Puppets

This is a Puppet Show:

Nice, right? See the wizard and the lady? See the hands controlling the puppets, and the French guy? Of course you do. Puppet shows require multiple roles. First of all you have the puppets, who are the characters and the only part of the show that people are supposed to see. Then you have the puppeteers, who are controlling the puppets and giving each one a voice, unbeknownst to spectators (because they are children, and not-so-sharp). Among them is a narrator of some sort who tells us the whole story, potentially revealing things to the audience (or not). Then, of course, there is an author (the aptly-named Mr. Not-appearing-in-this-blog-post), who is on vacation somewhere because he wrote this puppet show yeeears ago. When they're all in order, it's time to get some popcorn, grab a root-beer, and sit right in front of that bar-napkin drawing of mine for a kick-ass show.

If you think about it, any old narrative fits into the same kind of basic structure: You have characters, an author who writes about them, and a narrator who bridges the gap between the two. After some struggles with diagrams, here is an example that makes a bit more sense to me: Our same puppet show, where the pink boxes represent what Barbara Dancygier calls the "Story-Viewpoint" space, and the red box represents the "Main Narrative" space. My diagram is a little different than Dancygier's, because I have that silly Frenchman on the side. We will come back to him.

What ends up happening is that the narrative action (in the Main Narrative space, stay with me) plays out, creating different narrative spaces for the audience. Those narrative spaces are constructed by observers, based on the action and narration: They are like the scenes in your  head that you make-up as you read, and then associate with different characters and actions. 

So, again, in that red box we have 1.) Characters, 2.) their actions, and therefore 3.) Narrative spaces.

The Story-Viewpoint space (pink, remember?) is where we have our Narrator, the puppeteer, through whose viewpoint we learn what's happening. The narrator chooses what to highlight on stage, what the characters on stage will say and do, and what commentary to make about it. He therefore shapes how we will interpret each character and the narrative as a whole.

But the whole puppet-stage (everything in blue) was constructed by an author, i.e. the writer of the puppet show script who is probably rolling in dough from this clear success of a performance (not the French guy, wait for him, he's coming up next).

So, between the Main Narrative/stage/red box and the Story-Viewpoint/backstage/pink box, there is a lot of connection, i.e. those puppet strings. The characters, though perhaps based on real people with free-will, are totally non-agentive puppets. The viewpoint is thus established by the narrator/puppeteers who are calling all the shots, and are the lens (viewpoint) through which we view all the action. Get it?

But this is a little too simple --- we know that sometimes there is a narrator-character-puppet who appears on-stage, and tells us what has happened/is going to happen/whatever they want us to know which can change our interpretation of the story as a whole. In that case, the string from the hand to the narrator is a live-wire, connecting the narrator to that Main Narrative space (pink box to red box, yes) because he is also a character in the story.

What about that French guy, eh? Well, he can have different roles --- like, sometimes the narrator is totally outside the action, not connected to the narrative at all, but can still give us some background or reveal some secrets. This narrator can even be the author himself (is Mr. Not-appearing-in-this-blog-post French?), or a least the personaof the author, who controls viewpoint as well, but not interact with the characters. But in the end, the author is totally at his time-share, because the show was written in the past, and the performance is just a re-telling of the story the author intended. He is not there. We know you didn't write this, Frenchie. Don't play games.

The possibilities get much more complicated depending on the type of viewpoint that the author is trying to create,which involves time and language as well as shifting viewpoints and all types of crazy narration techniques, but here's one simple example for you. Hopefully this will become clearer, but for now, just watch out for that guy with the mustache --- he's tricky.

-Sarah

And a Narrative is...

When enrolling in classes for this semester, I had decided that I would focus on linguistics as much as possible, taking only the required literature courses. Not that I don't like literature, but... Well, I just don't like it as much, okay? When I looked at the course offerings, I saw a course on Narratology, which, to be honest, I didn't recognize as a linguistics course until talking to my advisors. So here I am, in what looks like is going to be an AWESOME class, and the first question we are tackling is, "What is Narrative?"

