- 13 - CHAPTER 2: SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF NARRATIVE
2.1 Preliminary Remarks
Before launching into a detailed description of the narrative discourses which have been collected, it is important to define the term “narrative”. A narrative presupposes a
“narrator” and popular dictionaries variously describe it as a “tale” or “story”, an “orderly account of events,” or a “recital of facts”; the “kind of composition or talk that confines
itself to these”. According to Grimes 1975, to be regarded as narrative, a discourse must be based on “the notion of temporal sequence”. A “simple narrative” is one that has “well-
separated participants” which are clearly and fully identified and “the sequence in which events are told matches the sequence in which the events actually happened”. But many
narratives are obviously not “simple”. They have so many participants that it is impossible for the reader or hearer to keep track of them all, while others start at the end and then tell
the rest of the story in “flashback”. So, is “narrative” one single discourse genre, or does it cover more than one genre? Then again, how do you compare a simple folk tale with a full
length modern novel? What are the features which unite them? Roland Barthes, in his essay “Structural Analysis of Narratives”, writes of the plurality and
universality of narrative in spoken, written, visual and gestural modes. Narrative is first and foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed
among different substances - as though any material were fit to receive man’s stories. Able to be carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images,
gestures, and the ordered mixing of all these substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting think
of Carpaccio’s Saint Ursula, stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news items, conversation. Barthes 1977a:79; 1977b:95
A similar point is made by Wolfson: Genre is here understood as a categorization which is defined on the one hand by the
formal properties of the discourse appropriate to it and on the other by situational properties. For this reason narrative itself cannot be considered as a single category; it
enters into many genres and serves many goals. Wolfson 1982:54
- 14 - Therefore, to answer the question, “What is a narrative?” we must go outside linguistic
theory into the area of literary theory and what Seymour Chatman calls “the nature of literary objects and their parts”. We must ask, as Chatman does, “Which are its necessary
and which its ancillary components, and how do they interrelate?” Chatman 1978:10. Toolan 1988, in the first chapter of his “critical linguistic introduction” to narrative,
begins his discussion by stating: Narrative typically is a recounting of things spatio-temporally distant: here’s the present
teller, there’s the distant topic—hence the sense gap. This can be represented diagrammatically thus:
Figure 2.1 Toolan 1988:2
In spite of the title, his early chapters are concerned with literary theory rather than linguistics. He differentiates between narrative and other speech events where there is
inherently a speaker and something which is spoken, not just by the truism that in narrative there must be a tale and a teller, but by the fact that “the teller is often particularly noticeable”.
However, as we indicated in our opening preamble, there are different ways of telling a story. Some tellers are noticeable to the point of intrusiveness; others are only fleetingly
present, “enigmatic, removed”. Toolan diagrams these contrasting relationships between teller and tale as follows:
TELLER
TALE ADDRESSEE
- 15 - Figure 2.2
Here the teller makes what is distant and absent “uncommonly present”: there is no sense of gap between the present teller and the tale being told; the two are merged together. The
oral narratives of personal experience which we will be discussing later in the chapter come into this category see p. 29 et seq..
Conversely, a teller may become so absorbed in his “self-generated sense of the distant topic” that the addressee sometimes has the impression that the teller has withdrawn from
him completely. He appears to be totally involved in the removed scene. This relationship, which is captured by the third abstract representation, can be exemplified by the formal
reading of a written fairy story or folk tale:
Figure 2.3 Hawthorn 1985 uses the popular painting, The Boyhood of Raleigh by Millais, to illustrate the
role of the teller. In the painting, two boys are being addressed by an aged seaman. They appear to be engrossed in the information being passed on, as the man points out to sea.
But the boys’ eyes are on him, not on the far horizons being described so graphically.
TELLER
TALE ADDRESSEE
TELLER
TALE ADDRESSEE
- 16 - Narrative focuses our attention on to a story, a sequence of events, through the direct
mediation of a “telling” which we both stare at and through, which is at once central and peripheral to the experience of the story, both absent and present in the consciousness of
those being told the story. Like the two young boys we stare at the “telling” while our minds are fixed upon what the telling points towards. We look at the pointing arm but
our minds are fixed upon what is pointed at. Hawthorn 1985:vii Because the narrator is the source of narrative, his role is a distinctive characteristic of it. A
narrator, or teller, is stared at by his hearers rather than engaged by them in interaction, as he would be in general conversation. In literary narratives, a narrator may even be
“dehumanized” and appear merely “as a disembodied voice”. However, Hawthorn also observes that stories and storytelling are not confined to a literary context.
