IK O NT IH R S OF N A R R A T I V E

Scries Editor
I )avitl 1 Ierman, North Carolina State University
Narrative
across Media
The Languages of Storytelling

Edited by Marie-Laure Ryan

U niversity o f N ebraska Press Lin coln and London

(' ■) 200.} by the Board of Regents of the University ol Nebraska
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America

©
Acknowledgments for the use of previously published material appear on page vii, which
constitutes an extension of the copyright page.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Narrative across media: the languages of storytelling / edited by Marie-Laure Ryan,
p. cm.— (Frontiers of narrative)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-8032-3944-0 (cl.: alk. paper)— isbn 0-8032.-8993-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Narration (Rhetoric) z. Mass media. I. Ryan, Marie-Laure, 1946- II. Series.
PN2J2 .N3727 2004
808---dc22
2003015225

1 III HI . I d l I I I <
*U.’' HI (. IA
11 At f 111 M*I
Contents

Acknowledgments, vii
Introduction
Marie-Laure Ryan, i
Part i: Face-to-Face Narration, 41
1. Toward a Transmedial Narratology
David Herman, 47
2. Frame and Boundary in the Phenomenology of Narrative
Katharine Young, 76
3. Gesture and the Poetics o f Prose
Justine Cassell and David McNeill, 108
Part 2: Still Pictures, 139
4. Pictorial Narrativity
Wendy Steiner, 145
5. Art Spiegelmans Mans and the Graphic Narrative
Jeanne Ewert, 178
Part 3: Moving Pictures, 195
6. Neo-Structuralist Narratology and the Functions of-Filmic Storytelling
David Bordivell, 203
7. Literary Film Adaptation and the Form/Content Dilemma
Kamilla Elliott, 220
8. Ordinary Horror on Reality tv

Cynthia Freeland, 244

Part 4: Music, 267
9. Overview ol the Music and Narrative Field
Emma Kafhlenos, 275
vi Contents

10. Music as a Narrative Art

Eero Tarasti, 283
11. Music, Genre, and Narrative Theory
Peter J. Rabinowitz, 305
Part 5: Digital Media, 329 J
12. Will New Media Produce New Narratives?
Marie-Laure Ryan, 337
13. Quest Games as Post-Narrative Discourse
Espen Aarseth, 361
14. The Myths of Interactive Cinema
Peter Limenfcld, 377
Coda: Textual Theory and Blind Spots in Media Studies
Liv Hausken, 391
Contributors, 405
Index, 409

/
Acknowledgments

Earlier versions or foreign language translations o f some of the essays pub­

lished in this volume have been published elsewhere:
David Bordwell, “ NeoStructuralist Narratology and the Functions o f Fil­
mic Storytelling,” appeared in Swedish translation under the title “Neo-
struktrualistisk narratologi och filmiska berattarfunktioner,” in Aura:
Filmvetenskaplig tidskrift i.i (1995): 47~57- Reprinted by permission o f
the author.
Justine Cassell and David M cNeill, “ Gesture and the Poetics o f Prose,”
appeared in Poetics Today 12.3 (Fall 1991): 375—404. Copyright (c) 1991,
Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. All rights reserved. Reprinted
by permission of Duke University Press.
Liv Hausken, “Textual Theory and Blind Spot in Media Studies,” appeared
in a longer version as “Tekstteoretiske utfordringer i den medieviten-
skaplige disiplin,” in Norsk medietidsskrift 1 (2000): 99—113. Reprinted
by permission of the author.
Peter Lunenfcld, “ The Myths o f Interactive Cinem a,” appeared in The New
Media Book, ed. Dan Harries (London: British Film Institute, 2002).
Reprinted by permission o f b f i Publishing.
Marie-Laure Ryan, “ Will New Media Produce New Narratives?” is an
expanded version of an article published in Frame 16.1 (2002): 19-35.
Reprinted by permission o f the journal.
Wendy Steiner, “ Pictorial Narrativity,” is a shortened version of chapter 1
o f Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and Literature
by W. Steiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Reprinted
by permission of the University o f Chicago Press.
Katharine Young, “ Fdgework: Frame and Boundary in the Phenomenology
of Narrative,” is a revised, slightly shortened version of chapter 1 of
'Idleworlds and Storyreahns by K. Young (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff,
1987). Reprinted by permission o{ the author.
'The work o f the editor was supported in pan by a fellowship from the
Guggenheim Foundation.
Narrative across M edia
Introduction

Marie-Laure Ryan

Narrarology, the formal study of narrative, has been conccived from its
earliest days as a project that transcends disciplines and media. In 1964
Claude Bremond wrote: “ IStoryJ is independent o f the techniques that bear
it along. It may be transposed from one to another medium without losing
its essential properties: the subject o f a story may serve as argument for a
ballet, that o f a novel can be transposed to stage or screen, one can recount
in words a film to someone who has not seen it. These are words we read,
images we see, gestures we decipher, but through them, it is a story that
we follow; and it could be the same story.” 1 This statement has remained
in theoretical hibernation for over forty years— occasionally contested by
opponents o f the form and content dichotomy, which it seems to imply,
occasionally invoked as inspiration for concrete comparative studies, but
never developed into a full-scale transmedial narrative theory. Nearly forty
years later, in a period of swelling interest in both comparative media
studies and narrative (the latter demonstrated by the so-called narrative
turn in the humanities), the question of how the intrinsic properties o f
the medium shape the form o f narrative and affect the narrative expe­
rience can no longer be ignored. The study o f narrative across media is
not the same project as the interdisciplinary study o f narrative: whereas
one project directs us to the importance o f narrative in mostly language-
based practices, the other focuses on the embodiment, that is to say, the
particular semiotic substance and the technological mode o f transmission
o f narrative. Its categories are language, image, sound, gesture, and, further,
spoken language, writing, cinema, radio, television, and computers rather
than law, medicine, science, literature, and history.
Even when they seek to make themselves invisible, media arc not hollow
conduits lor the transmission ol messages but material supports of infor­
mation whose materiality, preiisely, “matters” lor the type ol meanings
I

2 Ryan

that can be encoded. Whether they function as transmissive channels or

provide the physical substance for the inscription o f narrative messages,
media differ widely in their efficiency and expressive power. In the words o f
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, their built-in properties “open up possibilities
and impose constraints which . . . shape the narration, the text, and even
the story" (160). The present collection o f essays takes a close-up look at
some o f these constraints and possibilities— which we may call, following
the psychologist J. J. Gibson, “affordances”— with a broader question in
mind: what docs it mean “to narrate,” and what kinds o f stories can be
told in different medial environments?
To prepare for this journey, let me attempt to package narrative and
media into transportable definitions. It is not my intent to develop a for­
mula that captures the position of all the contributors to this volume,
but in the process o f working my own definition I hope to give a rea­
sonably comprehensive view of the options that underlie my decisions.
The parameters that make up ihis field o f possibilities should provide a
common denominator for the comparison of differing individual positions.
The definitional considerations will be followed by a survey o f some o f
the milestones o f media studies, from which we should get a clearer idea
of what needs to be done to turn its flirtation with narrative theory into
a productive partnership for both parties. This introduction will not in­
clude a survey o f narratology, mainly because the field is too vast to be
presented in a limited space but also because several essays in this book
involve a discussion of key narratological concepts: those in particular by
David Herman and Wendy Steiner. For a presentation of the individual
essays and an overview o f the state o f narrative research in each area,
the reader should consult the specializxd introductions to the individual
sections.

Narrative: What It Could Be

^1 he phenomenon of narrative has been explored in many terms: existential,

cognitive, aesthetic, sociological, and technical. These explorations range
from broad considerations about the nature o f narrative to narrow defini­
tions. The existential type (represented by Paul Ricoeur and Peter Brooks)
/tells us that the act of narrating enables humans to deal with time, destiny,
and mortality; to create and project identities; and to situate themselves as
embodied individuals in a world populated by similarly embodied subjects.
It is in short a way, perhaps the' only one, to give meaning 10 life. Through
narrative we also explore .iliern.ile realities and expand our meni.il hoi i/on
 Introduction 3

beyond the physical, actual world— toward the worlds o f dreams, phan­
tasms, f-antasy, possibilities, and co un ter fact uality.
Whereas existential approaches try to capture what it means for us to
produce (or receive) narratives, it belongs to the cognitive approaches to
describe the operations o f the narrating mind. Mark Turner opens an
ambitious program for both narratology and cognitive science when he
writes: “ Narrative imagining— story— is the fundamental instrument o f
thought. . . It is a literary capacity indispensable to human cognition gen­
erally” (4-5; emph. added). Why is narrative so fundamental to cognition?
Bccause to notice objects or events in our perceptual environment is to
construct embryonic stories about them: "Story depends on constructing
something rather than nothing. A reportable story is distinguished from
its assumed and unreportable background. It is impossible for us to look at
the world and not to see reportable stories distinguished from background”
(145). It may seem strange that a capacity as essential as narrative to cogni­
tion should be labeled literary, as if narrative were necessarily an aesthetic
object and as if thought were an exclusively language-based process, but for
Turner “the literary mind is not a separate sort o f mind. It is our mind” (v).
Turner labels the mind literary to suggest that we apply similar interpretive
principles when we read a text and when we engage in the activities of
everyday life.
Whereas Turner regards narrative as the instrument of human thought,
Jerome Bruner, more cautiously, describes it as one of two fundamental
ways of thinking, the other being the argumentative, or paradigmatic,
mode: “A good story and a well-formed argument are different natural
kinds. Both can be used as means for convincing another. Yet what they
convince o f is fundamentally different: arguments convince one of their
truth, stories of their lifelikeness” (11). The narrative mode is the mode o f
the particular; it deals with “ human or human-like intentions and actions
and the vicissitudes and consequences that mark their course.” The argu­
mentative mode, on the other hand, “deals in general causes, and in their
establishment, and makes use o f procedures to assure verifiable reference
and to test for empirical truth.” It “seeks to transcend the particular by
higher and higher reaching for abstraction” (13). It is easy to recognize in
the argumentative mode the scientific way o f thinking, but the domain o f
the narrative mode is less clear. Bruner seems to associate narrative with
fictional stories when he writes that it is not judged by criteria o f truth
and verifiability-—-but where in this dichotomy should one fit such genres
as history, news reports, and, above all, courtroom testimonies, which deal
wiih 1 lie p.in i<. ul.tr, and do so in an obviously narrative way, but at the same
 4 Ryan

time make a very direct truth claim? In addition to regarding narrative as

typically fictional, Bruner associates it with aesthetic qualities: “ In contrast
to our vast knowledge o f how science and logical reasoning proceed, we
know precious little in any formal sense about how to make good stories'
(14). Neither Turner nor Bruner thus attempts to distinguish the properly
narrative element from a group o f features that yields what is certainly
the most diversified, but by no means the only, manifestation of narrative:
literary narrative fiction.
The aesthetic approaches deal with more concrete textual phenomena
than either the existential or cognitive ones. This should, in principle,
give them a better shot at a definition. But their chances at developing
the formula o f narrative are hampered by their in tegration ist stance. I call
“ integrationist” an approach that refuses on principle to isolate “narrativ­
ity” from other layers o f meaning and from the total textual experience.
This approach regards narrativity, fictionality, and literariness (or aesthetic
appeal) as inseparable features. For many literary critics the quintessential
narrative text is the novel, a proteiform genre that encompasses not only
action-filled talcs but also the psychological narratives o f modernism and
the plotless or self-reflexive texts o f postmodernism. To the integration ist
aesthetician, a satisfactory definition of narrative should gives equal status
to Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Flann O ’Brien’s At Swim-'ftvo-
Birds or to James Joyces Dubliners, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. One o f the
most extreme forms of this approach is the concept o f narrative proposed
by Philip Sturgess. In Narrativity: Theory and Practice Sturgess criticizes
available attempts at defining narrative, particularly those o f Gerald Prince
and o f the story-grammar school on the ground that they presuppose a
deep-structural, preverbal armature to which the text owes its narrativity
(14). For Sturgess there is no such thing as nonverbalized narrativity, nor are
there nonnarrative elements in a narrative text: narrativity is a global effect
toward which every single textual element conspires, and it is inseparable
from the “verbal and syntactic” progress o f the text. “ Narrativity,” Sturgess
writes, “ is the enabling force o f narrative, a force that is present at every
point in the narrative” (29). The inevitable consequence of' this rather
tautological definition is that narrativity becomes indistinguishable from
aesthetic teleology, or, as Sturgess puts it, from the consistency with which
[ every text uses its devices (36). Since aesthetic teleology is unique to each
' text, so is narrativity. For the most radical versions of the integration ist
position, narrative is just too deeply entangled with the verbal fabric of the
text to be definable at all.
S o c i o l o g i c a l a p p r o a c h e s s li il i i l u - l o c u s o l i n v e s t i g a t i o n ( n u n n a r r a t i v e
 Introduction 5

as a text to the performance of this text as what we may call, with David
Herman (in this volume) a “contextually situated practice.” The study of
the contexts in which narration takes place is an important project, hut it is
not conducive to a general definition. Even if we remain within the domain
o f verbal narration, the common denominator o f social events as diverse as
conversational gossip, the presentation o f news on television, the play-by-
play broadcast of a sports event, the oral performance of a traditional epic
by a bard, the retelling o f the plot o f a movie to a friend, the confession
of sins to a priest, or the writing o f a novel resides neither in the concrete
circumstances nor in the particular social function o f the narrative act but
in the context-transcending nature o f this act. This leads us back to square
one: for we cannot define the act o f narration without defining the object
created through this act.
The technical approaches are the most inclined to isolate narrativity
from both context and other textual features. We may therefore call them
“segregationist.” By technical approaches I mean not only narratology
proper, a structuralist project that recruits most o f its troops from literary
theory, but also work done in folklore, experimental psychology, linguis­
tics, and discourse analysis. Since the technical approaches tend to favor
language-based narrative, I propose here to examine some o f the difficulties
encountered by the project o f defining narrative as a discourse-theoretical
object. This investigation should pave the way toward a medium-free def­
inition.
One of the main concerns of the technical approaches is the place of
narrative in a comprehensive discourse theory: is it a speech act, a genre, or
a type of sentence? Several theorists have proposed definitions of narrative
that suggest a speech act— for instance, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, who
writes, “we might conceive o f narrative discourse most minimally and most
generally as verbal acts consisting o f someone telling someone else that some­
thing happened' (228). One o f the basic assumptions o f speech act theory,
as formulated by Searle, is the relative independence of illocutionary force
(a technical term for speech act) from the prepositional content of an utter­
ance. W hile the relation between illocutionary category and propositional
content is governed by constraints (you cannot, for instance, mean “ I will
kill you” as advice or use “ The weather is nice” to christen a ship), an illocu­
tionary category cannot be entirely predicted on the basis o f prepositional
content. A proposition made of the subject the dishes and the predicate
washed L*a11 be used to make an assertion (“ The dishes are washed”), a
question ('‘Arc the dishes washed?” ), a command “ Wash the dishes!” ), the
coiulii ion 101 .1 1 h 1eat f ' I Iie dishes had be 1 u t be washed bv noon, or you’ll
6 Ryan

be in trouble” ), and so on. At first sight Smiths characterization divides

neatly into an illocutionary category (someone telling someone else) and a
prepositional content (something happened). To narrate, then, would be
one of- the several speech acts that one can accomplish with a prepositional
content o f the type “something happened,” but what can one do with
a collection of propositions that describe events besides narrating them?
And what is narrating, if not asserting these propositions either seriously
or in make-believe (for example, fictionally)? The so-called speech act o f
narration thus turns out to be an assertion that concerns a particular type o f
meaning. This suggests that narrativity is a matter of prepositional content,
not o f illocutionary force.
If narrating is not a technically distinct sort of speech act, one that stands
on par with assertion, command, question, or promise, could narrative be
a genre? It all depends on whether we interpret genre in an analytical or a
cultural sense. (This distinction is from Dan Ben-Amos.) In the analytical
interpretation, genre (or analytical category) corresponds to any kind o f cri­
terion that can be used to build a discourse or text typology. In the cultural
sense, by contrast, genre designates text types not merely drawn by theorists
but enjoying widespread recognition in a given community. Within the
medium o f language the genre system o f Western cultures correspond, for
instance, to traditional literary labels, such as the novel, poetry, drama,
essays, and short stories. Other media also have their culturally recognized
genres: comedy, action, drama, and pornography in the cinema; historical
scene, landscape, portrait, and still life in painting; symphony, concerto,
sonata, fantasy, intermezzo, and nocturne in music. To return to verbal
texts, the notion o f genre is much more problematic outside the literary
sector, but a case could be made for scientific discourse, history, law, self-
help books, song lyrics, and recipes as genres o f contemporary Western
cultures. Insofar as they form reasonably well-defined categories, cultural
genres are defined by unique sets of analytical features, but a given feature
can be shared by several genres: for instance, “ being fictional” is common
to novels and drama, while “ being about past events” characterizes both
history and historical novels. Narrative, however, does not seem to possess
the recognition o f a cultural genre. People go for novels, biographies, self-
help, or for the subgenres romance and science fiction, but nobody would
walk into a bookstore and ask for a narrative. Yet, as a property o f texts,
narrative enters into the definition of many genres, in combination with
other features that operate further distinctions. It is, therefore, a prime
example of an analytical category.
This diagnosis ol narrative as a concept broader than genre whether
 Introduction 7

we call it an analytical category, discourse type, text type, or macro-genre—

does not solve the problem o f its definition. The description of discourse-
theoretical concepts usually begins with the identification o f the categories
that operate on the same level, but in this case there is no consensus about
what other categories provide a useful contrast: Chatman opposes narra­
tive discourse to persuasive and descriptive; Fludcrnik’s model comprises
narrative, argumentative, instructive, conversational, and reflective (“ Gen­
res,” 282); and Virtanen envisions five basic types, including narrative,
description, instruction, exposition, and argumentation. Moreover, as all
these authors recognize, narrative intervenes both on the macro and the
micro level: a persuasive text, such as a political speech, will use narrative
anecdotes; a descriptive text, such as an account o f the behavior of wildlife
in a certain area, will almost inevitably resort to mini-stories. Conversely,
a narrative text includes description or argumentation on the micro level.
A typology that resorts to the same categories on different levels is a dan­
gerously tangled hierarchy.
Since narrative appears on two discourse levels, its macro-level manifes­
tation could be regarded as the extension of a micro-level feature. Would it
be possible to associate narrativity with small discourse units, such as a spe­
cific rhetorical or semantic type o f sentence? Here the rival categories might
be description (again), evaluation, generalization, commentary, judgment,
argument, or metatextual comments. This interpretation o f narrative sup­
ports the intuitive notion that, within a novel, not every sentence moves
the plot forward. The narrativity o f a text would be born by sentences that
imply the temporal succession o f their referents, as is the case with the
evocation of events and actions, as opposed to those sentences that refer to
simultaneously existing entities, to general laws, to static properties, or to
the narrator’s personal opinions. The degree of narrativity o f a text could
thus be measured by the proportion of properly narrative sentences. A
fairy tale or conversational narrative of personal experience would be much
higher in narrativity than a nineteenth-century novel rich in descriptions or
philosophical passages, even if the latter has a more intricate plot, because
a summary would retain a higher proportion o f the information contained
in the text.
While the idea o f degrees o f narrativity indeed seems promising— it
enables narrative theory to recuperate most of postmodern literature—
the assimilation o f narrative to certain rhetorical or semantic sentence
types puts excessive restrictions on the reader’s representation o f narrative
meaning. In our mental image of a plot, expository statements (“ Little Red
Riding I lood was .1 little girl ") and at least some descriptive ones (“ She was
T

8 Ryan

named that way because her mother made her a red cap”) coexist with
propositions reporting the actions o f characters. It would make no sense
to commit to memory sequences o f action without including in the pic­
ture the identifying properties of the individuals involved in those actions.
Moreover, as David Herman has argued in Story Logic (chap. 7), narrative
is a spatio-temporal construct: it reports actions that take place in a world,
and the evocation of the spatial layout o f this world requires descriptive
sentences. Explanatory and evaluative sentences are no less constitutive of
narrative meaning than state-reporting discourse: the former are needed to
make explicit causal relations between events (for example, “ G rief caused
the queen to die” ), while the latter are used to state the importance o f
events for the protagonists (“ It totally changed her life”). Without denying
1 the privileged connection between narrativity and action-reporting, clock-
moving sentences, we cannot, therefore, exclude a priori any kind o f sen­
tence from a text s narrative layer.2
All o f these attempts at fitting narrative within a formal discourse model
encounter the same difficulty: we cannot identify positively the other el­
ements o f the presumed system. Since we have a clearer intuitive idea of
| what narrative is than of what it contrasts to, the Saussurean program o f
defining the units o f language differentially fails in this case for a lack of
neighboring elements. The alternative to regarding narrative as a member
o f a linguistic paradigm is to define it as a type o f meaning and to do so
in positive terms. By advocating a semantic approach, I am not denying
that narrative involves both a signified and a signifier (what narratologists
customarily call “story level” and “discourse level” ), but I am making the
claim that its identity resides on the level o f the signified. In contrast
to the approach that attempts to link this meaning to a specific type of
sentence, I propose to regard narrative meaning as a cognitive construct,
or mental image, built by the interpreter in response to the text. Gerald
1 Prince has attempted to describe this construct through an elaborate formal
grammar.3 Here 1 would like to propose an informal characterization of
the representation that a text must bring to mind to qualify as narra­
tive.

1. A narrative text must create a world and populate it with characters

and objects. Logically speaking, this condition means that the narra­
tive text is based on propositions asserting the existence o f individuals
and on propositions ascribing properries to these exisrents.
2. The world referred to by the text 111 usi undergo changes ol siaie that
are caused by nonh.ibil 11.11 physii a I events: eil her.u\ idem s ("happen
 Introduction 9

ings” ) or deliberate human actions. These changes create a temporal

dimension and place the narrative world in the flux o f history.
3. The text must allow the reconstruction o f an interpretive network of
goals, plans, causal relations, and psychological motivations around
the narrated events. This implicit network gives coherence and intel­
ligibility to the physical events and turns them into a plot.

When a text fulfills these conditions, it creates what I shall call a “narra­
tive script.” This definition does not take into consideration what enables
a narrative script to capture the interest o f the audience: a complete nar­
rative theory would need to complement minimal conditions with what
discourse analysts, following William Labov, call “principles o f tellability.”
It would also need principles o f efficient presentation, such as Labov’s
structural analysis o f conversational narration into five components: ab­
stract, orientation, complicating action, evaluation, result or resolution,
coda. But narrativity is a type of meaning that transcends aesthetics and
entertainment, as anybody who has been forced to listen to a boring, self-
absorbed, rambling conversational storyteller realizes. A narrative that falls
flat is still a narrative.
How compatible is this formula with nonverbal forms o f narrative?
Rather than locating narrativity in an act of telling, my definition an­
chors it in two distinct realms. On one hand, narrative is a textual act
o f representation— a text that encodes a particular type o f meaning. The
definition remains unspecific about what type o f signs are used to encode
this meaning. On the other hand, narrative is a mental image— a cognitive
construct— built by the interpreter as a response to the text. Once again,
this representation may be induced by various types o f stimuli. But it does
not take a representation proposed as narrative to trigger the cognitive
construct that constitutes narrativity: we may form narrative scripts in our
mind as a response to life, which is definitely not a representation (though,
of course, we experience it through cognitive processes that produce mental
images). To describe these two modalities, I propose to make a distinction
between “ being a narrative” and “possessing narrativity.” The property of
‘'being” a narrative can be predicated on any semiotic object produced
with the intent of evoking a narrative script in the mind o f the audience.
“ Having narrativity,” on the other hand, means being able to evoke such
a script. In addition to life itself, pictures, music, or dance can have narra-
livity wiihoi.il being narratives in a literal sense.
The lullcM lorm ol narrativity occurs when the text is both intended
as tian.ilivr .ind possesses mi Hu ieni narrai ivil v (o be construed as such,
though the story encoded in the text and the story decoded by the reader
can never be extracted from the brain and laid side by side for comparison.
But the properties o f being narrative and having narrativity can be dissoci­
ated in a variety’ of ways. The standard case of dissociation occurs when the
story is so poorly presented that the audience cannot reconstrue the proper
script. In this case the text is a narrative of low narrativity. I alluded earlier
to the opposite case, o f a life situation rationalized in narrative terms. The
property o f being a narrative is much more clear-cut; than the property
o f having narrativity, but it becomes fuzzy when the text uses narrative
scripts in an instrumental way— for instance, when sermons or philosoph­
ical works resort to parables and narrative examples on the micro-level or
when computer games rely on story to lure the player into their w'orld,
even though the story does not form the focus of interest once the player
is immersed in the strategic action. A game, after all, is not “a narrative”
in the sense that a novel or a film can be. The question “ Is it a narrative?”
is even more problematic when the text embodies the artistic intent to
both arouse and frustrate narrative desire. Many postmodern texts present
themselves as hits o f pieces o f a narrative image but prevent the reader from
ever achieving the reconstruction of a stable and complete narrative script.
This may explain why narrative theory has never been comfortable with
either including or excluding postmodern literature.
Bur, if the distinction between being a narrative and having narrativity
allows the extension o f the concept o f narrative beyond verbal artifacts,
it docs not entirely solve the thorny problem of the relationship between
language and narrative. It seems clear that o f all semiotic codes language is
the best suited to storytelling. Every narrative can be summarized in lan­
guage, but very few can be retold through pictures exclusively. The narrative
limitation o f pure pictures stems from their inability to make propositions.
As Sol Worth has argued, visual media lack the code, the grammar, and the
syntactic rules necessary to articulate specific meanings. A prepositional act
consists of picking a referent from a certain background and o f attributing
to it a property also selected from a horizon o f possibilities. Whereas lan­
guage can easily zero in on objects and properties, pictures can only frame
a general area that contains many shapes and features. To convey the idea
that Napoleon was short, for instance, a picture would have to represent
the height of the emperor together with many o f his other visual properties,
and there would be a significant risk that the spectator would be more
impressed by one o f the other features than bv ihe height itself. Pictures
may admittedly find ways around their lack ol pro positional ability to
suggest specific properties (for insiainv, 1I1 rough i aricnture), hut dim* are
 Introduction 11

certain types o f statements that seem totally beyond their reach. As Worth
argues, pictures cannot say “ain’t.” Nor, as Rimmon-Kenan observes, can
they convey possibility conditionality, or counterfactuality (162).'* Being
limited to the visible, they are unable to express abstract ideas, such as
causality Only language can make ir explicit that the queen died of- grief
over the death of the king or that the fox stole the cheese from the crow by
fooling him into believing something that was not the case.
The narrative limitations o f music are even more blatant than those
of pictures, since sound waves (or tones and rhythms) are not in them­
selves sejniotic objccts. As Seymour Chatman writes, “ Music offers 110
consistency o f reference between each o f its elements— notes, phrases,
movements— and something else in the real or an imagined world so that
wc may think of the first as signifier and the second as signified” (Coming to
Terms 8). Pure sounds can be used to evoke mental images, some o f which
may resemble stories, but they possess neither a context-independent, sta­
ble core o f signification definable by “ lexical” rules nor an immediately
perceivable iconic meaning.
All o f these observations seem to support the conclusion that verbal
language is the native tongue o f narrative, its proper semiotic support.
Without denying the unsurpassed narrative ability of language, however,
I would like to defend a more nuanced position. If we define narrative in
cognitive terms, it is not a linguistic object but a mental image. While
it may be true that only language can express the causal relations that
hold narrative scripts together, this does not mean that a text needs to
represent these relations explicitly to be interpreted as narrative. As David
Bordwell and Kristin Thompson have argued, the seemingly disconnected
sequence o f cinematic images “A man tosses and turns, unable to sleep.
A mirror breaks. A telephone rings” can become a narrative sequence if
the spectator supplies common agents and logical connections (55). Brian
Richardson proposes the following narrativization: “The man can’t sleep
because hes had a fight with his boss, and in the morning is still so angry
that he smashes the mirror while shaving; next, his telephone rings and he
learns that his boss has called to apologize” (170). The visual track may be
unable to explicate causal relations— this is why some people who are used
to books have difficulty following cinematic narratives— but what matters
in this case is the spectator's ability to infer them from the text. Even purely
verbal texts, which are peri eel Iv able to say, “The queen’s grief over the
king's death caused her to die,” usually dispense with such explanations.
Although the ability 10 infer causal relations is essential to narrative un­
derstanding, leaders’ mental images ol stories could be as elliptic as the texts
»

