Narrative Comprehension and Film

Edward Branigan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136129322
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Narrative is one of the ways we organise and understnad the world. It is found everywhere: not only in films and books, but also in everday conversations and in the nonfictional discourses of journalists, historians, educators, psychologists, attorneys and many others.
Edward Branigan presents a telling exploration of the basic concepts of narrative theory and its relation to film - and literary - analysis, bringing together theories from linguistics and cognitive science, and applying them to the screen. Individual analyses of classical narratives form the basis of a complex study of every aspect of filmic fiction exploring, for example, subjectivity in Lady in the Lake, multiplicity in Letter from and Unknown Woman, post-modernism and documentary in Sans Soleil.

1

NARRATIVE SCHEMA

PSYCHOLOGICAL USE VALUE

Narrative has existed in every known human society. Like metaphor, it seems to be everywhere: sometimes active and obvious, at other times fragmentary, dormant, and tacit. We encounter it not just in novels and conversation but also as we look around a room, wonder about an event, or think about what to do next week. One of the important ways we perceive our environment is by anticipating and telling ourselves mini-stories about that environment based on stories already told. Making narratives is a strategy for making our world of experiences and desires intelligible. It is a fundamental way of organizing data.¹

Recently narrative principles have been found in the work of a wide range of professionals, including attorneys,² historians,³ biographers, educators, psychiatrists, and journalists.⁴ This demonstrates that narrative should not be seen as exclusively fictional but instead should merely be contrasted to other (nonnarrative) ways of assembling and understanding data. The following kinds of document exemplify some nonnarrative ways of organizing data: lyric poetry, essay, chronology, inventory, classification, syllogism, declaration, sermon, prayer, letter, dialectic, summary, index, dictionary, diagram, map, recipe, advertisement, charity solicitation, instruction manual, laundry list, telephone directory, birth announcement, credit history, medical statement, job description, application form, wedding invitation, stock market report, administrative rules, and legal contract. The relevance and connection of narrative, or nonnarrative, to our world – how it may be used in that world to accomplish a goal – is a separate issue concerning its “mode of reference” as either fiction or nonfiction.

As a starting point and for simplicity, then, I will divide texts into four basic types: narrative fiction (e.g., a novel); narrative nonfiction (e.g., history); nonnarrative fiction (e.g., many kinds of poetry); and nonnarrative nonfiction (e.g., essay). The boundaries among these types are not absolute but relative to the questions one wishes to ask about the data that has been organized. The fact that certain poetry, for example, is nonnarrative does not mean that, considered at a fine grain, it may not also exhibit some aspects of narrative organization (e.g., defining a scene of action and temporal progression, dramatizing an observer of events). One should not allow the usefulness of broad categorizations (poetry, novel) to obscure the ways in which a narrative strategy may be applied successfully by a reader in comprehending certain aspects of some texts; or, for that matter, to obscure the ways in which nonnarrative reading strategies may penetrate narrative texts at certain levels.

It is also important to distinguish between two broad fields in which a given narrative may function. In one context, it can be said that a narrative must be consumed as a material and social object, and must respond to an agenda of community issues. In this context, a narrative acquires labels of immense variety in order to arouse the interests of community members. These labels are the pathways on which it moves through society by being bought and sold, or exchanged. In a second context, however, a narrative can be said to exist for only one person at a time. Engaging intimately with a perceiver, narrative enters thought itself, competing and jostling with other ways of reacting to the world. Thus narrative, at least initially, may be analyzed in two different ways. From one angle it appears as a social and political object with an exchange value arising from its manufacture as an object for a community; from another angle it appears as a psychological object with a use value arising from perceptual labor – from the exercise of the particular skills possessed by a member of that community. Ultimately, of course, these two values are not independent. One may study the psychological dimension of exchange (e.g., commodity fetishism) and the social dimension of use (e.g., propaganda). The particular social ground which defines an individual’s language and horizon of action cannot be completely divorced from that individual’s language competence and abilities. Narrative depends on an unspoken, permanent agenda of topics in a community which, in turn, justifies the community activities for which abilities must be found and developed in individuals.⁵ In studying how a narrative is assigned labels in order to be exchanged and used, one is studying basic human proficiencies: skills employed in manufacturing and selling a material object as well as perceptual skills employed in realizing a use for the object.

