Narrative Retellings

Stylistic Approaches

Marina Lambrou

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350120044
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Narrative Retellings presents pioneering work at the intersection of stylistics and narrative study to provide new insights into the diverse forms of fictional and factual narratives and their retellings. Common types of retelling, such as translation, adaptation, textual intervention and reader responses are reconceptualised in the chapters, and fresh insights are offered into experiences retold as autofiction, witness statements and advertorials on social media. From modernising the most cherished novels of Jane Austen to deciphering conflicting testimonials following the Hillsborough disaster, this volume reveals the complexities involved in all forms of narrative retellings. As such, it makes a valuable contribution to the interdisciplinary study of stylistics and to the understanding of narrative texts.

1

Introduction to narrative retellings: Stylistic approaches

Marina Lambrou

1.1 Introduction to narrative retellings

Narrative Retellings: Stylistic Approaches presents new work at the intersection of stylistics and narrative study to offer new insights into the diverse forms of fictional and factual narratives and the many ways that they are told and retold. The chapters in this volume take an empirical stylistic approach to consider what is understood by retelling through processes such as adaptation, translation and rereading for example, with explorations through specific cases studies, across a range of narrative genres, including classic and contemporary works of literature, factual experiences retold in a literary style, and personal narratives retold in witness reports.

Once told, it is inevitable that the narrative will be retold, reconstructed or reimagined into a new text where original elements, such as characters and plot, may or may not always be recognizable, influenced by factors such as the audience (reader, listener, etc.), the medium (and its affordances) and the rhetorical goal linked to its retelling. By understanding reworkings of narratives as process and product, it is possible to gain insights into the complexities involved in their reconfiguration. For example, the mechanisms for retellings (and in some cases, the inevitable evaluation of the retellings) are explored for a greater understanding of them, such as the responses to the cherished work of Austen and its modern adaptations, or the decisions made by an author revising a draft of their novel, or the stylistic choices taken when carefully translating the poetry of holocaust survivors, or reasons behind the conflicting testimonials following the 1989 Hillsborough disaster. Readers will be presented with discussions on a broad range of narratives and their retellings which focus on classic literary fiction; contemporary fiction (including crime fiction and a short story); the epic to fantasy fiction; personal traumatic experiences (as autobiography, autofiction and poetry); witness statements; advertorials; retelling through rereading; and pedagogical applications of retellings designed to facilitate the learning of language and literacy skills, cultural awareness, and a greater sensitivity to the text and its meaning through stylistic choices.

1.2 Narratives and storytelling

Before exploring the scope of this volume, it is useful to present an understanding of narratives – in terms of their form, function and presence in everyday discourse. Readers understand that storytelling is generally accepted as a universal activity practised across all cultures (Bruner 1990; Miller and Moore 1989) and it is through narrative that meaning is constructed and individuals are able to develop a sense of identity. Specifically, exchanging experiences through the narrative form is seen as social and transactional as through the act of storytelling, individuals represent and shape their lives in order for them to be shared. The cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner (1990:7) goes as far as to argue that humans have a propensity or ‘push’ to construct experiences into the narrative form and that we ‘cling to narrative models of reality and use them to shape our everyday experiences’ (2003:7). This inclination to shape experiences into a version of reality through narrative is one way of making sense of our lives, albeit a subjective version, and is necessary for our cognitive functioning. In other words, it is through narrative that experiences can be memorized, recalled and retold as all individuals have the facility and ability to narrate experiences to be shared. Historically, personal experiences extended to shared narratives that called to question a nation’s identity and values, often set up in opposition of the other, as commonly found in early heroic epics passed on as part of an oral storytelling tradition. It is no wonder that narratives emerged from the myths (or mythos) of early civilizations and in the narratives imitating reality (mimesis).

As a subject for research and study, narrative is at the intersection of numerous disciplines each with their own concerns but with some overlapping interests that bring new insights in their interdisciplinary explorations, for example, in areas such as linguistic choice and style at the micro-level; structure, plot and progression at the macro-level; memorization and recall at the cognitive level; and multimodal and paralinguistic at performance levels. Moreover, the growing and broadening interest in the narrative form supports the notion of a ‘narrative turn’ where narratological principles are usefully applied to other story forms as part of the interdisciplinary conversations that engage and unite researchers and critics alike. While these other forms are composed of their own distinct structural and stylistic rules, the emergence of a ‘literary linguistic procedure’ (Toolan 1992: xiv) enables each to be analysed systematically for original insights.