12 Ryan

themselves. It seems unlikely that narratives will be internalized as fully

connected networks o f logical relations. The mind is notoriously capable
o f emergent behavior— o f creating new connections and o f forming new
patterns o f ideas in response to certain stimuli. It is much more efficient
to store an incomplete version o f a given narrative and to flesh it out when
the need arises than to clutter memory with all the details o f its logical
armature. What is left out and what is included in this image depends on
the individual interpreter. The complete and explicit representation o f a
story is an ideal, somewhat Platonic version toward which readers work, as
they fill in their cognitive blueprint o f the story.
A model that defines narrative as a cognitive construct remains uncom­
mitted about what this construct is made of. Since no c a t scan ca n reveal
the contents o f the brain, we c a n only speculate in this domain, but cogni­
tive research suggests that the mental representation of a story involves vari­
ous types o f images (the term is taken here in the broadest possible sense, as
an informational pattern stored in the m ind)/ It seems safe to assume that
propositions abstracted from the text, rather than reproducing it, are the
dominant clement, but certain aspects of narrative could be stored as words
(for instance, the memorable replies of characters) or as visual images (the
setting, the appearance o f characters, the map of the narrative world, and
some striking actions and situations, such as Emma Bovary making love to
Ldon in a carriage storming in full gallop through the streets o f Rouen).
It is not inconceivable that moods and emotions will be associated with
rhythms and melodies. Conversely, pictures can be remembered e ith e r in
visual terms or as propositions: we may, for instance, be able to tell that in
the background of a painting is a mirror, though we c a n n o t r e m e m b e r its
exact shape.6The cognitive representation that 1 call narrative could thus be
the mental equivalent o f a “multimedia” construct. While its logical struc­
ture is probably stored as p ro p o s i t io n s , which in turn can only be translated
through la n g u a g e , other types of images, and consequently other “mental
media,” enrich the total representation in ways that remain inaccessible to
language. Yes, language is the privileged medium of summaries because it
can articulate the logical structure o f a story; yes, language all by itself can
support a wider variety o f narratives than any other single-track medium,
not just because o f its logical superiority but also because only words can
represent language and thought. But this does not mean that media based
on sensory channels c a n n o t m a k e unique contributions to the formation
o f narrative meaning. There are, quite simply, meanings that are bette r
expressed visually or musically than verbally, and these meanings should
not be declared a priori irrelevant lo ih e n .ir ralive e xp e rie n ce .
 Introduction 13

To capture the ambiguity o f the relationship between language and nar­

rative, we need to distinguish theory from practice. Theoretically, narrative
is a type of meaning that transcends particular media; practically, however,
narrative has a medium of choice, and this medium is language. This
explains why narratology tends to treat the types o f narration exemplified
by novels, short stories, news, history, and conversational storytelling as
the unmarked, standard manifestation o f narrativity: telling somebody else
that something happened, with the assumption that the addressee is not
already aware of the events. But, if narratology is to expand into a medium-
free model, the first step is to recognizc other narrative modes, that is to
say, other ways o f evoking narrative scripts. What should wc understand
under this concept o f modes? I propose to include the following pairs in
what I regard as an open list. In each case the left term can be regarded
as the unmarked case, because the tests that present this feature will be
much more widely accepted as narrative (at least by theorists) than the texts
that implement the right-hand category. To take only one example: those
narratologists who define narrative as “telling somebody that something
happened” exclude all instances o f mimetic narrativity.
D iegetic!M im etic: This distinction goes back to Plato’s Republic. It is
also discussed in Aristotle’s Poetics. A diegetic narration is the verbal sto­
rytelling act o f a narrator. As the definition indicates, diegetic narration
presupposes language, either oral or written; it is, therefore, the typical
mode o f the novel, conversational storytelling, and news report. A mimetic
narration is an act o f showing: a “spectacle/' as David Bordwell character­
izes it (Narration 3). In forming a narrative interpretation, the recipient
works under the guidance o f an authorial consciousness, but there is no
narratorial figure. Mimetic narration is exemplified by all dramatic arts:
movies, theater, dance, and the opera. But each of these two modes can
intrude into a narration dominated by the other. The dialogues o f a novel
are islands of mimetic narration, since in direct quote the voice o f the
narrator disappears behind the voice o f the characters, and, conversely, the
phenomenon o f voiced-over narration in cinema reintroduces a diegetic
element in a basically mimetic m edium /
Those theoreticians who regard the presence o f a storyteller performing .
a verbal act of narration as an essential condition o f narrativity recuperate
mimetic narrative by ascribing these forms to a non human narratorial
figure, such as the ghostly “grand-image-maker” of film theory.HBut the
narrativity ol mimetic forms cotild also be defended by regarding them
as virtual stories. When we retell a play, we produce a standard diegetic
n.inative. I hr juiwihility to leiell as a siory would 1 lien be the condition of
14 Ryan

narrativity, and the narrativity o f a given text would stand whether 01 not
the possibility is actualized.
Autonomous/Illustrative (or ancillary): In the autonomous mode the
text transmits a story that is new to the receiver; this means that the logical
armature o f the story must be retrievable from the text. In the illustrative
mode the text retells and completes a story, relying on the receiver’s previous
knowledge o f the plot. Halfway between these two poles is the case o f a text
that offers a new, significantly altered version of a familiar plot.
Receptive/Participatory, In the receptive mode the recipient plays no
active role in the events presented by the narrative: he merely receives the
account o f a narrative action, imagining himself as an external witness.
In the participatory mode the plot is not completely pre-scripted. The
recipient becomes an active character in the story, and through her agency
she contributes to the writing o f the plot. This mode has been practiced
for quite a while in staged happenings, “ improv” theater, and scripted role-
playing games (for example, Dungeons and Dragons), but it has flourished
with the advent o f interactive digital media. In many computer games,
for instance, the user is represented in the game world through an avatar.
By solving problems in the real time of the game session, she determines
whether the life story o f this avatar will end in success or failure or how
long the avatar will live.
Determinate/Indeterminate (or actual/virtual): In the determinate
mode the text specifies a sufficient number of points on the narrative
trajectory to project a reasonably definite script. In the indeterminate mode
only one or two points are specified, and it is up to the interpreter to
imagine one (or more) o f the virtual curves that traverse these coordinates.
Literal!Metaphorical. What constitutes a literal or metaphorical nar­
ration depends on the particular definition given to narrative. Whereas
literal narration fully Satisfies the definition, the metaphorical brand uses
only some o f its features. The degree of metaphoricity o f a narrative thus
depends on how many features are retained and on how important they
are to the definition. If we conceive narrative as the mental or textual rep­
resentation o f a causally linked sequence o f events involving individuated
and humanlike agents, the following relaxations o f the definitions should
be regarded as metaphorical: scenarios about collective entities rather than
individuals (for example, the “grand narratives” o f history or the “narra­
tives o f class, gender, and race” so dear to contemporary cultural studies);
narratives about concrete entities deprived o f consciousness (for example,
Darwin’s story of evolution); and dramatizalions that attributes agency
to abstract o b j e c t s . ’’ II we want 10 slivu h t h e metaphor to its l i m i t s , we
 Ijitroductiou 15

can apply it to an forms deprived o f semantic content, such as music and

architecture. In the ease of music the metaphor can be invoked to analyze
tiie struct are of the work in terms of narrative effects, such as foreshadow­
ing and suspense, dramatic patterns o f exposition, complication, climax
and resolution, or even Propp-inspired narrative functions. In the case of
architecture a metaphorical interpretation may draw an analogy between
the temporality o f plot and the experience o f walking through a building.
In a narratively conceived architecture— found, for instance, in Baroque
churches, where the walk-through reenacts the stages o f the Passion—-the
visitor's discovery tour is plotted as a meaningful succession o f events.10

lo sum up the previous discussion: The nature of narrative and its relation
to language can be conceived in three ways. Each of them carries different
implications for the project o f this book:

1. Narrative is an exclusively verbal phenomenon. You cannot speak

ol narrative outside language-supported media (that is, media that
not only include a language track but also rely on language as their
principal mode of presentation). This position is incompatible wirh
the study of narrative across media.
2. The set o f all narratives is a fuzzy set. The fullest implementation of
narrativiy is in its language-supported forms. The study o f narrative
across media is only feasible if one can transfer the parameters o f
verbal narration to other media. This means, generally, finding a
communicative structure that involves a narrator, narratee, and nar­
rative message, in addition to sender (author) and receiver (reader,
spectator, etc.).
3. Narrative is a medium-independent phenomenon, and, though 110
medium is better suited than language to make explicit the logical
structure o f narrative, it is possible to study narrative in its nonverbal
manifestations without applying the communicative model o f verbal
narration. The definition proposed in this introduction represents
the third option. But option 2 is also compatible with a study of
narrative across media, and some o f the contributors to this volume
implicitly or explicitly adhere to it.

What Are Media?

Ask a sociologist o r c u l t u r . i l critic to e n u m e r a t e m e d i a , a n d he will a n ­

swer: t v , radio, cinema, t h e Internet. An art critic may list: music, paint­
i n g , sculpture, l i t e m h i t , di.ima, t h e opera, photography, architecture. A
16 Ryan

philosopher o f the pheno men ologist school would divide media into visual,
auditory, verbal, and perhaps gustatory and olfactory (are cuisine and per­
fume media?). An artist’s list would begin with clay bronze, oil, watercolor,
fabrics, and ir may end with cxotic items used in so-called mixed-mcdia
works, such as grasses, feathers, and beer can tabs. An iniormation theorist
or historian o f writing will think o f sound waves, papyrus scrolls, codcx
books, and silicon chips. “ New media” theorists will argue that comput­
erization has created new media out o f old one: film-based versus digital
photography; celluloid cinema versus movies made with video cameras;
or films created through classical image-capture techniques versus movies
produced through computer manipulations. The computer may also be
responsible for the entirely new medium of virtual reality.
These various conceptions o f medium reflect the ambiguity ol the term,
"['he entry for medium in Webster’s Dictionary includes, among many other
meanings more or less irrelevant to the present study (for example, “some­
body in contact with the spirits” ), the following two definitions:11

1. A channel or system o f communication, information, or entertain­

ment.
2. Material or technical means o f artistic expression.

The first definition presents a medium as a particular technology or

cultural institution for the transmission of information. Media o f this type
include t v , radio, the Internet, the gramophone, the telephone-— a ll dis­
tinct types o f technologies— as well as cultural channels, such as books and
newspapers. In this conception of medium, ready-made messages are en­
coded in a particular way, sent over the channel, and decoded on the other
end. t v can, for instance, transmit films as well as live broadcasts, news
as well as recordings o f theatrical performances. Before they are encoded
in the mode specific to the medium in sense I, some o f these messages
are realized through a medium in sense 2. A painting must be done in oil
before it can be digitized and sent over the Internet. A musical composition
must be performed on instruments in order to be recorded and played on a
gramophone. A medium in sense t thus involves the translation o f objects
supported by media in sense 2 into a secondary code.
In his groundbreaking work on the “technologizing ol the word,” Walter
Ong avoids the term medium as a label for the various supports ol language
because he objects to its sense i:

The term can give false impression o f the nature ol verbal commu­
nication, and ol other human communication .is well. I Linking ol .i
 Introduction 17

“m edium ’ of communication or o f “media” o f communication suggests

that communication is a pipeline transfer of material called “informa­
tion” from one place to another. M y mind is a box, I take a unit o f
‘‘information” out of it, encode the unit (that is, fit it to the size and
shape of the pipe it will go through), and put it into one end o f the
pipe (the medium, somewhere in the middle between two other things).
From the one end o f the pipe the information proceeds to the other end,
where someone decodes it (restores its proper size and shape) and puts
it into his or her own box-like container called a mind. This model . . .
distorts the act of [human] communication beyond recognition. (176)

If indeed communicative media were the hollow pipes that O ng carica­

tures, there would be little purpose in analyzing their narrative potential;
any kind o f narrative could be fitted into the pipe and restored to its prior
shape at the end of the transfer. On the other hand, if we totally reject the
conduit metaphor and the notion that meaning— in this case, narrative—
is encoded, sent over, decoded, and stored in memory at the other end of
the transmission line, if, that is, we regard meaning as inextricable from its
medial support, medium-free definitions o f narrative become untenable.
What, then, would entitle us to compare messages embodied in different
media and to view them as manifestations o f a common semantic struc­
ture? To maintain the possibility of studying “narrative across media,” we
must find a compromise between the “ hollow pipe” interpretation and the
unconditional rejection of the conduit metaphor (which itself is a concrete
visualization o f Roman Jakobson’s model of communication). The terms
n! this compromise are suggested, perhaps unwittingly, by Ong himself,
when he writes that information must be fitted to the “shape and size” of
the pipeline. This amounts to saying that different media filter different
aspects o f narrative meaning. Far from being completely undone at the
end of the journey, as Ong suggests in his critique, the shape imposed 011
die message by the configuration o f the pipeline affects in a crucial way the
eonstruction o f the receiver’s mental image.
Because of the configuring action o f the medium, tt is not always possi­
ble to distinguish an encoded object from the act of encoding. Consider the
einema: what it records are not autonomous artistic objects but a staging of
.u lion done for the express purpose of being filmed. It is the edited footage
1 hat forms (he artistic object, not something that exists independently of
the f i l m i n g . In the live broadcasts o f t v , similarly, the object to be sent
is created through the act ol recording itself. Moreover, if communicative
media em ode and deeode messages, they do not strip them o l anv material
18 Ryan

support at the end of the journey. After being decoded by the electronic
circuits i n the black box, t v signals are projected on a small screen in the
middle o f a family room. The experience is very different from watching a
f i l m on a large screen in a dark theater, and it calls for different forms of nar­

rative. Insofar as they present their own type o f material support, channel-
type media can be simultaneously modes o f transmission and means of
expression.
In media theory, as in other fields, what constitutes an object o f investi­
gation depends on rhe purpose of the investigator. Here we want to explore
media in terms o f their narrative power. Hence, what counts for us as a
medium is a category that truly makes a difference about what stories can be
evoked or told, how they are presented, why they are communicated, and
how they are experienced. This approach implies a standard o f comparison:
to say, for instance, that “radio is a distinct narrative medium” means that
radio as a medium offers different narrative possibilities than television,
film, or oral conversation. “ Mediality” (or mediumhood) is thus a relational
rather than an absolute property. To test the thesis of the relativity of me-
diality with respect to narrative, let us consider the respective status o f the
gramophone and of daily newspapers. From a technological point o f view
the gramophone stands as a prototypical medium. When it was developed
at the end o f the nineteenth century, it did to sound what writing had done
to language. Thanks to the new’ technology, sound could now be recorded,
and it was no longer necessary to be within earshot of its source to appre­
hend auditory data. From a narratological perspective, however, the purely
transmissive medium of the gramophone does not seem to entail significant
consequences. It wasn’t until the development o f wireless telegraphy that
a long-distance, purely auditory type of narrative was developed, namely
the radiophonic play. Daily newspapers represent the opposite situation:
historians of technology would regard them as a manifestation o f the same
medium as books, since they rely on roughly the same printing techniques,
but narratologists would defend their medium status with respect to books
by pointing out that the daily press promoted a new style of reporting news,
which gave birth to an autonomous narrative genre. Daily newspapers
also differ pragmatically from other types o f communication channels in
that they must be delivered regularly at twenty-four-hour intervals. The
coverage o f a time-consuming crisis must therefore begin before the crisis
is resolved, and the daily reports lack the completeness and retrospective
perspective o f other types o f narrative. All these characteristics suggest that
new'spapers indeed support a distinct type o f narrativity.
Where, however, does medium end, and when' dors g e n r e begin? I
 Introduction ]9

would suggest that the difference between medium and genre resides in the
nature and origin o f the constraints that relate to each o f them. Whereas
genre is defined by more or less freely adopted conventions, chosen for both
personal and cultural reasons, medium imposes its possibilities and limita­
tions on the user. It is true that we choose both the genre and the medium
we work in. But we select media lor their affordances, and we work around
their limitations, trying to overcome them or to make them irrelevant.
Genre, by contrast, purposefully uses limitations to channel expectations,
optimi7x expression, and facilitate communication: tragedy must be about
the downfall o f a hero and use the mimetic mode o f narrativity; symphonies
must comprise several movements (usually four), each with a distinct mood
and rem po;,J novels must be long, and novellas must be short, and both
must possess some degree o f narrativity (far more lor the novella). These
conventions arc imposed as a second-order semiotic system on the primary
mode of signification. Genre conventions are genuine rules specified by
humans, whereas the constraints and possibilities offered by media are
dictated by their material substance and mode o f encoding. But, insofar
as they lend themselves to many uses, media support a variety o f genres.
The diversity o f criteria that enters into the definition o medium makes
it very difficult to establish a typology o f media and to draw a dividing line
between medium and genre. I will nevertheless give it a try, fully aware that
my decisions will not meet with unanimous acceptance. If table o.i helps
readers refine their own notion o f medium and understand the complexity
o f the problem at hand, it will have reached its goal, no matter how many
amendments they make to my taxonomy, i propose two main criteria for
classifying a form o f expression/communication as a narrative medium:
(i) As suggested earlier, it must make a difference about what kind o f
narrative messages can be transmitted, how these messages are presented,
or how they are experienced. (2) It must present a unique combination of
features, These features can be drawn from five possible areas: (a) senses
being addressed; (b) priorities among sensory tracks (thus, the opera will
be considered distinct from drama, even though the two media include
the same sensory dimensions, because the opera gives music higher prior­
ity than drama); (c) spatio-temporal extension; (d) technological support
and materiality o f signs (painting versus photography; speech versus writ­
ing versus digital encoding of language); (e) cultural role and methods o f
production/distribution (books versus newspapers). Table 0.1 uses spatio-
temporal extension and sensory dimension as primary taxonomic cate­
gories. These criteria seem indeed more relevant to the issue of narrativity
than distinctions relative to teclutologic.il support, though the latter are
20 Ryan

not negligible. The drawback of this prioritization of sensory dimensions

is that a given technology or cultural channel needs to be listed twice when
it is used to transmit different types of sensory data: digital writing is distin­
guished from multimedia applications o f computer technology; silent film
is distinguished from multisensory movie productions. Another problem
with the division of media into temporal and spatio-temporal is that, if
we apply strict criteria, the temporal column will be virtually empty. As
LeonardTalmy remarks, a case could be made for putting all manifestations
o f writing in the spatio-temporal column, since writing requires a two-
dimensional support and exists all at once for the reader (425-26). Books on
tape would then be the only legitimate members o f the temporal column.

Narrative Media Studies: A Very Brief History

O f the two definitions o f the term medium— channcl o f communication or

material means o f expression— the first has been by far the more influen­
tial on the field of media studies. At U.S. universities most departments
o f media studies concern themselves with the cultural institutions and
technologies o f mass communication developed in the twentieth century:
telephone, radio, t v , computer networks, and the press. As the theorist
Joshua Meyrowitz observes, the majority of these studies focus on the
content o f the messages sent through the medium under study. Questions
o f social impact are primary: “ Typical concerns centre on how people
(often children) react to what they are exposed to through various media;
how institutional, economic, and political factors influence what is and
what is not conveyed through media; whether media messages accurately
reflect various dimensions of reality; how different audiences interpret the
same content differently; and so on." A different approach to media as
instruments o f mass communication has been promoted by Meyrowitz
as “medium” (rather than media) theory. This approach focuses not on
the content of messages but on “the particular characteristics o f each in­
dividual medium or of each particular type of media. Broadly speaking,
medium theorists ask: What arc the relatively fixed features o f each means
of communicating and how' do these features make the medium physi­
cally, psychologically, and socially different from other media and from
face-to-face interaction?” (50). Here, again, the primary focus o f studies is
sociological: “On the macro-level, medium questions address the ways in
which the addition o f a new medium to an existing matrix of media may
alter social interaction and social structure in general” (51). Working from
the assumption that the development of technologies oi communication is
Table 0. 1. A typology of media affecting narrativity
22 Ryan

one o f the most decisive influences on the development of human societies,

medium theorists postulate three (and more recently four) pivotal events
in the history of civilization: the invention o f writing; the invention of
print; the development o f electronic communications ( t v , radio); and the
development o f electronic writing and computer networks. This sketch
o f history— inspired by the pioneering work o f two Canadians, Harold
Adams Innisand Marshall McLuhan— provides a solid theoretical founda­
tion, and a vast program of research, to communicative medium or media
studies.
The concentration of this book on narrative calls, however, for ap­
proaches based on the second definition. The comparative study of media
as means of expression lags far behind the study of media as channels of
communication in both academic recognition and theoretical maturity. We
have well-developed analytical tools and methodologies relating to individ­
ual media, such as cinema, music, literature, and electronic art, but we do
noi have a comprehensive and widely accepted theory of the importance of
the medium as material support for the form and content o f message, from
their origins in poetics, rhetoric, and aesthetics, semiotic media studies— as
1 will call this type of inquiry— have progressed bottom up rather than top
down, as a series o f individual case studies and not as the application of
global principles. M y brief overview o f the field will, therefore, not be the
outline o f a unified theory but a sketch of some of the milestones in the
emergence o f medium as an object o f semiotic inquiry. My preference will
be given to those landmarks diat bear upon the question of narrativity.
Awareness of a dimension o f art and communication that translates into
English as medium goes back at least to Aristotle’s Poetics. After defining
poetry as a “species o f imitation,” Aristotle mentions three ways of distin­
guishing various types o f imitation: medium, object, and mode (z, 3 ) .13
Und er medium Aristotle understands expressive resources, such as color,
shape, rhythm, melody, and language (or voice).11 He sketches a classifica­
tion o f art forms based on the media they use: “ For example, music for pipe
and lyre . . . uses melody and rhythm only, while dance uses rhythm by
itself and without melody (since dancers too imitate character, emotion and
action by means of rhythm expressed in movement) . . . The art which uses
language unaccompanied, either in prose or in verse . . . remains without
a name to the present day . . . There are also some arts which use all the
media mentioned above (that is, rhythm, melody, and verse), tor instance,
dithyrambic and gnomic poetry, tragedy and comedy; these differ in that
the former use them all simultaneously the latter in distinct parts” (a.i,
4 )-
 Introduction 23

The second criterion, object, operates generic distinctions within imita­

tions that share the same medium. Tragedy, for instance, imitates better
people, while comedy depicts inferior ones. Aristotle invokes die third
criterion, mode, to make distinctions between imitations that share both
medium and object: “ It is possible to imitate the same objects in the same
medium sometimes by narrating . . . or else with all the imitators as agents
and engaged in activity” (2.3, 5). Thus, tragedy and epic both deal with
“ better people’ and do so through language, but tragedy imitates in what
Plato calls the mimetic mode, while epic poetry imitates through diegesis. (I
use here Plato’s terminology instead o f Aristotle’s contrast between narrative
and performing arts to avoid describing tragedy as nonnarrative.) When
Aristotle claims that mode operates distinctions within the same medium,
he forgets, however, that performing actors appeal to the sense of vision,
while diegetic narration does not. Differences in mode inevitably entail
differences in medium.
According to Aristotle, the distinction between the mimetic and the
diegetic mode does not afFect the general structure of plot: “ The compo­
nent parts [of epic plots] are the same [as those o f tragedy]: it too needs
reversals, recognitions, and sufferings” (10.2, 39). But, because o f their
distinct mode (and consequently medium), tragedy and epic poetry im­
plement this abstract structure in different ways: “one should not compose
a tragedy out of a body of materials which would serve for an epic— by
which I mean one that contains a multiplicity o f stories . . . [EJveryone
w'ho has composed a Sack o f Troy as a whole, and not piecemeal like
Furipides . . . has either failed or done badlv in the competitions” (8.7, 30).
Fpic plots and dramatic plots can be represented by the same summary, but
dramatic plots are much more tightly woven, since their temporal frame
must roughly correspond to the length o f the performance, while epic plots
can afford to stretch out the basic structure through numerous episodes that
repeat one another. Not being tied to the here and now o f the stage, epic
poetry has an “ important distinctive resource for extending [the length o f
the plot]” : it is able to “ imitate many parts of the action being carried on
simultaneously” (10.3, 39—40). By presenting plot as a structure common
to dramatic and epic poetry, while suggesting that the resources inherent to
the medium make a difference about what kind o f subject matters can be
represented efficiently, the Poetics outlines an agenda for the cross-medial
study o f narrative: to find out how the medium configures the particular
realization of narrativity.
I he concept o f artistic medium lay dormant until the eighteenth cen­
tury, when Ci. K. Less i 11 g published / .doc00>1: An lissay on the I.'units o f
24 Ryan