In spite of the copresence of exchange value and use value, I will tentatively separate the two contexts in order to better highlight the nature of a relative autonomy where each value provides a ground for the other. This will also enable me to limit the terms of discussion so as to begin to talk about how narrative functions in our world. It is the aim of this book to examine the use value of narrative, specifically the psychological dimension of use. I wish to examine how we come to know that something is a narrative and how a narrative is able to make intelligible our experiences and feelings. I will argue that it is more than a way of classifying texts: narrative is a perceptual activity that organizes data into a special pattern which represents and explains experience. More specifically, narrative is a way of organizing spatial and temporal data into a cause–effect chain of events with a beginning, middle, and end that embodies a judgment about the nature of the events as well as demonstrates how it is possible to know, and hence to narrate, the events.

Although it will often be convenient to use the word “narrative” to refer to an end result, or goal, one should not forget that this final product (“here is a narrative”) arises from a particular and ongoing (narrative) method of organizing data. Thus the word “narrative” may refer to either the product of storytelling/comprehending or to its process of construction. The first four chapters will begin to specify narrative in both these senses while chapter 7 will consider how a narrative relates to the real world in a “fictional” or “nonfictional” manner.

If narrative is to be considered as a way of perceiving, one still needs to specify the way. Further, one needs to specify what is meant by “perceiving.” In general, my approach will be to allow the notion of “perceiving” to remain quite broad and elastic, capable of referring to any one of a range of distinct mental activities. When sharp lines must be drawn, I will use special concepts. Thus the word “perception” will be used in this book to point toward any of the following: a “percept” derived from reality; a preconscious assumption being made about reality; or an acknowledged fact of physical reality. The word “perception” may also be used to refer to an intuition (e.g., perceiving that color seems to be intrinsic and permanent to an object while sound appears to come from an object, to be created and contingent); or, it may refer to a propositional conclusion that a perceiver has reached about sensory perception through a process of reasoning; or, it may simply refer to an attitude we adopt when confronted by something that is a representation of something else. Some theories would classify the latter as cognition rather than perception. As we shall see, particular theories of narrative will divide up the operations of human consciousness in various ways to emphasize different abilities. Thus the word “perception” in this book will earn its exactness only through the finer discriminations made by particular theories. In the next chapter, for example, I will begin to refine the notion of “perception” by introducing a fundamental distinction between “top-down” and “bottom-up” modes of perceiving.

LOGICAL TRANSFORMATIONS IN NARRATIVE

What way of arranging data is characteristic of narrative perception? We readily distinguish narrative from other experiences even if we cannot say how the judgment is being made, just as we may not be able to say why something counts as a “game” or a “grammatical” sentence.⁶ Intuitively we believe that a narrative is more than a mere description of place or time, and more even than events in a logical or causal sequence. For example, an account of the placement of objects in a room is not a narrative. Similarly, though a recipe involves temporal duration and progression (“bake until golden brown …”), it is not normally thought of as a narrative (the story of a pie). Nor does a sequence of actions become a narrative by being causal, completed, or well-delineated; for example, a planet orbiting the sun, the construction of a syllogism, the recitation of an alphabet, or the actions of departing, traveling, and arriving do not by themselves form a narrative. Instead, narrative can be seen as an organization of experience which draws together many aspects of our spatial, temporal, and causal perception.

In a narrative, some person, object, or situation undergoes a particular type of change and this change is measured by a sequence of attributions which apply to the thing at different times. Narrative is a way of experiencing a group of sentences or pictures (or gestures or dance movements, etc.) which together attribute a beginning, middle, and end to something. The beginning, middle, and end are not contained in the discrete elements, say, the individual sentences of a novel but signified in the overall relationships established among the totality of the elements, or sentences. For example, the first sentence of a novel is not itself “the beginning.” It acquires that status in relationship to certain other sentences. Although being “physically” first in some particular way may be necessary for a “beginning,” it is not sufficient since a beginning must also be judged to be a proper part of an ordered sequence or pattern of other elements; the elements themselves are not the pattern. Narrative is thus a global interpretation of changing data measured through sets of relationships. We must now consider the nature of this overall pattern of relationships.

