Narrative

and
Narratology

 Narratology: the study of narrative

structures.
As the study of structures then, it adopts
a formalist approach.
Vladimir Propp (Morphology of the
Folktale) was a Russian formalist critic.
Picked up by the structuralists later on in
the 1950s narratology a branch of
structuralism.

Three parts to the lecture:

Brief overview; historical development.
The components of a narrative.
The simplest way to define narrative is as a
series of events in a specific order with a
beginning, a middle and an end. (Bennett
and Royle, 53)
To qualify the claim that very few aspects of
life are not bound up with strategies and
effects of narrative anticipate postmodern
criticism later on in the semester.

Narratology is the study of how narratives make

meaning, and what the basic mechanisms and
procedures are which are common to all acts of
story-telling. Narratology, then, is not the reading
and interpretation of individual stories, but the
attempt to study the nature of story itself, as a
concept and as a cultural practice. (Barry 215)
To discover the basic mechanisms and procedures
Which are common to all acts of story-telling.
As a cultural practice placing, and studying, the
telling of stories within particular historical, political
and cultural contexts.

Distinction between story and plot

The story is the actual sequence of events as they happen, whereas the
plot is those events as they are edited, ordered, packaged, and
presented in what we recognise as a narrative. This is a crucial distinction;
the story being the events as they happen, has to begin at the beginning,
of course, and then move chronologically, with nothing left out. The plot
on the other hand, may well begin somewhere in the middle of a chain of
events, and may then backtrack, providing us with a flashback which fills
us in on things that happened earlier. The plot may also have elements
which flash forward, hinting at events which will happen later. So the
plot is a version of the story which should not be taken literally... (Barry
215)

Events that take place

The telling, or recollection, of those events.

Roots in Russian Formalism

Two general approaches to culture and art in Russia in the
early 20th century.
The formalists an heir to the ideas of the Russian
intelligentsia
Opponents to the ideas of the intelligentsia.
Eg. Bakhntin, who argued that traditional formalist
analysis in the strictest sense tended to be monological
in its approach.
Intelligentsia: referred to someone who firmly held on to a
particular ideological system.

 Systems were expected to be determinist,

atheist, and scientific, meaning, systems are
capable of explaining everything.
There are certain laws that enable the
functioning of the system.
Discover these laws discover the system
explain everything that happens in the system.
The main belief here is that laws are fixed,
systems are fixed, and hence deterministic.
Humanist in its belief that a system can explain
everything inside it, can stand outside of its own
historicity, can transcend its own historical
status.

 Systems themselves are ideologically informed.

Hard and rigid system leaves little room for
contingency.
Little room for discontinuities.
Cannot account for abnormalities, surprising
behaviour, things that do not fit into the system;
excesses and transgressions.
Bakhtin: we need to study language, not as a fixed
system but as a continuously evolving entity
language that is heteroglossic, dialogical, multiple,
plural, and ever changing.
Strict adherence to the laws of the system discount
choice response in existentialism, which held the
belief of existence over essence.

 To create a genuine science of literature.

Literature is an object of study, studied by the
disinterested critic focusing on the data (or fact)
before him.
What is studied is the literariness of the work;
what makes this object literary, and therefore
literature.
Eg. the language of literature distinguish between
poetic language, and practical everyday language.
Bakhtin: in place of a monological approach to
language, we need to adopt a dialogic approach
instead.
Another system or structure is narrative.

Barry identifies three historical marker figures in his own story

of narratology:
Aristotle
Vladimir Propp
Grard Genette
Aristotle
Aristotle identifies character and action as the essential
elements in a story, and says that character must be revealed
through action, which is to say through aspects of the plot.
(Barry 216) These are:
the hamartia a sin or fault
the anagnorisis recognition or realisation (often selfrealisation)
the peripeteia turn around or reversal of fortune

Vladimir Propp:
Character is secondary to the action, and character is there
only for distributing the functions around the story. (Barry
221)
...spheres of action (spheres in which the action unfolds, is
carried forward).
There are seven spheres of action:
The villain
The donor (provider)
The helper
The princess (a sought-for-person) and her father
The dispatcher
The hero (seeker or victim)
The false hero

This potential duplication, then, opens up the Proppian

methods used to analyse relatively simple material, and
begins to hint at the complexities of characterisation and
motivation which form the basis of psychological, realist
fiction. In realist fiction, the subordination of character
to action is reversed, and roles cannot be simply
demarcated as hero and villain. (Barry 222)
the Proppian approach seems to hint at the way simple
archetypes from much more basic narrative material
can provide the shadowy deep foundations of complex
realist fictions the way, for instance, the Cinderella
archetype (a tale found in some form in cultures
worldwide) lies beneath novels like Mansfield Park and
Jane Eyre. (Barry 222)

Grard Genette
Lacks anything about the way the narrative is presented,
such as the viewpoint or the style. (Barry 222)
http://www.signosemio.com/genette/narratology.asp
(Great summary of Genettes study of narrative!!)
I will not be performing narrative analysis in the strict
formalist sense.
I will attempt to identify a context of use
I will bring in structures of intelligibility that are
external to the text itself.
Narrative as cultural practice.