Painting and Poetry (1766).1S Neither medium nor narrative appears in the
translation o f rhe text, bur Lessings essay offers the first detailed compar­
ative study o f the narrative power o f artistic media. The title refers to a
famous Greek sculptural group that depicts an episode narrated by Virgil
in the Aeneid: the Trojan priest Laocoon being devoured by sea serpents
together with his two sons. The critics o f the time wondered why Laocoon
expressed an almost serene resignation in the face of such a horrible death.
Against those critics who invoked an ethics of stoicism or a cultural taboo
against the display of male emotions in Greek society, Lessing proposes
an explanation entirely based on aesthetic principles. The face o f Laocoon
cannot be distorted, he argues, because sculpture is a work o f visual art,
and the purpose o f visual art is to represent beauty. We may no longer
accept Lessing’s association of art with the beautiful— shortly after he wrote
the “ Laocoon” the work o f Goya began to demonstrate the artistic power
o f horror— but, by insisting 011 the visual nature of painting, the essay
represents a watershed in aesthetic philosophy. The art criticism scene of the
eighteenth century was very much dominated by the philosophy captured
in the saying o f Simonides o f Ceos: “painting is mute poetry and poetry
a speaking painting” (4). Taken literally— and Lessing shows little under­
standing for figural language— the formula blatantly ignores the sensory
and spatio-temporal dimensions o f the two media: painting speaks to the
sense o f sight, poetry to the imagination; painting is spatial, poetry is tem­
poral. These contrasts predispose painting and poetry to the representation
o f different ideas: “ I reason thus: if it is true that in its imitations painting
uses completely different means or signs than does poetry, namely figures
and colors in space rather than articulated sounds in time, and if these signs
must indisputably bear a suitable relation to the thing signified, then signs
existing in space can express only objects whose wholes or parts coexist,
while signs that follow one another can express only objects whose wholes
or parts are consecutive” (78).
The spatial dimension o f its signs enables painting to represent physical
beauty, because beauty is an effect that results from the harmonious com­
bination of various parts. Poetry cannot do so: it divides what should be
perceived simultaneously into discrete elements and present them one at
a time to rhe “eye” o f the imagination. Homer’s use of a simple epithet—
“white-armed Helen”— therefore goes farther in suggesting beauty than
lengthy descriptions. Conversely, because o f its temporal nature, poetry
excels at the representation o f actions, while painting freezes processes into
a single shot: “ In the one case [poetry] the action is visible and progressive,
its different parts occurring one after the other in a set] tie nee ol time, and in
 Introduction 25

the other [sculpture] rhe action is visible and stationary, its different parrs
developing in co-existence in space” (77).
Should we conclude that poetry cannot describe and that painting can­
not narrate? Even a series o f paintings, Lessing argues, would not give an
adequate idea of the plot o f the Odyssey (71). Throughout the “ Laocoon”
Lessing admonishes painters and poets to avoid subject matters that do not
take advantage of the strength of the medium. The subtitle o f the work,
on the limits of painting and poetry, is symptomatic o f a prescriptive and
separatist stance. To be an artist, in the classical age, is to learn to work
within the limits of the chosen medium. Yet, despite his classical restraint,
Lessing does not totally lack understanding for the artistic drive to push
back the limits of media. One of the few descriptive passages in poetry that
meets his approval is Homer’s technique o f narrativized description: “I f
I lomer wants to show us Juno’s chariot, he shows Hebe putting it together
piece by piece before our eye. We sec the wheels and axle, the seat, the pole,
the traces, and the straps, not as these parts are when fitted together, but as
1 hey are actually being assembled by Hebe” (80). The description works,
because spatial vision has been transformed into temporal action.
Conversely — 1 reserve here for the end of my sketch the concept for
which the “Laocoon” is the most famous— painting can overcome its nar­
rative limitations (or at least push them back) by turning its spatial display
into the representation o f what has become known as a “pregnant mo­
m ent”: “ Painting can use only a single moment of an action in its coexisting
composition and must therefore choose the one which is most suggestive
and from which the preceding and succeeding actions are most easily com­
prehensible” (78). The representation o f a fold in a garment, so dear to
Baroque art, captures the trace o f a moving body: “ We can see from the
folds whether an arm or leg was in a backward or forward position prior to
its movement; whether the limb had moved or is moving from contraction
nr extension, or whether it had been extended and is now contrasted”
(Anton Meng, qtd. by Lessing, 92). For Lessing the most pregnant moment
in ;i process is the one that just precedes its climax: “ Thus, if Laocoon sighs,
1 he im agin ation can hear him cry ou t; but i f he cries ou t, it can neither go a
step higher n o r on e step lower than this representation w ith o u t seeing him
111 a more tolerable and hence less intense condition” (20). Elsewhere in
1 lie essay Lessing writes that painting is strictly an art of the visible, which
means that it is an art of the present, but through the pregnancy o f the
dcpicicd moment p ain tin g can rench into rhe past and the future, thereby
tu n sfo i tilin g ilsell from an art that speaks exclu sively 10 the senses to an
.111 dial also speaks, like poetry, 10 the im agin ation . W luu is represented in
26 Rynu

the fold o f the garment and in the face of Laocoon is not arrested time but
a virtualization of temporal movement: the passing o f time is contained
in potcntill in the pregnant moment, as the tree is contained in the acorn.
“ To use the language of scholastic philosophy,” writes Lessing, “what is not
contained in the picture actu is there virtute” (100). Whereas poetry actually
narrates, painting docs so, when it does, in a virtual mode that leaves much
more to be filled in by the interpreter. To use a pair o f terms that Marshall
McLuhan would propose tw?o centuries later, \\t could say that poetry is a
“ hot” narrative medium and painting a “cold” one.
Let's fast-forward to the twentieth century. The technological explosion
o f the nineteenth century produced new artistic media, photography and
cinema, and led to the development o f a whole array o f mainly trans­
missive media: gramophone, telephone, radio, and t v . Around 1930 the
term medium entered language to designate channels o f communication.
Jn the midcentury two intellectual events took place that would alter the
course of rhe humanities and lend to the birth of contemporary media
studies. The first is die so-called linguistic turn in the humanities. After
discovering Ferdinand de Saussures linguistic theory, scholars wrorking in
various disciplines proclaimed linguistics to be a “pilot science” in the
humanities and set out to fulfill the masters prediction that linguistics
would soon be part of a general science o f signs. The French version of
this “science,” know'll as “semiology/' conceived its task as the extension
o f Saussures conception o f the linguistic sign to all areas of significations;
doing semiology was, therefore, a matter o f insisting on the arbitrariness of
the relation between signifiers and signifieds and o f discovering the system
o f relations— or play o f differences— through which these signs acquire
their phonic or semantic value. This branch eventually led to what is known
as deconstruction, poststructuralism, or simply “theory,” a critique o f rep­
resentation that originated to a hu ge extent in a reading o f media: written
versus spoken language for Derrida; advertisement and photography for
Barthes; t v and other mass media for Baudriilard and Virilio; the cinema
for Deleuze. Meanwhile, a mainly American branch o f the project known
as semiotics, also joined by the Italian scholar and novelist Umberto Eco,
relied on C. S. Peirce’s division o f signs into symbols, indices, and icons.
In contrast to its French counterpart, this school did not try to impose a
linguistic model on nonverbal media. In spite of their different theoretical
inspiration, both schools ventured into hitherto neglected areas of significa­
tion, and both refocused the study o f artistic media from die hermeneutic
question “ what does this work mean?” to the more icchnical issue: '"how
does it mean?” or “ how docs it work?”
 hitrodui'tioii 27

The second event, which is mainly associated with the name of Marshall
McLuhan (hut Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes also made significant
contributions toward this development), is the emancipation o f media
studies from aesthetics, philosophy, and poetics. This emancipation meant
the breakdown o f the academic barrier between elite and popular culture.
For McLuhan comic strips, advertisements, or the composition o f newspa­
per front pages were 110 less worthy o f “poetic” analysis than works o f “ high”
literature. A mercurial, aphoristic thinker who loved to play with language
in a way that anticipates French poststructuralist theory, McLuhan pre­
ferred puns, metaphors, parody, and the epiphanies o f sudden jumps to
the systematic, linear development o f ideas. It is, therefore, poetic as well as
philosophical justice that nowadays most people associate his name with a
lew catchphrases that lend themselves to free interpretation, such as “global
village,” “ hot and cold media,” or “the medium is the message.”
Although the work o f McLuhan defies summarization, his own interpre­
tations of the slogan “the medium is the message” allows a glimpse into the
nature and style of his contribution to media studies. In this postmodern
age the interpretation o f the slogan that immediately comes to mind is the
self-referentiality that pervades both avant-garde art and popular culture,
but McLuhan has broader phenomena in mind: “ This revolution [that
is, electric modes of moving information] involves us willy-nilly in the
study of modes and media as forms that shape and reshape our perceptions.
That is what I meant all along by saying rhe ‘medium is the message,’ for
the medium determines the modes o f perception and the matrix o f as­
sumptions within which objectives are set” {EssentialMcLuhan 188; emph.
added). In his book The Gutenberg Galaxy McLuhan develops the idea
that media affect perception and consequently thought by linking oral and
written communication to different types o f brain activities. The oral com­
munication o f preliterate societies relies on an “acoustic space” in which
sound comes to us from all directions and in which all the senses contribute
information. McLuhan associates this effect with the right side o f the brain.
With the development o f writing technologies, emphasis shifts to the left
side: now all information comes to us through an act of vision that scans the
book linearly, one letter at a tim e.16This is why print culture favors logical,
abstract, and controlled thought, at the expense of spatial perception and
of (he artistic, holistic, metaphorical, or musical types o f imagination. But
in the development o f electronic media, which offer data to all the senses,
Mc Luhan sees a chance to reverse what for him is an impoverishing trend
lm the hum,m mind: “ 'Unlay, our universal environment ol simultaneous
dec t ionic Mow, ol 1 on sum Iv inieti hanging informal ion, favors the sensory
28 Ryan

preferences o f the right hemisphere. The First World is aligning itself,

however gradually, with the Third World" [Global Village 56).
The second interpretation o f the formula suggests, in vaguely Saussurean
fashion, chat media form a tightly connected system, in which every ele­
ment functions through a network of connections with other media. But
the relations, rather than being purely differential, consist o f a chain of
positive substitutions: “ The 'content' of any medium is always another
medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the
content o f print, and print is the content of the telegraph. It is asked, ‘ What
is the content o f speech?’ it is necessary to say, ‘It is an actual process of
thought, which is in itself non-verbal’ ” (Essential 151). O r further: “The
content o f a movie is a novel or play or opera” (159). T his statement could
be taken to mean that writing is a mere translation o f speech, speech a
mere translation of thought, and so on. Such an interpretation would clash,
however, with another of McLuhans probes into the meaning of his own
slogan: “ ‘the medium is the message’ because it is the medium that shapes
and controls the scale and form o f human association and action” (152).
How, then, can a medium form the content o f another medium, without
becoming interchangeable with it? 1 would suggest that McLuhan’s self-
interpretation ought to be read in the light o f C. S. Peirce’s definition o f
signs. According to Peirce, a sign is “anything which determines something
else (its interpretant) to refer to something to which itselPrefers (its object),
the interpretant becoming in turn a sign, and so on, ad infinitum” (303).17
To “understand” a medium in formal and cultural terms is thus to think
o f another medium, which itself necessitates interpretation through yet
another medium. Because “ interpretation” is always a partial fit, this chain
of substitutions highlights the particularities o f each medium much more
than it negates their differences.
It was left to much more systematic and less cryptic thinkers than
McLuhan to cultivate the seeds that he casually scattered in the furrows o f
the new field. Walter Ong, McLuhan’s one-time student and colleague, un­
dertook a thorough investigation o f the effect o f the passage from oral/aural
to chirographic/tvpograpliic cultures for consciousness, perception, and
cultural life. More important tor the present project, he reconnected media
studies with literary theory by studying the impact o f the material sup­
port o f language 011 narrative form. To summarize O ng’s observations: the
contrast oral/written is felt in three areas: the pragmatic, or cultural, role
o f narrative; the shape o f the plot; and the narrative themes, especially
rhe presentation of characters. In oral cultures naira live used in In- Ilu-
sole vehicle ol knowledge. Since stories ileal wiili pariii ill.11 s, 1 11 is .illeets
 Introduction 29

the kind ot knowledge being transmitted: '‘ Oral cultures cannot generate
[scientifically abstract categories], and so they use stories o f human action
to store, organize, and communicate much o f what they know” (140).
Moreover, by creating a sense of community, oral narrative “serves to bond
thought more massively and permanently than other genres” (141). In his
discussion o f the shape ol the plot Ong reinterprets the differences observed
by Aristotle between epic poetry and drama in terms o f the contrast oral
versus written. Even though it is designed tor oral performance, drama
represents the written pole: “The ancient Creek drama . . . was the first
western verbal art form to be fully controlled by writing” (148). The written
origin of tragedy explains the carcfully cralted rise and fall in tension
known to drama theorists as rhe “ Freytag triangle.” Such a structuration
necessitates a global overview' of the plot that is only possible in a writing
situation, for (as McLuhan fails to see) writing creates a space that frees the
author from the linearity o f language. Whereas tragedy is constructed top
down by an author, epic poems are created by the storyteller bottom up,
moment by moment, through the concatenation o f relatively autonomous
episodes: “ Having heard perhaps scores o f singers singing hundreds o f
songs o f variable length about the Trojan War, Homer had a huge repertoire
o f episodes to string together, but, without writing, absolutely no way to
organize them in strict chronological order” ((43). “ If we take the climactic
linear plot as the paradigm o f plot, the epic has no plot. Strict plot for
lengthy narrative comes with writing” (144). Rather than denying plot to
epic poetry, wc might say, with Janet M urray that oral epic has a multiform
plot: each performance results in a particular linearization, which creates
a different plot, at least within certain limits. O ng’s “medial determinism”
also accounts tor the birth o f the novel, a genre whose origin has been a
topic o f lively speculations among literary critics. “ Print . . . mechanically
as well as psychologically locked words into space and thereby established
a firmer sense of closure than [manuscript] writing could. The print world
gave birth to the novel, which eventually made the definitive break with
episodic structure” (149). The novel comes into its own, after the eighteenth
century, by developing a compromise between the loose structure of oral
epic and the tight climactic organization o f drama: a compromise that
expands the global pattern typical o f written composition to epic dimen­
sions. In the area of characterization, finally, Ong associates oral narrative
with “ Hat” characters who delight the reader by “fulfilling expectations
copiously” (151): and wriiien narrative with an attention to mental pro-
cesses Ihat results in die creation of unpredictable, psychologically complex
individuals what E. M. Forster 1 ailed “ round” characters.
30 Ryan

Both McLuhan and Ong predicted that the advent o f “the electric way
of moving information’ would create a cultural turning point. Electronic
technology would challenge the supremacy ot print as a channel o f mass
communication and open an alternative to the linear mode of thinking as­
sociated with writing. Thinking principally o f t v , radio, and the telephone,
all diffusers o f talk, Ong calls this new stage in media history “secondary
orality.” But by the late 1980s rhe talk media had been supplanted, in terms
of novelty, by the digital way of moving information. Reversing the trend
observed by McLuhan and Ong, the development o f computer networks
meant to some extent a secondary literacy: e-mail, Internet chatrooms
(where chatting is done by typing on a keyboard), and the World Wide Web
now contend with the telephone, radio, or t v for both personal contacts
and as a way to keep informed o f currcnt events.
The media explosion that followed the so-called digital revolution gave
a tremendous boost to media studies. There were not only brand-new
artistic media and modes o f communications to investigate— hypertext,
computer games, art c d - r o m s , Web pages, e-mail, chatrooms, virtual re­
ality installations, all media that depend on digital support— but also old
media to revisit. These old media did not live in a digital environment,
but, as they began to use the computer as a mode o f production, they were
able to achieve entirely new effects. From drama to film, photography to
painting, architecture to music, virtually every “old medium” has a new,
digital twin, though whether or not this twin counts as an autonomous
medium is a debatable question. (It will, according to the criteria adopted
in this book, if it makes a difference in terms o f narrative expressivity.)
Moreover, by introducing new species competing for survival in what was
increasingly becoming known as the “media ecology,” the digital revolution
placed old media in a different contcxt, both in terms of their cultural
function and in terms of how they were approached. In need o f a standard
of comparison, the study o f digital writing turned, for instance, back to
the codex book and discovered features that had until then been taken for
granted: the advantage o f a bound spine over loose leaves; the possibility to
access pages randomly, despite rhe linear reading protocol of most printed
texts; the escape from sequential reading offered by footnotes; and the
importance of indexes as “navigational aide”— a concept that would have
been unthinkable until the development o f hypertext and o f the World
Wide Web.
Not to be left behind, literary criticism caught the medial tide wave by
turning its attention to rhe proliferation of media in the twentieth tenuirv
and on the effect of this proliferation on the literary imagination. Led by
 Introduction 31

Friedrich Kittler, John Johnston, Donald ThealL Michael Wutz, and Joseph
Tabbi— the larrcr r\vo editors o f the collection Reading Matters: Narrative
in the New Media Ecology— this school dedicates itself to such questions as
reassessing the role o f literature in a changed medial environment (a ques­
tion that echoes the concerns o f Meyrowitz’s “medium theory” ); analyzing
how different technologies-— manuscript, typewriter, or word processor—
affect the practice o f writing; and describing the new narrative techniques
developed by modern and postmodern novelists (especially James Joyce
and William Burroughs) in an attempt to simulate the resources ol other
media. But, in its tendency to read texts through the theories o f Jacques
Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleu/.e, Felix Guattari, and other beacons
o f postmodern thought, the “media ecology” school often practices a top-
down approach that is alien to the spirit o f the present volume: here the
bottom-up movement from data to theory will receive precedence over the
top-down application of ready-made theoretical models.
M y last landmark in this survey of media studies develops the metaphor
of media ecology— itself a transposition of McLuhans vision of a media
network— into the most ambitious account we have so far of the nature
and history o f both old and new media. This landmark is Jay Bolter and
Richard Grusins concept o f “remediation.” Ihe authors define remediation
as “the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms”
(273). Every medium, they argue, is developed as an attempt to remediate
die deficiencies o f another medium. Remediation is thus “ the mediation
o f mediation: Each act o f mediation depends on other acts o f mediation.
Media are continually commenting on, reproducing, and replacing each
other, and this process is integral to media. Media need each other to
(unction as media at all” (55). According to the authors, this chain of substi-
1 if tions describes not only the development o f media but also rheir intrinsic
Iunction: “ W hat is a medium? We offer this simple definition: a medium is
that which remediates. It is that which appropriates the techniques, forms,
.md social significance o f other media and attempts to rival or refashion
diem in the name o f the real” (65). In this definition the appeal to reality
Iunctions as rhe end condition that puts a slop to what would otherwise be
.in endless recursion: at the beginning was reality; then medium 1 attempted
n> mediate some ol its features; medium 2 remediated the deficiencies of
medium 1; and so 011. The narrative o f progress implicit to this definition
is obviously better suited to transmissive technologies than to artistic me-
di.i. (liven the postulation of “the desire to achieve the real” as the force
tli.it drives the process o f remediation (si), it seems strange that Bolter
. m d ( i i u s m p n » p o s e t w o " s t r a t e g i e s ’’ o f r e m e d i a t i o n : o n e is ttnmcdirtcy, the
32 Ryan

attempt to make the medium disappear; the other bypermediacy, “a style

o f visual [jr/V] representation whose goal is to remind the viewer o f the
medium” (272). How could the opacity implicit in hypermediacy help the
user “achieve the real”— unless it is the reality o f the medium itself?
These reservations notwithstanding, the concept of remediation is a
powerful tool of media analysis. The versatility of the concept is particularly
useful in framing questions that fall within the concerns of transmedial
narratology. Let me, therefore, enumerate some o f the various possible
interpretations o f remediation and translate each o f them into a narrative
topic. In the list that follows, narrative implications are entered either as
examples or as topics o f investigation formulated as questions:

1. “ Medical” remediation: the invention o f a medium to overcome

the limitations o f another medium. Bolter and Cirusin’s examples:
“writing makes speech more permanent” ; “ hypertext makes writing
more interactive” (59).
Narrative application: Cinema remediates the spatial limitations o f
drama by making the setting infinitely variable. What are the conse­
quences of this freedom to travel on the thematic content of movies
as well as on their presentational techniques?
2. Change in the technological support of a type o f data. Example: the
evolution of writing from manuscript to the typewriter, from the
printing press to the word processor, or from clay tablets to scrolls,
codex books, and electronic databases.
Narrative application: The questions addressed by Walter Ong: how
did these changes affect narrative plot? what was the role o f the
invention o f the printing press in the development o f the novel?
3. The phenomenon captured by McLuhan’s formula: “The content of
a medium is always another medium.” This formula is literally appli­
cable to cases such as the written transcriptions o f oral performance
or books on tape.
Narrative application: Investigating the differences between actual
conversation and the conventions of dialogue representation in fic­
tion. Examining a novel as an instance o f oral confession (for exam­
ple, Ca m us , 7 be Fall).
4. A medium taking over the social function o f another. Example: tele­
vision replacing radio as the main source o f news and replacing movie
houses as the main channel for rhe transmission ol film.
Narrative application: W hat h appens 10 m ovies w hen ih ey are m;ule
for TV? I low does 11arr.1tion d ille r in radio .mil i v news p iogi.im s?
 Introduction 33

5. The representation of a medium within another medium by either

mechanical or descriptive means. Mechanical examples: the photo­
graphic reproduction o f paintings, t v broadcast o f classic f ilm , the
digitization of all artistic media. Descriptive examples: the verbal
evocation o f music; the musical depiction o f a story or painting.
Narrative application: Ekphrasis in novels (verbal description o f art­
works); the representation o f performance arts or t v shows in movies
(for example, The Truman Show).
6. A medium imitating the techniques o f another. Example: digital ma­
nipulations o f photographs that apply the “ Van G ogh,” the “ M onet,”
or the “ Seurat” filter.
Narrative application: Cinematic or musical techniques in novels;
literary collage; voiced-over narration in movies.
7. Absorption o f the techniques o f a new medium by an older one.
Example: the use of digitally produced special effects in movies.
Narrative application: What is the effect on movie plots o f digital
manipulation? (Possible answer: a move away from psychological
drama and toward action and the fantastic.)
S. Insertion o f a medium in another. Example: text in paintings, movie
clips in computer games; photos in novels.
Narrative application: How do these inserts enhance a work’s ability
to tell stories?
‘j. Transposition from a medium into another. Example (from Bolter
and Grusin 273): commercial “repurposing” of products, such as
t h e creation o f a soundtrack C D , a Broadway musical, a Saturday

morning cartoon, or a line of toys and actions figures out of the

I )isney movie The Lion King.
Narrative application:’This is the richest area o f investigation: trans­
positions o f novels into movies, novelizations of film or computer
games, computer games based on literary works (the shooter Alice),
illustrations o f stories.18

Narrative across Media: Framing the Project

I low docs one do media studies? I low does one do narrative media studies,
01 iiansmedial narratology? I Iere 1 would like to warn the Hcdgling field
ol ilnee dangers. The first is the temptation to regard the idiosyncrasies of
111d1v1dt1.il texts as features ol the medium. Tor instance, just because many
lispeiiexi .uiihors were inllueiKcd by postmodern aesthetics, does it mean
th.11 digii.il media inhcienily embody ihese ideas and that the relation is
 34 Ryan

neccssary? Since media present themselves only through individual texts,

the problem o f passing from observations gathered horn the text to prin­
ciples that describe the medium as a whole is one o f the greatest challenges
o f media studies. The second danger is what Liv Hausken describes, in the
concluding essay o f this book, as media blindness: the indiscriminating
transfer o f concepts designed tor the study o f the narratives of a particular
medium (usually those of literary fiction) to narratives of another medium.
Hausken’s prime example is the postulation o f a narrator figure for all
narratives, including those realized in mimetic media, such as film and
drama. The third caveat is what I call “ radical relativism.” It resides in the
belief that, because media are distinct, the toolbox o f narratology must be
rebuilt from scratch for every new medium. Radical relativism involves two
types o f blindness. The first is blindness to narrative universals. Many of
the concepts developed by structuralism— for instance, Propps functions,
Bremond’s modalities, or Greimas’s semiotic square— describe narrative on
a semantic level, and, though these concepts have been mainly tested on
literary texts, they are not limited to verbal narrative. Radical relativism
is also blind to the fact that different media often incorporate common
tracks or semiotic systems. Print and electronic writing may rely on dif­
ferent material supports, which open different possibilities, but, insofar as
they both involve language, they share many properties. Radical relativism
would also prohibit what has been one of the most productive practices
of narratology: the metaphorical transfer of concepts from one medium
to another. To take a few examples: the optical notions o f point of view,
o f focalization, of camera-eye narration, and of cinematic montage have
provided insights into literary narrative that could not have been reached
by limiting the investigators analytical toolbox to strictly language-based
concepts. Metaphorical borrowing is a standard practice in the narrative in­
vestigation o f music, precisely because musical narration is itself restricted
to the metaphorical mode (unless, o f course, one adds a language chan­
nel).
Between medium blindness and radical relativism there is room for a
diversified program of investigation. I envision this program as follows
(each item on the list is followed by the name o f the contributors who
address it in their essay).

i. Critique the narratological models developed for literature; assess

the applicability of their categories for media other than written
language; when necessary, adapt these tools or develop new ones.
(Aarseth, Bordwell, Cassell and Mac'Neill, I l.msken, I lerman)

