Narrative Gravity

Conversation, Cognition, Culture

Rukmini Bhaya Nair

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134397914
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique

In this elegantly written and theoretically sophisticated work, Rukmini Bhaya Nair asks why human beings across the world are such compulsive and inventive storytellers. Extending current research in cognitive science and narratology, she argues that we seem to have a genetic drive to fabricate as a way of gaining the competitive advantages such fictions give us. She suggests that stories are a means of fusing causal and logical explanations of 'real' events with emotional recognition, so that the lessons taught to us as children, and then throughout our lives via stories, lay the cornerstones of our most crucial beliefs. Nair's conclusion is that our stories really do make us up, just as much as we make up our stories.

1
STRUCTURAL SIMPLICITIES

The Grammar and Context of Narrative

(Guru: William Labov)

A. A violent order is disorder; and
B. A great disorder is an order. These
Two things are one. (Pages of illustrations.)

After all the pretty contrast of life and death
Proves that these opposite things partake of one,
At least that was the theory, when bishops’ books
Resolved the world. We cannot go back to that.
The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind
If one may say so.

Now, A
And B are not like statuary, posed
For a vista in the Louvre. They are things chalked
On the sidewalk so that the pensive man might see.

The pensive man … He sees that eagle float
For which the intricate Alps are a single nest.

Wallace Stevens, Connoisseur of Chaos

My relation to Structuralism [is] against shutting oneself in the text. … The resulting formalization and depersonalization: all relations are of a logical nature (in the broad sense of the term). I, on the other hand, hear voices everywhere, and dialogic relations among them.

M. Bakhtin, Concerning Methodology in the Human Sciences

Structuralism spanned the early and middle decades of the twentieth century like a great cantilever bridge. Conceptually girded like an engineer’s marvel, it led the ‘pensive men’ (Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Levi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson) who set it up to think that its stretch might cover all those ‘squirming facts’ which Wallace Stevens found so hard to order. In their choice of primary materials, however, most structuralists seemed to prefer to study ‘the statuary in the Louvre’ rather than ‘the things chalked on the side walk’. So, Claude Levi-Strauss’s primary materials included the Greek myths, and Vladimir Propp’s morphology analysed the Russian folk-tale; but stories as a part of casual conversation seemed to evade that ‘eagle’s eye’ analysis which made of complex intricacies the ‘single nest’ demanded by high structuralism.

But today, the doctrinal pages of the ‘bishops’ books’ of structuralism have been swept aside by the viewless winds of deconstruction and postmodernism. Why bother to resurrect them? Well, for a start, every member of the human species seems born a connoisseur of chaos. An escape from the structural paradigm, cognitively rather than culturally defined, hardly appears possible for the only species on the planet caught in the perceptual trap of linear time, which ‘hears voices everywhere’ and defines its sense of community through talk and language.

As a historical production, structuralism may be passé but its mental sources run deep. The biologist’s impulse to dissect and label the body of Vac, to impose an order on the squirming facts, has always driven, and will continue to motivate, both our fascination with binaries—mirroring the alternating ABABAB structures of conversation—as well as our strong intuitions about linear sequencing—reflecting the temporal ‘and then’ ABCCDE structure of narrative. That is why it seems important, even as we accept the inevitability of a cognitive bondage to structural principles, occasionally to ponder over our pre-programmed and potentially ‘violent’—an adjective implied by Vac and used by Stevens—structuralist procedures of enquiry in the human sciences across cultures.

In this first chapter, I return to the seventies and early eighties—the heyday of the ‘story-grammars’. These grammars all shared the premise that there is, out there in the world, a natural, linear structure of events. Our words, for the most part, follow and secure this powerful temporal order. That is to say, in a story-grammar, as in life, it would be distinctly odd for an Outcome or Resolution to precede an Action, such as in the following inversion presented by Harvey Sacks:

The mommy picked it up. The baby cried.

Sacks points to the normal structure of our inferences. We expect that:

If the baby cried, it ought to have started crying before the mother picked it up, and not after. Hearing it that way, the second sentence ‘The mommy picked it up’ is explained by the first ‘The baby cried’. Hearing them as consecutive, or with the second preceding the first, some further explanation is needed.¹

The psycholinguist J.M. Levelt makes the cognitive implications of Sacks’ remark clear:

Linearization … serves the main purpose of evoking certain inferences in the mind of the listener. Order is one determinant of implicature. … Order of mention apparently implicates order of events … The old principle in rhetoric corresponding to this is known as ordo naturalis. Natural order is, so to speak, the unmarked form of linearization. All other words, the so called artificial orders, are designed to create special attentional or aesthetic effects. A psycholinguistic consideration of linearization starts out most profitably with the unmarked case. … The principle of natural order may have two related but still different, psychological sources. … A first source is the organization of the speaker’s own pre-linguistic experience. An event-structure, for instance, is in our culture quite likely memorized in such a way that consecutive events are more closely associated than non-consecutive events. … The other source of natural order is conversational [emphasis mine]. If the speaker intends the listener to derive certain implicatures from the order in which things are said, he should base his speech on mutual knowledge. There is general knowledge in our culture that causes precede effects, that means are sought before ends are achieved, that planning precedes execution, etc. By using unmarked order, the speaker can make sure that the listener will correctly apply such knowledge and come up with the intended implicature. … Here the speaker’s and the listener’s interests are likely to coincide: if the speaker’s retrieval process is, in part, governed by what is stereotypic in the culture, the listener will be able to use the same stereotype to encode and store the information. The short answer, therefore, to what makes natural order so natural is that it allows for easy retrieval on the part of the speaker and for easy inference on the part of the listener, given shared general or more specific knowledge in the speech community.²

Levelt’s strategy of setting inference-making from such domains of discourse as stories within the context of a cooperative speech community means that the ‘two sources’ of ‘natural order’ with which I’m concerned in this book—the narrative and the conversation—are inevitably drawn together. Departures from this dominant combination of natural orders, as in the Sacks story, are also ‘naturally’ noticed, since they demand extra effort at sense-making. The ‘Paradox of the Indian Rope Trick’, to which I return at the end of this chapter, focuses on these ‘so called artificial orders…designed to create special attentional or aesthetic effects’.

