How (not) to Understand a Story
When reading and writing stories, it is tempting to use a system to reduce the story to a structure. It’s beguiling, but it is fundamentally problematic. Beware!
Narrative is everywhere. Whether reading overt stories, both fictional and factual, or reading texts that are not explicitly narrative, such as a scientific paper, say, narratives pervade.
Narrative (Sub)structure is Slippery
Previously I wrote about how we develop narrative competence through our exposure to stories, which Ricoeur calls our ‘prefiguration,’ and one legacy of that in our minds as writers and readers is that we are often formed by specific stories. These are the stories to which we keep returning or inadvertently refer in our everyday lives, so that we forget that phrases like ‘the milk of human kindness’ come from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and ‘something wicked this way comes,’ (also Macbeth) gets recycled in the score of the Harry Potter films.
Often, we are referring to explicit narrative structures, either certain story elements — Luke Skywalker’s climactic confrontation with Darth Vader in Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back, when Vader utters those four profound words … well, watch it for yourself if you don’t already know — or whole stories — Elizabeth and Mr Darcy’s decent into and overcoming of their pride and prejudice in Pride & Prejudice, say. This is frequently so with references to stories from history, where, for example, a business journalist may refer to a multinational retailer deciding to stop trading in a particular country as a ‘Dunkirk’ moment for the company.
Oftentimes, though, those references are less explicit. As I said in previous posts, writers are informed by social and political narratives that shape the vocabulary and idioms they draw on when composing their text, and readers bring their narratively-formed view of the world to the texts that they read. Those narratives may not appear explicitly in the texts themselves, but without a distinct reference those narratives still shape the text. However, some critics take a further step and suggest that later texts conform to the narrative world, rhythm and even structure of those formative texts such that they exist, in some sense, in the foundations of the text at hand. In narrative criticism (especially narrative critical approaches that descend from the structuralist movement) this is referred to as narrative substructure.
Here be Dragons!
This, for me, is the beginning of the dangerous territories of structuralist approaches to analysing and describing narratives. The term ‘narrative substructure’ is a slippery one — beware, here be dragons!
It enables the reader or critic to assert that a story contains a narrative presence of another informing narrative, especially a political, social, economic or religious narrative, without requiring the rigour of proving it.
That means that stories can easily be hijacked for ideological means, or made to conform to, to confirm or to validate a pre-existing ideology.
This matters with non-fiction and polemic texts, especially the religious texts of my field. But it also matters with fiction, since every story projects a world and asks you to believe in it. Take, as a fairly blatant example, the fiction writings of Ayn Rand, which many on the political right-of-centre regard highly for the narrative substructure they read. A more interesting example might be Dr Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham, which was banned in China from 1965 to 1991 for its ‘portrayal of early Marxism’ in its narrative substructure.
Working Out (Badly) How Stories Works
It is one thing to be able to spot a narrative text or a narrative substructure to a text. It is another thing to say how that narrative functions, what impact it has on the text, the author and readers, and the way(s) of perceiving the world it is proposing.
To progress, structuralist narrative critics proceed from the notion of narrative substructure to assert that all narratives share an underlying structure. The most significant proposals of story structure have come from Vladimir Propp (it mystifies me that his work in Morphology of the Folktale [1928] is still influential now, but I keep seeing him being positively referred to now, almost 100 years later), Roland Barthes, Claude Bremond, Tzvetan Todorov and, closer to the boundary between structuralism and its successors, Gérard Genette.
One of the most significant proposals on narrative structure, though, is that of A J Greimas.¹ Greimas’s narratology is derived from structuralism, and follows particularly from his work on structuralist semantics.
This is how Greimas’s narratology works.
In sentences, predicates need a subject, particularly a subject able to act in accordance with the predicate. (The predicate is the part of the sentence that contains a verb saying something about a subject — ‘went home’ in the phrase ‘Jane went home.’)
These Greimas calls actants: subjects able to play an active role.² Actants do not have to be animate actors: inanimate objects, abstract concepts, character traits, signs or portents often take a subjective or symbolic part in a narrative.
Greimas identifies six actants with narrative functions:³
- sender;
- object;
- receiver;
- helper;
- subject;
- opponent.
