Story

Narrative

Narrative Jerry: No story? George: No, forget the story. Jerry: You got to have a story' George: Who says you got to have a story? Seilifeld ARGUMENT The image is plotted into a linear path. Story is "a narrative of events," wrote E. M. Forster, "arranged in their time sequence.'" He argued, "We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next."2 Story involves a series of "fictional events";3 it has to do with "the lived experiences of historical actors,"4 giving structure to cultural experience.s Plot is "the dynamic shaping force of the narrative discourse."6 It is plot that "makes events into a story,"? involving its layered organization.s Narrative, as the term is used here, involves such plotting of events, a movement from conflict to resolution. But narrative is not story. Story is the totality of activities that comprise storytelling performance, each of which is a crucial ingredient. Narrative, the organization of events, is not the crucial activity as far as the eventual experience of story is concerned. Story is never simply a cause-and-effect organization of events. It is that, necessarily, but that is not the reason for its existence. We have seen that the narrative is not even the first aspect of storytelling that a child learns: patterning is. To stop with an analysis simply of narrative , and thereby to ignore the more critical aspects of storytellingemotion , rhythm and pattern, trope-is to dwell on only the most obvious and the simplest aspect of the tradition. It is true, narrative is inviting because it can be studied in an almost mechanical way. It is possible, as Propp has demonstrated,9 to anticipate the organization of events in a story. The reason for the attractiveness of this one aspect of story is that it can be scientifically analyzed, charted, and graphed. But in the end, it tells little about story. 10 47 Copyrighted Material 48 Part One: Emotions NARRATIVE PLOTTING OF IMAGES Narrative provides the story with a backbone, as Forster suggests, but the skeletal aspects of story are not the message-producing elements. The meaning of story has little to do with narrative, which has simple organizing functions to play. "And does the world," asks Hayden White, "even the social world, ever really come to us as already narrativized , already 'speaking itself' from beyond the horizon of our capacity to make scientific sense of it?"ll The answer, of course, is no. Narrative is a device, a tool-nothing more, nothing less. There is a repertory of remembered images, held in common by both audience and artist; these images provide the raw material for the creation of a surface narrative that reveals fundamental themes, all of which affirm the society and its values in some way. Through a metaphorizing process, these surface narratives are manipulated and juxtaposed in order to create, for the life of the performance, a network of unstable images that complement and develop from the more fixed, remembered images. Underlying this system of fixed and evanescent images are certain polar movements that govern the arrangement of the surface images. During the creation of the narrative in a performance, the audience is not witnessing new conflicts and novel resolutions. Its members know the narratives of the tradition well; they have the same repertory of inherited images that the artist has, and the artist depends on this. The audience does more than wordlessly fill in gaps left by the performer ; it provides a rich context for the unfolding drama. The performer links diverse narratives together in a variety of ways, meshing such images. The audience is actively involved in this creation, supplying not only its own store of images but its bodies, voices, and diverse experiences as well. When the artist selects one or two individual narratives from the tradition of narratives, the audience views them in their larger context and connects them with the many other images and narrative variants that cluster about them in the matrix. The audience's repertory, its familiarity with the tradition from which the stories emerge, endows every image in the narrative being produced with a depth of meaning not readily available to the uninitiated. When, for example, the performer introduces an ogre into the action of her narrative , the members of the audience bring to that creature the sum of their experiences with scores of fantasy ogres in numerous conflicts. The members of the audience link the...