Come See me!

It looks like things are going to start to get a little busier for me for a couple of weekends.

The weekend of March 28th, I'll be in Rhode Island, presenting a paper on Camille Utterback's Text Rain at URI's "Bodies in Motion" Interdisciplinary Grad Student conference. I'm really excited to take the trip and hear some new work there.

Then the following weekend, I'll be back in Virginia, here at my own stomping grounds at VCU. I'll be attending and presenting a paper at the Virginia Humanities Conference on Poe's take on humanity and embodiment in some of his short stories. I was a presenter back in 2007 and had a great experience at Christopher Newport University, so I'm glad to be invited back to this conference to see some familiar faces and hear some great talks. I also think that some of my MATX peers are going to be participating, so I'm excited to see some of them whom I haven't had any classes with lately.

Come see me and my comrades if you get the chance!

Story, Discourse, and a Little Bit of History

This week, I'm going to post one longer write-up on Seymour Chatman's Story and Discourse, and a shorter summary of the history of narratology, cribbed from the first few essays in Phelan and Rabinowitz's A Companion to Narrative Theory.

Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Seymour Chatman

Seymour Chatman’s Story and Discourse, first published in 1978, reads like a primer to the macro and micro elements of, surprisingly enough, story and discourse. This is a great text, for both the insights that Chatman provides and the clear and deft way that he introduces and explicates information that can, in lesser hands, get somewhat messy. Chatman outlines some of the major contributions of thinkers from Aristotle to Propp, Bakhtin to Genette, and then embarks on his own analysis of these ideas, application of the theories, and, when necessary, revision and critique of the preceding thought patterns.

Breaking the text into five sections, Chatman first outlines a general introduction to the field and a structuralist approach to it. He then moves to outlining notions relevant to story (events and existents), and discourse (nonnarrated stories and covert versus overt narrators). What follows is a brief summary of some of the more salient points Chatman makes.

1. Introduction
Here Chatman outlines his basic approach to literary theory, in which he hopes to study the nature of literature, not the specific literary works. He outlines his reasoning behind a formulaic (though not unyielding) approach to studying literature, and distinguishes the two major elements of any narrative: the story/ fabula (i.e. – what happens in the story), and the discourse/ sjuzet (how the story is related to an audience, the medium that the narrative takes). Outlining his rationale behind advocating narrative as a structure, Chatman utilizes three essential elements of a structured group of objects common to other fields like math, social anthropology, philosophy, linguistics, and physics: wholeness, transformation, and self-regulation, and applies these functions to narrative works. Chatman also pushes for an idea of narrative as semiotic, meaningful structure in its own right, suggesting that “narrative structure imparts meanings […] precisely because it can endow an otherwise meaningless ur-text with eventhood, characterhood, and settinghood, in a normal one-to-one standing-for relationship” (25). Chatman continues to outline Roman Ingarden’s distinction between the “real” object and the aesthetic object, a useful way to think of story and discourse.

2. Story: Events
Events occur as either actions (nonverbal physical acts, speeches, thoughts, and feelings, perceptions, or sensations) or happenings (a predication of which the character or other focused existent is a narrative object). Events are correlative and causative, and Chatman distinguishes between kernels (necessary to the “storyness” of the story) and satellites (auxiliary, can be removed without altering the foundational story). Some notions salient to the microstructure of story are order (normal sequence vs. anachronous sequence), duration (relationship between time it takes to read narrative to time the story events lasted), and frequency of events. Relevant to the macrostructure of story are such concepts as types of plots (such as the six proposed by Aristotle, the two types proposed by Frye, or the three types proposed by Crane).

3. Story: Existents
Chatman discusses the notion of space within narratives, distinguishing between the salient features of film (visual narrative) space and written (verbal narrative) space. This space, of course, is filled by characters (existents) fulfilling actions or thinking. Chatman argues for a conception of character as open – allowing compelling questions to be asked and answered about his nature and behaviors. Here Chatman also outlines the contribution of setting to narrative.

4. Discourse: Nonnarrated Stories
Narrative statements exist in two realms, process and stasis. The narrative style of a story highlights its nature as either mimetic or diegetic (showing vs. telling). The distinction between the author and narrator is important to understanding the discourse, as well as a grasp of the point of view that the story is told in. All stories are mediated to become narrative; the “least” mediated ones are diaries or epistolary novels, which presume immediacy (though they do not actually attain perfect synchronism with writing about life exactly as it happens). It is important to be able and willing to recognize distinctions in narrative voice in order to make educated conclusions about the work as a whole.

5. Discourse: Covert versus Overt Narrators
The role of the narrator shifts depending on how the audience identifies him or her; as his he attains more attributes in the story we get a stronger sense of his presence in the discourse. While covert narrators can’t easily express judgments on the story (thus blowing their cover), overt narrators can and will color our perception of the story. As we come to recognize a narrator as distinct from a character, we see that Ethos can apply in fiction to the narrator only. In the final pages Chatman discusses the role of the narratee within narrative. A scan of the final diagram of narrative structure is reproduced below.