Four propositions:

Stories are everywhere

Stories tell us
The telling of stories is always bound up in
power, with questions of authority, ownership
and domination.
Stories have something to tell us about stories
themselves: they involve self-reflexive and
metafictional dimensions

(adapted from Bennett and Rolye, Literature,

Criticism and Theory, 52)

 We come to know our world, to understand our world,

through story telling.
History, as Hayden White has pointed out, is a series of
emplotments of events into a narrative.

Time
Setting
Character
Plot
Teleological progression (the notion that the end, Greek
telos)
Causality (showing how to two events are related to each
other)

We, as historical subjects, are narrative subjects.

Lacan: Language signifies us.
Althusser: Ideology signifies us.
Stories signify us.

 Barbara Hernstein Smith argues that our understanding of

narrative must be grounded in terms of someone telling
someone else that something happened. (Smith, cited in
Bennett and Royale, 56)
Jonathan Culler points out that to tell a story is to claim a
certain authority, which listeners grant. (Culler, cited in
Bennett and Royale, 56)
Resonates with Sartre on the mutual recognition of
freedom between author and reader that gives rise to
writing.
But the teller is not necessarily the author.
The various levels of worlds with corresponding tellers/
speakers and their narratorial points of view:
The world of the text
The world outside the text
The world between the two

 The character, trustworthiness and objectivity

of the figure who is narrating.
Narrative theory attempts to distinguish
between different kinds of narrators first
person, third person, omniscient narrators,
reliable or unrealiable, as well as questions
concerning point of view.
Who tells the story bearing on identifying the
ideological assumptions that inform the
telling.

French Lieutenants Woman

Male, white, British, and appears to be from the 1960s.
For a large part, an omniscient narrator.
Interrupts his telling quite often, to correct the readers
assumptions, or to draw our attention to his as well as our
biases, and to comment on the process of story-telling and
writing (self-reflexivity).
He also admits that he doesnt in fact know everything.
The implied author/ author-persona of the text, not the
author-person.
The storyteller relinquishes control over to the reader
through.
The narrator/ implied author does not claim to have full
control over the story or his characters.
Chapter 13: an exposition on story-telling, the function of
the teller, the limitations of the tellers understanding/
knowledge etc.


Slaughterhouse 5
An eye-witness account ofthe Dresden bombing.

Vonnegut was there, and this is his story of what

happened.
One narrator this is the narrative I introduced to us
in the preface, also the implied author of the text.
He is the omniscient narrator of Billys story.
There are several narrative points of view:
The fictional world of Billy Pilgrim
The world outside the text, which is Vonneguts world,
which we assume to have correspondence with the
preface.
The world between; the preface.

 Testimonial writing basically says I was there, I saw what

happened, this is my story, it is true because I was there.
Informed by an incredulity towards metanarrative, meaning, apart
from the claim that I was there there cannot be any other way to
verify or legitimise the story.
It recognises that there are multiple accounts of what happened,
this being only one of them.
Different texts within the novel appear to be competing for
authority over Dresden.
The refusal to lay claim to authoritarian control over Dresden is
seen in the narrators/ implied authors appearance into Billys
narrative.
A case of stories telling us: the narrator becomes a subject of the
story/ narrative; an acknowledgement of his status as a historical
(or narrative) subject.
He can no longer stand outside the story he is telling.
The novel thus demonstrates that narrative is pervasive in its
effects. Even a storyteller is not spared from the effects of his own
narrative.
No one stands outside of narrative or history.

French Lieutenants Woman

Two stories:
Charles
Sarah

Plotting:

The plot begins in the middle; uses flashbacks to

Ernestinas proposal to Charles and Charles
childhood.
The plot also begins in the middle; uses flashbacks to
trace how Sarah came to be an outsider.

Slaughterhouse 5
Two stories:

Vonnegut (implied author)

Billy Pilgrim

Plotting:

Flashbacks and flash forwards

In fact, plotting devices like flashbacks and flash forwards
are dramatised in the time travel. The flashback is no
longer just a plotting device he literally goes back to the
past. Characteristic of metafictional writing: plotting as
narrative device, which include flashbacks and flash
forwards is thematised in the novel as time-travel.

The God of Small Things

The story: There are multiple stories
Sophie Mols death
Ammu and Veluthas love story
Individual stories/ histories may or may not conflict
each other.
The telling: use of flashbacks and flashforwards. Account of
Ammu and Veluthas love affair is the final chapter of the
book. Significance? We know that this is not according to the
sequence of events. The telling is not the same as the story.