So what is a narrative? Narratives are conventionalized discourse structures; that is, they are comprised of minimal narrative units and paradigmatic structures which present ‘a timebound linear form that can be heard, watched or read’ (Keen 2003:16). The most prototypical narrative follows a linear or temporally ordered structure, though that is not to say that plots with anachronous, unconventional and metafictive plot strategies are not recognized as narratives too (see Dannenberg, 2008; Lambrou, 2019). Default temporal plot structures allow for creative manipulations (Sorlin 2020) and immersions into and out of the storyworld allowing for alternative forms of storytelling to emerge. Simply put, narratives by definition are

a perceived sequence of non-randomly connected events, typically involving, as the experiencing agonist, humans or quasi-humans, or other sentient beings, from whose experience we humans can learn. (Toolan 2001: 8)

Narratives can also be distinguished by other familiar characteristics such as ‘the presence of a story and a story-teller’ (Scholes and Kellogg 1966: 4), which emphasizes the interactivity of the process and relationship between those involved. In other words, storytelling is a communicative act and this argues for a more dynamic model of narrative as a successful narrative depends not only on the constitutive elements and ‘arrangement of the narrative but also on the context of the telling and to its “receiver”’ (Prince 1982). Narratives, therefore, perform a rhetorical purpose as they are essentially about ‘somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purposes that something happened’ (Phelan 2017: ix). Foregrounding the dynamic and dialogic nature of narratives and responses to them also offers a view that shifts away from a focus on form to consider ‘the temporal dynamics that shape narratives in our reading of them, the play of desire in time that makes us turn pages and strive toward narrative ends’ (Brooks 1984: xiii).

1.3 Narratives and their retellings

Why are stories told and retold so pervasively? Perhaps some stories are too good to not be shared and perhaps the propensity to form experiences into narrative also extends to their re-telling. Early studies on narratives and their retelling focused on memory and recall to establish what we now understand as schema theory, predominantly associated with the work of the psychologist Frederic Bartlett (1932). Schema theory was found to explain the cognitive structures and processes used in comprehension and memorization of information. In Bartlett’s study, subjects were asked to read a Native American story containing details which differed from their own cultural backgrounds and then asked to recall the story. The memorized versions were found to differ from the original through a process of either ‘flattening’, where details were omitted; ‘sharpening’, where parts were elaborated and exaggerated; or ‘rationalizing’, where parts of the prose were filled in, as subjects tried to make sense of the recalled story. It was also argued these distortions resulted from an attempt to fulfil expectations of a coherent story by adhering to a story schema based on the subjects’ prior knowledge of the narrative genre, dictated to some extent by the affective tone of the story. From these findings, Bartlett concluded that recall was a reconstructive process with schema providing the organizing principle.

Other experiments for recalling a story include Wallace Chafe’s (1980) Pear Story project, which involved non-linguistic input via a silent film. In this experiment, the chosen subjects were speakers of diverse languages from around the world (including English, Japanese, Chinese, German, Greek, Haitian Creole, Mandarin and Mayan) who were asked to watch a silent film called the Pear Story and then recall it. The silent film deliberately contained universal themes, and the aim of the experiment was to compare how different individuals comprehend the same story through their discourse choices and, in this way, understand how cultural and linguistic differences affect narrative production.

Throughout our lifetime, individuals experience numerous personal experiences that culminate to ‘express our sense of self: who we are and how we got that way’ (Linde 1993:3). These ‘life stories’ are continuously being made and evolve as individuals navigate their way through a constantly revised life story, composed of numerous smaller episodes of stories documenting events in an individual’s life. These life stories can be shared as the ‘small stories’ (Georgakopoulou 2007) that emerge in conversational narratives produced as talk-in-interaction, for example, and may be retold numerous times. Retelling experiences in conversational narratives is the subject of Polanyi’s (1981:319) research which set out to investigate the idea of ‘telling the same story twice’ in an attempt to understand the existence of an ‘underlying semantic structure’ and ‘script’ – the elements of the story’s macrostructure and its linguistic components – which are repeated in a second telling. Her findings showed that conversational narratives are socially situated and develop through local occasioning and recipient design, factors that shape the story in the same way that conversations develop generally (see Sacks et al., 1974). While the underlying structure in the retelling may replicate that of the original, it is likely that no two retellings are identical because of variables such as the audience, which requires tailoring the story, which in turn affects the rhetorical goal of the telling, its tellability, and the narrator’s performance and stylistic choices.