L
 Introduction 35

2. Define the conditions under which nonverbal media can tell stories.
(Steiner, Tarasti, this introduction)
3. Catalog the “modes of narativity.” (This introduction)
4. Identify and describe narrative genres, devices, or problems that arc
unique to a medium. (Young, Freeland)
5. Explore phenomena of remediation, especially the problem of trans­
ferring a narrative from one medium to another. (Elliott, Steiner)
6. Explore “what can medium x do that medium y cannot” and ask
how media can push back their limits. (Implicit in many essays, lor
example, Steiner, Ewert, Elliott, Rabinowitz)
7. Study the contribution o f the various tracks to narrative meaning in
“multimedia” media. (Cassell and McNeill, Rabinowitz, Ewert)
8. Ask if the properties of a given medium arc favorable or detrimental
to narrativity. (Ryan, Aarseth, Eunenfeld)

I'he organization o f the volume reflects two choices. First, literary nar-
1alive, arguably the fullest form o f narrativity, does not form the object of
.1 special section but is treated, instead, as the implicit frame o f reference of
Ilu* entire collection— the standard against which the narrative potential of
nt her media can be measured. The literary manifestations of narrative are
•.imply too diverse to be adequately covered in two or three essays. And,
second, rather than representing as many media as possible through one
essay each, a policy that would give the reader a false sense of the authority
.md unchallenged status o f the selected approach, the book restricts the
bieadih o f its coverage to five areas— face-to-face narrative, still pictures,
moving pictures, music, and digital media— in order to represent each of
ihese areas through a cluster o f articles. This policy led, unfortunately,
id the exclusion of various types of performing arts— theater, mime, and
lullei —but it also made it possible to give a voice to different, sometimes
lompeting positions within a given area.
Whether we call it “narrative media studies” or “transmedial narratol­
ogy,’’ the study of narrative across media is a project from which the un-
dcisi.mding o f both media and narrative should benefit. Media studies
will gain Irom the focus of this book on narrativity a point o f comparison
IIia 1 should expose the idiosyncratic resources and limitations o f individual
media more efficiently than single-medium investigations can do, while
11.11 laiology, an enterprise so far mainly concerned with literary fiction, will
I1,am 110m 1 lie 1 onsiileiai ion ol nonverbal forms ol narrative an opportunity
in h-think its objei 1 and 10 icjuveuate itself.
36 Ryan

Notes

I am indebted co David Herman and I.iv Hausken for useful comments on a first
draft o f this introduction.
1. Translation by Seymour Chatm an, Story and Discourse, 20. The original reads:
“ La structure [d’ une histoire| est indcpcndante des techniques qui la prennent en
charge. Elle se laisse transporter de l’une a l’autre sans rien perdre de ses proprictcs
essentielles: le sujet d’ un conte pent servir d’argument pour un ballet, cclui d’un
roman peut etre porte a la scene 011 a I’ecran, on peut raconter un Him a ceux qui
ne I’ont. pas vu. Ce sont des niois qu’on lit, ce sont des images qu’on voit, ce sont
des gestes qu’on dechiffre, mais a travers eux, e’est une histoire qu’on suit, et ce
peut etre la meme histoire.”
2. A n exception may be those sentences that deal exclusively with univcrsals,
such as “All men arc mortal.”
3. This formal characterization is developed in A Grammar of Stories. In his
Dictionary o f Narratology Prince proposes the following informal paraphrase: a
minimal story is “a narrative recounting only two states and event such that (1)
one state precedes the event in time and the event precedes the other state in time
(and causes it); (2) the second state constitutes the inverse (or the modification,
including the ‘zero’ modification) o f the Hrst.” Prince’s example is “John was happy,
then he saw Peter, then as a result he was unhappy” (53). Prince also recognizes a
minimal narrative: “A narrative representing only a single event: ‘ She opened the
door’ ” (52). In a cognitivist framework, however, the difference between m ini­
mal narrative and minimal story tends to disappear, since the interpreter of “She
opened the door” will rationalize the statement as a state (door closed)—event—end
o f state (door open) sequence. In Princes model more complex narratives can be
generated by com bining minimal structures through embedding or concatenation.
4. As David Herman reminds me, comic strips and the cinema have developed
some visual means to signal the lack of reality of an episode: in a comic strip, a
different color frame may, for instance, indicate that the content of the picture is
to be taken as merely imagined by a character; in a movie a gradual loss of focus
or a trembling o f the picture may lead us into an alternative possible world. Rut,
if these devices are visual, they are not, strictly speaking, pictorial: they create an
arbitrary code, similar in that respect to language, rather than expressing the lack
of reality in an iconic manner.
5. For an overview o f this research, see Ellen Esrock, The Reader’s Eye, chaps. 4—5.
6. Ellen Esrock captures the dilemma in the following terms: “ One can look
at M onet’s painting of a water lily, a visual stimulus, and process the experience
either by creating a visual image of the lily, thereby using a visual code, or by
assigning certain wordlike attributes to the image, such as ‘oval shape, blurred
edges,
o blue-sreen,’
D which is to use the verbal code. Similarly,
* these two codes can
be deployed with verbal material. One can process the phrase 'a host ol golden
daffodils’ by forming a menial image ol flickering fields ol liglu, 01 by forming
 Introduction 37

some kind of verbal-abstract representation of word meanings pertaining to a field

of yellow flowers” (96). In the case o f verbal coding 1 would like to add: one
can remember the exact words together with the meanings or store only what
Esrock calls “verbal-abstract representations o f word meanings.” These arc what I
call “propositions.”
7. Bordwcll also suggests that there are mimetic theories of the novel and
diegetic theories of cinema (3). The common advice to novelists “show, don’t tell”
betrays a preference for the mimetic mode, while the attempt to locate a narrator
in any type o f movie constitutes a diegetic approach.
8. As postulated by authors such as M el/ and Chatman.
9. An example o f a narrative that attributes agency to inanimate objects is this
description of his field by the mathematician Keith Devlin: “ Mathematicians deal
with a collection of objects— numbers, triangles, groups, fields— and ask questions
like, 'W hat is the relationship between objects x and y? If x does thus to y, what
will y do back to x?’ It’s got plot, it’s got characters, it’s got relationships . . . a bit
ol everything you can find in a soap opera.” Quoted in Denver Post, January 9,
2001, iA .
to. This idea of architecture as a “narrative art” is developed by Celia Pearce,
Interactive Book, 25-27.
11. Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield m a : Mcrriam-Webster,
199O.
12. These rules have been relaxed in the twentieth century.
13. The first number refers to the section in Aristotle’s Poetics in which the
lext appears, the second to the page number of the translation from which I am
quoting.
14. Medium is obviously a term introduced by the translator, since the root of
the word is Latin and not Greek. Other translators (for example, I. Bywater in the
( )xlord edition) use manner. The Greek text, “ he gar ton en heterois mimeisthai
e to hetera e to heteros,” tacks different endings on the word hetera (other) to
suggest the three kinds of differences. A literal translation would read: “for [they
diller] in imitating in different things (= medium) or different things = object) or
by different ways (= mode).” The use o f medium to translate “ in different things”
is consistent with a conception o f medium as material support. (1 am indebted to
( A'nthia Ereeland for these clarifications.)
15. I use “ Laocoon” to refer to Lessing’s essay, Laocoon to refer to the statue, and
laocoon to refer to the Greek character.
16. Since McLuhan equates visuality with linear scanning o f alphabetic char-
.u lets, he is not bothered with placing media such as painting, cinema, or t v in
die nonvisual category: “ This is a major hang-up in all the confusion between t v
.md movie form, lor example, t v is ‘non visual’ as Joyce understood from careful
analysis" (letter to 1)onald Ihe.ill, qtd. in I heal I 219).
1 \ I’he niimbei in parentheses refers to a paragraph in Peirce’s text, in confor­
mity with die stand.ud way to quote Peirce.
38 Ryan

18. Cases 5, 6 , 8 , and 9 are the objects o f a type o f investigation currently

practiced under the name interm ediality. Werner W olf provides a detailed typology
o f all the phenomena that fall under the scope of this concept. W o lf’s concept
of intermediality also cover a phenomenon that does not easily fit within Bolter
and Grusins theory o f remediation: the presence o f multiple scmiotic and sensory
channels in an artistic form.

References

Aristotle. Poetics. Trans, and intro. M alcolm Heath. London: Penguin Books, 1996.
Ba.udrilla.td, Jean. Simulacra and Simulations. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann A r­
bor: University o f M ichigan Press, 1994.
Ben-Amos, Dan. “Analytical Categories and Ethnic Genres.” Genre z (1969): 275-
302.
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media.
Cambridge: m i x Press, 1999.
Boidwell, David. Narrative in the Fiction Film. Madison: University o f Wisconsin
Press, 1985.
Bordwell, David, and Kristin 'Thompson. Film Art. 3d ed. New York: M cGraw-
Hill, 1990.
Bremond, Claude. Logique du recit. Paris: Seuil, 1973.
Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot. New York: Random House, 1984.
Bruner, Jerome. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1986.
Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film.
Ith aca: Cornell University Press, 1978.
— ------ Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1990.
Esrock, Ellen. The Reader’s Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response. Baltimore: Johns
Hopldns University Press, 1994.
Fludernik, Monika. “ Genres, Text Types, or Discourse Modes? Narrative M odali­
ties and Generic Categorization.” Style ^.7. (2000): 274—92.
Gibson, J. J. “The Theory o f Affordances.” Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing. Ed.
R. E. Shaw and J. Bransford. Hillsdale Nj: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1977.
Herman, David. “ Parables o f Narrative Im agining.” Diacritics 29.1 (1999): 20-36.
----------. Story Logic. Lincoln: University o f Nebraska Press, 2002.
Innis, Harold A. Empire o f Communications. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1972.
Johnston, John. Information Multiplicity: American Fiction in the Age o f Media
Saturation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
Kitder, Friedrich A. literature, Media , Information Systems. I'd. John Johnsum.
Amsterdam: ( \ 1 B Ans, 1097.
 Introduction 39

Labov, W illiam. Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular.
Philadelphia: University o f Pennsylvania Press, 1972.
Lessing, Gotrhoici Ephraim. Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Po­
etry. Trans, and intro. Edward Allen M cCorm ick. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1984.
iVIcLuhan, Marshall. Essential McLuhan. Ed. Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone.
N ew York: Basic Books, 1996.
M cLuhan, Marshall, and Bruce R. Powers. The Global Village: 'Transformations in
World Life and Media in the Twenty-first Century. N ew York: O xford University
Press, 1989.
Metz, Christian. Film Language. A Semiotics of the Cinema. Trans. Michael Taylor.
N ew York: O xford University Press, 1974.
Meyrowitz, Joshua. “ Medium Theory.” Communication Theory Today. Ed. David
Crowley and David Mitchell. Stanford c a : Stanford University Press, 1994. 50—
77 -
Murray, Janet. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New
York: Free Press, 1997.
Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing o f the Word. London:
Methuen, 1982.
Pearce, Celia. The Interactive Book: A Guide to the Interactive Revolution. Indianapo­
lis: M acm illan Technical Publishing, 1997.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers. Vol. 3. Ed. C. Hartshorn, P. Weiss and A.
W. Burkes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931-58.
Prince, Gerald. A Grammar o f Stories. The Hague: M outon, 1973.
-----—— . Dictionary o f Narratology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987.
Richardson, Brian. “ Recent Concepts o f Narrative and the Narratives o f Narrative
Theory.” Style 34.2 (2000): 168-75.
Ricoeur, Paul. Temps et recit. 3 vols. Paris: Seuii, 1983, 1984, 1985.
Rim m on-Kenan, Shlomkh. “ How the Model Neglects the Medium: Linguistics,
Language, and the Crisis of Narratology.” Journal o f Narrrative Technique 19.1
(1989): 157-66.
Searle, John. Speech Acts. London: Cam bridge University Press, 1969.
---------- . “ The Logical Status o f Fictional Discourse.” New Literary History 6 (1975):
319—32.
Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. “Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories.” On Narra­
tive. Ed. W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1981. 209-
32.
Sturgess, Philip J. M . Narrativity: Theory and Practice. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1992.
T il my, Leonard. “A Cognitive Framework for Narrative Structure.” Toward a Cog­
nitive Semantics. Cum bridge: M ir Press, 2000. 2:417-82.
I lie.ill, I )o 1lit lil. Beyond the Word: Reconstructing Sense in the Joyce Fra of Technology;
Culture. <md ( 'oini/iuuiciitioiis. 10101110: University ol I (>101110 Press, 199s.
40 Ryan

---------- . The Virtual Marshall McLuhan. Montreal: M cGill-Q ueen’s University

Press, 2001.
Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Virtanen, Tuija. “ Issues of Text Typology: Narrative— A 'Basic’ Type of Text? Text
12.2 (1992): 293-310.
Wolf, Werner. The Muskalization o f Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History o f
Intermediality. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999.
Worth, Sol. “ Pictures Can’t Say A in’t.” Studies in Visual Communication. Ed. and
intro. Larry Gross. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981.
Wutz, Michael, and Joseph Tabbi. Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media
Ecology. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997.
i. Face-to-Face N arration

Face-to-face narration: the phrase is almost, but not entirely, synonymous

with oral storytelling. With the invention of the telephone, radio, and
television, modern technology has dissociated orality from co-presence.
Most o f Walter O ng’s channels o f secondary orality lack the live interaction
between the narrator and the audience that we find in the primary type.
H ie label “oral narrative” is therefore insufficient to capture two essential
properties o f face-to-face narration. The first o f these properties is interac­
tivity. It is current these days to extol the interactive narrativity o f digital
media, but no amount of hyperlinking can match the oral narrator’s free­
dom to adapt his tale to the particular needs o f the audience. In a conver­
sational context the text is not delivered ready-made to the recipient but is
dynamically and dialogically constructed in the real time o f the storytelling
event, as the narrator responds to diverse types o f input: questions from
the audience, interruptions, requests for explanations, laughter, supportive
vocalizations, and facial expressions. The same fluidity characterizes the re­
lation between the narrator and the audience. Since face-to-face interaction
constantly renegotiates the role o f the participants, every listener is, at least
in principle, a potential storyteller. The second distinctive property is the
multi-channel dimension o f what McLuhan called in Ihe Global Village
(1989) (somewhat reductively) “acoustic space” : face-to-face storytelling is
more than a purely mental experience o f language based on syntax and
semantics; it is also a corporeal performance in which meaning is created
through gestures, facial expressions, and intonation. The telephone may
share the interactivity o f face-to-face storytelling, and television may em­
ulate the diversity o f its channels, but only face-to-face narration presents
both properties.
l'.arly narratology the b o d y of w o rk associated w ith the nam es o f
I ic'netie, lo d o m v , Barthes, (Ireim as, L evi-Strau ss, and P ro pp — was too
loc used 011 ihe idea ol narrative as a sync hronic structure to pay m uch
.111 m l ion 10 1 lie dynam ic s ol its em ergfiic v I m m a con versa 1 ional context.
42 Face-to-Face Narration

Structuralist narratology does not study oral narrative genres for their
transactional nature but because these genres provide purer examples chan
complex literary texts of the elementary structures of narrative significa­
tion. Whether it is Levi-Strauss’s analysis o f the Oedipus myth in terms
o f kinship structures, Greimas’s diagramming o f folktale into semiotic
squares, or Propp’s dissection o f Russian fairy tales into narrative functions,
structuralist interest in oral narrative is exclusively focused on the level
of story, at the expense of discourse strategies, ft wasn’t until American
linguistics expanded its scrutiny from the sentence to larger units, such as
text, discourse, and conversation, that the dynamic construction o f face-
to-face oral narrative, what may be called its “performantial dimension,”
began to attract attention. It is the immense merit o f the sociolinguist
William Labov, who studied the use o f language in the African-American
communities o f inner cities, to have demonstrated that conversational
storytelling is no less deliberately crafted than the narratives o f “ high”
literature. Labov argued that the success o f a conversational story— its
ability to make a point— depends not only on the sheer reliability o f its
subject matter but, above all, on the speaker’s ability to display narrative
content properly through the use o f clauses that fulfill a sophisticated
pattern o f rhetorical functions: abstracting, evaluating, highlighting, or
providing an appropriate coda. Led by scholars such as Deborah Tannen,
Deborah Schiffrin, Harvey Sacks, and Livia Polanyi, to mention only a few,
the study of conversational storytelling soon blossomed into an alternative
narratology. But most literary critics were too absorbed in structuralism
and poststructuralism to notice this development. The literary and the
sociolinguistic branches o f narratology developed side by side for many
years, in blissful ignorance o f each other.
The first literary scholar who attempted to bridge the two traditions was
Mary Louise Pratt. In her groundbreaking book Toward a Speech Act Theory
o f Literary Discourse (1977) she attacked the formalist dogma o f a radical
opposition between poetic (literary) and ordinary language by demonstrat­
ing the applicability of Labov’s model of conversational storytelling co a
selection o f literary narratives. The book started a wave o f attempts to link
literary texts to what was quickly becoming known as “natural discourse.”
Pratt conceived novels as fictional imitations o f nonfictional genres, such
as biography autobiography, history, diary, annotated critical edition o f
a poem (Nabokov’s L}ale Fire), or simply “narrative display text” (Pratt’s
term for conversational narratives whose point resides in their tellabiliry).
In her book On the Margins o f Discourse, published jusi a year afier Plan's
manifesto, Barbara 1 lerrnsiein Smith described poeiry as an imitation ol
 Face-to-Face Narration 43

“natural” (that is, conversational) utterances. The most ambitious attempt

to date to integrate the study o f literary and oral narrative inro one com­
prehensive model is Monika Fludernik’s Towards a ‘N atural” Narratology
(1996), but the quotation marks in the title signals the beginning of a
certain skepticism toward the concept o f natural discourse and its whole-
sale applicability to literary narrative; for, with their omniscient narration,
stream o f consciousness, jumping back and forth between different plot
lines, collage techniques, jumbling o f chronological sequence, or elliptical
representation of events, most novels arc anything but imitations o f “spon­
taneous oral narration of past events” (Fludemiks definition of “natural”
narrative [71]). Even when novels ostentatiously imitate oral storytelling,
the imitation is never close enough to fool the reader into taking the text
for a genuine transcription o f oral discourse. I f “spontaneous oral narration
of past events” sets the standard o f naturalness, all novels are artificial,
and so are many instances of oral narration: telling well-re hearsed jokes,
performing epic poetry, reporting live events in a radio or TV broadcast.
How can an integrated narrative theory avoid the Charybdis o f a total
dissociation o f literary and conversational narrative and the Scylla o f re­
ducing one to the other? In “ Principle and Parameters o f Story Logic: Steps
toward a Transmedial Narratology” David Herman examines what needs
in be done to equip “classical” narratology, as he calls it in his introduction
in Narratologies (1), with a toolbox capable o f describing oral and written
narratives in both their differences and similarities. The investigation takes
the form of a comparison between an oral and a written narrative that
share a common theme: the story of a shape-shifting ghost told by a young
North Carolina woman to an interviewer seeking linguistic data; and Franz
Kafka’s classical story The Metamorphosis. Treating the question o f the im­
portance of the contrast between oral-conversational and written-literary-
lu tional narrative as a special case o f the larger problem of the medium
dependency o f narrative, Herman begins his essay with a review o f nar-
i.nological positions regarding the possibility o f transferring a given story
110111 a medium to another. This review is presented in dialectical form.
I lu- thesis claims that narrative is medium independent; the anthithesis
states that narratives of different media arc incommensurable; the synthesis
irg.m ls 1 he medium dependence o f stories as a matter of degree. Synthesis
i>. 1 lie only conception that justifies a study o f “narrative across media.” At
M.ikt- in all three positions is the classical narratological distinction between
story ,ind discourse: thesis takes its validity for granted, antithesis denies it,
synthesis reaffirms i t .1 In its implicit view ol die storytelling act as the
01 |'t,in 1/.11 ion ol .1 sri ol 1 tics lor the const run ion ol a story" (Bordwell
44 Face-to-Face Narration

62), Herman’s approach ro narrative offers a concrete implementation o f

the functionalist program outlined in David Bordwell’s contribution to
this volume. To assess the similarities and differences o f oral and literary
narrative, Herman investigates how a common set o f narrative functions
are fulfilled in each o f his two examples: how do narratives represent space?
How do they perform temporal sequencing? How' do they assign actantial
roles to characters (that is, agent, patient, and so on)? How do they anchor
their storyworld in a particular context o f interpretation?
'[’he work o f Katharine Young, both in general and in the essay con­
tributed to this book, is one o f the most powerful demonstrations available
to date o f the interactive nature o f face-to-face storytelling. In “ Edgework:
Frame and Boundary in the Phenomenology of Conversational Narrative”
Young describes this interactivity as a drawing o f frames and a crossing o f
boundaries. The problem o f framing a narrative from its context occurs in
all media, but the frame is usually established once and for all through static
devices, such as the columns and titles of newspaper articles, the frame o f
a painting, the audiovisual devices that signal the beginning and end o f
a feature movie, or the covers of a book. It is only in conversation that
narrative must be isolated from a steady stream o f signs that belong to the
same medium, and it is only in conversation that frames are constructed in
the real time of the narrative performance. Describing the temporal flow
of conversation through a bold spatial model, Young regards narratives as
“enclaves” in the realm o f conversation. Since participants in a conversation
do not easily concede the floor to one speaker for a lengthy period, the
boundaries o f these enclaves must be constantly defended or renegotiated.
To participate in a storytelling event in the context o f informal conversation
is to move back and forth, under the guidance o f the narrator but also
through the initiative of the other participants, between three concentric
domains: the taleword, the story realm, both tightly delimited territories,
and the unbound realm of conversation. As Young persuasively demon­
strates, it is the function o f framing devices, such as prefaces and codas,
openings and closings, or beginnings and ends, to mark the boundaries o f
these domains and to facilitate the perilous operation o f their crossing—
perilous because the interest and attention o f the audience must be rebuilt
or consolidated with any change in focus, topic or speaker.
Whereas Young focuses on the purely verbal signals that structure con­
versational storytelling into distinct layers-—what she calls “ laminations” —
Cassell and M cN eill’s essay “ Gesture and the Poetics of Prose” shows the
importance o f the other channel ol Iace-to-face narration lor the Iraming
of these layers. The narrative potential ol .1 medium or semiotic system
 Face-to-Face Narration 45

is proportional to its ability to develop a reasonably well-defined syntax

and semantics. Cassell and McNeill demonstrate that the visual channel of
face-to-face narration is regulated by a sufficiently sophisticated grammar
to take over or assist significant narrative functions. Using as data the oral
retelling ofvSylvester andTweetie Bird cartoons by various informants, the
essay distinguishes four semiotic types o f gestures: iconics (gestures that
depict narrative action); metaphorics (gestures that display the vehicle o f a
metaphor inherent to language, such as mimicking the transfer o f a solid
object to announce the transmission o f a story); beats (gestures that index
discourse structures, such as introducing a new character or summarizing
the plot); and abstract pointing (deictics pointing to objects in the narrative
world that are not objectively present). This gestural repertory enables sto­
rytellers to perform an astonishing variety o f narrative functions: indicating
whether the narrator speaks in his own voice, or mimics a character; mark­
ing narratorial perspective (that is, indicating where the narrator is located
in the taleworld); diagramming the plot by outlining character movements
in the taleworld; mimicking action, thereby remediating the visual charac­
ter o f the cartoon; and moving in and out of the taleworld, from a properly
narrative to a metanarrative or paranarrative stance. Through its efficient
recycling o f the classical narratological concepts o f voice, perspective, and
narrative levels, Cassell and M cNeills essay will leave those who have in­
vested their scholarly reputation in the development o f literary narratology
with the comforting feeling that the extension of narrative analysis beyond
the verbal channel o f storytelling doe not need to start from ground zero.

Notes

i. Gerald Prince defines story through a systematic contrast to discourse: “The

concent plane o f narrative as opposed to its expression plane or discourse; the ‘what’
ol a narrative as opposed to the ‘how’; the narrated as opposed to the narrating;
the fiction as opposed to the narration; the existents and events represented in a
narrative” (Dictionary 91).