In a purely practical sense it would probably be correct to say that it all began
when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem. Perhaps its true that things can change in
a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of a whole lifetime. And
that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned
house the charred clock, the signed photograph, the scorched furniture must
be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for.
Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new
meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.
Still, to say that it all began when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem is only
one way of looking at it.
Equally, it could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago.
Long before the Marxists came. Before the British took Malabar, before the Dutch
Ascendency, before Vasco da Gama arrived, before the Zamorins conquest of
Calicut. Before three purple-rooted Syrian Bishops murdered by the Portuguese
were found floating in the sea, with coiled sea serpents riding on their chests and
oysters knotted in their tangled beards. It could be argued that it began long
before Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a teabag.
That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws
that lay down who should be loved, and how.
And how much.

All stories are interconnected intertextuality.

We are all products of stories; we are historical subjects.
The attempt to trace origins is futile.
Does not give us a specific date and time, nor a specific event,
compared to the other historical events it cites before this.
There is no exact origin for the caste system in India; there
are only theories surrounding the origins of the caste system.
What is the significance of origins, or point of origins? Having
a point of origin makes it easy to ascribe reasons for why
things happen cause and effect make it easier to apportion
blame.
No origins we look to ourselves to account for what has
happened. This is supported by the telling of the story
(emplotment) as well.

 Our search for origins our desire for purity.

The idea of the first, the original, and thus the pure.
Fear of contamination of upper caste by the
untouchables; betrays the anxiety of contamination,
of mixing.
Bakhtin criticised traditional stylistics because it
insisted on treating language as a single unitary
system; he says language is heteroglossic in nature.
History is not a singular unitary system no single
historical account of any one event; history is a
discourse that is heteroglossic there are multiple
accounts, vying for legitimacy, some in conflict with
each other.

Is the basic narrative mode mimetic

or diegetic?

Mimesis refers to show-telling or

dramatising.
Diegesis refers to telling or relating.

French Lieutenants Woman

Dramatising is taken to its limits in the voyeurism the narrative seems
to imply.
Mimetic mode is a truly apt description of the narrative when it
concerns Sarah.
Mimetic mode is exploited by the author to imply, or invite, our
voyeurism, and conversely, also to enhance Sarahs impenetrability.
The effect of the reader watching in, spying in, on this far away distant
Victorian world.
Imagery: the woman looking far away into sea, the man at the
telescope.
The narrative becomes this medium through which we access this
other world.
Intertexts provide another channel or telescope into this other world.
Diegesis: obvious that there is a telling going on here, and the
narrative shifts between the two.
The diegetic mode betrays a self-reflexivity, meaning, the teller
constantly reminds us that this is a telling and so we are not to take
the mimetic aspects of the novel too literally.

Slaughterhouse 5
Largely diegetic.
This is quite different from the realist mode of writing
that is appropriated ironically in FLW.
Mimesis comes from the Greek word meaning to imitate.
Offers a personal account of the bombing of Dresden, and
what it imitates is not an objective reality but a highly
subjective experience that is as much memory and
therefore reconstructed representation, as it is truth.
The diegetic mode also suits testimonial writing.
The telling of the story is itself thematised self-reflexive
mode of metaficational writing.

How is the narrative focalised?

Viewpoint or perspective; the point of view from
which the story is told.
External focalisation: the viewpoint is outside the
character depicted, so we are told only things
which are external or observable what
characters say and do
Internal focalisation: the focus is on what
characters think and feel.
Zero focalisation: no particular point from which
it is told.
The focaliser would be the main point of view
from which the narrative is told.

French Lieutenants Woman

The narrative generally moves between internal and external
focalisation.
External focalisation centred on Sarah.
It invites our voyeurism and enhances her mystery.
The focaliser would arguably be Charles.
He represents a patriarchal point of view, and readers identify with
him, and in doing so, we go along with him in solving the mystery of
Sarah, the other who is inaccessible to him, but also to us.
We are situated by the text, implicated by it, in treating her as an
object.
Both strategies of focalisation and dramatisation (show telling)
work together to place the reader in a particular relation to the
text, and to Sarah.
Metaficational writing also manipulates the reader.
The reader and his/ her society are also implicated in upholding
patriarchal ideology.

Slaughterhouse 5
The God of Small Things
SH5:
- Mostly external focalisation
- Why?
- Bathos our existence is pretty banal. There is nothing special
about human beings. We are not the centre of the universe.
The God of Small Things:
- Largely zero focalisation, when no systematic conceptual or
perceptual constraint governs what may be presented. (Prince, as
cited in Barry 225)
- Omniscient narration.
- Though individual chapters sometimes make use of specific
focalisations.

