The Evolution of Narration: A Journey Through Literary History

The Narrative Verbal Icon /2

A Brief Overview of the History of Narration

• Phase 1: Mythic narration = "histories" of the world. Very ancient stories, which are signs of the thinking man. They are a kind of documentation about how people think. This was the narrative of fictitious cultures. The heroes were divine beings, outstanding humans who were able to do things which others are unable to.
• Phase 2: High Mimetic narration = imitating a culture which is superior to another, connecting the stories with historical facts. The producers of heroic epics found a tradition and storytellers followed them. (primary=oral, secondary=written). The journeys of Odysseus and Aeneas belong here. The focus is on the journey made by the characters (mostly without), outside the fictitious world.
• Phase 3: Romantic narration. (not in the sense in which we use it in everyday life. Here romantic doesn’t mean a love story or a progressing relationship between two people). The main characters of Medieval Chivalric romances were knights. The backbone of the muthos was the quest which involves travelling, going somewhere because you are looking for something. The inner journey of the knight is rare. It existed in the 16th century. We can realize the journey and very important life events.
• Phase 4: Low Mimetic narration. This is what we associate with realistic fiction. The form is the novel. The average person becomes the normal. The bourgeois (non-heroic) epic. They have a documentary style to show things the way they are. Ordinary elements are important. They are full of tiny details about everyday life. Traveling is a dominant activity of the muthos. Sometimes traveling is the basis of the novel. E.g.: D.Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, J.Swift, Gulliver’s travels, L. Sterne, A sentimental journey, H. Fielding, Tom Jones
• Phase 5: Modern, postmodern narration -> a strong tendency to the within, moving along in the inner space. More and more time and space is devoted to the inside, what the characters learn. In the 20th century plot structures cannot tell what is happening, every happening takes place inside the characters. The stress is on the characters, how they realize things and react to them, what kind of pains they are suffering from. The journey without is barely measurable. (E.g. V.Woolf, Kew Gardens; Kafka, Metamorphosis) At this time, storytelling is the most popular way of literature.

The Narrative as a Verbal Icon

• Literary works are verbal icons, because they are made up of language and show an image of life. It is a different thing, how every narrative realizes that.
• We interpret the text as a vehicle, we can make steps to understand it.
• A text is an icon, an image of a thought.
• The icon is one unit but composed of more elements.
• The Perceptible Shape (Layout/Skhéma) is the first thing we can see. According to the text’s longness or shortness, we can conclude whether the journey will be long or short. We can also draw the conclusion from the shape of the text. It can be a continuously narrated "road" or divided into stops (A Rose for Emily, which has important stations and we should read the story accordingly.)
• The Fictional Inner Form (Morphé)

There are techniques of reading.

1. Narratology (French): Text as a Signifier: signs are arranged into a meaningful structure (Roland Barthes’ theory, narrative sequences). The text is an arrangement of codes. The prospective/proairetic code contains a piece of information that points forward. (The rose in A Rose for Emily refers to Miss Emily buying poison and the smell from the house. It is a structural element, because you buy poison to use it for something. It contains an information gap, because if there is a smell, there is something behind it.) The function of prospective signs: we are looking for these road signs because we want to know the answer for certain things.

Retrospective (Hermeneutic Code): solves an enigma, answers a question, then we learn why things happen. (In the closing scene, going back to Emily’s bedroom, people find things which point backwards)

Texts can be classified according to whether they have an ending with a hermeneutic code, then they are readerly and if they lack it, they are writerly. Texts often end without a solution, then we have to end the story. It is common in the postmodern mentality where there are no answers. You also have to write on the stories of the avant-garde.

1. Poestics of Fiction (Russian): Text as a Signified: focuses on the inner text space. Metaphor is used as an instrument in the inner fictitious world. The basic resemblance to start from is that life is a journey. Reading is a mapping activity. The plot structure is the focus, what characters do, we join them on their journey of life, we look at their movements in space and time.