References

l^orcl well, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: University o f Wisconsin
Press, 1985.
Mudcrnik, Monika. Ibivards a "Natural"Narratology. New York: Routledge, 1996.
I Icnnan, I Xtvid. “ Inimdiu (ion: Narraiologies.” Narratologies: Neiv Perspectives on
Nitrrittivc A)/i/ly\i\. I’d. I >avid I In man. Colum bus: ( )hio Stale University Press,

L
46 Face-to-Face Narration

M cLuhan, Marshall, and Bruce R. Powers. The Global Village: Transformations in

World Life and Media in the Twenty-first Century. N ew York: Oxford University
Press, 1989.
Pratt, M ary Louise. Toward a. Speech Act 1 heory of Literary Discourse. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1977.
Prince, Gerald. Dictionary o f Narratology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1987.
Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. On the Margins o f Discourse: The Relation o f Literature
to Language. Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1979.
 1

Toward a Transmedial Narratology

David Herman

True to their structuralist inheritance, narratologists such as the early Ro­

land Barthes sought to use linguistics as a “pilot-science” in their efforts to
develop new (and revolutionary) techniques for analyzing stories. Thus, in
his 1966 “ Introduction to the Structuralist Analysis o f Narratives” Barthes
conceived o f discourse as the object o f a second linguistics, a linguistics
beyond the sentence, with narrative viewed as only one of the “ idioms apt
for consideration” in this context. Yet, in one o f the great ironies o f the
history o f narrative theory, the narratologists tried to elaborate this second
linguistics on the basis o f a structuralist approach to language that had
already proven deficient in the broader context o f linguistic inquiry (see
Herman, “ Sciences”). Notably the structuralists tried to build a linguistics
of discourse on the basis o f models unable to account for the complexities
of larger, suprasentential units o f language. What is more, in founding
the field of narratology, theorists such as Barthes, Gerard Genette, A.-J.
Greimas, and Tzvetan Todorov focused mainly on literary narratives as
opposed to instances o f everyday storytelling. Barthes drew on Fleming’s
)ames Bond novels in his “Introduction” ; Genette, Greimas, and Todorov
used Proust, Maupassant, and Boccaccio as their tutor texts. Here emerges
a second major historical irony. One o f the foundational documents for
structuralist narratology was Vladimir Propp’s investigation o f folktales
rooted in oral traditions. But the structuralists neglected to consider (let
alone mark off) the limits of applicability o f Propp’s ideas, trying to extend
10 all narratives, including complicated literary texts, tools designed for a
restricted corpus of folktales. The result was an approach that championed
the* study of narratives of all sorts, irrespective o f origin, medium, theme,
reputation, or genre, but lacked the conceptual and methodological re-
\011u c s 10 substantiate its own claims to generali/ability.
Meanwhile, in die Anglo American 1 railition, one year after the publica­
48 Herman

tion o f Barthes’s “ Introduction,” William Labov and Joshua Waletzky pub­

lished a groundbreaking article that sketched out a sociolinguistic approach
to analyzing conversational narratives.1 This approach derived from and
led back into traditions o f linguistic research with which the structuralist
narratologists were barely familiar. Centering around narratives o f personal
experience, Labov and Waletzky’s model sparked a widespread research
initiative still being pursued by a variety o f investigators (see Bamberg for
an overview'). Labov and Waletzky’s 1967 article (along with a follow-up
article published in 1972 by Labov) established a vocabulary for labeling
the components o f personal experience narratives (abstract, orientation,
complicating action, evaluation, result, coda). It also identified clause- and
sentence-level structures tending to surface in each of these components,
suggesting that story recipients monitor the discourse for signs enabling
them to “chunk” what is said into units-in-a-narrative-pattern. For exam­
ple, clauses with past-tense verbs in the indicative mood are likely to occur
in (that is, be a reliable indicator of) the complicating action o f the narra­
tive, whereas storytellers’ evaluations depart from this baseline syntax, their
marked status serving to indicate the point o f the narrative, the reason for
its telling. More generally, Labov’s model laid the groundwork for further
inquiry into both the linguistic and the interactional profile o f narratives
told during face-to-face encounters. Conversational narratives do consist o f
clause-, sentence-, and discourse-level features, yet they are also anchored
in contexts in which their tellers have to have a (recognizable) point or else
be ignored, shouted down, or worse (cf. Goodwin 239-57).
Although it was firmly anchored in empirical models for studying nat­
ural language data, however, the sociolinguistic approach also lacked gen-
eralizability. Originally designed for narratives elicited during interviews,
the model was manifestly incapable o f describing and explaining the more
complex structures found in written narratives, especially literary ones. For
one thing, as Genette showed so skillfully in his brilliant discussion of
Proust in Narrative Discourse, literary narratives characteristically rely on
flashblacks, flash-forwards, pauses, ellipses, iterations, compressions, and
other time-bending strategies not captured by Labov’s definition of narra­
tive as “one method o f recapitulating past experience by matching a verbal
sequence of clauses to the sequence o f events which (it is inferred) actually
occurred” (370). Further, noting the rise of simultaneous and prospective
narration in contemporary literary works, Uri Margolin has revealed retro­
spective narration to be just one option within a larger system of narrative
possibilities. The result is that, in literary contexts, it would be difficult
to maintain that clauses with past-tense indicative verbs are the unmarked
 Toward a Transmedial Narratology 49

unit of narration, the baseline against which marked (that is, evaluative or
point-indicating) syntax could be measured (cf. Herman, “ Socionarratol-
ogy”). For that matter some avant-garde literary narratives make a point o f
emphasizing their apparent pointlessness, throwing up obstacles in the way
of readers struggling to discern a reason for the telling. Whereas generally
speaking the onus of evaluation is on storytellers in contexts o f face-to-face
interaction, in experimental literary fictions the burden quite often seems
to shift from teller to interpreter (but see Pratt 116; and my discussion here).
As even these preliminary comments suggest, research on the relations
between conversational and literary narrative can only benefit from open­
ing up lines of communication between what have emerged as distinct
disciplinary traditions. With some important exceptions in recent years
(for example, Fludernik, Polanyi, and Tinmen), researchers studying sto­
ries have taken one or other o f the two paths just traced— dichotomous
paths that began to birfucate from the very inception of sustained inquiry
into narrative. One path leads through literary-theoretical terrain, which
encompasses narratives that vary dramatically with respect to length, genre,
and degree o f complexity. The other path leads the investigator toward nat­
uralistic uses o f stories in everyday communicative settings. Here the nar­
ratives encountered are, though not artful in the literary sense, nonetheless
artfully adapted to the ecology of face-to-face interaction, with its moment-
by-moment fluctuations in linguistic and paralinguistic signaling, its turn-
taking imperatives, and what Erving Coffm an characterized as its ritual
constraints on processes of acknowledgment, disputation, inattention, and
affirmation, stories being part of an interactional etiquette that generates a
whole spectrum o f potentially face-threatening and face-saving behaviors.
1'he remainder o f my contribution seeks to create new opportunities for
dialogue between researchers traveling on these two paths, whose exact
relations to one another have yet to be charted. One o f my guiding as­
sumptions is that the two routes pass through different areas o f the same
landscape, some o f the areas separated more widely than others but none o f
i hem so far apart that communication between the regions is impossible.
In what follows I begin by exploring three theses concerning the more
general problem of which the relations between conversational and literary
narrative can be viewed as a special case. T he more general problem can be
poseil as a question— What are the relations between narrative and its me­
dia (including spoken and written language)?— with each thesis constitut­
ing a strategy lor addressing that question. At rhe risk of oversimplification
(not i<> mention predictability), I present the three theses in quasi-dialectic
lashiou, as tlu-sis, antithesis, and synthesis. Although it exists in stronger
50 Herman

and weaker forms, thesis posits that narrative is medium independent

and that essential properties o f stories remain unchanged across different
presentational formats. Antithesis construes stories as radically dependent
011 their media, making the distinction between spoken conversational
and literary narrative a fundamental one— to the point where spoken and
written versions o f a story would not be “versions” at all but, instead, differ­
ent narratives altogether. Synthesis posits that medium-specific differences
between narratives are nontrivial but only more or less firmly anchored in
their respective media; intertranslation between story media will be more
or less possible, depending on the particular formats involved.
After reviewing previous scholarship affiliated with thesis, antithesis, and
synthesis, 1 go on to outline a program for research that takes its inspiration
from synthesis but extends that research paradigm in new directions. In
particular, the second half o f my essay outlines an integrative approach
to “story logic” that 1 have also developed in other work (Herman, Story
and “ Story”). As 1 use the term, story logic refers both to the logic that
stories have and the logic that they are. Stories have a logic that consists
o f strategies for coding circumstances, participants, states, actions, and
events in the “storyworlds,” that is, the global mental representations that
interpreters are prompted to create when they read or listen to a narrative.
Temporal relations between events, for example, can be more or less exactly
specified, whereas participants can be assigned a variety o f roles (Senser,
Agent, Saver, and so on) and their situation in space can be configured by
way o f choices between different kinds of verbs o f motion. But narrative
also constitutes a logic in its own right, providing human beings with one
o f their primary resources for comprehending experience and organizing
interaction. The first kind o f logic pertains chiefly to narrative as product,
the second kind of logic to narrative as process. In particular, the logic that
stories are encompasses processes of narrative communication; at issue are
the ways in which people tell and make sense o f stories in specific commu­
nicative contexts, that is, the methods by which narratives are deployed as
contextually situated practices.
Sketching the logic that stories have and are, 1 compare and contrast
a conversational and a literary narrative; on the one hand, a North C ar­
olina storytellers tale (transcribed in the appendix) about her grandfathers
encounter with a shape-shifter who transforms himself from a man into a
squirrel and back into a man again; on the other hand, Franz Kafka’s “ rhe
Metamorphosis,” a literary treatment of a different kind of shape-shift—
one involving Gregor Samsa’s irreversible transformation into an insect.
By holding constant the problem that these narratives seek to address
 Toward a Trammedial Narratology 51

namely, characters who undergo cross-species transformations— I explore

how properties of spoken and written discourse bear on the story logic
of the two texts. M y research hypothesis is that, although narratives in
different media exploit a common stock o f narrative design principles, they
exploit them in different, media-specific ways, or, rather, in a certain range
of ways determined by the properties o f each medium.

Thesis: Narrative Is Medium Independent

l ’he st rong version of thesis, that all aspects o f every narrative can be trans­
lated into all possible media, has not enjoyed prominence in the study o f
narrative. But a weaker version, that certain aspects of every narrative are
medium independent, forms one o f the basic research hypotheses of struc­
turalist narratology. In effect, narratological distinctions between “story”
and “discourse”— or, equivalently, the what and the way,fabula and sjuzhet,
narrated and narrative— assume that the first term o f each o f these con­
ceptual pairs is medium independent whereas the second is dependent on
the particular medium in which a given story is conveyed. As Claude Bre-
mond put it in his 1964 article “ Le Message narratif,” “any sort o f narrative
message (not only folk tales) . . . may be transposed from one to another
medium without losing its essential properties: the subject o f a story may
serve as an argument for a ballet, that o f a novel can be transposed to stage
or screen, one can recount in words a film to someone who has not seen
it” (qtd. in Chatman, Story 20). Similarly, in distinguishing between story,
text (= discourse), and narration, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan characterized
“ ‘story’ [as] a succession of events, ‘text’ [as] a spoken or written discourse
which undertakes their telling” (3). As a mental construct independent
of any medium, story constitutes “the narrated events, abstracted from
their disposition in the text and reconstructed in their chronological order,
together with the participants in those events” (Narrative 2).
Barthes, in his “ Introduction,” reframes the medium-independence the­
sis in a manner that reveals its Saussurean-Hjelmslevian heritage. Noting
that there has been, from Aristotle on, “a periodic interest in narrative
lorm,” Barthes remarks that “ it is normal that the newly developing struc­
turalism should make this form one o f its first concerns— is not structural­
ism’s constant aim to master the infinity o f utterances fparoles] by describ­
ing the* language \htngnc\ ol which they are products and from which they
1.111 be generated |?|” (So). ( lorrelatively, since the narrative langue targeted
by structuralist analysis is not “the language* ol articulated language—
though very often vehic led by it narrative units will be substantially inde­
52 Herman

pendent o f linguistic units” (91). To use Hjelmslevian parlance, one of the

hallmarks o f classical narratology is its attempt “to disengage a form from
rhe substance o f the narrated content, a specific narrative form” (Rimmon-
Kenan, Narrative 6). Thus, Gerald Prince argues that, because narratives
and non narratives can center around the same topics and develop the same
general themes, the substance of the content side does not define narrative
(“Aspects” 50-51; cf. Chatman, Story 22-26). Further, since both narratives
and non narratives can be expressed in one and the same medium, neither
the form nor the substance of the expression side is definitive of story. W hat
defines narrative, rather, is the form of its content side, that is, the way a
sequence o f (medium-specific) cues must be structured for it to encode a
narratively organized (bur non-medium-specific) sequence of participants-
in-events.
The medium-independence thesis carries with it methodological con­
sequences, in effect determining what counts as “data” that can be used
to illustrate narratological theories. For example, an assumption about the
medium independence o f story is arguably what motivates Prince’s use o f
constructed examples as evidence for his claims about narrative (see Prince,
Grammar, “Aspects,” and Narratology). If the form of the content is the
real target o f narrative analysis, then rhe substance o f the content, which
encompasses the themes and ideas treated in a narrative, is not centrally
important, and constructed examples can be used to advance claims with
as much validity and reliability as claims based 011 naturally occurring
narratives, whether spoken or written. Fven among analysts who argued
early on for the medium independence of story, however, there was some
hesitation over the degree o f medium independence involved. For instance,
whereas Chatman argued that “narrative discourse consists of a connected
sequence of narrative statements, where ‘statement' is quite independent
o f the particular expressive medium” and there is “no privileged manifes­
tation” o f story in one medium as opposed to another {Story 25, 31), he
also acknowledged that “verbal narratives express narrative contents o f time
summary more easily than do cinematic narratives, while the latter more
easily show spatial relations” (25). Such considerations eventually induced
Chatman (“ Directions”) to question the autonomy o f story with respect
to print and film narratives, given that cinema draws on two information
tracks (visual and auditory) instead o f just one. Indeed, for some theorists
considerations o f just this sort provide evidence for antithesis— namely, the
view that narrative is not just partly or secondarily dependent on its media
but, rather, radically and primarily dependent.
 toward a TrammedialNarratology S3

Antithesis: Narrative Is (Radically) Medium Dependent

J he basic intuition underlying antithesis is that every retelling alters the

story told, with every re-presen tali on o f a narrative changing what is pre­
sented. In revising her own earlier position about the relations between
story and text, for example, Rimmon-Kenan embraces a version o f antithe­
sis. “ instead of relegating language to a position external or irrelevant to
narrative structure,'’ she writes, “we may perhaps reverse the perspective
and consider it the determining factor o f that structure’' (“ Model" i6o;
cmph. added). Rimmon-Kenan now argues that the semiotic format of
a narrative, the nature o f the medium in which it is realized, determines
the relations between text and story in a given case (162). To invoke C.
S. Peirce’s theory o f signs, dance affords possibilities for crcaring iconic
relations between sequences o f physical movements and sequences of events
in a sroryworld; w'ritten narrative, possibilities for creating conventional re­
lations between linguistic units and storyworld events; and conversational
narrative, possibilities for creating both iconic and conventional relations
via utterances and gestures. Further, the narrative-determining force of sign
systems stems from their being not only media o f expression but also re­
sources for (inter)acting (160). 1 hus, in Barbara Flerrnstein Smith’s critique
of structuralist narratology the medium-dependence antithesis informs her
argument that stories, which arc always told by someone to someone (else),
should be viewed as socio-symbolic transactions instead of inert, preex­
istent structures. Insofar as narratives are acts, doings more than things,
stories will inevitably unfold differently across different tellings. Structural­
ist theories about an autonomous and invariable structure, or “story," are
there fore, from this perspective, a token o f residual Platonism— o f a prc-
deconstructive desire to hold on to unchanging essences amid stories-in-
llux (but see Prince, “Narratology” 167).
Linguists investigating the relations between spoken and written dis­
course have developed arguments analogous to those advanced by Rim-
tnon-Kenan and Herrnstein Smith. Wallace Chafe, for instance, has out­
lined differences between the activities o f speaking and writing that imply,
in turn, differences in the way spoken and written “texts” (in Rimmoti­
ke nans sense) might encode a story (41—50). Whereas spoken language is
relatively evanescent, written language is relatively permanent and trans­
portable; whereas spoken language is relatively fast, writing is produced
more slowly; whereas conversations (end 10 be spontaneous, writing is
typically deliberate or “worked over” ; whereas speaking affords language
users the Itil lest possible exploitation ol prosody (pitches, pauses, changes
54 Herman

of tempo and timbre, and so on), written language is impoverished in this

respect. Meanwhile, theorists working in the conversation-analytic or eth-
nomethodological tradition have interpreted narrative as a situated prac­
tice, all storytelling acts being uniquely tailored to specific circumstances
that they also help constitute (Schegloff; cf. Garfinkel). In other words, nar­
ratives are, from a conversation-analytic perspective, fragments of behavior
by which both tellers and recipients collaboratively display their under­
standing o f— as well as create— the socio-communicative logic of a context
for interaction. As interactional achievements that also enable interaction
itself, stories are necessarily particularized; hence, retellings produce not
different versions o f the same story but new narratives-in-contexts.
If thesis has difficulty accounting for the ways in which narratives are
shaped by their telling, antithesis struggles to capture the intuition that
stories have a “gist” that can remain more or less intact across fairly dramatic
shifts in context, style, degree o f elaboration, and so on. Constancy of
gist is quite high in near-verbatim recountings, but even rhe most bizarre
parody depends for its effect on commonalities between the source text
being parodied and the parodic target text (Genette, Palimpsests). Synthesis
predicts, however, that at some threshold the shift of contexts will be so
extreme as to result in a different narrative; the gist of a story can be lost in
a retelling, which then shades o ff into the telling o f another narrative.

Synthesis: The Medium Dependence o f Stories Is a Matter of Degree

Positing that differences between narrative media are gradient (more or less)
rather than binary (either . . . or), synthesis suggests that stories arc shaped
but not determined by their presentational formats. Rather, synthesis con­
strues narratives as variably anchored in expressive media characterized
by different degrees of intertranslatability. According to synthesis, what
Chatman described as constraints on the intertranslatability o f print and
cinematic narrative would need to be situated within a broader system of
analogous constraints, including those affecting the translation of, say, an
English-language narrative into Japanese; the presentation o f The Ilia d in
pantomime; or the (doomed) attempt to market M y Dinner with Andre
action figures, as portrayed in Christopher Guest’s film Waitingfor Guffman
(1996).
Inquiry into this wider system of contraints on narrative remediation is
beyond the scope of the present essay.2 Instead, my aim is to characterize
that portion o f the system that bears on the commonalities and contrasts
between spoken and written narratives— more specifically, between con­
 Toward a Transmedial Narratology 55

versational and literary narratives, nonfictional as well as fictional. Work

done under the auspices of synthesis provides an initial point o f entry into
the relevant region o f the constraint system at issue; to put the matter the
other way around, researchers who argue that spoken and written narrative
can be located on a continuum or scale, instead o f exemplifying distinct
categories, are rejecting both rhe medium-independence thesis and the
medium-dependence antithesis in favor o f some version o f synthesis.3 For
proponents o f synthesis, despite nontrivial differences between everyday
storytelling and literary art, instances o f the narrative text type that fall into
these two classes show a relatively high degree o f intertranslatability. Other
instances, by contrast, would have to be grouped into less intertranslat-
able classes— for example, operatic narratives as compared with narratives
conveyed through silent film.
In the (socio)linguistic tradition Deborah Tannen is one o f a number o f
theorists who have developed a scalar model of spoken and written narra­
tive (cf. Polanyi, “ Literary” ). Tannen suggests that “strategies that have been
associated with orality grow out of emphasis on interpersonal involvement
between speaker/writer and audience, and . . . strategies that have been
associated with literacy grow out of focus on content” (“ Introduction” xv).
Accordingly, it is possible to situate narrative discourse on “an oral/literate
continuum, or, more precisely, a continuum o f relative focus on interper­
sonal involvement vs. message content” (Tannen, “ Oral/Literate” 15). Fan-
nen’s continuum assumes that there is a functional equivalence— that is,
intertranslatability— between involvement-oriented and content-oriented
features in spoken and written narrative. Thus, as Tannen (“ Strategies” )
shows, the more the involvement-oriented features included in written
narrative, the more successfully it remediates the functional profile of oral
narrative. Relevant features include high concentrations o f detail or im­
agery; use o f the active instead o f the passive voice; parallel (that is, list­
like) constructions rather than embedding or hypotaxis; and use of direct
quotation of storyworld participants. Tannens position can be aligned
with synthesis insofar as it begins with the premise that distributions of
involvement-oriented or content-oriented features shape the sort of story
told; anchors those features in particular media; but then explores rhe
extent to which one medium can appropriate, or approximate, features
associated with another medium. Tannen’s approach can be reconstrued
as arguing that there are relatively few (and relatively weak) constraints
on the redistribution of both sets of features across the boundary between
spoken and written narratives a boundary that must therefore be viewed
as variable and open rathei than fixed and impermeable.
56 Herman

Likewise, in the narratological tradition Monika Fludernik lias advanced

a scalar model based on a version of synthesis. Focusing on conversational
and literary narrative specifically, Fludernik detects a continuum that links
the foregrounding o f narrative experientiality in everyday storytelling with
the experiential modes o f narration prominent in the realist and modernist
novel (Towards 92/ ff.). Further, she identifies a set o f features surviving
from natural narrative into much contemporary fiction, including the use
o f a narrator figure, who often provides moralizing and evaluative com­
mentary; the storytellers empathetic identification with and self-distancing
from story wo rid participants; and mimetic impersonation via various styles
o f discourse representation (57/ ff ) . In parallel with Tannen, Fludernik
assumes not the identity but, rather, the intertranslatability o f such features
across natural and literary narrative. Hers is not a general claim about
processes o f remediation vis-a-vis all narrative formats but, instead, an
investigation of the extent to which features prominent in two particular
formats might be functionally equivalent.
As should already be apparent, carrying synthesis forward will necessi­
tate an integrative, cross-disciplinary approach to narrative analysis— one
that takes into account developments not only in literary and cultural
theory but in other, neighboring research traditions as well, including lin­
guistics, ethnography, sociology, and cognitive science. In the sections that
follow, 1 hope to make a small contribution to this important program
for research. In particular, I explore why some aspects o f narrative lend
themselves particularly well to redistribution along the continuum linking
features of spoken and written discourse, whereas other aspects prove more
resistant to such remediation.

Extending Synthesis: Story Logic in Conversation and Literature

My strategy for extending synthesis is to examine in more detail some o f

the principles governing story logic, together with the parameters for their
use across media (in this case, conversational and literary narrative). To
reiterate: in referring to story logic, I mean to suggest that stories do not
merely have but also constitute a logic, narratives being not just semiotic
structures but also strategies for structuring and thereby making sense o f
experience— for problem solving in the broadest sense. I shall explore each
o f these dimensions o f story logic in turn, studying how they manifest
themselves in narratives centered around characters who undergo quite
startling, difficult-to-understand transformations. More .specifically, rad­
ical transformative processes are at work in both Kafka's account ol the
 1'oward a Transmedial Narratology 57

transmutation of Gregor Samsa into a dung beetle in “ Die Verwandlung”

(“The Metamorphosis”) and in t s ’s story of the shape-shifting squirrel/man
(see appendix).4 Each story charts a causal-chronological sequence in which
characters take on a hybridized physical form, blending human attributes
with those of insect and animal species, respectively. Yet, besides their use of
different media, there is also a generic contrast between the two narratives:
Kafka’s text is explicitly fictional, whereas t s ’s story purports to be a factual
(if supernatural) account of what her grandfather experienced in the past.
At the heart o f each narrative, however, is the same problem— namely,
how to make sense of a transformation by w'hich a character becomes a
member of a different species. Given that narrative is a primary resource for
building causal-chronological patterns— that is, sequences o f events linked
not just by temporal succession but also by relations of cause and effect—
the problem of accounting for characters’ metamorphoses would seem to
be one for which stories are ideally suited. But the issue that arose during
my discussion of synthesis resurfaces in this context as well. Assuming that
i onversational and literary narratives do in fact draw' on shared principles o f
story logic to address such fundamental problems as how to track characters
.11 toss shifts of shape, to what extent do differences between the two media
icsult in variable use of the principles in question? More precisely how
i ommensurate is the range of ways story logic can be used in conversational
storytelling as compared with the range of ways it can be used in literary
i i.irrat ives?

The Logic That Stories Are: Communicative Strategies for

Storytelling

I he first dimension o f story logic to be considered— the logic that stories

.in- involves the place of narrative within the broader logic of commu-
iiu .ition. O f concern here are features o f narrative that enable storytellers
.is well as fiction writers to accomplish communicative aims in particular
discourse environments, the ecologies o f talk in which their narratives
unfold. Along these lines, note that t s ’s story of the shape-shifter is not a
t nnversatioiial narrative plain and simple, that is, a story told by a discourse
p.ii tic i pan t to peers who have in turn prompted the telling o f those stories
d m in}; the normal give-and-take of informal interaction, t s ’s account o f
die shape-shifter is a tale that forms part of a larger sequence of stories told
in iespouse to a relatively decontexiuali/.ed question about supernatural
n tiiiiieiu es .1 question designed in advance ol the interaction itself and
posed in is by lieldwoikeis who .lie not members of her community.

L .
58 Herman

Conversely, however, the narrative profile o f t s ’s account impinges on

the discourse context in which it is embedded. Displacing a dyadic in­
terview format marked by pairs of questions and answers, the narrative
organizes a relatively monologic type o f speech event, one accommodating
the extensive turns at talk required for storytelling. Thus, once t s s story is
under way, the interviewer ( b a ) passes on opportunities for interrogative or
other utterances in favor o f minimal forms o f “ backchanneling” (lines h, j,
u, bb, dd, mm, w , yy, and ccc). In addition, in a portion of the interview
not transcribed in the appendix, i s and b a co-construct a story preface in
which b a demonstrates her willingness to adopt the role o f listener by way
of explicit requests that t s “tell some stories.” The preface also contains
emphatic speech productions in which b a underscores her interest in and
appreciation of stories in general, ghost stories in particular:
t s: ‘Cause of the ‘ stories . . 1 just . . all the stories
and mv house is the world’s worst
to tell you things /inaudible word/ (laughs)
I
ba: 'Tell som e stories
1 'lo ve stories like that.
'Tell us some (claps hands) . . 'yes.
Hence, as much by what she refrains from saying as by the specch tokens
that she does in fact produce, the interviewer signals that she is ceding
her floor rights to the storyteller, who for her part periodically checks for
permission to complete the long turn at talk required for the elaboration
of her narrative.
The communicative logic o f “The Metamorphosis” likewise involves a
situated form of narrative practice. More than this, although Kafka’s nar­
rative is differently situated in sociointeractional space than t s ’s account, it
represents a mode of narrative practice fundamentally continuous with the
mode at work in spoken stories. In the case of literary works such as Kafka’s,
it is true, producers and interpreters of narrative discourse do not have to
make on-the-fly assessments o f a real-time storytelling situation. Yet, as
Mary Louise Pratt noted, in both “natural” and literary narrative the role
structure o f participants in the speech situation remains similarly marked
vis-a-vis “the unmarked situation among peers, in which all participants
have |in principle] equal access to the floor” (113). In other words, Kafka’s
readers, like t s s interlocutors, assume the role of an audience ceding its
floor rights to discourse producers who must as a result live up to “ in­
creased expectations of delight” (Pratt 116). In contexts ol literary narrative,
requests for the floor can be accomplished by a variety ol textual as well
 Toward a Transmedial Narratology 59

as paratextual cues, for example, the publication of a story in a volume

containing other texts by the author or by other fiction writers. Such cues
are functionally equivalent to t s ’s “ ‘Cause o f the stories . . . .”
Further, just as the story logic of t s s account both emerges from and
helps constitute a larger ecology o f talk, a communicative environment
encompassing multiple spoken discourse genres or text types (interviews,
arguments, stories) from among which participants are constantly selecting
and signaling their selections, so too does Kafka’s narrative at once issue
from and impinge upon a wider discourse environment, one encompassing
written genres as diverse as recipes, academic essays, news stories, and
political speeches. Literary theorists have used the term intcrtextuality to
refer the network of relations between various kinds of texts, though it is
important to emphasize that the network involves relations of difference
as well as similarity. Indeed, part of the richness of “ The Metamorphosis”
derives from the way it adopts conventions and motifs from several genres
without falling comfortably into any one of them. The result is a hybridized
text that combines elements o f psychological fiction, fantasy, and quasi-
(or perhaps anti-) religious allegory. The communicative logic o f Kafka’s
narrative thus depends on its location in j«£generic and not just generic
space. The tale— like t s s account, for that matter— specifies highly nu-
.inced interpretive protocols vis-a-vis other subtypes of narrative practice.

