NARRATIVE

• Alasdair McIntyre: “Man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal.”

• Terry Pratchett: “Stories, great, flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling. Stories don’t care who takes part in them. All that matters is that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer, stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service of only the story itself. Servant girls have to marry the prince. That’s what life is all about. You can’t fight a Happy Ending.”

Two aspects of narrative:

• STORY (TALE) – TELLING/SHOWING

• ‘what’ – ‘how’

Properties of narrative

Story/tale: 1. plot

2. character

3. setting

Telling/showing:

4. point of view

5. voice (narrator)

Plot

“There was an old man

And he had a calf

And that’s half

He took him out of the stall

And put him on the wall

And that’s all”

action vs. plot• Action: events one after another (annals)• Plot: arrangement • Aristotle: plot (mythos) is action (praxis)

arranged artistically • E. M. Forster’s example: the king died -

the queen died; • the king died - the queen died of grief; (as

it turned out, the bishop killed them both)• Causality

Teleology (telos)

Peter Brooks:

“Plot is the design and intention of narrative, what shapes a story and gives it a certain direction or intent of meaning.”

Plot= ‘conspiracy’

(French for plot: ‘intrigue’)

Character• Hero – protagonist • Protagonist – minor character • Protagonist – antagonist

(Antigone – Creon)

Hero – villain

(Richard III, Krisztyán Tódor)

Hero – antihero

(Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

chinovnik; Oblomov, Gregor Samsa

Vladimir and Estragon, Nyúl Béla

The double

• doppelgänger, alter ego• Hidden aspects of the self (repressed

desires, fears) • E. A. Poe: „William Wilson” • R. L. Stevenson: Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde• Chuck Palahniuk: The Fight Club

(Tyler Durden) Babits Mihály: A gólyakalifa

THE STUDY OF NARRATIVE

• (Structuralist) Narratology• (Vladimir Propp; Tzvetan Todorov; Roland

Barthes; Gérard Genette) • Narratives are translatable (bw languages, bw.

different media)

aim: universal, timeless structure

Roland Barthes: “a narrative is a long sentence just as every constative sentence is in a way the rough outline of a short narrative”

(1) deep structure - surface structure

Snow White~Sleeping Beauty~Little Red Riding Hood

• Vladimir Propp (Russian ethnographist) • Russian folktales • 7 character types or Roles (hero, enemy,

helper, etc.) and • 32 plot elements or Functions (doing

damage, questing, setting up a prohibition, etc.)

•

Propp

• Individual tales:

• variations and combinations of functions, roles (eg ‘doing damage’: kidnapping, stealing, magic spell, killing)

• → grammar of all possible tales

• Western films

• Hero – society – villain – helper

• What about more complex narratives?

(2) fabula and sjuzet (fabula, szüzsé): the tale and the telling

• fabula: the action considered separately from the text (without the plotting, the ‘telling’)

• sjuzet: the actual text; the ‘how’, the way in which the fabula is constructed, actualised, told, worked (much more than plotting)

Fabula/sjuzet

• E.g. the sjuzet of Onegin:

• not the story of Onegin ad Tatjana (narrative voice, irony, parallel story of Lensky and Olga)

• Faulkner, Jane Austen, Bridget Jones

• Film: point of view, colour or b/w, slow-motion, fast-tracking, editing, soundtrack, voice-over,

temporal organisation of narrative(fabula and sjuzet in the handling of time)

Order (Memento, Faulkner, Pulp Fiction)

Frequency (Hitchcock)

Duration

„many years passed” (acceleration); cuts in film

descriptions (pause: zero time, much text)

The Function of Storytelling

Why do we need stories?

The cultural significance of stories

1. Narrative (as) knowledge

Aristotle: “We need stories because we hav not lived enough”

Sanskrit gna: “know” and “narrate” - myths

Narrative in myth, history and natural history

(the origin of death, the neck of the giraffe)

3. Narrative as identity

• Tengelyi László: „The time we live in is woven through by stories. Our place in the world – even before we are conscious indeed, perhaps before we are born – is staked out by family narratives. Then we add our ... story to the stories we inherit.”

Narrative and identity

• Creating and maintaining selfhood; continuity

• Trauma → gaps in self-stories

• (‘I can’t make it into a story’)

• Individual – collective identity (national)

• Ambiguity of self-stories: honesty and fraudulence, clarification and self-mythologisation

3. Narrative as act(ion)Old English spell (enchantment) ‘story’

Telling a story: an act

the point of the story: why? To whom?

Biblical parables

• psychoanalysis: understanding, healing

• confession: absolution

• courts of law, testimonies: judgement

Narrative as action

• La Fontaine’s tale about Athens

(the swallow, the egg and the eel)

• Arabian Nights: Sheherezade and Prince Shahryar

• (narrative as seduction, spell)

Shakespeare: Othello • [Brabantio believes that Othello seduced Desdemona with the help of some magic

potion or spell]

• “Yet, by your gracious patience, I will a round unvarnish’d tale deliver Of my whole course of love; what drugs, what charms, What conjuration and what mighty magic, For such proceeding I am charged withal, I won his daughter. …

• Her father loved me; oft invited me; Still question’d me the story of my life, From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes, That I have passed. I ran it through, even from my boyish days, To the very moment that he bade me tell it; Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances, Of moving accidents by flood and field Of hair-breadth scapes i’ the imminent deadly breach … 

Othello/2• … This to hear 

Would Desdemona seriously incline: But still the house-affairs would draw her thence: Which ever as she could with haste dispatch, She'ld come again, and with a greedy ear Devour up my discourse: which I observing, Took once a pliant hour, and found good means To draw from her a prayer of earnest heart That I would all my pilgrimage dilate, Whereof by parcels she had something heard, But not intentively: I did consent, And often did beguile her of her tears, When I did speak of some distressful stroke That my youth suffer'd. My story being done, She gave me for my pains a world of sighs: 

Othello/3• She swore, in faith, 'twas strange, 'twas passing

strange, 'Twas pitiful, 'twas wondrous pitiful: She wish'd she had not heard it, yet she wish'd That heaven had made her such a man: she thank'd me, And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her, I should but teach him how to tell my story. And that would woo her. Upon this hint I spake: She loved me for the dangers I had pass'd, And I loved her that she did pity them. This only is the witchcraft I have used: Here comes the lady; let her witness it.”