition of student organizing transcended politics. As the student body became more heterogeneous between 1911 and 1914, with greater numbers of peasants joining the universities as well as more students entering the new technical and professional institutes, studenchestvo organizations became more important than ever. Samuel Kassow, in an important study of student life and academia during the final years of Tsarist Russia, writes, “Student organizations were showing unmistakable resilience and vitality” (371). This “vitality” was primarily around issues of political and moral commitment, as well as student professionalism—not art and poetry. Yet Opojaz took that impulse and turned it towards questions of aesthetics and culture.

We might look back at Opojaz as a watershed moment in literary and cultural history. At the same time, however, the association of students with a passionate interest in something shared, coming together in a spirit of debate and collaboration around ideas, was very much part of studenchestvo life.

What set Opojaz apart, what would get it into trouble again and again, and finally lead to its suppression, was its priorities. In its early years, the emphasis on aesthetic questions rather than political or economic ones made it suspect. Early on, and as the Marxist line hardened, Opojaz seemed misguided not only because it was taking up the wrong kinds of questions, but because it was also finding the wrong kinds of answers. Formalism demanded answers to aesthetic questions beyond sociopolitical dogma and ideological didacticism.

Once the 1917 Revolution was upon them, and in the years following which saw a hardening of the Marxist position and increasing encroachment on university life and governance by the Soviet state, this stance held by the Formalists became dangerous; literary study should take as its purpose the refinement and propagandizing of Marxism, and to imagine that form is the priority was ideologically questionable. The Formalists got away with this for about ten years, but by the mid-1920s into 1930, as Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan (1928–33) got under way, they were increasingly victimized by Soviet repression. Opojaz was finally suppressed in the early 1930s and its members forced to recant for being essentially heretical, for holding “an erroneous critical doctrine” and a “‘reactionary’ social position” (Erlich 106).

Let’s now take a closer look at those important parts of narrative and how to read them. We can start by following the lead of French literary theorist Roland Barthes, who tried to define the smallest units of narrative and how they work. Barthes considered himself, and is considered by many, to be a structuralist. A structuralist is one who studies a story by looking at its parts in the context of the whole and seeing how those parts all work together in relationship, and then thinking about how that individual story works within an entire system of all other narrative, especially whether or not that system has rules and what they might be—analogous to how individual words work in sentences, individual sentences work within the system of an entire language, and each individual language work...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: How to do things with narrative
• 1 Story parts and purpose
• 2 The reader in the (story) world
• 3 Stories beyond the page, stories on the screen
• 4 Narrative, ethics, and empathy
• Index