Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

20.1 Narrative form and narrative content
Unit 20 Narrative
Section 5 Narrative

In this unit we examine narrative. Narratives are stories involving a sequence of related events. There are various kinds of relationship between events in a narrative. The most obvious kind is where one event causes another. Such causal connections link one event with another and function partly to give unity to the narrative, and partly to enable the narrative to draw moral conclusions about the consequences of actions.

In the simplest narrative texts, there is a single series of events with causal connections between them. More complex narrative texts might be compounded from simple narratives, with two or more simultaneous narratives (perhaps as plot and sub-plot), or with narratives in sequence that are only loosely connected, perhaps through sharing the same basic character (this is the structure of picaresque narratives).

20.1 Narrative form and narrative content

Much thinking about narrative distinguishes between two dimensions or layers of interest, which we will call ’narrative form’ and ’narrative content’. The content of a narrative is a collection of represented events, along with the participants in those events, and the circumstances of those events. The form of a narrative is the way in which those events are represented through a particular narrative medium (usually spoken or written language, and/or images). Many components of a narrative show a tension between content and form, as we shall see in this unit.

The distinction between content and form is realized in different ways for different aspects of narrative. If we consider narrative events, we can distinguish between the content order of events and the form order of events. The ’content order’ is the chronological order of events (events in the sequence in which they supposedly ’really’ occurred). The ’form order’ is the order in which the narrative presents these events to us. In the simplest narratives, the presentational or form order is the same as chronological or content order: thus form order = content order. In fact, if there is nothing to tell us otherwise, we just assume that the orders are the same and hence that, if we are told first one thing and then another, the first thing we heard about happened first and the second thing happened second. Thus, if a narrative simply states:

The queen died. The king died.

we typically assume that the queen died before the king and that probably the latter’s death was a result of the former. However, it is also possible for narratives to present events out of chronological sequence. For instance:

The king died. Only a month earlier the queen had died in child birth.

The presentation of events (the order in which they are narrated) does not match their chronological occurrence. There is thus a mismatch between form order and content order, with content being reordered. Complex narratives, such as we find in film or the novel, often tend to manipulate the presentation of events. Detective fiction, for instance, may begin with the crime and spend the rest of the narrative uncovering the chain of events behind it. Flashbacks in film also manipulate form order and content order. Thus, for example, the film Sunset Boulevard (1950) begins with a body floating in a pool; the next images we see represent events that occurred earlier than the first image of the body in the pool.

There are various terms used to describe the distinction between form order and content order in a narrative; one terminological distinction is between ’story’ (= the content order of events, the order in which they supposedly happened) and ’discourse’ (= the form order of events, the order in which they are presented to us in the narrative as it is told.)

A mismatch between content order and form order is an example of an ’aesthetic strategy’, a strategy that might typically be used in creating an aesthetic object such as a novel, film, oral narrative, etc. It is never possible to pin down a single function for an aesthetic strategy; instead, it might perform any one of a number of functions. The strategy of mismatching content order and form order might be used to create enigmas (we are told the consequences before we are told how they were achieved), to create suspense (the order of events is interrupted by a flashback), to help organize our understanding of the content (crucial background history is delayed until we need to be told it) and so on. The Russian Formalists, a group of theorists working in the early twentieth century, focused their energies on an attempt to establish what makes a text ’literary’; one basic idea was that a text is literary to the extent that our attention is drawn to its aesthetic strategies. One very noticeable aesthetic strategy is a mismatch between form order (which they termed sjuzhet- something like ’story’ above) and content order (which they called fabula, something like ’discourse’ above); hence such a mismatch helps define a text as literary.

A mismatch between form and content can have consequences for narrative pace. Minor events in the narrative can be dwelt on at length and major events treated briefly or compressed. Spelling out minor events in detail can give the effect of slowing down - retarding - the narrative. Conversely, condensed treatment of a crucial event seems to speed the narrative up.

Orwell’s account of an execution in Burma (’A Hanging’, 1931) deals with events that last only about half an hour. The prisoner is picked up at eight and is pronounced dead by eight minutes past eight. Orwell’s account, however, dwells in detail on small events that retard the progress to the execution: a dog runs out to interrupt the procession; the prisoner steps aside to avoid a puddle; his final prayer seems to last for ever.