These six actants are conceived so as to encompass and exhaust the narrative possibilities.⁴
In Greimas’s model, a sender wishes to transmit or communicate an object to a receiver. The sender gives a subject the mandate to perform this communication. The opponent is a figure or force that tries to prevent the subject from carrying out the commission. The helper, conversely, is a figure or force that tries to aid the subject in fulfilling the mandate.
Greimas suggests a diagrammatic formulation to describe the relationships between these six actants.
Greimas argues that the strength of the model lies with its focus on the object of desire aimed at by the subject, in transmission from the sender to the receiver.⁵ The helper and the opponent moderate the desire of the subject for the object.
This model is stated only once in his Structural Semantics, though much of the rest of the work is spent developing the model and methods for applying it. (Patte and Calloud later offered more detailed versions of the actantial model than Greimas himself.) The conceptual simplicity of the actantial model is its most attractive quality that has allured scholars to use it, including notable figures in my field of Biblical Studies. Its simplicity, though, is a siren song.
These approaches follow Greimas’s conceit that narratives are governed by ‘invariant principles’ of construction such that narrative units can be identified and isolated, their relations determined and rendered in diagrammatic form. Narrative criticism derived from Greimas sees a profusion of actantial diagrams like that above, defining the six actants in the story being examined. This systematic approach is very seductive — it looks structured, methodical, almost scientific, and our modern world if it looks like science then it must be valid. But, It’s also very damaging.
The same thing happens all over the place in the field of narrative: unhealthy systemisation. You may never have come across Greimas or his actantial model of narrative, but his vision is everywhere in the world of narrative. Approaches to narrative that draw on Vladmir Propp’s theory tries to define his 31 narrative functions for the story at hand. Others follow Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. Others don’t mention any specific theory of narrative but still argue that there are 9 or 7 or 3 or 15 or whatever basic plots, 8 or 6 or 11 basic character types, and argue for a structural, systematic format to all stories, all plots.
In my view, these are a delusion. There are simply too many stories, told by too many people in too many places and too many contexts, to ever conform to a defined structure. They are snake oil. They’re an idea sold to writers wanting a cast-iron guarantee that their novel or play or film script will be successful. They’re proposed by theorists who prey on that vulnerability, on people who want to believe that it’s easy if you just follow the system, academics, literary critics and practitioners.
Take the famous shortest story ever written, apocryphally attributed to Ernest Hemingway:
For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.
A perfect story, but it contains none of the narrative structure required by structuralism whatever.
Le Bien, Le Mal
So, my view is that there is merit in structural approaches to narrative. There are many important things that it teaches us, like the importance of structure (whilst being ever conscious of resisting systemisation), and the importance of tropes and typology (whilst focussing on surface-level characterisation and figuration, not the recurrence of deep-level roles), and so on.
But there are also enormous drawbacks, and if we’re not aware of these flaws then we end up with predictable, repetitive and fundamentally boring stories.
Structuralism and structural narratology has been amply criticised for:
- its tendency to heavy-handed systematisation: the zealous belief that everything fits the system so everything has to fit the system. The consequence is that things are either a) lauded as exemplars of the system, b) shoehorned to fit the system, or c) quietly ignored or overlooked since they don’t fit the system.
- the deterministic force of the perceived structures in the texts: structure is seen everywhere … ‘Look, it fits the system — it must be true!’ … that ultimately does not allow stories to just speak for themselves but must speak as models of the system.
- an inclination to ahistorical readings: that ignore or overlook the significance of the time and place of the story, both in its origins and in its reception, assuming they are coherent throughout time.
These matters are very problematic. There is a beguiling explanatory expedience of structuralist narratology, but it means that problematic, inconsistent or inconvenient elements have to be subsumed within the rubric of ‘narrative’ and made to serve the substructure.
Although superficially structural narrative seems powerful, the apparently advantageous harmony of this approach is not in fact justified and is actually rather dangerous in the way that heterogeneities — the things that do not fit — are smoothed out. There is a nasty homogenising habit of structuralism.
And there’s more …
Two further short criticisms should be noted.