We live in a world increasingly dominated—and characterized—by the telling of stories; by anonymous communication, by messages notable for what has been termed “agency
deletion”, and by disseminated but disguised authorities and authoritarianism. 1985:x Toolan 1988 links this ubiquity and universality of narrative production with the fact that
“narrators are typically trusted by their addressees”. In seeking and being granted rights to a lengthy verbal contribution “OK, go ahead, let’s
hear it””OK, I’ll give this storynovel a try” narrators assert their authority to tell, to take up the role of knower, or entertainer, or producer, in relation to the addressees’
adopted role of learner or consumer. To narrate is to make a bid for a kind of power. 1988:3
Narratives may often be seen to stand alone as self-contained entities, cut off from the surrounding context of their production: they do not necessarily have to be related back to
their narrators or to their socio-historical backgrounds for their message to be understood. So how do we define them? What are their essential characteristics? Toolan lists the
following pp. 4–5: 1. “A degree of artificial fabrication or constructedness not usually apparent in
spontaneous conversation”: narratives are planned, polished and rehearsed by their authors before they are finally presented to their audiences.
- 17 - 2. “A degree of prefabrication”: no narrative production is completely novel; they all
contain elements which have been seen or heard before—stereotyped characters, such as the gallant prince or beautiful princess, or the ‘rags to riches’ theme typical of many fairy
tales, in which the country boy wins the princess’s hand or ‘Cinderella’ meets her prince charming.
3. “Narratives typically seem to have a ‘trajectory’”: they usually go somewhere; there is a beginning, a middle where problems are created and resolved, and a conclusion, such as
the ‘And they all lived happily ever after’ ending of the popular fairy tale. 4. “Narratives have to have a teller, and that teller, no matter how backgrounded or
remote or ‘invisible’, is always important.” This definition places narratives firmly in the realm of language communication, despite their other special characteristics.
5. “Narratives are richly exploitative of that design feature of language called displacement the ability of human language to be used to refer to things or events that
are removed, in space or time, from either speaker or addressee. In this respect they contrast sharply with such modes as commentary or description.”
Toolan does not claim that these are any more than characteristics of narrative; they certainly do not constitute a rigorous definition of what narrative really is. Other
commentators appear less reticent. Scholes and Kellogg 1966:4 define narrative as: “all those literary works which are distinguished by two characteristics: the presence of a story
and a storyteller”. This definition makes a distinction between narrative and drama, but is there a clear-cut boundary between the two modes of expression? We have already alluded
to the variable nature of storyteller presence: we might also argue, with Toolan, that “behind any drama stands an invisible implied teller”. Our conclusion is, therefore, that
this definition is too narrow. Traugott and Pratt 1980:248 come up with something a little broader; they define
narration as: “essentially a way of linguistically representing past experience, whether real or imagined”.
- 18 - This definition is important and particularly applicable to the work which is being
presented in this thesis, where we are applying a model developed for the description of “narratives of personal experience” to narratives which are not real, but imagined. The
emphasis on “representation of past experience” implies a sense of detachment, which cuts narratives off from the external world and even from their authors: we read novels in order
to escape briefly from our circumstances into a “tale world” the term is Katharine Young’s inhabited by the characters in the particular tale we are reading. The term “past
experience” needs to be interpreted broadly to include “futuristic science fiction, or a novel with future reference, or a novel in the present tense”; the reader encounters and grasps all
such temporal relationships as “events that have already happened”. In our second paragraph we referred to Roland Barthes’ all-pervasive view of narrative; the
quotation continues: …narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society…Caring nothing for
the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself. Barthes 1977a:79
This may seem rather an over-the-top view of the impact of narratives on our lives, which leaves us wondering how in the world we can pin the notion of narrative down to
something manageable; however, Barthes does go on to say that narrative is still analysable and can be understood in a systematic way. Toolan takes up this emphasis on systematicity
and attempts a “minimalist definition” of what narrative might be: “a perceived sequence of non-randomly connected events” 1988:7. Having defined narrative, he is now obliged
to say what he means by event: “The event itself is really a complex term, presupposing that there is some recognized state or set of conditions, and that something happens, causing a
change to that state” 1988:7. Chatman’s definition of event is somewhat fuller:
Events are either actions acts or happenings. Both are changes of state. An action is a change of state brought about by an agent or one that affects a patient. If the action is
plot-significant, the agent or patient is called a character. Thus the character is narrative—though not necessarily grammatical—subject of the narrative predicate.
Chatman 1978:44
- 19 - We now need to see how these preliminary considerations fit into other aspects of
narrative theory. We will take Chatman’s introductory chapter as our basic text.
2.2 Elements of a Narrative Theory
Kategori