Basic Elements of Narrative

David Herman

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781405141543, 9781405141536
• eBook ISBN: 9781444356687
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Basic Elements of Narrative outlines a way of thinking about what narrative is and how to identify its basic elements across various media, introducing key concepts developed by previous theorists and contributing original ideas to the growing body of scholarship on stories.

• Includes an overview of recent developments in narrative scholarship
• Provides an accessible introduction to key concepts in the field
• Views narrative as a cognitive structure, type of text, and resource for interpersonal communication
• Uses examples from literature, face to face interaction, graphic novels, and film to explore the core features of narrative
• Includes a glossary of key terms, full bibliography, and comprehensive index
• Appropriate for multiple audiences, including students, non-specialists, and experts in the field

1

Getting Started

A Thumbnail Sketch of the Approach

Toward a Working Definition of Narrative

The overall aim of this book is to sketch an account of some of the distinctive properties of narrative. At a minimum, stories concern temporal sequences – situations and events unfolding in time. But not all representations of sequences of events are designed to serve a storytelling purpose, as we know from recipes, scientific explanations of plant physiology, and other genres of discourse. What else is required for a representation of events unfolding in time to be used or interpreted as a narrative? This book develops strategies for addressing that question, and the present chapter provides a thumbnail sketch of my approach. The next chapter then situates the approach in the context of the growing body of research on stories and storytelling, while the remaining chapters provide a more detailed description of the model presented in synoptic form here.

One of the main goals of this book is to develop an account of what stories are and how they work by analyzing narrative into its basic elements, thereby differentiating between storytelling and other modes of representation. Here at the outset, it may be helpful to provide an orienting statement of features that I take to be characteristic of narrative.¹ A relatively coarse-grained version of the working definition of narrative on which I will rely in this study, and that I spell out in more detail as I proceed, runs as follows: rather than focusing on general, abstract situations or trends, stories are accounts of what happened to particular people² – and of what it was like for them to experience what happened – in particular circumstances and with specific consequences. Narrative, in other words, is a basic human strategy for coming to terms with time, process, and change – a strategy that contrasts with, but is in no way inferior to, “scientific” modes of explanation that characterize phenomena as instances of general covering laws. Science explains the atmospheric processes that (all other things being equal) account for when precipitation will take the form of snow rather than rain; but it takes a story to convey what it was like to walk along a park trail in fresh-fallen snow as afternoon turned to evening in the late autumn of 2007.

Yet just as it is possible to construct a narrative about the development of science, to tell a story about who made what discoveries and under what circumstances, it is possible to use the tools of science – definition, analysis, classification, comparison, etc. – to work toward a principled account of what makes a text, discourse, film, or other artifact a narrative. Such an account should help clarify what distinguishes a narrative from an exchange of greetings, a recipe for salad dressing, or a railway timetable. This book aims to provide just this sort of account, drawing integratively on a number of traditions for narrative study to characterize the factors bearing on whether a representation of a sequence of events functions as a story. Another overarching goal of the book is to enable (and encourage) readers to build on the ideas presented here, so that others can participate in the process of narrative inquiry and help create more dialogue among the many fields concerned with stories, ranging from the humanities and social sciences (literary studies, creative writing, (socio)linguistics, history, philosophy, social and cognitive psychology, ethnography, communication studies, autobiography and life-story research, etc.) to clinical medicine, journalism, narrative therapy, and the arts.³

The next two sections of this chapter seek to move closer to a working definition of narrative. I begin by noting that narrative can be viewed under several profiles simultaneously – as a form of mental representation, a type of textual or semiotic artifact, and a resource for communicative interaction – and then identify four basic elements of narrative (some of them with sub-elements), which might also be viewed as conditions for narrativity, or what makes a narrative a narrative. Subsequent chapters zoom in on these elements or conditions in turn, offering a more in-depth treatment of the core features synopsized below.