Firstly, structuralist narratology is attempting to analyse the narrative as a closed system — the inside of the story itself. However, Ricoeur argues that the ‘“meaning” is not confined to the so-called inside of the text. It occurs at the intersection between the world of the text and the world of the readers. It is mainly in the reception of the text by an audience that the capacity of the plot to transfigure experience is actualized.’⁶
Secondly, it is in the context of limit-situations — the extremes of human experiences, forms, phrases and articulations that ‘intensify’ meaning in language to the point where it ‘dislocates our imagination and turns it away’ from its previous conceptions and towards new horizons⁷ — that the fragility of structuralist narratology is exposed.
Luke Skywalker is in a limit situation when he has his final showdown with Darth Vader in Cloud City in the scene of The Empire Strikes Back I mentioned above. At that moment, Luke is not merely the subject actant of the plot, he is a valiant warrior, an apprentice, an orphan and a son, a student, a prophet, a resistance fighter, and so on. Vader is the ultimate baddy, but he also opens the path to the ultimate good, making him both an opponent and a helper; he is Goliath; he is a father; he is a machine of the Empire; he is a pawn of the Emperor.
In these limit situations, the rules of structural approaches to narrative break down. In limit situations, characters can no longer be categorised. It is the character as a character that is vital, not as a manifestation of a type.
Mimetic Narrative and Structural Narrative
Mimetic narrative’s riposte to structuralist narratology demands that the conception of narrative expands beyond the horizon of the story being told. Ricouer’s three moments of narrative — the prefiguration, configuration and refiguration — his dogged attention to the actual figuration of the story itself — the characters, events, reversals, symbolism, causes and effects, the flow of time, etc. — and his great insight that the configured story itself mediates between that which precedes it (the constantly developing narrative competence) and that which follows it (the impact of the world of the story on the world of the reader) offers a profound and fundamental challenge to structuralism.
That is not to say that structural approaches are wholly redundant, as Ricoeur sees them. Instead, they are considerably less exhaustive, coherent and comprehensive than they claim. Structuralism can help interpret a narrative, but it cannot provide the comprehensive understanding of a narrative and moreover it is not even the right place to start.
As a result, in the imaginary Venn diagram of theories of narrative, structural narrative and Ricoeur’s mimetic narrative I am advocating, structural narrative is sited wholly within the mimetic narrative circle.
Mimetic narrative is larger and more comprehensive in that its vision encompasses the pre-, peri- and post-narrative experiences.
Structural narrative does not go away. It must, however, become more diminished and restrained. Ricoeur’s critique is that structural narrative criticism’s claim to interpretive universalism should be rather more modest.
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Footnotes
¹ For Greimas’s narrative model, see A.-J. Greimas, Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method (trans. Danielle McDowell, Ronald Schleifer and Alan Velie; London: University of Nebraska Press, 1983); trans. of Sémantique Structurale: Recherche du Méthode (Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1966). See also later extensions and clarifications made to Greimsas’s model by Daniel Patte, What is Structural Exegesis? (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976); Jean Calloud, Structural Analysis of Narrative (Semeia Supplements 4; trans. Daniel Patte; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976 and Missoula, Montana: Scholars, 1976).
² Greimas, Structural, 146.
³ Greimas, Structural, 207. Greimas’s six actants are derived from the earlier work of Propp on Russian folklore in which Propp describes a rather more unwieldy thirty-one actants. Cf. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (2nd ed.; ed. Louis A. Wagner; trans. Laurence Scott; Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1968), 25–65.
⁴ Ronald Schleifer and Alan Velie, ‘Genre and Structure: Toward an Actantial Typology of Narrative Genres and Modes,’ MLN 102.5 (1987): 1126 (1122–50).
⁵ Greimas, Structural, 207.
⁶ Paul Ricoeur, ‘Toward a Narrative Theology: Its Necessity, Its Resources, Its Difficulties,’ in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (ed. Mark I Wallace; trans. David Pellauer; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995) 240 [236–48], emphasis original.
⁷ Paul Ricoeur, ‘Manifestation and Proclamation’ in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (ed. Mark I Wallace; trans. David Pellauer; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 59 [48–69].