I’he Logic That Stories Have: Coding Strategies in Storytelling

So far, I have been discussing the logic that t s ’s and Kafka’s narratives
.ire. 1 have suggested, more specifically, that producers and interpreters o f
literary narrative are caught up in a sociointeractional nexus that remains
anchored at essential points to the communicative dynamics o f face-to-face
storytelling. To rephrase this point, across spoken and written language
there is a high degree o f commensurability between the range of ways in
which this first dimension o f story logic manifests itself. There are a number
ol methods by which storytellers, on the one hand, and fiction writers, on
ilu- other hand, can prompt shifts into and out o f narratively organized
discourse; allowing for the different spans o f time and space separating
piodtti (ion and interpretation o f spoken versus written narratives, stories
in the two media exploit a comparable range o f methods for cuing such
•-hilts. Indeed, insofar as narrative provides a basic resource for structuring
.md i oinprehetiding diverse aspects of experience, it is perhaps unsurpris-
i»11; io find robust similarities in (lie processes of 'narrative communication
i ondui led in iliese two media.
60 Herman

The question remains, however, whether the narrative products that re­
sult from those processes are equally intertranslatable. To address this ques­
tion, which requires shifting from the logic that stories are to the logic that
they have, 1 introduce in the sections that follow some ideas developed
more fully in Story Logic.'' Although the two texts under examination draw
on a common stock o f coding strategies, which I shall also refer to as “design
principles,” there are media-specific constraints on how those principles or
strategies can be exploited in written and spoken discourse. In some ways
the differences involved are negligible, but in other respccrs the constraints
on remediation are significant.
in all, 1 discuss five sets of coding strategics that can be used to structure
the storyworlds evoked by conversational and literary narratives. These
include role assignments for participants; blends o f states, events, and ac­
tions; temporal ordering; the configuration o f entities in space; and the
use o f deictic expressions [here, I, now) to anchor storyworlds in particular
contexts o f interpretation.

Processes and Participants

By assigning particular roles to individuals and entities mentioned or im­
plied in a narrative, interpreters can distinguish participants more or less
centrally and obligatorily involved in what goes on from various sorts o f
circumstances also populating storyworlds. 'I’o adapt some o f the categories
of the functional grammar developed by M .A . K. Halliday: narratives
can potentially encode many different types til processes, with story world
participants taking on fluctuating roles— and relations to one another—
depending on which process type predominates at a given point. Pro­
cess types include (among others) the perceptual, involving the partici­
pant roles o f Senser and Phenomena; the material, involving Actors and
Goals/Patients; the relational, involving Carriers and Attributes; and the
verbal, involving Sayers, Receivers, a n d ’Iargets.
There are no a priori limitations on what process types can figure in nar­
rative discourse, whether spoken or written. Perceptions o f unusual Phe­
nomena are as reportable as the performance o f unexpected, equilibrium-
disturbing Doings. Nonetheless, choices from among types of- process con­
stitute one of the coding strategies used to index (or interpret) a story as
belonging to a particular narrative genre or subgenre. Epics, for example,
show an overall preference for material over mental processes, whereas
psychological fiction displays the opposite preference rankings. In rs s story
oftheshape-shifter, perceptual processes (marked, for example, by die verbs
saw in line r, noticed in 1, the dialect -.specific variani kuourd in ii and aaa.
 Toward a Tmnsmedial Narratology 61

see in it, and looked in tt) me intermixed with material processes (marked,
for example, by went out in p, was hunting in q, shot in v, fell in w, went in
aa, scraped in cc, tried to find 'm gg, were headed in hh, come hack in qq, and
so on) as well as verba] processes in which the squirrel/man is the Saver (cf.
yelled in x and ee and screamed in y). The grandfather and his cohort are,
variably, Sensors, Actors, Targets, and, when the man/squirrel “ looked at
them so mean,” the Patients/Goals of a process o f perception that seems
to have a kind o f material force in its own right. It is no accident that t s ,
in relling a tale of the supernatural, uses story logic to create such complex
blends o f the mental and material (and verbal) realms. 'The shape-shifting
event involves acts o f misperception and re-perception that in turn require
a rethinking o f what constitutes material reality itself.
Because o f its polygeneric status, Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” like­
wise reveals a rich blend o f process types and participant roles. More than
this, however, properties associated with written discourse, particularly its
deliberate or “worked-over” nature in contrast with the relative spontane­
ity o f spoken discourse (Chafe), allow producers o f literary narrative to
situate participants in an even denser network of process types over the
course of a story’s unfolding. The increased span of rime separating the
production o f the narrative from its interpretation and, for that matter,
the longer span o f time allowed for interpretation of literary narratives,
facilitates complex blends of various processes with their attendant par­
ticipants. The complexity of these blends differs in degree, though not
kind, from those afforded by stories presented in conversation. Although
Kafka’s tale initially foregrounds material processes, ascribing Gregor the
role o f an Actor attempting to get his beetles body out of bed and explain
himself to the office manager, from the very start Gregor is also involved in
processes of perception, struggling to make sense of- the bizarre Phenomena
associated with his insectoid transformation. As the story unfolds, Gregor’s
role as Senser blends with his role as Goal/Patient; he becomes the target o f
material processes that include being shoved through the door and pelted
with apples by his father, whose agency and stature increase in direct pro­
portion with the diminishment o f Gregor’s own. Indeed, as an instance
of figural narration— in which “third-person,” or heterodiegetic, narration
gets tillered through a particularized center o f consciousness, or “filter”—
Kallci's text evokes astoryworld in which it is sometimes difficult for readers
to drUTinine exactly how particular phenomena are being coded, whether
they are projections of ( iregor's mental stares or else actions performed (or
evenis triggered) by oil hi participants in the narrated world.1.
62 Herman

States, Events, Actions

Besides assigning roles to participants, narrative entails apportioning par­
ticular facets o f storyworlds into states, events that happen without be­
ing deliberately initiated, and deliberately initialed actions. Differences be­
tween narrative genres can be correlated, in part, with different preference
rankings for states vis-a-vis (various types of) states, events, and actions.
Psychological talcs, for example, show a preference for coding strategies
that foreground the interior states o f participants over the events that befall
them or the actions that they initiate. For their part both o f the narratives
under examination focus on the interior states o f their protagonists, ts
recounts her grandfather’s reactions to rhe size and behavior of the shape-
shifting squirrel/man as well as his remorse after the shapc-shifter dies—
apparently from the gunshot wound inflicted on the squirrel. Meanwhile,
Kafka’s narrator gives expression to the un vocalized reactions o f Gregor as
he glimpses the mind-shattering apparition o f his father cloaked in a bank
attendant's uniform, his enormous boots lifted threateningly, his voice no
longer the voice of one father but of all the fathers there ever were. Of
course, as these remarks suggest, both of my tutor texts orient themselves
not only around psychological states but also around the combinations of
planned actions and unplanned events that bring those states into being.
When it comes to detailed, fine-grained representation o f interior states,
however, the narrative structures that are typical to spoken and written
discourse again display significant differences in degree, if not kind. Again
bccausc o f an increased span of time separating production and interpreta­
tion ofwritten narratives (and also because o f the individually customizable
periods of time available for interpretation), deliberate, “worked-over” lit­
erary texts accommodate more extensive narration o f participants’ private
beliefs, desires, and intentions than does conversational storytelling, whose
greater spontaneity and brevity often require interpreters to do more infer­
ential work to reconstruct such interior states. Granted, as Labov notes,
tellers o f persona] experience narratives often evaluate— that is, signal rhe
point o f— their stories by commenting on their thoughts and feelings at the
time the narrated actions and events occurred (370—75). Bur such 'external”
evaluation, in Labov’s phrase, is a tar cry from the paragraphs that Kafka
devotes to Gregors changing attitude toward the furniture in his room
(“Verwandlung” 10 1-6 ; “ Metamorphosis” 489-91).

Temporal Ordering
A b r o a d contrast can be draw n betw een m odes ol narration in w hich events
are assigned a definite location on a tim eline am i inodes in w hich the exaci
 Toward a Trammedial Narratofogy 63

sequence o f events resists reconstruction— whether because it is impossible

to know the order in which things happened or because (as in certain
postmodern texts) the narrative represents events themselves as fuzzily or
indeterminately ordered. Indeed, one of the features distinguishing be­
tween narrative genres is the method of temporal ordering that is typical or
preferred in a given genre. For example, in their canonical form narratives
o f epic adventure display a preference for definitely ordered sequences of
events. By contrast, in recounting events of which he or she has a vague
or incomplete memory, a witness testifying in court and bound to say
what is liter;illy true will likely produce a narrative in which events are only
partly ordered. Meanwhile, in experimental literary fictions such as D. M.
Thomas’s The White Hotel or Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of Forking
Paths,” time itself is portrayed as being bidirectional or multidirectional.
"Later” events may be portrayed as causing “earlier” events (Thomas), or
any given moment may be represented as occupying simultaneously an
infinity o f timelines, with each line corresponding to possible courses the
world could take (Borges). Such texts code temporal relations between
events not jusr as difficult-to-know but, furthermore, as intrinsically in­
determinate.
Besides setting apart narrative genres, however, methods of temporally
ordering events also help distinguish between narrative media. In par­
ticular, whereas the full range of methods for sequencing events can be
exploited in literary narratives, conversational storytelling is marked by a
default preference for determinate ordering. In raking the extended turns
at talk required to tell a story, participants must work against the grain
ol the conversational speech exchange system, which reveals a bias toward
smallest possible turn size (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson). ’The result is
that chronological as well as causal relations between situations and events
have to be sketched as economically as possible— a constraint reinforced by
tlie interpretive needs of story recipients, who must work synchronously to
uvonstruct the event sequences being presented. Hence, whereas preferred
o r d e r i n g methods in literary narratives vary by genre, event sequences re-
i (Hinted in conversation can be expected to show a medium-based prefer­
ence for definite, fully reconstructible ordering, exploiting only a subset o f
i In- sequencing options that are technically possible in narrative.
Although a larger sample size is, o f course, needed, the two narratives be-
nij• i onsidered here provide initial confirmation of this hypothesis. Events
.iif lully ordered in T.s’s story ol the shapeshilter. ( )vcr the course of a single
d.iv (he old man stares meanly at T.s’s grandfather alter he shoots the squirrel
IMMIu-|< ue Ihe j»i .mdl.it her i o nies h.u k on his own to find (lie old nun dead,
64 Herman

his back torn open as if by the very same gunshot wound. By contrast,
although it is possible to reconstruct global event sequences in Kafka’s text,
there are local instances o f indeterminate ordering. For one thing it is not
possible to determine in what order certain events occur: after Gregors
transformation, who was the first to find employment, Gregor’s father or
his sister, Crete? Further, at one point in “The Metamorphosis” Kafka’s
narrator uses a rhetorical question (“ Weihnachten war doch wohl schon
voriiber?” ‘Christmas was already past, wasn’t it?’ [120; 498]) to suggest
Gregor’s growing inability to arrange ongoing events into a determinate
series, this incapacity being itself a sign o f the widening gap between Gregor
and his human past.

Spatial Configuration
In addition to ordering events temporally, storytelling entails configuring
places, entities, and paths o f morion in space. Likewise, making sense o f
a narrative involves building and updating “cognitive maps” o f the story-
world it evokes— a process that requires situating participants and other
entities in emergent networks of foreground-background relationships as
well as mapping the trajectories of individuals and objects as they move or
are moved along narratively salient paths. My claim in this connection is
that, as was the case with temporal reference, literary narratives are free to
exploit modes o f spatial reference that are relatively dispreferred in conver­
sational storytelling.
It should be stressed that the two texts under examination do rely on
shared strategies o f spatial reference. For example, verbs o f motion provide
a crucial resource for spatialization in both narratives. In English these
verbs arc located on a semantic continuum whose poles are come and
go (Brown 108-24, 188-91; Landau and Jackendoff; Zubin and Hewitt).
By encoding the directionality o f movement, motion verbs express the
locations o f entities being perceived by narrators as well as paths taken
by entities as they move or are moved from place to place. Thus, in the
spontaneous spoken narratives Gillian Brown studied, verbs such as “ come,
arrive, walk in are used o f entry into the space . . . which is nearest the
observer. . . whereas go, walked off/out and leave are used as characters
leave that space” (190). Similarly, in the story about her grandfather, t s uses
motion verbs to encode the direction o f the two hunters’ movements along
the paths that lead to and away from the shape-shihers house. Relevanr
forms include were headed to (hh), went (jj), left (00), went on (pp), and
come back and went around (qq). These forms encode ihe sinipe-shiIters
house as an object located ai the distal end ol .111 axis whose proximal end
 Toward a Transmedial Narratology 65

is the vantage point o f the storyteller, t s ’s account thus demonstrates how

motion verbs can be used to mark viewer-relative, or “projective,” locations
in narrative discourse (Frawley 262—73; Herman, “ Spatial”).
In Kafka’s story, similarly, trajectories of motion unfold along a distal-
proximal axis whose near end— for much o f the story, at least— corresponds
with Gregors vantage point. Thus, when Gregor first emerges from his
bedroom as an insect (“ Verwandlung” 82-83; “ Metamorphosis” 479), he
sees the office manager as he “ langsam zuriickwich” ‘slowly shrank back’
toward the outer door o f the apartment, whereas his mother clasps her
hands together and then “ging . . . zwei Schritte zu Gregor hin” ‘took two
steps toward Gregor.’7 A few moments later the narrator recounts how “der
I’rokurist hatte sich schon bei den ersten Worten Gregors abgewendet,
und nur iiber die zuckende Schulter hinweg sah er mit aufgeworfenen
I .ippen nach Gregor zuruck” ‘the office manager had already turned away at
( iregor’s very first words, and he only looked back at him over his twitching
shoulder and with gaping lips’ (84-85; 480). In an effort to stop rhe manager
Irom leaving and thereby compromising Gregor’s position at the office,
( Iregor “wollte zum Prokuristcn hingehen” ‘intended to head toward the
office manager’ (85; 480); at the same instant, after leaping up and crying for
help, Gregors mother “ lie f. . . sinnlos zuruck” ‘senselessly backed away’
(86; 480), in the process colliding with a table and knocking over a full
pot of coffee. The story thus charts the office manager’s and the mother’s
movements as they unfold along parallel paths leading to and away from
( Iregors perspective on events.
Despite their shared reliance on verbs o f motion, however, the two nar­
ratives display different preferences when it comes to using this strategy for
spatial reference. As was the case with temporal reference, the differences
between ways o f configuring things in space can be ascribed to medium-
specific constraints. Notably, in contrast to conversational storytellers, pro­
ducers of written, literary narratives are at leisure to select a host of lexical
variants for the modes o f motion associated with come and go (or came and
ti’ct/l). Went, in fact, is the most frequently occurring verb of motion in
1s's narrative, despite t s ’s occasional use o f functionally equivalent forms
sin h as left and beaded to. By contrast, Kafka’s lexicon o f motion includes
forms such as “schob sich” 'squirmed along’ (70; 472); “glitt er . . . ab” ‘kept
sliding down’ (80; 477); “nahm einen Anlauf ” ‘broke into a run’ (86; 481),
.mil “drangie sich . . . in” ‘jammed |hi nisei f | into’ (88; 482). Although still
clustering around (he semantic poles marked oil by come and go, motion
veibs in kalka thus encode lichei irpiesenutions ol the manner in which
p.u 1 ic ipa 111s’ c0111 ings and goings unfold. Io adapt I con.ml l almy’s sc hema
66 Herman

for the representation o f motion events (Cognitive 25-69; cf. Talmy, “ Se­
mantics” and “ Lexicalization”), whereas t s ’s conversational narrative builds
detailed representations o f the f a c t o f motion and the p a t h along which
it occurs, in Kafka’s text readers are cued to represent a third component
of motion events, m a n n e r , in an equally detailed way. Further research
(and a larger sample size) is needed to confirm that, in literary narratives
generally, writers furnish richer representations of the m a n n e r component
of motion events than do conversational storytellers.8

Deictic Reference
Thus, although both literary and conversational narratives rely on shared
principles for temporal ordering and spatial configuration, there arc me-
dium-spccific constraints on the range o f ways in which those principles
can be used or implemented. Similar differences come into play vis-a-
vis the use o f deictic terms to attach storyworlds to particular contexts o f
interpretation. Those differences, however, trend in the opposite direction.
In particular, in the case of spatial deictics— expressions such as here and
there— conversational storytelling affords more options for anchoring texts
in contexts than do literary narratives.
In designing narrative texts that will be read by interpreters separated in
time and space from the contexts in which the stories are composed, literary
writers have to rely on readers’ basic capacity for spatial navigation and their
general, stereotypic knowledge of how particular sectors of the world tend
to be arranged— for example, the interior of apartments or movie theatres
or classroom buildings. By contrast, conversational storytellers can use spa­
tial deictics such as here and there in reference to a current spatiotemporal
environment for talk. In other words, to help their interlocutors assign
referents to such expressions, storytellers can prompt their interlocutors to
draw analogies between the spatial configuration of the storyworld and that
of the world in which the narrative is being told and interpreted. Hence,
spoken narratives can cue story recipients to build a model o f the overall
spatial configuration o f the storyworld by drawing not just on general
“ background knowledge” but also on information available in the present
interactional context.9
Although t s ’s account does not contain any spatial deictics o f this sort,
another narrative in the corpus o f supernatural tales from which t s ’s story
is taken exemplifies the process in question. In this second conversational
narrative l b is telling the interviewer, n s f ., about an apparition ol her dead
brother.
i n: (a) A n d m y 'b ro t h e r . . . he got kille d
 Toward a Transmedial Narruiology 67

(b) but anyway . . . I’m a tell you . . honey I seen him in the night
(c) sure as if it had just been in the daytime
n se: (d) Yeah.
(e) Now my bedroom was . . windows is right 'there,
(f) two double windows.
(g) And I seen him when he come up 'standing
(h) just as pretty as 1 ever seen him in my l if e
(i) a-standing there.
In this extract l b uses the spatial adverb there twice, in lines (c) and (i).
Whereas the second instance refers to a storyworld-internal location, the
loken of there in line (e), which “sets up” the second occurrence, functions
deictically. The first there is the verbal accompaniment to a gesture with
which l b designates a place within the current context o f interaction. More
precisely, the first token of there serves to anchor a storyworld location
to a location currently at hand; that is, the there in line (e) prompts l b ’s
interlocutors to project a storyworld-external space onto a storyworld-
internal space, and vice versa. The second instance o f there in line (i)
i Inis designates a kind o f blended location, one straddling the storyworld
and the world in which the story is being told and interpreted. Arguably,
by superimposing mental representations associated with two discrete sets
of spatio-temporal coordinates, the blend in question is richer than that
achieved via spatial deictics in a literary narrative such as Kafka’s. As is
characteristic for literary narratives, “ The Metamorphosis” prompts not
a blending of coordinates but, rather, a deictic shift from the here and
now orienting the act o f interpretation to that orienting participants in
i he storyworld.10

In this essay, which focuses on elements o f story logic in just two commu-
nicaiive media, I have managed to rake only a few tentative steps toward a
transmedial narratology. My chief aim has been to show that a principled
study o f the relations between spoken and written narrative cannot take
place in the absence o f a more general theory about the links between
stories and their media. Attempting to extend the position I characterized
earlier as synthesis, my account suggests that story logic can be thought o f
as a system of principles and parameters within which spoken (for example,
* onversational) and written (for example,, literary) narratives occupy differ­
ent i oordinates. The principles must be implemented, in some manner or
.Mtot her, for a text or a discourse to be located within the system at all— to
be intei pretable <t.\ a narrative. But the parameters for variable realization of
i lie pi iiu iples detei mine pret isely what plac e within the system a particular
68 Herman

narrative can be assigned. Thus, the story logic o f a tale about shape-shifting
told conversationally is bound by different constraints than those bearing
on a literary tale such as Kafka’s, even though the two narratives focus on
similar experiences. Only barely initiated here, a project for future research
is to determine just what sorts of constraints shape the communicative and
representational properties of each storytelling medium, creating more or
less untranslatable differences between texts with comparable content.

Appendix

This story was elicited during a sociolinguistic interview that occurred in

the trailer home o f p s , one of the participants in the interview and a twenty-
two-ycar-old Anglo American female. The other participants included b a ,
the ficldworker, and t s , a twenty-four-year-old Cherokee female. The in­
terview occurred on March 21, 1997, hi Robbinsville, North Carolina.
Robbinsville is located in Graham County, which lies in the mountainous
extreme western portion o f the state. For ease of reference the story has
been divided into alphabetically labeled clauses. (The transcription actually
features a p a tr o l stories; the first focuses on the experiences of the narrators
cousin and provides an introduction or bridge to the analogous— but more
meticulously recounted— experiences of t s ’s grandfather in the second nar­
rative.)
t s: (a) And I ’ve had a c o u sin . .
(b) lie was a G e o r g e . .
(c) 11m . . that shot an owi. . .
(d) and it ricocheted straight of f that owl
(e) and it hit him and it killed him.
(f) That meant that that was somebody . . .
(g) that was in the owl.
I
ba: (h) Are you s e r io u s ?
t s : (i) They call them shape shifts
ha : (j) Uh huh . . uh huh.

ts: (k) And uh . . Grandpa told me this years ago

(1) and he . . swears up and down he . . he’s killed somebody.
(111) And uh . . he uh . . when he was littler
(n) he used to live in Cherokee
(o) and there was two o f them
(p) and they went out . . .
(q) and uh . . they was hunting lor s<,juiuui:i„s and stuff
(r) And he saw oik - . . il was a preliy good si/rd squiricl.
 Toward a Transmedial Narratology 69

s) He said it wasn’t . . a little squirrel or nothing

t) he noticed it was b ig g e r .
ha: u) Uni hm.
is : v) They s h o t that squirrel,
w) And . . they could . . when it tell
x) he said i t . . y e l l e d . .
y) it screamed.
z) And he said it from . . like from its head back on its back
aa) it just had this . . you know the bullet just went . . right through:
I
ha: bb) Uni hm.
is : ec) =and . . kind o f scraped it open and stuff=
I
ha: dd) Um hm.
is : ee) =and lie said th a t. . it y e l l e d going down
ff) and they tried to find il
gg) and they couldn’t p in d that squirrel.
Iih) He said he was . . they were headed to some man’s h o u se

ii) and he knows . . he knowed the names and everything

jj) and he w e n t to that house
kk) and he said that m a n looked at t h e m so ‘ m e a n .
II) And he said that normally he doesn’t do that=
[
ha: mm) Um hm.
is : nn) but he said he just looked at them . . so m ean .

oo) And he said th a t. . they left and everything

pp) the other bo y had just w ent on
qq) he said he come back and went around the house
rr) and he sa . . he wanted to s e e . . .
ss) what was going on
tt) he said he looked and the man had rolled over
uu) and he had . . blood down his back . .=
1
ha: vv) Ohhhh.
is : ww) =and he said he was bleeding,
xx) And he said that man died,
ha: yy) I’ll he ''darned.

*SS( ] (s:(zz) And lie .said “ I "didn't mean lo do that”

aaa) he says “ bm I k n o w e d dial . . lie said that . . was me.”
hhb) I le said "W e shot him ,”
ha: m ) /I’ll be d.n ihhI/
I
70 Herman

ts: (ddd) And he said that was him . .

(eee) and that’s . . he was a s q u ir r k i , (laughs)
(fff) And he said he’ll never forget that . . you know
(ggg) and he told us over and over about that story.