Who is telling the story?

The disembodied narrator: the authorial persona,
or implied author.
Narrator who is identified as a distinct, named
character, with a personal history, a gender, a
social-class, position, likes and dislikes etc.
They have participated in the experience and are
overt or dramatised or intrusive narrators.
heterodiegetic (not present in the story he tells)
homodiegetic (present in the story he tells).

 Autodiegetic narration: the narrator is the

protagonist in his/ her narrative. Eg. The Bloody
Chamber by Angela Carter.
A text is homodiegetic if among its story-related
action sentences there are some that contain firstperson pronouns (I did this; I saw this; this was what
happened to me). The criteria for homodiegetic
narrative: if the narrating I is present in the world of
his/her story.
A text is heterodiegetic if all story-related action
sentences are third-person sentences (She did this,
this was what happened to him).

 The fact that homodiegetic narrators refer to

themselves in the first person is not an
absolutely reliable criterion for determining
the relationship between the narrator and the
narrative:
(1) overt heterodiegetic narrators refer to
themselves in the first person. For eg. FLW, even
in chapter 13, although the narrator refers to
himself as the I, he is not in the Victorian world
of his story. But later, when he shares a train
carriage with Charles, then the narrative takes the
form of a homodiegetic narration.
(2) there are some homodiegetic narrators who
refer to themselves in the third person.

French Lieutenants Woman

Slaughterhouse 5
FLW:
Begin with a heterodiegetic narrator homodiegetic narrator.
SH5:
Begin with a disembodied narrator homodiegetic narrator.
The novel thus acknowledges that stories tell us, meaning, no
one, not even the narrator stands outside of history.
The traditional omniscient narrator is presumed to stand outside
the text, outside the narrative, and have, precisely, an all-seeing,
God-like perspective
Postmodern writing: no longer conceive of an omniscient
narrator, with a God-like perspective who stands outside.
Recognises the historical embeddedness of all subjects, including
the narrator, or teller.

How is the story packaged?

Frame narratives (also called primary narratives) NOT
embedded in any other narrative.
Embedded narratives (also called secondary narratives) usually
the main narrative.
Narrative further embedded into the secondary narrative third
degree narrative.
FLW:
Primary narrative: Charles and Ernestina
Secondary narrative: The story of Sarah the title of the novel
Third degree narratives?
The book Grogan gives Charles to read (chapter 28)
Charles is the officer; Sarah is the girl who, in order to attain a
desired end, [is willing to] inflict pain upon herself. (Chapter 28)

SH5:
The frame narrative in this case, is also the paratext - the
preface.
Paratext refers to material that frames the main text.
Paratexts affect the interpretation of the main text.
Claims this is an eyewitness account of Dresden: we read with
the notion in mind that Billys story is a representation of the
narrators traumatic war experience in Dresden.
This leads us to a possible interpretation that Billys time
travelling as well as his alien abduction are symptoms of
trauma.
Are there more narratives embedded within the secondary
narrative? Told by whom? What is the relationship between
these smaller narratives and the others?

How is time handled in the story?

Flashbacks (analeptic details) and flashforwards (proleptic
details).
Treated in a literal way in SH5, in Billys time travel.
An instance of how metafiction thematises the process of
writing, or telling.
Generally two narrative tenses: narrative present and
narrative past.
The current point in time in plot time: the narrator's
NOW.
The current point in time in story time: usually, a
character's NOW.

FLW:
Two narrative presents:
The heterodiegetic narrators, which is the
1960s.
The characters, which is the 1830s.
Conflation of the two later on:
Significance? Perhaps the narrator is as much
a subject of the Victorian prejudices and
biases that he had previously mocked and
criticised.

How are speech and thought

represented?
Barry, page 230:
I have to go, I said to her. (Mimetic speech)
I told her I had to go. (Transposed speech)
I informed her that it was necessary for me to leave. (Narratised
speech)
The last of these converts living speech into narrated event, and
interposes the maximum distance between the reader and the
direct impact and tone of the spoken words. (Barry 231)
To what effect?
Why is it used at this point in the narrative to create distance?
Which characters are involved at this point?

The God of Small Things

(for tutorial discussion)

Compare opening and closing chapters.

Opening chapter in the diegetic mode.
Closing chapter largely in the mimetic mode.
What is the treatment of time in both
chapters like? What about speech
representation?
Significance of your observations? HELPFUL
HINT: ask yourself so what?, which you
must be able to provide an answer for.

Chapter: The History House

The History House, which gives an account of Veluthas
beating
largely mimetic
external focalisation (discuss various points of view)
Why? Effect?
Do identify context first of all. What is happening here? Who
are involved?
What does this chapter tell us about history?
How is this narrative packaged? Is there a frame narrative?
Secondary narrative?
What about treatment of time?