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.

June 18, 2006: Why Structure?

Returning to the theme raised in the hermeneutics entry on June 11, I thought it might be useful to ask why we should be so concerned with finding structure in the first place. In the world of information technology, we tend to take the need for structure for granted without asking this question; but this blog is all about not confusing that world with the real one. So why are we so interested in having rules for describing structural representation, and what do we really do with them?

In the world of structural linguistics, we tend to associate structural analysis with parsing and parsing with well-formedness. Thus, we have structural rules to tell us whether or not a string of words is legitimately a sentence. Unfortunately, as soon as we move from "standard expository prose" to the ways in which we actually use language (including speech acts), this concept of well-formedness loses much of its value. So then we fall back and say, "Well, we are just using the rules to describe the string of words (or utterances, or whatever)." However, that just begs the question. Why do we need such a description? Is it just a basis for representation in some database, even if we are not sure why we want that database in the first place?

I would argue that there is a bit more at stake; and that is because, as a rule, those descriptions tend to be hierarchical. That means that, between two elements, there tend to be (but not necessarily always) subordinate-superordinate relations. Put another we, there is information that is serving to elaborate; and it is associated with the information being elaborated. This allows us to prioritize the entire structure, sorting out those elements that matter most from those serving to elaborate.

The most important insight in Ray Monk's How to Read Wittgenstein has to do with the numbering system in the Tractatus. This numbering system is very strictly tree-structured; so, as Monk demonstrates, while the book is a depth-first traversal of the tree, the reader tends to get a better understanding by traversing the tree breadth-first. In other words get the important points under your belt first, even if you need to be convinced of some of them; you can get the convincing later when you descend into the elaborations. Not all texts are written this way, but this is the perfect example of how sorting things out is best served by structural analysis.