The ordering of the world, in effect, is a cognitive process which requires us to rely on our intuitive understanding of linearization as temporal. If we were to imagine the ‘now’ universe of, say, chaffinches, or chimps, or very young babies, or even patients with Alzheimer’s, we would surely attribute to them a much fuzzier sense of time. This would imply that they are unable to process the world in narrative terms. Narrative requires, that is, a meta-theory of time. The deep illusion—if illusion it is—that we harbour about the unidirectionality of the arrow of time actually helps us to organize chaos. Because we hold fast to the belief that, despite Einstein’s equations, perceptual and physical time both flow always forwards, we are able to play narrative games with time—to cut it up, re-sequence and re-label parts of the body of Vac and then recombine them.

Narrative is perhaps our most efficient way of packaging our perceptions of time, which in turn crucially promotes our sense of individual identity. Sorting events into a temporal format which enables easy storage, easy retrieval and easy cultural exchange confers a distinct evolutionary advantage. As several recent studies have shown, there is a clear time lag between the perception of an event and its recording by the brain.³ This suggests that what we ‘consciously’ see or hear is a sort of continuous ‘action replay’, split seconds after things happen. In other words, at the very moment we prove ourselves excellent narrators who can connect events with amazing facility, we are robbed of much agency or decision-making power over what we perceive. Yet this lost agency is then returned to us through another channel, since the ‘stereotypic’ expectations we have of an event invest it with structure before it takes place—allowing us to ‘predict’ how it will work out. That is why I called narrative a ‘species of natural theory’ in my Introduction; in this chapter, I shall try to show how the analysis of the structuralist story-grammarians in fact highlights this ‘theoretical’ nature of narrative.

What does any theory accomplish? At its simplest, it describes observable phenomena, makes deductive generalizations about these, and creates a meta-vocabulary of statements that are in principle falsifiable and thus have non-trivial predictive power. A ‘good’ theory must also suggest replicable experiments which anybody with suitable skills can carry out, experiments which reinforce its claims to have ‘explained’ the phenomena in question. Furthermore, we have to assume that it is a characteristic of a good theory that it keeps up a constant struggle to maintain its place against competing theories which could provide simpler, more elegant and more exciting explanations for the same phenomena. Now narratives, I submit, paradigmatically do all these things: they describe things and events in the world, generate meta-vocabularies such as those on display in the terminology of the structuralist story-grammars (Abstract, Orientation, Action, Cause, Evaluation, Resolution, Coda, etc.), make generalizations which may be falsified by a community of skilled listeners, predict events, are reproduced in a ‘formulaic’ mode; and, finally, offer explanations of both psychological and physical phenomena.

A narrative, as ‘theory’, competes with other narratives that could displace it because they offer ‘better’ and more ‘universal’ explanations of a comparable range of phenomena. Conversational narrative thus functions as ‘theory in the round’, if not exactly ‘theatre in the round’, with several opportunities for listeners to present rival narrative accounts. Of course, a great deal of tedium is involved in ‘proving’ such a hypothesis about the purpose of narrative. One wishes that the ‘pages of illustrations’ that Stevens so neatly bracketed off in his poem were unnecessary. However, since we can assume no such thing, let’s start with as unobjectionable a set of observations as possible.

A Thought Experiment

Story-telling is an intuitively recognizable and frequently observed phenomenon in everyday conversation. Like the sentence, it is highly amenable to structural analysis, being linear and hierarchically organized. It possesses, too, the same capacity for infinite recursive embedding. One can imagine, if not process, a very long sentence that would include all the words in a given language, some more than once, and still have room left over. Such a sentence, if we were to change over to a ‘post-structuralist’ perspective for a moment, could be said to ‘drain’ language, to blanch it of its ‘potential meanings’, and convert them into ‘narrative meanings’. Throughout this book, I shall engage with the implications of this narrative takeover over meaning. A simple prediction follows: should anyone try the Gedankenexperimente of attempting to construct that mythical Indian rope trick of a sentence, she will end up before long with a compelling narrative turn to her production. Long sentences naturally tend to metamorphose into narrative.

I begin, then, with the premise that narrative has the same psychological validity as the sentence. It is as central in cognitive processing. While the sentence is accepted, however, as perhaps the most significant of grammatical universals, the narrative has still to win its spurs as a discourse universal—an indispensable communicative and cognitive tool for self-fashioning across cultures.⁴ Narrative differs from the sentence in that it tends constantly to break through the ‘upper bound’ of grammatical analysis and enter a different and less well-charted realm. The realm of ‘discourse’, peopled with speakers, hearers and enriched with context. My examination of ‘story-grammars’ in this first chapter is thus committed to teasing out the notion of context in relation to the grammatical units of a story described by structuralist researchers like Labov and Waletsky and Mandler and Johnson: Steps I and II, in fact, of the mad, methodological parabola described in my Introduction.

Surprisingly, or perhaps not so surprisingly, given their historical genesis, the psycholinguistic story-grammars of the seventies, and the more literary structural analysis presented by Barthes, also in the seventies, resemble the Labovia...