Reading Novels

8. Narrative I

119 8 Narrative I In looking at works of fiction, we are looking at narratives, and we need to have some sense of what that implies. Roland Barthes famously said that narratives are “international, transhistorical, transcultural”: they are “innumerable ,” “simply there, like life.”1 It is certainly true that we constantly exchange narratives; we understand narratives told in other times and places, and narratives can cross cultural boundaries. We assume that narratives can transfer from medium to medium—from novel to film, or theater, or opera, or comic strip—though they will take different forms in different media. We understand our lives, our history, and the world about us (including much of science) through narratives. What, then, do we mean by “narrative ”? And how does this apply to the novel? Fundamental Patterns Narratives provide a way of structuring our accounts of the world. They concern events. But a narrative is not just a series of events (that would be a list or description). It is a series of events put together and understood in a certain way. A narrative requires a state of affairs, which changes or transforms in some way. Because of this transformation, a narrative is always involved in one way or another with time. Narratives lead toward some goal, resolution , or closure.2 A narrative has to be told. Usually we expect a narrator to tell a narrative to a narratee, but the same person can perform both functions: given some events, we can tell narratives to ourselves. But we do not have to reading novels 120 know who the narrator is to follow a story. Narratives can be told in a series of anonymous pictures, or by films. The telling of a narrative means that events are linked by some kind of intentionality—they are not randomly placed. Narratives constantly involve problems of causality. They typically assume that the agents concerned have a consistent personal identity. Events in a narrative may appear jumbled at first. Narratees understand narrative through an active process of recognizing, anticipating, making assumptions and hypotheses. Our involvement in this process—as readers, listeners, or spectators—depends on what David Bordwell calls “a central cognitive goal,” “the construction of a more or less intelligible story.”3 We can list some fundamental elements of narrative: • A state of affairs • Transformation • Closure • Intentionality • Coherence How does this apply to the novel? A novel does not contain only one narrative. Rather, it contains many interlocking narratives, which expand forward and backward as we proceed, and which suggest various possible closures. When we get to the end, we may feel that the narratives are linked in one convincing act of closure, though it is often more complex. Narrative Expansion in the Novel We can consider how narrative works by taking an example from the incipit of a novel by Henry Green: A country bus drew up below the church and a young man got out. This he had to do carefully because he had a peg leg. The roadway was asphalted blue. It was a summer day in England. Rain clouds were amassed back of a church tower which stood on rising round. As he looked up he noted well those slits, built for defence, in the blood coloured brick. Then he ran his eye with caution over cypresses and between gravestones. He might have been watching for a trap, who had lost his leg in France for not noticing the gun beneath a rose. (Henry Green, Back, 1946) narrative I 121 The first sentence of this passage gives one small narrative that could be read as complete: there is a state of affairs (the church and country bus), a transformation (the bus drew up), and closure (the man got out). But the sentence is not given to us in isolation—it is part of a text. The state of affairs is expanded upon (we learn of the man’s “peg leg,” the “blue” road, the “summer day,” and so forth), and there is further transformation as the man acts (he looks up, he runs his eye over things). Although we do not know the man’s name or background, we assume it is the same man whose actions are described throughout, and that he has a personal identity. So far the narrative is concerned with a succession of events on the summer’s day, but the temporal frame expands to tell us that the...