Here is how Orwell dwells on one of these moments that retard the narrative:

And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.

It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working - bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming - all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned - reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone - one mind less, one world less.

But when the end finally comes, it comes swiftly:

Suddenly the superintendent made up his mind. Throwing up his head he made a swift motion with his stick. ’Chalo!’ he shouted almost fiercely.

There was a clanking noise, and then dead silence. The prisoner had vanished, and the rope was twisting on itself.

So, just as dwelling on some events can slow the narrative down, compressing major events can give the impression of acceleration. We get the effect of the narrative decelerating when things are described very slowly (an effect also seen in slow motion sections of films); and narratives can also accelerate or jump when two events separated in the narrative content by major gaps in time are placed next to each other. A strategy of this kind is used by Woolf in To the Lighthouse (1927). Various functions are possible for this aesthetic strategy, which again exploits the difference between narrative form and narrative content.

’Narrative coherence’ amounts to our recognition that we are being told one unified story - which means that we understand why we are told every event, we understand how events fit together, and, if there are any sub-stories inside the main story, these sub-stories make sense in terms of the overall story, perhaps as commenting on it (e.g. sub-plots in a Shakespeare play or a story one character tells another). An interesting test for coherence in a narrative is to try formulating the narrative as a whole as a single sentence, or even as a single word; this exercise can bring out quite abstract kinds of coherence (the title might carry out this function). Even the author of the narrative may not always find this easy to do. F. Scott Fitzgerald went through a series of titles for his most famous novel, including Among the Ash-Heaps and Millionaires, Trimalchio in West Egg, Trimalchio and The Golden-Hatted Gatsby, before finally settling for The Great Gatsby (1925). In retrospect, his final choice seems to capture the core meaning of the novel in ways eluded by the earlier attempts. One of the distinctions between form and content in a narrative is that form is inherently more coherent than content. If we take narrative content to be analogous to the way reality is, then we acknowledge its complexity, density and multiplicity; reality is a mess rather than a single coherent thing, and narrative content takes on this implied messiness. In contrast, the organization of narrative content by selection and ordering, which is part of the construction of narrative form, is the creation of order, a fitting together, a making sense, and in general a creation of coherence. Narratives tend to move from a lack to a resolution, a particular kind of beginning to a particular kind of end, but these are formal characteristics that give the narrative its coherence; the implied reality represented by the narrative (the narrative content) lacks any coherent movement from a particular kind of beginning to a particular kind of end - this is imposed upon it by the process of narration.

Finally, another possible kind of mismatch between narrative form and narrative content comes when we consider ’narrative point of view’ (see Unit 21). Events in narrative content just occur; they do not occur from a particular point of view. However, in a particular narrative, the selection of events and the way in which they are described will interact with the choice of a focalizer from whose perspective the events are described. In Henry James’s classic ghost story, The Turn of the Screw (1898), crucial events are presented to us from the perspective of the governess. From her perspective the children in her charge are in danger of demonic possession from ghostly apparitions; but readers may wonder if the apparitions are merely figments of the governess’s neurotic imagination. It is difficult to decide what actually happens in the narrative because of the overriding position given to the governess’s point of view. In The Turn of the Screw the point of view is that of a character who is supposedly involved in the events (and hence has a particular angle on them). In other cases the narrator stands outside the events of the story.

The use of a narrator is thus an aesthetic strategy, which, like all such strategies, can be used in various ways and for various purposes. Point of view might be switched in the course of the narrative (a technique systematically used by the author Philip K. Dick, or in the film Rashomon(1951) for example); the consequence might be, again, that we become uncertain about the narrative content because it alters depending on point of view. Also, because narrators are fictional constructions, it is possible to invent narrators who are fantastic in various ways; so an animal may be a narrator, or a dead person (the body in the pool in Sunset Boulevard is also its narrator).

In this section we have seen that differences between narrative form and narrative content can be exploited in aesthetic strategies. In some cases, the narrative form is rigidly constrained but variation is possible in narrative content as in flashbacks, while in other cases it is the content that is constrained and the form that is unconstrained as in narrative pace acceleration and deceleration. In other cases, the narrative content simply lacks a characteristic that can be found in narrative form, such as narrative coherence and narrative point of view. In the next section we look at how events themselves, and the participants in those events, also show a tension between narrative form and narrative content.