This work was exciting for me in several ways. I felt that Chatman opened up doors: establishing a need for a systematic, formulaic approach to narrative theory and setting a great example. His critical analysis was well-formed and illuminating, and his writing about both macro and micro elements of narrative theory was lucid yet compelling in its own right. While still acknowledging the theoretical nature of this book, Chatman has written a text that gives space to intellectual consumption and criticism and provides numerous examples of the theory in practice.

Some thoughts on the text:

Chatman pushes for an idea of narrative as structured, and in doing so asserts its “wholeness,” suggesting that an element is whole because it is constituted of elements that differ from what they constitute (21). I wonder about this claim. Are open-ended narratives “whole” in this sense? What about new narrative techniques – i.e. collaborative, dynamic works, auto-generated narratives, etc. Are these narratives whole? Are these works narrative at all, if we subscribe to Chatman’s definition? I’m not disagreeing with Chatman; I’m just questioning the logic. Perhaps the distinction between closure and resolution may be a helpful notion to consider in terms of wholeness, though Chatman considers closure more in the domain of self-regulation of narrative. Does Chatman undo his own logic when he discusses the self-selecting, incomplete nature of narratives (28-29)?

My Bakhtin foundations are a little shaky, so when Chatman writes that Bakhtin argues for a duplex notion of quotation, as being both signs and markers or characters (107), I’d like to delve a little deeper into this idea. How can they be both? Does indirect discourse also act in this doubled way?

I feel like much of Chatman arguments stems from a nearly grammatical approach to narrative; parsing out the individual elements to arrive at the greater whole. I’m intrigued by this structuralist approach and wonder if greater, more exhaustive critical works have yielded success across a battery of narrative texts?

Speaking of multi-faceted narratives, Chatman suggests that “work should proceed genre by genre” (95). Doesn’t this have some telling implications for Chatman’s own theories: namely that there are either few or no universals about narrative, or that the differences between narratives of different genres exceed their similarities, and thus perhaps the notion of a general field of “narrative discourse” is not as useful as we might like to think?

Finally, Chatman goes to great depths to outline the significant differences between indirect and direct discourse, tagged vs. free, etc. I’ve always been shaky on these concepts, having attended public school, and would like to spend a little more time applying these notions to texts. While Chatman uses many examples that make it easy to recognize these different types (when they are being pointed out to the reader), I’ve found that I stumble when trying to pinpoint the types myself, without Chatman’s aid.

Historical Essays in A Companion to Narrative Theory, James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz, Ed.

In this text, several essays outline the (sometimes) contentious history of narratology as a field. In his essay on the “A Genealogy of Early Developments,” David Herman describes narratology as originating from a morphological approach to narrative structure, expanding its scope to include as foundational three interconnected aspects of novel theory: characterization of fictions as organic wholes, adoption of a descriptive rather than prescriptive approach to narrative analysis, and skeptical attitude toward exact recipes or protocols for the production of fictional texts (James, “The Art of Fiction,” 1884). After Russian Formalism narratology adopts a semiotic/linguistic approach to narrative, borrowing the same structure and many of the same terminology from this related (though, importantly flawed in some ways) field. A survey of the history of narratology reveals that Narrative theory materializes as “fields of forces emerging at different rates of progression and impinging on one another through more or less diffuse causal networks” (31).

In her essay “From Structuralism to the Present,” Monika Fludernik picks up where Herman leaves off, outlining the more recent history of narratology. Structuralism is marked by its aspirations to scientificity and descriptive aims, yet runs into problems with its difficult relation between theory and practice. As the field moves into the 70s and 80s, most narratologists are concerned with discourse and narration rather than plot. Greater specificity is then incorporated into the field, as contextual, conversational, gender-oriented, and post-colonial narratology develop. Finally, Fludernik suggests that the cognitive turn of narratology may be one way in which the field could more closely reach its scientific goals.

With this historical background, one can better see how the elements of narratology, and the major players, converse and question each other. Foundations have been set for the revision and adaptation of narratological principles, and a history of narratology shows the important ways that thinking has shifted as the field had developed.

The F-Bomb (on repeat)

You've heard of the Christian Bale incident, in which he lost his mind and engaged in a profanity-laced tirade against one of the crewmen on set last summer. I think that the news broke Monday. In the tradition of great 21st-century procrastinators everywhere, I offer you this (likewise profanity-laced) remix of the outburst, by L.A. artist RevoLucian.

In case I need to say it, this is Not Safe for Work, or Children, or your mother. But RevoLucian has done a great job pouncing on the piece, and the whole scenario is rather funny.