Tzvetan Todorov argues that narrative in its most basic form is a causal “transformation” of a situation through five stages:

1 a state of equilibrium at the outset;

2 a disruption of the equilibrium by some action;

3 a recognition that there has been a disruption;

4 an attempt to repair the disruption;

5 a reinstatement of the initial equilibrium.⁷

These changes of state are not random but are produced according to principles of cause and effect (e.g., principles which describe possibility, probability, impossibility, and necessity among the actions that occur). This suggests that there are two fundamental kinds of predication in narrative: existents, which assert the existence of something (in the mode of the verb “to be”), and processes, which stipulate a change or process under a causal formula (in the mode of such verbs as “to go, to do, to happen”).⁸ Typical existents are characters and settings while typical processes are actions of persons and forces of nature. But there is more: the changes of state create an overall pattern or “transformation” whereby Todorov’s third stage is seen as the “inverse” of the first and fifth stages, and the fourth stage the “inverse” of the second (since it attempts to reverse the effects of the disruption).⁹ The five stages may be symbolized as follows: A, B, –A, –B, A. This amounts to a large-scale pattern (repetition, antithesis, symmetry, gradation) among the causal relationships and is temporal in a new way; in fact, some theorists refer to such patterns as a “spatial” form of narrative.¹⁰ This emergent form, or transformation, is a necessary feature of narrative because, as Christian Metz observes, “A narrative is not a sequence of closed events but a closed sequence of events.”¹¹

Consider as an example the following limerick:

There was a young lady of Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger.
They returned from the ride
With the lady inside
And the smile on the face of the tiger.¹²

Analyzing the limerick as a narrative using Todorov’s transformations, results in the following global structure:

There was [once upon a time]:

A	smile
B	ride
–A	[swallowed: a horrible pleasure?]
–B	return
A	smile

[which goes to show that …]

The limerick illustrates several important points about Todorov’s transformations. First, the structure does not represent directly the actual processing of the narrative by a perceiver but only its conceptual or logical form after it has been interpreted. The reader discovers that the narrative did not begin with “lady,” or “youth,” or the place of “Niger,” as its initial term (“A”) because none of those beginnings will yield a macro-description of the required kind. Taking “smile” as an initial term, however, produces a sequence of transformations that will embrace the limerick as a whole (A, B, –A, –B, A). Nevertheless, this does not yet explain why a reader may smile at the limerick. The humor of the limerick resides in the sudden realization of what must have happened, of what was omitted from its proper sequence in the telling. The absence of the woman at the end answers to a gap in the chronological structure of the telling of the event. Todorov’s middle stage – a “recognition” of the disruption – already hints that the actual process of moving from ignorance to knowledge will be of central importance to our experience of narrative. Not only characters and narrators, but readers are caught up in ways of perceiving and knowing. These crucial issues will need to be addressed in more detail and will be the topic of chapters 3 and 4.

Second, Todorov’s structure does not represent the entirety of our comprehension of the narrative aspects of the limerick. The reader must supply an epilogue or moral to the story which justifies its being told (which goes to show that …). This involves a rereading and a reassignment of some of the meanings – a process facilitated in the first line by assuming that reference will be partially indeterminate in the manner of a fiction (once there was a time …). Eventually the reader must rationalize how he or she might know such an exotic world within his or her preconceptions of an ordinary world.

Finally, although this narrative is arranged to focus attention on what Todorov calls the inversion of the initial equilibrium (the middle cause which is the opposite of smiling, i.e., being swallowed, –A), the logical structure cannot account for all of the inferences that the reader must draw in discovering the nature of the “inversion” which turns out to have an unexpected literal dimension (ingestion) as well as a number of metaphorical dimensions. What qualifies the inversion as an inversion? The rea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Haltitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• 1 Narrative Schema
• 2 Story World and Screen
• 3 Narration
• 4 Levels of Narration
• 5 Subjectivity
• 6 Objectivity and Uncertainty
• 7 Fiction
• Notes
• Works cited
• Index