Morphé: what the text looks like from inside. The journey made in a fictional space/world refers to the shape of the road taken by the characters’ movement. There is measurability in space and time, a from and to movement with a departure and destination, distances taken horizontally and vertically. The movement in the inner (psychological, mental) space, the journey within is a cognitive, psychological movement. Somebody is not the same person in the beginning and in the end, characters change. At the departure, they don’t know what will happen. The aim of the journey is to gain experience and learn.

Mapping the Inner Text Space

Road signs are to be followed by the reader.

1. Leading Micro-Elements: they are recurrent, they return time after time and show you the way to the destination. It does matter where they appear in the text. They are symbolical, they have organizing force, and create a pattern, so they are of high significance.

e.g. (1) in Somerset Maugham’s String of Beads Miss R’s adventure with the pearls can be read. The first road sign is a string of pearls, the second is a divergence with beads, their likeness is very important. It turns out that there are two strings. Pearls and beads are the two vehicles but the tenors are difficult to find. The stations are London and Paris, they look identical but they have different meanings (horizontal). Social significance is a vertical movement in her life. The rising and falling of this recognizable character is also involved in her adventures.

e.g. (2) in A Rose for Emily, Miss E. has a place of departure and a place of destination, she moves in space. We are in the southern historical sphere with slaves. Jefferson is a public sphere, the house is a private sphere. But we move to the absolute private sphere. We are supposed to interpret what she does. Parts of her certain activities can be interpreted to the happenings in the South. Everything happens inside the house. The dianoia is between the house and the owner.

e.g. (3) Hemingway, Cat in the Rain: the couple’s journey of life, marriage as a journey. The station is the Italian city, the road signs are rain and cat. There are returning elements which seem to organize the story which are to be connected.

B) other micro-vehicles are scattered all over the text, they may be connected to diverse dimensions (space, time, psychology). They don’t obey any systematic logics. They can help with the localization of the tenor. They illuminate the thought structure (dianoia). In D. Parker’s Standard of Living, the girls’ identical looks are the phenomena of consumer society.

Faulkner’s taxation scene, the smell, the negro servant are all elements which mean more than a simple fact in the story.

Spatial and Temporal Circumstances of the Journey

1. Spatial Circumstances:

a) simply a setting for the action, with the importance of opening scenes. Setting can be geographically extant or nonexistent (unmappable). Geographically unlocatable settings are fictions which cannot be shown on the map. The creations have special meanings. Geographically locatable settings can be found on the map, but the details are fictions. Real elements run parallel with the idea. It isn’t accidental that the girls go to Fifth Avenue and the typical honeymoon place is Venice.

It is symbolical in Miss E’s house in Jefferson that every house is modernized but E’s not. Its falling apart let us guess about the state of Emily.

b) stressed significance: when leading or simple micro-element. Spatial details have extra meanings. There is a close relation between personality and place. Motifs are also embedded in the place of ideology.

1. Circumstances of Time (The Dual Concept of Time)
2. Cyclical (similar to the Odyssey-type of journey in space, repetition)

e.g.(1) the contrast between nature and human life: summer=youth, autumn=aging, winter=death, spring=birth.

e.g.(2) the cycle of life

It might have something to do with the interpretation of a text.

1. Linear: the succession of past->present->future, time as having a direction realized by history, from prehistorical time to the end (of recorded time).

In the empirical field, the circumstances of time are cyclical when there is no sense of the passing of time (timelessness, standing in one place, characteristic for mythical time). In the case of the linear, there is a 'from-to' movement -> historical time.

Techniques of the Presentation of Time: the narrative time is simultaneous, the narrated time is an extension. We can interpret flashbacks from the past, minute details from the present and the anticipation of an action from the future.

The combination of the spatial and temporal circumstances is the chronotope, like the spatialization/shaping of time-Gatsby’s house.