June 28, 2006: Narratology 101 or Both Sides Now

Movies can be a great source of irony, particularly when they are juxtaposed in the just the right way. Last night I was watching Patton and was struck by the amount of ceremony associated with our first view of the man in Africa, being honored before the Moroccan army. His reaction is to praise the Moroccans for having developed the most disciplined troops he had ever encountered. That was all very well and good, except that the previous evening I had watched Moroccan soldiers rape the "two women" from the title of Vittorio De Sica's outstanding film. This led me to think back on observations about how we use narrative to make sense of the world around us, which then led me to wonder whether or not too many of us now deal with the world only in terms of the stories we are told about it, neglecting not only other sources but also the whole question of what the story is trying to tell.

One of the products of the structuralist movement, particularly on the European continent, was the emergence of the discipline of narratology. If hermeneutics is concerned with the full generality of texts, then narratology narrows the field down to narrative texts and then invokes similar methodological baggage. On the one hand there are questions concerned with how a narrative account is structured (which then bring up questions of priority of the structural elements); and then there are the questions of what the story is actually trying to tell. Needless to say, this can then run into arguments over whether or not a story can be interpreted in different ways, which brings us back to the conflict over diversity of interpretation. Where faith is involved, this is a particularly sensitive issue, since much of the absolutism of fundamentalism involves the conviction that there is only one way to interpret Biblical narrative.

My personal feeling is that, if narrative can help us to make sense of the complexity of our world, it is not by providing us with punch-line answers (or the morals of Aesop). Rather, it is by virtue of the fact that narrative, itself, is often highly complex; but it can still be rendered in such a way as to make that complexity more palatable. This is why (artificial intelligence notwithstanding) it is so absurd to trying to reduce a play like Macbeth to a representation in some logical calculus. If you only pay attention to the "facts," you miss out on all the things that Shakespeare does to draw you into this story; and, as Aristotle observed in his "Poetics," that "being drawn in" is actually a highly-charged learning experience. Furthermore, different narratives will then cross over each other in our own minds (like the scenarios for Patton and Two Women), leading to further access to that complexity of the world.

Think about that the next time you lay out $10 for two hours of special effects that do not hang on much of a narrative line. As a former colleague of mine once put it, "That's like picking all of the raisins out of the box of raisin bran." A narrative experience is yet another invitation to commitment. Every rejection of that invitation is made at our own peril.