Here at the outset, it is important to address a broader – indeed, foundational – issue pertaining to my attempt to identify basic elements of narrative. This issue can be approach by way of the distinction between what might be termed “etic” and “emic” approaches to narrative study – a distinction also applied to narrative research by Georgakopoulou (2007: 39ff.) in an important recent book that bears significantly on my own analysis, and that I return to at the end of this section. The etic/ emic distinction, coined by Pike (1982), is based on the contrast between phonetic and phonemic differences. Phonetic differences include, for example, all the various shades of difference among tokens of the consonant [p] that may be produced by speakers of English when they pronounce the first sound in the word put, such as aspirated [p^h] versus unaspirated tokens. Whereas in Hindi such differences do affect the meaning of utterances containing the [p] sound (i.e., the differences are phonemic), in English these differences do not (i.e., the differences are merely phonetic). By contrast, shifting from an unvoiced to a voiced bilabial stop, that is, from [p] to [b], does change the meaning of an utterance in English, as anyone hearing or reading put versus but would recognize. To extrapolate from this distinction: whereas etic approaches create descriptive categories that are used by analysts to sift through patterns in linguistic data, whether or not those categories correspond to differences perceived as meaningful by users of the language being analyzed, emic approaches seek to capture differences that language users themselves orient to as meaningful. Accordingly, a question for any account of the basic elements of narrative is whether those elements are in fact oriented to as basic by participants engaged in storytelling practices (= emic), or whether the elements are instead part of a system for analysis imposed on the data from without (= etic).

For example, Eggins and Slade (1997) draw on Labov’s (1972) approach to narrative analysis and Plum’s (1988) work on storytelling genres in face-to-face discourse to differentiate between full-fledged narratives and anecdotes (defined as reports of remarkable events plus the reactions they caused), exempla (defined as reports of incidents coupled with the interpretation of those events), and recounts (defined as the giving of a more or less bare record of events).⁴ But the question remains whether these are emic categories to which participants themselves orient, using them to make sense of different kinds of communicative activity, or whether such differences go unnoticed in the business of talk and are instead viewed by storytellers and their interlocutors as instances of the broader category “narrative.” To what extent do participants themselves discriminate between anecdotes and recounts, for example, in their own practice, and how would we go about finding that out? Similar questions can be posed about the model presented in this book – for example, whether participants in face-to-face discourse, readers of written texts, or viewers of films would discriminate among the categories of description, narrative, and argument in the manner suggested by my account later in this chapter and also in chapter 4. Further, for what populations do the critical properties of narrative outlined in this study indeed constitute basic elements of narrative, such that texts, discourses, or mental representations lacking one or more of those properties would be categorized by members of those populations as something other than a story? And how robust are these effects: within a given population, how important is a given element identified in my approach as basic?

To be addressed adequately, these questions must be explored via empirical methods of investigation, whether in controlled laboratory settings, through statistical analysis of responses to questionnaires, or in more naturalistic environments through techniques of participant observation, followed by interpretation of the data elicited in that fashion. I do not undertake these methods of inquiry here; instead, I argue for a particular approach to identifying the basic elements of narrative in the hope that it might provide a basis or at least a context for further studies of this kind. The book draws on my own native intuitions about stories and storytelling, coupled with traditions of narrative scholarship, to construct a model that I argue provides emic categories for narrative study, and not just etic ones. The possibilities and limitations of the model will not be fully evident, however, until others test it against their own intuitions about what constitutes a story – as well as the intuitions of broader populations whose narrative practices might be studied through the empirical approaches just mentioned.

This last point affords a segue back to a recent study that I mentioned above and that I wish to return to for a moment in concluding this section. The study in question is Georgakopoulou’s (2007) ethno-graphically oriented analysis of stories told in face-to-face interaction, and more specifically in non-interview settings where peers or family members tell (and retell) stories about events from their immediate as well as longer-term past, co-narrate shared stories, engage in projections of future events, and also produce truncated yet heavily evaluated reports that Georgakopoulou terms breaking news (Georgakopoulou 2007: 40–56; cf. Norrick 2000, 2007). Building on Ochs and Capps’ (2001) pathbreaking account (discussed below and also in my next chapter), and in particular their working assumption that “mundane conversational narratives of personal experience constitute the prototype of narrative activity rather than the flawed byproduct of more artful and planned narrative discourse” (2001: 3), Georgakopoulou argues that the development of models appropriate for research on everyday storytelling has been hindered by the kinds of narratives assumed to be canonical or prototypical. In the domains of sociolinguistics, life-story research, and other fields concerned with narratives produced in face-to-face interaction, Georgakopoulou suggests, the canonical or prototypical narrative is the kind of story on which Labov’s (1972) influential account was based: “namely, the research or interview narrative that is invariably about non-shared, personal[-]experience past events, and that occurs in response to the researcher’s ‘elicitation’ questions or prompts” (Georgakopoulou 2007: 31).⁵ By contrast, adapting a term first suggested by Bamberg (2004b), Georgakopoulou proposes to shift the focus of research on everyday storytelling to “small stories” whose structure and functions do not map directly onto the narratives featured in the Labovian model:

small stories... can be brought together on the basis of their main characteristic, namely that they are presented as part of a trajectory of interactions rather than as a free standing, finished and self-contained unit. More specifically, a) the events they report have some kind of immediacy, i.e. they are very recent past or near future events, or are still unfolding as the story is being constructed; b) they establish and refer to links between the participants’ previous and future interactions... including their shared stories. In this way, the stories are not only heavily embedded in their immediate discourse surroundings but also in a larger history of interactions in which they are intertextually linked and available for recontextualization in various local settings. (Georgakopoulou 2007: 40)

By focusing on such noncanonical stories, and by drawing on ideas from linguistic ethnography, Conversation Analysis, and other approaches to talk-as-interaction, Georgakopoulou aims to “document local theories of what constitutes a narrative and what the role of narrative is in specific communities” (2007: 21).

Despite some terminological and methodological differences, Georgakopoulou’s analysis and my own are arguably quite consonant in their underlying assumptions. Though readers are advised to come back to the following remarks after they have had a chance to read the rest of this chapter (and perhaps the subsequent chapters as well), it may be worth underscoring at this point the links between Georgakopoulou’s and my approaches. For one thing, as chapter 3 explores in more detail, in the model developed here one of the basic elements of narrative is the embeddedness of stories in a specific discourse context or occasion for telling. To paraphrase Heraclitus: the same story cannot be told twice, because the context in which the first telling takes place is irrevocably altered by that initial narrational act – this being a way of capturing what Georgakopoulou terms the “social consequentiality” (2007: 148) of situated storytelling acts. Shifting to a different issue, it is true that my account is based on the premise that there are modes of representation that are prototypically narrative, and also that there are identifiable critical properties associated with those modes of representation. Yet chapter 4 begins by characterizing such properties as more or less evident in a given story and anchors them in the patterns of use by virtue of which certain texts or discourses come to count as narratives. In other words, what constitutes a prototypical story is defined in a gradient, more-or-less way, and emerges from the strategies on which people rely in their everyday narrative practices.⁶ And as I also discuss in chapter 4, what is considered to be prototypical can vary across different contexts; think of the prototypical cold day in Tampa, Florida, versus Helsinki, Finland. Hence Georgakopoulou’s “small stories” might be redescribed as modes of storytelling in which, because of a shift of communicative circumstances, the normal and expected range of narrative practices differs from the practices used for relatively monologic narration in an interview setting, for example. Yet both sets of practices fall within the scope of narrative viewed as a kind or category of texts, and are oriented to as such by participants.

Profiles of Narrative

Part of the challenge of analyzing stories into their basic elements is that narrative can be viewed under several profiles: as a cognitive structure or way of making sense of experience; as a type of text, produced and interpreted as such by those who generate or navigate stories in any number of semiotic media (written or spoken language, comics and graphic novels, film, television, computer-mediated communication such as instant messaging, etc.); and as a resource for communicative interaction, which both shapes and is shaped by storytelling practices.

Among the most resonant and often cited words about stories and storytelling are the following, from Roland Barthes’s 1966 essay, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives”:

The narratives of the world are numberless. Narrative is first and foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed amongst different substances.... Able to be carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting... stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news item, conversation. Moreover under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society.... All classes, all human groups, have their narratives.... Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface to the second edition
• Acknowledgments
• The Elements
• 1. Getting Started: A Thumbnail Sketch of the Approach
• 2. Framing the Approach: Some Background and Context
• 3. Back to the Elements: Narrative Occasions
• 4. Temporality, Particularity, and Narrative: An Excursion into the Theory of Text Types
• 5. The Third Element; or, How to Build a Storyworld
• 6. The Nexus of Narrative and Mind
• Appendix
• Glossary
• Notes
• Index