Transcription Conventions

(Adapted from Tannen, “ What’s” ; and Ochs and others):

. . . represents a measurable pause, more than o.i scconds

. . represents a slight break in timing
indicates sentence-final intonation
, indicates clause-final intonation (“more to come”)
Syllables with - were spoken with heightened pitch
Syllables with * were spoken with heightened loudness
Words and syllables transcribed with a l l c a p i t a l s were emphatically
lengthened speech productions
[ indicates overlap between different speakers’ utterances
indicates an utterance continued across another speaker’s overlap­
ping utterance
/ / enclose transcriptions that are not certain
() enclose nonverbal forms o f expression, for example, laughter
(()) enclose interpolated commentary

Notes

i. In this essay 1 use conversational narrative as a term more specific than oral
narrative. Like written narrative, oral narrative in fact subsumes a variety of nar­
rative modes. Hence, one o f my guiding assumptions is that any study of the
differences between narrative media must also take into account a broader system
of distinguishing features not based strictly on medium— for instance, oral or
spoken narrative ranges over relatively formal genres (such as formulaic epic poetry
or recitations of traditional narratives) as well as relatively informal genres (such
as conversational storytelling). Yet level o f formality constitutes only one o f the
dimensions along which narrative genres (and subgenres) can be distinguished.
Written narratives, for example, can be distinguished not only with respect to
degree of formality (for example, news reports o f a barroom brawl versus epic
accounts o f a heroic battle) but also with respect to degree o f elaboration (jot ted -
down anecdotes and jokes versus full-fledged autobiographies and political satires);
topic (travel narratives versus narratives of domestic lile); target audience (a written
narrative produced during a psychological experiment versus one embedded in
a private journal entry); and so on. Thus, as used here, t h e l e i m s iinincrsational
 Toward a Transmedial Narratology 71

narrative and literary narrative refer to instantiations o f the text type “narrative,”
with a variety o f factors other than medium accounting for differences between
these instantiations.
2. l-or an investigation of some o f the constraints at issue, see Genette’s Palimp­
sests, especially the discussion o f tmnsmodalization in chap. 57 (277-82). There
Genetic distinguishes between intermodal and intramodal shifts as well as two
subtypes of each— that is, “the shift from the narrative to the dramatic, or drama­
tization, and the reverse shift from the dramatic to the narrative, or narrativiza-
tion . . . [along with] variations within the narrative mode and within the dramatic
mode” (277—78). See also Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation,
which surveys some general factors bearing on inter-adaptations of sign systems.
3. For a model positing a “categorical boundary” between everyday storytelling
and literary narrative, instead of a scale connecting them, see W olf-Dieter Stem pel’s
study.
4. Research inform ing m y discussion o f t s ’s ghost story (and also, in the final
section o f this essay, l b ’s narrative) was supported by n s f Grant SBR-9616331.
5. [ do not mean to give the impression that these two dimensions of story
logic are wholly unrelated. Indeed, in what follows I will revert repeatedly to
the ways in which the different spans of time allowed for the production and
interpretation of conversational versus literary narratives— aspects, that is, of their
situation in surrounding discourse— result in different distributions o f preferred
and dis-preferred types of narrative structure.
Further, in speaking o f different spans o f time and space separating the produc­
tion and interpretation of written and spoken narratives, I am setting aside narra­
tives written in something approximating real time in synchronized forms of elec­
tronic communication, for example, chatrooms or America Online’s Instant Mes­
senger. Even in these modes of communication, however, participants are still sep­
arated from one another in space— in all but a very few specialized circumstances.
6. Am ong other devices Kafka’s frequent use o f rhetorical questions indexes
situations and events as internally focalized, marking them as the product o f a
reflector’s efforts to perceive and interpret.
7 . 1have slightly modified the English translation o f the first of the two German
phrases quoted in this sentence
8. Preliminary support for this claim can be found in an ongoing project
reported in Herman, “ Corpus.” The project involves an empirical study of the
Irequency of 20 motion verbs in a corpus of approximately 250,000 words consist­
ing of 8 different narrative text types in two different media— that is, spoken and
written discourse. With respect to medium, although the conversational narratives
11 u luded in the corpus scored near the top on the measure of overall frequency o f
motion verbs, they scored low 011 the measure of how many different motion verbs
were used. In turn, one can assume a positive correlation between the number of
dilli'ti'iit motion verbs used ,md (he detail with which the m anner component of
mol ion events is lepiesenied.
72 Herman

9. Here I may seem to be seconding M . A. K. Halliday's and Ruqaiya Hasan’s

distinction between endophoric and exophoric reference, or discourse-internal and
discourse-external (that is, deictic) reference (31—37). In fact, however, I begin from
the premise that all reference is in a certain sense endophoric. As Gillian Brown
and George Yule have pointed out, mental representations always mediate between
linguistic forms and interpretations of those forms, even when the forms in ques­
tion are used as the equivalent o f gestures pointing to features of an immediate
context o f interaction (190—222; cf. Em m ott 211—12).
10. Although literary narratives does not allow for “ blended” spatial deixis o f
this sort, narrative fictions told in the second person can in some cases create
analogous effects by way of person deixis. More specifically, some instances of
narrative you can create similar spatio-temporal blends by referring simultaneously
(and ambiguously) to a narrator-protagonist and to a current recipient of the story,
superimposing the spacetime coordinates of a storyworld-internal entity upon
those o f a storyworld-extcrnal entity, and vice versa.

References

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Borges, Jorge Luis. “ The Garden of Forking Paths.” "Frans. Donald A. Yates.
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Brown, Gillian. Speakers, Listeners and Communication: Explorations in Discourse
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Chatm an, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film.
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Fludernik, Monika. “ The Historical Present Tense Yet Again: Tense Switching and
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 2
Frame and Boundary in the

Phenomenology o f Narrative

Katharine Young

Frames distinguish two ontological presentations o f stories in conversation:

stories as a realm o f events transpiring in another space and time, which 1
call a “taleworld,” and stories as a realm of discourse transpiring in the here
and now, which I call a “storyrealm.” Either o f these realms is potentially
available at any moment during storytelling. However, for any one partici­
pant in the storytelling event, only one will be apparent at a time. Attention
shifts, whimsically or deliberately, from one realm to another. But frames
inherent in the storytelling occasion also direct attention from one realm
to another, so that realm shifts systematically over the course o f the telling.
This essay specifies the multiple frames o f stories in ordinary conversation.
These apparently ephemeral narratives turn out to be elaborately framed.
Frames thus constitute and uncover the limits o f narrative.

Frames

Gregory Bateson describes frames as metacommunication, that is, “com­

munication about communication” (Bateson and Ruesch 209), or, in Lud­
wig Wittgenstein’s phrase, the description-under-which an event is to be
seen (198, 202, and elsewhere on “seeing-as” ). An utterance, for instance,
might be seen-as a story. Frames themselves are o f two sorts, which Bateson
distinguishes as “exchanged cues and propositions about (a) codification
and (b) the relationship between the communicators” (Bateson and Ruesch
209). That is to say, on the one hand, that frames codify stories among other
kind o f events or that they codify kinds of stories and, on the other hand,
that they invite or reveal an attitude toward the story, which illuminates the
relationship between its tellers and hearers. I'rallies <>l the lust son set the
 Frame an d Boundary 77

realm status of an event; frames o f the second sort set an attitude toward
the events in that realm. For narrative events a passage o f conversation can
be framed in the first sense as a story and in the second sense as cruel,
revealing, disingenuous, rude, clever, funny, sad, or the like. Gerald Prince
has aptly named framings of the first sort “metanarrative signs,” indications
of what he calls the coding of discourse as narrative (115—27).
Framings of the second sort are akin to what William Labov and Joshua
Walctzsky call “evaluative devices,” about which they write: “The evalu­
ation o f a narrative is defined by us as that part o f the narrative which
reveals the attitude o f the narrator towards the narrative by emphasizing
the relative importance o f some narrative units as compared to others” (37).
Fabov and Walctzsky attend only to the events the story is about; I am
concerned with evaluations o f the telling as well as o f the tale. Thus, the
telling might be comical though the events recounted in it were terrifying.
Fabov and Walctzsky s inattention to this difference confuses events with
stories by failing to distinguish, as Erving Goffm an puts it, “ between the
content o f a current perception and the reality status we give to what is
1 Inis enclosed or bracketed within perception” (3).
Fhe confusion between taleworld and storyrealm— between, that is to
say, the events the story is about and their presentation in the form o f a
story— has been a problem in narrative analysis. The taleworld is a reality
inhabited by persons for whom events unfold according to its ontological
conventions. The storyrealm consists o f tellings, writings, performances—
that is, o f recountings o f or alludings to events understood to transpire in
.mother realm. The status o f one realm bears on but docs not fix the status
<>l the other.
Frames are metacommunications o f two sorts about two sorts o f event:
they either set the realm status o f or disclose an attitude toward either tale-
worlds or storyrealms. Story frames distinguish stories from other forms o f
discourse, such as explanations, quotations, descriptions, argumentation,
mmmands, and so on, and from other sorts o f narrative events, such as
pl.iys, games, mimes, films, or dreams; and they distinguish among such
genres o f narrative as myths, legends, folktales, fairy tales, tall tales, anec­
dotes, and personal experience narratives. Story evaluations characterize
Moiies as good, in the sense of spicy, sharp, amusing, witty, wry, well-told,
peni 1lent, or pointed, or as poorly told, pointless, malicious, maladroit,
m boring. Frames of the events the stories are about distinguish between
events in 11 it* realm of the ordinary, which might be thought o f as real
events, and events in othei lealm.s, which might be thought of as imagi-
11.11 V, m u h as the realms of the dead, ol dreams 01 dramas, of sc ience, the
78 Young

supernatural, or the extraterrestrial. Evaluations o f events qualify them as

disgusting or enchanting, romantic, adventurous, daunting, dreadful, or
dreary. This inquiry therefore distinguishes among four narrative frames—
frames and evaluations o f the story and frames and evaluations o f the events
the story is about— and considers their bearing on making stories.

Boundaries

Information about differences, Bateson remarks, are stacked at the edges o f

events (unpublished lecture). Differences between realms are at issue at the
moment of transition from the realm of conversation to the storyrealm and
from the storyrealm back to the realm of conversation. It is for this reason
that frames, indications o f realm status, are characteristically positioned
between realms, in the case of stories, between the event framed and the
realm that event is framed for. Frames, therefore, do what might be called
“edgework” for stories.
This characteristic positioning o f frames on the edges o f realms gives
rise to the confusion between boundaries and frames, between, that is,
the literal or physical frames that lie alongside contiguous realms and the
conceptual differences they reify. Boundaries locate the literal or physical
borders between realms; frames locate their conceptual limits. Events are
bounded; realms are framed. Or, more precisely, events are framed as to
their realm status. Boundaries occur at the same level of analysis as the
events they bound: a picture frame is a material object among material ob­
jects; a story boundary consists o f words among words. Setting a boundary
implies a frame by separating, setting off, and tying together the events
within the boundary. Maurice Natanson writes: “The act o f framing, of
literally surrounding a canvas with sides o f wood or metal, is the astonishing
sorcery o f the art apprentice. To frame a picture is to separate a part o f
experience from its context. . . To create, then, is to separate, to exclude,
to deny a whole by intending a fraction o f that whole” (81). Defining a
frame likewise implies a boundary by relating events to be conceived in one
realm. But, though all boundaries are frames, not all frames are boundaries.
Frames communicate about the ontological status o f other events, but
they have a different ontological status from the events they communicate
about. Unlike boundaries, frames do not count as parts of rhe event they
frame. As Bateson points out: “The analogy of the picture frame is exces­
sively concrete. The psychological concept which we are Il ying to define is
neither physical nor logical. Rather, the actual physic al Irame is, we believe,
added by human beings lo physii al pit lures bet ause hum.in beings operale
 Frame and Boundary 79

more easily in a universe in which some o f their psychical characteristics

are externalized” {Steps 188). Boundaries, then, are differences themselves,
drawn along the edges o f realms o f events whose differences they thereby
come to represent. Boundaries serve as cues, or, more closely, concrete
metaphors, for conceptual frames.
Boundaries are positional: they enclose or, in the case o f narrative, open
and close an alternate realm of experience, the storyrealm. Frames, by
contrast, are transfixual: they pervasively qualify the events they span and
inform. Framing transforms into a story a possible first hearing o f that
speech act as conversation. The frame imputes an ontological status to
events wherever they are located, rendering them constituents o f a realm.
By its nature a frame can lie within the same realm as the event it frames,
in some other realm, or along the border between realms. So, story frames
.ire either disclosures in the course of storytelling, remarks in the course o f
conversation, or bridges between realms.
The distribution of frames inside, outside, or alongside the realm o f
events they frame reflects their bidirectionality: frames are directed from
one realm and toward another, for instance, from the realm o f conversation
.iik I toward the storyrealm. The instructions they bear on how to see that
oilier realm o f events implies a realm to see the events from. Frames are
II ames-for tellers and hearers as well as framcs-of events. As Goffman points
oiu, “assumptions that cut an activity o ff from the external surround also
mark the ways in which this activity is inevitably bound to the surrounding
world” (249). Frames do not just enclose one realm; they specify a relation­
ship between two. Hence, this inquiry extends attention from how stories
.iic* framed to what stories are framed for.

I.tlgework

In virtue of their frames, stories can be identified as a different order o f

event from the conversations in which they are enclaves. They constitute
.1 sioryrealm. The storyrealm, that region o f narrative discourse within the
le.ilm of conversation, in turn directs attention to a third realm, the realm
ol 1 he events the story is about, the taleworld. F>ents in the taleworld are
II.imrd by the story, itself framed by the conversation. A single event can
III 1 his way be multiply Ira mod so that, as (ioffm an suggests, “ it becomes
1 oiiveiiiem to think ol each 1 ranslorniation as adding a layer or lamination
to (lie* activity. One c.111 address two (ealures of the activity. One is the
1111 ici most layering, whetein diamatic activity can be at play to engross the
pa 11 u ipa lit. I lie ol liei is 1 lie 011 lei most lam in.il ion, 1 he rim ol the frame, as
 O)
E O)
0> O) Taleworld ■a _£Z as
o C c if) -0
CO
v*— 'c Cf) LU O O
a> a> a> O
u .
CL O
CL OQ
O

Storyrealm

Realm of Conversation

Fiqure 2.1. Frames that arc boundaries.

it were, which tells us just what sort o f status in the real world the activity
has, whatever the complexity o f the inner laminations” (82). This essay
skips the structure o f the innermost layer, the province of narrative analysis,
to analyze relations among three realms: the taleworld, the storyrealm,
and the realm o f conversation, the province o f what Goffman has dubbed
“frame analysis.” These realms are conceived to open out onto one another
in such a way that the innermost or deepest realm is the taleworld, a realm
o f unfolding events and enacting characters. The next lamination, or level,
is the storyrealm, the recounting o f events and acts in narrative discourse.
And the outermost or presented realm is the occasion o f this recounting,
the realm of conversation. Frames, on this analysis, orient one realm to
another. (Fig. 2.1 shows these narrative laminations.)
The dynamics o f the framing activity that takes place during oral sto­
rytelling will be investigated here in a corpus o f stories told in the course
o f an evening’s conversation at Algernon M ays farm on Dartmoor in D e­
vonshire, England, on Saturday, March 29, 1975. This is the first o f many
such conversations I tape-recorded with Algy during a year’s fieldwork on
Dartmoor. On this occasion the stories are exchanged among five partici­
pants: Algy, who is the main storyteller; his wile, Jean; his niece Marian, a
neighboring farmer, Miles Fursdon; and mysell. Algy is a sprightly, sturdy.
 Frame an d Boundary 81

sixty-seven-year-old countryman with bright white hair and blue eyes. His
wife, Jean, spare and skittish, with a long, folded face, is a painter and
breeder of thoroughbred horses and greyhounds. Marian, stocky, ruddy­
faced, dark-haired, works on the farm with Algy and helps Jean with the
breeding. Miles, tall, lean, and dark-haired, is a young farmer and old friend
o f the Mays. 1 am a folklorist and foreigner, to follow the Devon practice
o f so describing anybody from outside the shire.
Wc talk in the dark, stone-flagged kitchen o f their nineteenth-century
farmhouse in the company of three dogs, a cat, and a baby lamb, being
warmed and nursed by the fire. In the background the television mur­
murs. The Mays know I am interested in stories, and after a half-hours
conversation Algy mentions a story connected with the main house on his
farm, Rowbrook, just over the hill from the farmhouse in which we are
gathered. Do I know it? At this point I get Algys permission to start tape-
recording and continue from this, the first story told on this occasion and
the first I have ever heard Algy tell, to the last story he tells as Miles and I
are leaving an hour and a half later. In that time span thirty-three stories
have been exchanged. The corpus illustrates two functional types o f frames,
ihose that mark boundaries and those that do not.

Frames That Mark Boundaries

I;rames that are boundaries lie between the realms they are frames-for and
Ihe realms they are frames-of. So positioned, they point in two directions:
loward the realm they frame and toward the realm they frame that realm
lor.

lieginnings and Ends

I .abov and Waletzsky claim it is characteristic o f what they call “personal
experience narratives” that the sequential organization o f narrative clauses
in the story matches the temporal organization o f events in the taleworld.
I hus, “narrative will be considered as one verbal technique for recapitu-
l.uing experience, in particular, a technique o f constructing narrative units
which match the temporal sequence o f that experience” (13). Sequence is
.1 lonvention for time. As Roland Barthes writes, “Time does not belong
10 discourse proper, but to the referent” (252). In the taleworld one event
happens after another; in the storyrealm one event follows from another.
< (instilling consecutive events as causally related gives stories their conse­
quent ialiiy. “ I lu* sense ol closure," Barbara I lerrnstein Smith writes, “ is a
luiuiion of the perception ol structure” (.|). Consider the first story that
82 Young

evening about three brothers by the name of French, who once lived in the
main house on Rowbrook Farm. (See appendix for transcription devices.)
Three Brothers
Opening Algy: The point was

Beginning there were

three
teenage
Frenches
sleeping in one bed over here
in the cottage— in the oldhouse.
Thunderstorm?
End Father French comes down
finds the center one
struck
by lightning.
Closing Three boys in one bed = center one killed.
Closing Tchew.
In order to arrive at its end, the story of the three brothers opens up
and spins out earlier events in such a way that they orient to the death of
the middle brother. The story then moves from the beginning toward that
end as its completion. The appearance of consequentiality in narrative is
produced by counting the last event taken from the taleworld an end and
then constructing the story backward to include whatever is necessary to
account for it, thus arriving at the beginning. Beginnings do not so much
imply ends as ends entail beginnings. “ By reading the end in the beginning
and the beginning in the end,” writes Paul Ricoeur, “we learn also to read
time itself backward, as the recapitulating o f the initial conditions of a
course o f action in its terminal consequences” (180). Where the sequence
o f events starts and finishes in the taleworld becomes the beginning and
end o f the story. Taleworlds do not have beginnings and ends. They are
realms experienced by their inhabitants not as beginning and ending but
as ongoing. The story cuts out a portion of the taleworld to recount, but
the taleworld extends beyond the boundaries set in it by the story. Other
events are understood to have happened before and after, as well as at the
same time as, those being recounted. Beginnings and ends are introduced
into the taleworld by the storyrealm, thus rendering consequential what is
merely consecutive. These boundaries set up by the story in the taleworld
frame events in that world for the storyrealm. They constitute, that is,
instructions that the events within the boundary are to be taken in a certain
relation to one another, framing events as stories invests them with the
 Frame and Boundary 83

sense o f an ending. Beginnings and ends are frames-of the taleworld and
frames-for the storyrealm.

Openings and Closings

I he stories, unlike their taleworlds, are enclaves in another realm, the realm
o f conversation. Story enclaves are a different order of discourse from the
conversation that encloses them, namely, a representation o f events not
present to the occasion. They are also a different order o f event from
other events likewise enclosed in conversation. They are set off from the
enclosing conversation by openings and closings, which mark the entries
and exits between the storyrealm and the realm o f conversation. Openings
and closings can also distinguish a narrative event from other enclaves in
conversation. A distinction must be made between beginnings and ends,
on the one hand, and openings and closings, on the other. Beginnings and
ends are the points where the events are about start and finish; openings and
closings are the points where the stories start and finish. Beginnings and
ends create boundaries in the taleworld; openings and closings constitute
the boundaries of the storyrealm.
Characteristically, openings and closings neatly bracket beginnings and
ends, as in “Three Brothers,” in which the opening frame, directed to the
storyrealm, is tucked in next to the beginning o f the taleworld and in which
the closing phrases— there are two— closely follow the end. Occasionally,
however, the beginning of the taleworld is used to open the storyrealm,
and the end closcs both realms. For instance, after Algy finishes framing a
story about a Canadian film crew trying to film ferrets catching rabbits, he
opens his next story about his niece, iMarian, shearing a sheep by moving
straight into the taleworld to describe the film crew’s intentions.
Ferreting and Sheepshearing
Evaluation Algy: I swear it’s perfectly true.
Coda We got a fiver for that.
{{Chuckles))
O pening Then the other thing they wanted to film Marian
Beginning shearing a sheep.
Miles’s story, “ Foxy and the Flywheel,” is followed by an evaluation o f the
events in the taleworld. There is no separate frame to close the storyrealm.
Foxy and the Flywheel
End and ( ’ losing Miles: [and he was knocked Hat]
Evaluation Algy: [Cor, he was lucky,] wasn’t he
A result ol this con d en satio n of o p e n in g and b egin n in g as well as end and
clo sin g It,mu\s is that the story is mote1 slightly differen tiated from the
84 Young

conversation in which it occurs. For instance, the activities o f the Canadian

film crew are carried over into the story of the sheepshearing. Layering
openings along beginnings and closings along ends, on the other hand,
would result in a density of frames at the edges o f the story, these serving
to set it o ff more sharply from conversation.
When openings and closings are formulaic, such as “ Once upon a time”
and “The end,” not only do they mark a discontinuity in the order of dis­
course, but also, by convention, they specify the realm status o f the enclave
as fairy-tale-like. The openings and closings of conversational anecdotes are
not usually formulaic in this traditional sense, and, although they do mark
discontinuities in speaking, they do not necessarily specify the realm status
of the events they bound. In the story of the three brothers the opening
phrase, “ The point was,” alerts hearers that a story is about to commence in
much the same way the formulaic opening “ Once upon a time” does. The
phrase is technically a restart, indicating that the storyteller is picking up
where he left o ff doing preparatory work for the story before I interrupted
him to ask if 1 could record him. 'The closing phrase, “'Three boys in one
bed, center one killed,” draws attention to and reiterates the end o f the
story. The formulaic closing “'The end,” similarly positioned just after the
end o f a story, likewise draws attention to what has already happened,
though without repeating it. “The end” is not itself the closing event in the
taleworld, though it refers to it, but the closing utterance in the storyrealm.
The phrase that follows this closing, “Tchew,” appears to be a form o f w'hat
Coffm an has entitled “expression speech,” that is, utterances that convey
by rhythm or intonation the feeling o f a prior remark without replicating
its content (527). It is the sort of utterance adults often use with infants and
animals. Here the sound “Tchew” catches the quality o f lightning striking,
thus reiterating the end o f the story in another key. Repetition appears
to create a closural effect both by creating a sense of saturation with the
pattern repeated and by laying an evaluative emphasis on the element to
be taken as the end of the story (Smith 4 2 ) .1 The effect is produced by
doubling back over and thus reversing the How of discourse.
Besides doing closure on the storyrealm, closings direct attention inward
or backward to the taleworld and forward or outward to the realm o f
conversation. They can signal, on the one hand, that speakers have missed
the ending in the taleworld, and they can signal, on the other hand, for
hearers to resume the transition property o f utterance completions, which
have been suspended for storytelling.2 These storyrealm closings have been
deceptively classified by Labov as codas, though they do nor fulfill his
own criterion that codas follow from events in the taleworld ($65—66).
 Frame an d Boundary 85

Storyrealm closings orient hearers to the taleworld and to the realm o f

conversation while providing a transition between the two. During the
course o f Algy’s story about Marian shearing the sheep, Miles interpolates
the brief supportive utterances characteristic o f hearers but no remark to
indicate awareness o f its end, though this is marked by Algy and Marians
laughter. So, Algy follows the laughter with a storyrealm closing to which
Miles responds appropriately, both by his appreciative utterance and also
by the fact of taking up his turn at talk.
Sheepshearing
Algy: But at die end of the shearing
this— the camera was stopped for a second
then this huge fleece that I’d got from die
wool merchants (('buckles)
huge thing—
Marian throws it out, you know, as you do after shearing
but unfortunately the—
knd the old sheep had a green mark on it and this had
bright red
[((Laughs))]
Marian: [((Laughs))}
( 'losing Algy: That’s the only thing about that.
Miles: Tsh.
II beginnings and ends frame the taleworld for the storyrealm, openings
and closings frame the storyrealm for the realm o f conversation. Both
pairs of frames bound the story. This lodgment o f beginnings and ends,
as well as openings and closings, on the boundaries o f the story enhances
its discreteness from surrounding discourse.

Prefaces and Codas

I'Vames in the form o f prefaces and codas also lie alo n g the edges o f the
story enclave b u t on the side o f con versatio n . So, w hereas b egin n in gs and
ciuls lie just inside the talew orld and o p en in gs and closings ju st inside
the sto ryrealm , prefaces and codas lie ju st outside both , in the realm o f
i on vcrsation . B eg in n in g s and ends b o u n d the talew orlds they fram e, and
op enings and closings bo u n d the sto ryrealm s they fram e. Prefaces and
lo d a s bound both realm s oil Irom the realm of con versatio n , creatin g an
eiu losure for these alternate realities w ith in the realm of the ordinary. A l­
though located w ith in the realm ol con versatio n , prefaces fram e either the
storyrealm or the talew orld, and to d a s fiam e the talew orld. All three pairs
ol 11 am es i an opei ale as boundaries bet ween t lie lealm ol conversation and
86 Young

either the taleworld or the storyrealm, layering or laminating themselves

along the rim o f the story.
Prefaces are frames preceding the opening o f the storyrealm or the be­
ginning in the taleworld that announce a new speech event by saying, for
instance, “ 1 wanted to tell you something,” and sometimes also announce
the realm status of the speech event as a story, as in “ I’ve got a great story
for you,” or the quality of the events the story is about, as in “The most
dreadful thing happened.” The preface not only sets up the prospective
space into which the story can be inserted into the conversation; it also
hooks it back onto the conversation by intimating that that story or those
events are o f particular pertinence to the hearer at that juncture in the con­
versation. This prefatory work is critical to the organization of storytelling
in conversation because it ensures that the conversation will provide a place
in which the story can be completed.
Conversation consists of what sociolinguists call “utterance turns,” ar­
rangements for participants to speak alternately. At the completion o f a
turn, other participants will feel expected or entitled to take their own
turn at talk. Sentence ends signal utterance completions (Schegloff and
Sacks 23 6). Thus, if a speech event is going to take more than one sentence
to complete, speakers must arrange to take an extended turn or risk being
interrupted on completion of the first sentence (Sacks, “ On the Analyz-
ability” 344—45). Because of the sequential relationship between ends and
beginnings, even the briefest story takes more than a one-sentence utter­
ance to tell. According to Sacks:

The consequence o f that is that one produces, for what turn out to be
stories, what I’ll call a story preface. It is an utterance that asks for the
right to produce extended talk, and says that the talk will be interesting,
as well as doing other things.
At the completion of that “ interest arouser” if you like, one stops,
and its the business of others to indicate that it’s okay, and maybe also
that they’re interested, or it’s not okay, or they’re not interested. If one
looks at stories one finds that prefaces o f this sort are present. (1992,
226)

Algy May prefaces his story o f Snailly house in the following way.
Snailly House
Preface Algy: But you don’t know probably any o f the old
stories
about
Holly’s Cott, Snailly I louse.
 Frame a nd Boundary 87

D o you.
Kat: About wliat?

Preface Algy: [Never heard] anything about Snailly House.