1.4 Retellings in everyday discourse and contexts

Narrating and retelling stories play an important role in numerous contexts beyond their social and transactional purposes. For example, narrating traumatic experiences that break the continuity and normality of daily life can help individual’s make some sense of these extraordinary events. Retelling as therapeutic practice is a well-established activity in psychotherapy where narrative storytelling provides a coping mechanism for dealing with trauma in all its forms (Tuval-Mashiach et al. 2004). The strategy of repetition where the practitioner picks out specific words or phrases uttered by the patient functions evaluatively as it foregrounds salient elements of the patient’s experience and provides useful prompts for further exploration and insights into the patient’s experience (Ferrara 1994). Trauma narratives that become part of a nation’s oral history are characteristically compelling, such as the personal accounts of Holocaust survivors that convey unimaginable suffering. However, trying to find ways of narrativizing devastating experiences to make sense of them led one Holocaust survivor to ask questions of how to express what is indescribable:

How do you describe a nightmare? Something which is shapeless, amorphous …. It is not a story. It has to be made a story. In order to convey it. And with all the frustration that implies. (Cited in Greenspan 2010: 199)

Perhaps it is ‘because one can never immediately speak the present in the present’ (Linde 1993: 105) as time and distance is necessary to allow for reflection to be able to express deep trauma. (See Giovanelli’s chapter in this volume for a comparative analysis of the language of Siegfried Sassoon’s experiences of war in his poetry and in the later reframing of his trauma in the novelized form.)

Shaping experiences into narratives enables survivors to tell their story and ensures unprecedented events and experiences are passed down and never forgotten. Through their translations, these experiences have been able to be shared widely and consequently have gained the status of a collective oral history. (See Jean Boase-Beier’s Chapter in this volume.) (At the time of drafting this chapter, the world is experiencing the Coronavirus or Covid-19 pandemic which is seeing personal and collective narratives on grief and hope emerging daily on all media platforms as everyone navigates their lives through an unprecedented time.)

My own research into trauma narratives following the American 9/11 and London 7/7 terrorist attacks (Lambrou 2014a; 2014b) found that those who survived these terrible events felt the need to communicate their experiences to ensure that those who perished were remembered and the events never forgotten. As one survivor of 9/11, a father whose son Todd was killed in the same Twin Tower he managed to escape from, explained:

I want to tell the story and I want to tell I think it primarily, honestly for my own healing but I also think it is important to tell the story because Todd’s story in his life touches people that are alive, touches their lives, so in a way Todd lives. (Lambrou 2014b: 122)

In research that specifically looked at the phenomenon of retelling the same experience, I was particularly interested in how survivors of the London 7/7 terrorist attack make sense of extraordinary experiences through narrativization and, similar to Polanyi’s (1981) enquiry, whether there is an underlying script or story structure that narrators map their stories onto. I asked: To what extent does the second or retold story replicate the experience in the form of the linguistic structure of the first and which (prototypical) features of a personal narrative remain constant? (Lambrou 2014a: 35). In one survivor’s retold narrative, two and a half years after first narrating his experience of the attack, a number of differences embedded throughout the retelling at the structural, schematic and stylistic levels were found. One significant finding was that the second story fitted a prototypical narrative structure as described by Labov and Waletzky (1967) that filled in gaps as a result of what appeared to be local occasioning and recipient design. Another finding was that the retold story contained more factual details that were absent in the first narrative, which led me to conclude:

The factual details reported on a daily basis were likely to have been absorbed and assimilated into Angelo’s story to have become part of his personal narrative. In other words, Angelo’s personal experience became informed by other news stories to become part of a much larger mediated narrative, a ‘big story’ (Georgakopoulou 2007) that had become part of the public’s collective consciousness and repertoire of stories. (Lambrou 2014a: 44)

The elaborated second story is retold after a period of intense scrutiny by the media reporting on details that the subject could not have known at the time of experiencing the attack. These kinds of detailed and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction to narrative retellings: Stylistic approaches
• Part I: Fictional retellings
• Part II: Factual retellings
• Part III: Pedagogical applications of retellings
• Index
• Imprint