William Labov and Joshua Waletzki published what I understand to be the "Grand-Daddy" of Narrative analyses in 1966, in which they compiled a collection of recordings from narrators of different ages, classes, and backgrounds in order to analyze and define the basic parts and structure of a narrative. They open the paper with the notion that oral versions of personal experiences contain the fundamental structures of narrative --- NOT the perfected tales spun by expert storytellers after years of practice, but the everyday "So, this happened..." kind of thing. The idea of the whole paper is that by studying narratives as told by different speakers, we will uncover the real, basic elements of narrative.

The first difficulty is found in narratives across the board: When does a narrative start or end in oral tellings? The context on either end of a story might be a transition from one narrative to another, so where does one end and another begin? Or is it all just one big narrative? Right off the bat, they start separating clauses, defining whether they are crucial in the narrative process. These are "Narrative Clauses." The narrative places each of these narrative clauses in a temporal context, so that the listener can follow a sequence of events which occurred.

This paper says that a narrative must have temporal sequence, i.e. it must present actions in temporal, chronological order. They must be recapitulated in the same order as they were experienced (with a few exceptions). Sometimes it is unclear whether an action happened before, after, or during another action, so the article uses some mathety-math-type graphs and numbers to decide what's possible with the order of clauses. This confuses me, but the explanations give you the idea that the math is really just there for visual learners who like a challenge --- the written explanation was enough for me... I think.

After all the fancy equations involving the types and locations of clauses, the definition of a narrative is deemed "Any sequence of clauses which contains at least one temporal juncture is a narrative." There must be at least one a-then-b inference between clauses, like

"I walked to the bakery, I saw that they were closed, and I cried."

There are three clauses here, but no matter how you spin it, here is a cause and effect. I got there, and THEN I cried. Maybe because of the walk, maybe because I am addicted to cinnamon rolls and now I can't have any, or maybe because of something totally unrelated, but temporally things are clear: I didn't cry before I got there, I cried after. That's the a-then-b relationship.

But wait, there's more! Next we address orientation sections, which are the set of free clauses before the first narrative clause, which are optional but often part of the narrative structure. This section orients the listener in respect to person, place, time, and behavioral situation. So...

"I was hungry and tired. I knew it was late, but I wanted cinnamon rolls. I walked to the bakery, I saw that they were closed, and I cried."

The first two sentences are pure set-up, and are not temporally significant. All at the same time, I was hungry, tired, knew what time it was, and craved baked goods. THEN the action started. There's your orientation.

The part you might be missing here is the complication, or the series of events that may be termed the complicating action(s). It is hard to tell when a narrative 's complication and result have been given in full, making it hard to decide where the end of a narrative really is. But in my example sentence, you can see that the complication is that the bakery is closed, and the result is my crying in the street without any pastries. But is that the end? Maybe, maybe not.

Narratives can be of vicarious experience OR personal experience --- a personal experience narrative often has an evaluation, whereas a vicarious one can be just a set of events and their results. It is suggested in this paper that these types of vicarious narratives are not a narrative; they lack significance given by an evaluative clause. Furthermore, narratives tend to highlight the unusual or mysterious, portray the speaker in a positive light, and generally reveal the narrator's attitude toward theevents. This can be done semantically, formally, and culturally. It is often a comment at the end of the narrative, which can therefore signify resolution as well as evaluation. So, finally...

"I was hungry and tired. I knew it was late, but I wanted cinnamon rolls. I walked to the bakery, I saw that they were closed, and I cried. That was the worst day ever."

Ta-Da!

Fast-forwarding thirty years, Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capp's 1996 article Narrating the Self circles back to these fundamental arguments about narrative, while fleshing out the idea to include more than just written or spoken word: A narrative often involves another medium, such as gesture, dance, song, facial expression, etc. This broadens the field of what can be considered a narrative, and leads me to what may be a pretty cool idea: Analyzing blogs as narratives, specifically food blogs in Russian.

While a food blog is usually a collection of recipes, just like a cookbook, the ability to comment and discuss with readers makes it a sort of collaborative narrative, and the story behind making a dish makes it a narrative instead of just a list of instructions.

So here's to wiping my tears and making my own cinnamon rolls :) More on this to come!

Love,
Sarah