Kat: [Snailly I louse?]
Algy: Yes.
It’s a— its in the forest now but there used to be a
house up there

Picket Kat.: No, I didn’t know that.

Beginning Algy: Two old women lived in it
Conversation moves from the preface to the beginning o f the story in the
taleworld, “ I wo old women lived in it,” as soon as the storyteller receives
an appropriate response to his request in the form of what Coffm an calls
a “ticket” to take an extended turn at talk, in this instance, “No, I didn’t
know that.” Prefacing can be done neatly in three utterance turns— preface,
ticket, opening— and would have been so done here if T had not been
puzzled by the referents to two no longer existing houses, “ Dolly’s Cottage”
and “ Snailly House.” The preface, “ But you don’t know probably any o f the
old stories about Dolly’s Cott, Snailly House. Do you,” would neatly have
been followed by “ No, I don’t,” thus arriving at the beginning on the third
turn. If a second speaker requests a story, the work of prefacing can be
accomplished in two utterance turns, that request serving as both preface
and ticket. This happens when Algy’s wife, Jean, asks him to tell the story
ol Michael, the carthorse.
Michael and the Fla?
Preface and Jean: Tell them about um mm Harold Bluett
Ticket darling, in Cornwall
and uh
[and Michael] the horse
Algy: IYes]
Jean: (They’d like to know.)
O pening Algv: T his is true.
Beginning There was a great big carthorse in Cornwall
got out on the common.
Prefaces can be addressed to either the taleworld or the storyrealm,
arousing interest in either the events or the story. Contrast the preface to
‘T o xy’s Cremation” with the prelace to ‘T’oxy’s Surplice, the Bentley, and
die Deerstalker." The preface to 'T oxy’s Cremation” introduces Foxy, the
eiiem rii parson who will appear in the taleworld.
88 Young

Foxys Cremation
Preface Algy: But in more recent times— Miles will
remember Foxy—
Picket Miles: Yeah.
Algy: D o you?
Ticker Miles: Yeah.
Abstract Algy: Well, he— you know, took seventeen tries to
get a—
to be a
parson
The preface to “ Foxys Surplice, the Bentley, and the Deerstalker’1 directs
attention, instead, to the quality of the story, an attribute of the storyrealm.
Foxys Surplice, the Bentley, and the Deerstalker
Preface Miles: N ow I think the best— one of the best stories
about Foxy is that
he used to do the service at Princctown and he
used 10=
Ticket Algy: Umhm.
The use o f what sociolinguists call Iaminator verbs, such as think, tell, know,
hear, say, dream, and so on, can orient ro the realm status of the story as a
dream, a thought, a hearing, a saying, or a knowing, whether the preface
orients to the taleworld or the storyrealm (Goffman 510). Appropriate tick­
ers can be exceedingly slight, serving merely to return the floor to the sto­
ryteller in the awareness that he is embarking on an extended turn at talk.
Since prefaces arrange to suspend the transition property o f sentence
completions during storytelling, a difficulty can arise when the story ends
and turn-taking is supposed to be resumed. Ends are not always so clearly
consequent 011 beginnings that they are evident to hearers. The end can be
reinforced or its lack remedied by closings in the storyrealm, which draw
attention to the closure o f the events in the taleworld. Iwen these may be
insufficient to reinstate turn-taking. Despite, or in the absence of, such
framing devices, hearers sometimes overlook or fail to display appreciation
o f the end of a story by taking up their turn. In such an instance storytellers
can alert hearers that the story has ended with what I.abov calls a coda.
“ Codas close o ff the sequence o f complicating actions and indicate that
none of the events that followed were important to the narrative” (365-
66). A nice parity is evident between prefaces and codas: one opens up a
realm the other closes down, both working from the conversational side.
These conversational frames thus parallel the edgework o f openings and
closings on stories and of beginnings and ends on events.
 Frame an d Boundary 89

An elegant alternative to dependence on such closing frames is ro build

into the preface information about how to monitor the story for its end.
According to Sacks, “ It turns out that among the jobs of the story preface
is that of giving information about what it will take for the story to be over.
And there’s an obvious rationality to putting information about what it will
take for it to be over, right at the beginning so that people can watch from
there on in to see when it will be over” (1992, 228). Thus, the preface to
“ Bill Hamlyn and the Cable Spool” instructs hearers to monitor the story
for its similarity to the story that preceded it.
Bill Hamlyn and the Cable Spool
Preface Algy: Bur then you see Hamlyn
the contractor
told us a very similar story
Prefaces can take the form o f what Labov calls “abstracts,” consisting
“o f one or two clauses summarizing the whole story” (363). In this in­
stance they do not necessarily elicit tickets but only offer instructions about
Iiow to monitor the story for its end. Abstracts as prefaces are not to
be understood as part of the story nor even as a repiica of it in minia-
uire but as a metacommunication, or frame, about how to listen to it
(Labov 364; Labov and Fanshel 106). Algys abstract for the story of M ar­
ian shearing sheep instructs hearers to watch for the sheepshearing as its
end.
Sheepshearing
Preface as Algy: Then the other thing they wanted to do was to
Abstract film Marian sheafing a sheep
This is in October so I said, “ Oh, likely.”
Miles: Isa.
Algy: Anyhow.
Beginning Went down to Buckfastleigh and
got two very big Scottish Heeces.
Prefaces to invite stories from other participants quite characteristically lake
the form of abstracts, as in Algy’s preface to Marian’s story of Foxy and
1 lie cartwheel, thus indicating at once which story is being elicited and
pioviding a ticket to tell it.
Foxy and the ( 'artwheel
Preface Algy: Tell diem about —-Marian, tell them about
Ticket putting the mm
pushing l lie 1. ill wheel dmvn Meltor ’cause
that was
[really Foxy]
90 Young

Marian: [Yes.]
Algy: (scarred that again.]
Marian: [When— when he was um)
vicar at Leusdcn, he thought he’d— he'd

Codas consist o f frames following the end o f the events in the tale­
world that are designed to link that realm o f events to the conversation.
They relate the taleworld to the conversation by interposing, between the
story’s completion and the resumption o f conversation, events sequential
but not consequential to the story. Thus, Labov and Waletxsky note, “all
codas arc separated from the resolution by temporal juncture” (40). Labov
argues, “ Codas have the property o f bridging the gap between the mo­
ment o f time ar the end o f the narrative proper and the present. They
bring the narrator and the listener back to the point at which they en­
tered the narrative” (366). Such codas take the form o f residues, after­
maths,traces, in the present of the events recounted in thestory, Mar­
ian and Algy’scodas to the story o f Foxy and the cartwheelexemplify
this.
Foxy and the Cartwheel
Coda Marian: You can still see the old— old um
Coda Algy: [You can, down the] w'ood now, yeah.
Marian: [remnants down— 1
down in the wood.

The continuing presence o f these artifacts ties the setting of the present
conversation to the past realm o f events. Their persistence in everyday life,
of which the conversation is an aspect, appears to authenticate the story, to
attest to its relevance.
Both codas and closings succeed and reiterate the end o f the story,
codas from within the taleworld and closings from within the storyrealm,
but their relationship to the realm of conversation for which they effect
these closures is quite different. The storyrealm is an enclave in the realm
o f conversation, one speech event within another, whereas the taleworld
is a separate reality. For this reason, while codas construct continuities
between disparate realms, closings discriminate contiguous realms. The
boundaries o f stories provide junctures for the insertion of information
about ontological differences in the form o f frames, (big. 2.2 shows the
relation between the realms these frames are Ioca led in and die realms to
which they direct attention.)
 Frame and Boundary 91

Preface > Taleworld/Storyrealm

CTJ
</>
CD
>
E ra
o
o 2 Ia>
.03
o o End -> Taleworld
E CO
CQ
CD
0£ Storyrealm
Closing

Coda Taleworld

Figure 2.2. H ie bidirectionality o f frames that are boundaries.

Frames That Are Not Boundaries

1T am es that are not, or not necessarily, boundaries bear on the events

in a realm but do not mark the edges of that realm o f events. They are
conceptual but not positional markers.

Orientations
( )rieiitations provide information deemed neccssary in order to understand
what is transpiring in the taleworld. For instance, Algy tells a story about
a narrow escape, which he begins with a geographical orientation.
Algy and the Flywheel
COrientation Algy: Jean and I were going up a narrow lane in
Cornwall
( 'oda and we saw a very white-faced chap
looking at us
“ ( 'or, thank C od you’re well.”
1 said, “ W hat’s die matter,”
I le says, ‘‘ The bloody flywheel’s come off.”
And he’s pointing to the top ol die hill.
Miles: ({(.huckifs))
92 Young

Algy: And apparently it had come down so fast it

had
jumped over this
low lane
Miles: Tcha.
Algy: Yeah.
End missed us
Miles: 'lss.
Algy: and gone into the—
well, miles away
{{Chuckles))

If Algy had not placed himself" and Jean in the lane, it would not have
been clear that, in jumping over it, the flywheel had narrowly missed them.
(In this telling Algy has used the coda, which actually happened after the
misadventure, as an abstract to rouse interest in it beforehand.) Algy has
already oriented his hearers to the machines in question before he begins
the story.
A Igy and the Flywheel
Algy: Bui Miles
years ago
Orientation there used to be threshing engines—
Miles: Yeah.
Orientation Algy: steam engines.
Miles: Yeah.
Orientation Algy: Bloody good flywheels on them.
Beginning and we were going up—
Orientation Jean and 1 were going up a narrow lane.

Placed as they are around the beginning o f the story, orientations provide
background for the sequence o f events. In this position, as Labov and
Waltzky suggest, they “serve to orient the listener in respect to person,
place>time, and behavioral situation. We will therefore refer to this structural
feature as an orientation section ’ (32). Orienting remarks, explanations, or
clarifications, however, can also be inserted into or after the story, directed
to those particular aspects o f it they are designed to elucidate. After this
story it occurs to Algy that his hearers may not all realize that Cornish lanes
are cut so deeply into the land by ancient usage that a projectile skimming
along at ground level could fly cross the lane and miss the people in it, so
he adds another orientation later on in the conversation, one that expands
on the orientation to Cornwall inside the story. This orientation does not
lie along a boundary of the story.
 Fram e a n d Boundary 93

Algy and the Flywheel

Orientation Algy: These
real old sunken
Cornish lanes, you know, way down it was.
And o f course it just bounced [over]
M iles: [Right over] the top.
Orientations can thus transfix a narrow span o f events within the sequence.
In such a case, Sacks notices, “what we have is a sense of context being
employed by the teller, which involved fitting to the story, in carefully
located places, information that will permit the appreciation of what was
transpiring, information which involves events that are not in the story
sequence at that point” (1992, 274).
Orientations disclose the taleworld as a realm o f events not given to
hearers in the way events in everyday life are given, one for which some
metaphysical constants or background expectancies arc therefore made
explicit.3 The orientation to the following story locates the events in the
geographical space the conversationalists are inhabiting, Rowbrook Farm,
but two hundred years earlier.
Jan Coo
Algy: And Jan Coo.
Orientation The one for here— Rowbrook.
Orientation Fie was a boy about seventeen hundred and
something
looked after the cattle— only a youngster.
Attention to ontological differences qualifies orientations as frames even
when they do not provide information about how to regard the taleworld
.is a whole. Sacks argues that the strategic use o f such information keeps
hearers attentive to how to interpret what is being told (1992, 274). Algy
orients to the story o f Marian shearing the sheep in this way.
Sheepshearing
A b strac t A lg y: Then the other thing they wanted to do was to
film Marian shearing a sheep.
( ) riem atio n This is O ctober so T said, “ Oh likely.”
M ile s: Tsa.
Algy: Anyhow.
b eginn in g Went down to Buckfastleigh and got
two very big Scottish fleeces.
S lu rp ’s wool thickens over the winter and molts over the summer, so
•.hearing is usually done in the spring when the wool is thickest. An October
Mine is a l.iirly motley proposition. Miles, himself .1 farmer, is therefore
94 Young

alerted by the orientation to monitor Algy’s story for a solution to the

problem o f shearing a sheep in October.
Orientations can be offered by other participants who so display just the
kind o f attention to the story that orientations by the teller are intended to
evoke. Thus, orientations can not only insert information for understand­
ing the story but also insert it at just the point where its teller or other
participants figure the information will be needed. Its nicety of placement,
then, indicates when it is to be used (Sacks 1992, 274). Orientations can
be understood to introduce hearers into the realm codas then draw them
out of, codas and orientations consisting o f aspects or fragments of the tale­
world set out in discourse beforehand and afterward. Orientations afford an
angle of entry into the taleworld, an angle that can disclose a perspective on
that realm. In setting up the background against which events unfold, they
set up the angle from which hearers apprehend those events. They point
from the context o f the story to the context of the events, from hearers to
hearings, and tie them together. Orientations are frames-of the taleworld
and frames-for the realm of conversation, in the storyrealm, thus neatly
interrelating three realms o f experience. (Fig. 2.3 shows the interrelation o f
these three realms.)

Evaluations
Fhe frames examined so far bear on the realm status o f events and stories,
on whether a piece o f discourse is a story, what sort o f story it is, and what
sort of realm the events it recounts come from. These frames determine
orders of event, in contrast to evaluations, which disclose perspectives on,
attitudes toward, or feelings about events of that order. Labov describes
evaluation as, “the means used by the narrator to indicate the point of the
narrative, its raison d'etre: why it was told and what the narrator was getting
at” (366). He writes as if all these means were roughly equivalent. In fact,
a nice distinction between the point o f the story and the point o f telling
the story is involved. The first pertains to the relationship between events
in the story and the second to the relationship between the story and the
occasion on which it is told.
Evaluations o f events argue that the taleworld is reportable in its own
right. Labov claims, “To identify the evaluative portion of a narrative, it
is necessary to know why this narrative— or any narrative— is felt to be
tellable; in other words, why the events of the narrative are reportable”
(370). For Labov whatever warrants their telling is inherent in the events.
That quality is brought forward or marked by evaluations. ’ Ilie evaluations
give differential weight to some events over olher.s, cspa ially 10 last even is,
 Fram e a n d B oundary 95

Frame-for Frame-in Frame-of

Realm of Storyrealm Taleworld

Conversation

Orientation

i-'igure 2,3. Orientations.

so that events do not just succeed one another; they come to a point. In
1 hat way the point comes to have a bearing on the end. Yet, contrary to
I .abov’s argument, points are not ends; they arc recognitions of the relation
ol ends to beginnings as cogent. If the end can be seen as the final element
in the narrative sequence, then the point bears on the relationship among
narrative elements or between these elements and nonnarrative aspects
o f the story. For instance, the evaluation after “ Foxy’s Cremation,” “ he’d
only just got his bloody ticket,” meaning he had just recently qualified as
.1 vicar, links the orientation before the story to its end. That Foxy had
some difficulty becoming a vicar makes his vagariesespecially culpable.
( )ne might expect the freshly investedtotake exceptional careas, according
10 succeeding evaluations, the bishop did.
Foxy’s Cremation
Preface Algy: Rut in more recent times— Miles
will r e m e m b e r Foxy.
Miles: Yeah.
Algy: Do you?
M il es: Ycali.
< )i ieni.uion Algy: Well lie you know took seventeen fries to get
a
lo he .1
ll.ll son.
96 Young

Miles: Did he?

Algy: Yeah and he
got in on the eighteenth try.
Miles: Hmhnm .
Beginning Algy: And one of his first jobs was to—
to— (ha) them in uni t— Oh what do you call
it.
Miles: {{Chuckles))
Algy: Cremation.
He had to chuck the ashes about, you see,
and he went in to—
into
Evaluation Huccaby Church and the bloody wind blew
End chucked them up and they went out over the
wall, you see
All: [{(Laughter))]
End Algy: [Oui over the moor.]
(Ha)
Well that— that—
Miles: {{Chuckles))
Evaluation Algy: he’d only just got his bloody ticket.
All: {{Chuckle))
Kat: [Why did it— ]
Evaluation Algy: [The bishop] was hopping mad.
Evaluation He said, “ How dare you, Foxy.”
The relationships between Foxy s recent qualification, his first job, and its
outcome are forms o f intention, in this case o f intention foiled or Hawed,
or what is more commonly described in literary theory as motivation.
The point appears to be lodged in the arrangement of events, whether it
was inserted there by nature or teller. But it is evident that this story could
be extracted from its evaluative nest and told on another occasion with a
different point, one about sacred ground or botched jobs or cremations,
say, rather than eccentric vicars. Clearly, though the point is introduced
into the story, a narrative sequence without one would fail in some sense to
be a story. The question is, does the story make the point or the point make
the story? FVents, it turns out, are not just tellable but tellable on occasions.
It is their relevance to this occasion that is the point o f the telling. Point
is what connects stories to occasions. The point of the telling can, though
it need not, invest itself in the point o f the story. To miss the point ol the
story, then, is either nor to see how the events in it connci I together or not
to see how they are relevant to the occasion ol tlteii idling.
 Fram e a n d B oundary 97

Taleworld evaluations not only can evaluate events in the taleworld but
also can specify the ontological status o f those events for the occasion on
which they are told. They can frame the events, that is, as real or fictitious.
In this set o f stories, evaluations o f events as true is one o f the warrants
for telling them. The truth o f the tale enhances the authoritativeness o f
die teller. In this vein Algy accompanies several of his stories with truth
evaluations. They are positioned before and after as well as during the
story.
Snailly House
Evaluation Algy: This is absolutely true.

Flaymen’s Pit
Evaluation A lgy; l hat is true and you won’t heat that anywhere.
’Tis absolutely gospel.

The Plough and the Hare

Evaluation Algy: T h at’s supposed to be true.

Ferreting
Evaluation Algy: I swear it’s perfectly true.
Truth evaluations identify the taleworld as one o f those realms we call
realities; the events in that realm are understood to have or have had an
instantiation in space and 'time. Such realities are quite diverse and can
include the realms of the past, present, and future; o f the supernatural or
i he scientific; o f dreams, play, and work, the realm o f the dead and the realm
ol the gods. Evaluations of taleworlds as fictive identify them as imaginary
realms, fairyland, perhaps, or hell, the supernatural or the extraterrestrial.
( Nearly, understandings about which realms arc fictitious depend on differ­
ences in individual or cultural cosmologies. Legends, for instance, depict
ext raordinary events located in the geography of the ordinary. Whether that
realm is seen as continuous or discontinuous with the world o f everyday
Ilie depends on the skepticism or belief o f teller and hearer. The displace­
ment o f extraordinary events to distant times or exotic places enhances
i heir credibility. Thus, Algy’s orientation to the legend of Jan Coo and the
"piskies” (the proper Devon pronunciation of pixies) locates it in a realm
dial existed in "seventeen hundred anil something,” permitting hearers to
peneive as unremarkable otherwise extraordinary events. I le goes on to
disi i i111i11.11e the story, “ I lie I )evil at Tavistoi k Inn,” Irom the story that
It till >ws 11.
98 Young

The School Inspector

Evaluation Algy: this is nothing to do with
fiction at all, this is true.
This suggests that the story o f the devil, along with the stories about the
piskies, the prince, and the gypsies, which also preceded it, can be regarded
as fictions. The frame thus operates backward as well as forward.4
The evaluations observed so far are part of the storyrealm, comments by
tellers and hearers on events transpiring in the taleworld. Evaluations are
also located in the taleworld in the form of remarks or other indications by
characters in that realm of an attitude toward the events. These “embedded
evaluations,” to use Labov’s term, are quoted by tellers or hearers to disclose
that attitude (372). Embedded evaluations characteristically transpire in the
course o f the events they evaluate. Here, however, Algy appends an ob­
servers comment about the vicars driving to give emphasis to his account
of Foxy’s surplice, the Bentley, and the deerstalker. Both observer and his
observation are located inside the taleworld. The first embedded evaluation
comments on the events and the second on their storyability.
Foxy’s Surplice, the Bentley, and the Deerstalker
Algy: Somebody stopped me once,
“ Who was that.”
Foxy absolutely tearing down Dartmeet Hill.
Kat: [Laughs)
Algy: Dccr— deerstalker.
Bentley with a bloody great leather strap over
its bonnet and everything (Laughs).
Kat: (Laughs)
Algy: Brooom
All: ((Laughs))
Algy: W ho on earth’s that.
Embedded “ O h,” I said, “thats our local vicar,” “ M y
taleworld G o d ,” he said, “what
evaluation extraordinary people you’ve got on” (Laughs).
All: ((Chuckle))
Algy: ((Chuckles))
Embedded “ U m ,” he said, that’s an extraordinary story.”
storyrealm
evaluation
As is evident from this transcription, laughing often counts as taking a turn,
not just as a way o f punctuating discourse. The utterance has the weight ol
evaluation. What is being evaluated can be inferred only by proximity, sit ice
laughter, unlike talk, does not carry linguistic direuion.s to its relereiu.
 Fram e a n d B oun dary 99

Labov elucidates evaluations exclusively in terms o f how they frame the

events stories are about. They are discovered here to frame stories as well as
events. Storyrealm evaluations lodge value in the story Hearers’ attention
is warranted by the quality o f the story, not o f the events. In this vein Algy
follows his story o f the three brothers with the evaluation.
Three Brothers
Evaluation Algy: Fantastic story, isn’t it,
to strike one in a bed of three.
Harvey Sacks describes evaluations as instructions for hearing-as (1992,
2N6). Such instructions can be designed to preclude interactional awkward­
ness by disclosing the attitude o f teller or hearer to the story being told. For
instance, Jean May follows her husband’s story about an idiot boy with an
evaluation.
Not 'Xactly and the Cigarette
Evaluation Jean: It was awfully embarrassing ’cause he always
used to stare at you.
And the horses as well.
This suggests that the rest o f us hear the story as an account of embar­
rassment rather than, for instance, as mocking an idiot. Evaluations also
provide information on how a story has been heard. Jean follows Algys
account o f her own misadventures in a runaway cart with the evaluation,
“ Poor pony,” suggesting an interpretation o f the episode on her part as
unfortunate, rather than courageous, and modestly circumventing com­
pliments on her adventurousness.
Evaluations are thus o f two sorts: evaluations o f the taleworld and eval­
uations o f the storyrealm. Evaluations o f the taleworld focus on the events
1 he story is about, rendering the story a transparency to another realm.
Evaluations o f the storyrealm focus on the telling, constituting the story a
realm in its own right. Evaluations of the taleworld can be located inside
that realm, in the storyrealm, or in the realm o f conversation. Evaluations
ol the storyrealm are located in the storyrealm or the realm of conversation.
(Fig. 2.4 shows the extension o f evaluations from the outermost realm o f
1 onversation to the innermost taleworld.) Although they can modulate the
internal dramatic structure of the story, evaluations have more general uses,
wliiih can be characterized as the management o f attitudes, interest, and
.mention on storytelling occasions.

Nil nut five lit munitions

I he 1 lusteiing ol It.lines along the boundaries ol the story accomplishes a
kind ol edgewoik lot storytelling. I In-1 lusteied lum es give a neat parity to
100 Young

Frame-in Frame-of

2
k_
0
1
|j Evaluation > Taleworld I Storyrealm

Evaluation Taleworld I Storyrealm

Evaluation—1> Taleworld I Storyrealm

Figure 2.4. Evaluations.

the literal and ontological limits of the storyrealm. The edgework under­
taken on the storytelling occasion also lends an appearance o f circumscrip­
tion to the events in the taleworld. The storyrealm invests boundaries in
the taleworld so that events there take on some o f its discretion. In reality
story boundaries are not neatly fitted down over the taleworld. Events in
that realm have their own boundaries. Access to the taleworld, however,
is only through the story. So, apprehensions o f the realm status o f events
in the taleworld are not contingent on experience o f that realm but on its
framework on the storytelling occasion.
Attention to the storyrealm implies an awareness ol the occasion as
performance, in the sense that it involves an undertaking by storytellers and
hearers to tell and hear stories. Attention to the taleworld draws awareness
away from the performer and the performance toward the events recounted
by them. This tilts the occasion toward the conversational rather than
the performative. During actual storytellings attention to the taleworld or
storyrealm shifts over the course of a single telling and over the course o f the
storytelling occasion as a whole. Roughly speaking, the fixed frames move
hearers from the storyrealm into the taleworld and out again; movable
frames create a shifting emphasis on one or the other of those narrative
realms. (Fig. 2.5 shows the shift from storyrealm to taleworld and back
again.)
Algy M ays story, “The Plough and the I 1.1 if," is brat keied by Moryivalm
 Fram e a n d Boundary 101

Preface
Evaluation
Opening — -> Taleworld I Storyrealm
Evaluation Taleworld I Storyrealm
ro Orientation .....>
(/>
i_
Storyrealm
a> Beginning
> ---> Taleworld
c E Orientation
o
CO
32
v_ Taleworld
o .....>
a> o Evaluation Taleworld
o
I End .....>
E o Taleworld
as CO Evaluation Taleworld I Storyrealm
a>
a: Closing Storyrealm
Evaluation .....>
Taleworld I Storyrealm
Coda Taleworld
Evaluation ..... >
Taleworld I Storyrealm

I 'igitre 2.5. Distribution of frames over storytelling.

evaluations. Attention inside the brackets is turned to the taleworld. The

story opens with an evaluation, which directs attention to its status as a
story: “ I like the story o f . . . This modulates directly into orientations
to the taleworld in which events transpire. Attention to the taleworld is
sustained by the coda and evaluations that follow. Frames in subsequent
conversation redirect attention to the storyrealm by reiterating evaluations
of it. These are succeeded by evaluations and frames of the taleworld, which
result in the content o f that realm, hares, being taken up as a topic of
t onversation.
The Plough and the Han
Storyrealm Algy: Now 1 like the story
evaluation about seventy
( Opening
taleworld
( Orientation
taleworld driving a tractor.
Beginning Miles: (((.'/curs throat))
lalewoi Id Algy: ploughing
orientation [with Hill|
lean: ini
1.ilewi ii Id Alp-: three luiiow plough
102 Young

orientation You know up and down the bloody field

and a hare got up
and the old man
lorgot his furrow and he
All: [((Laughter))]
Taleworld Algy: [took it out]
coda right— and gave chase,
[((Laughter))]
All: [((Laugh))]
Taleworld Algy: [FIad a lovely furrow]
coda right—
following this
hare all across the field.
All: [((Laughter))]
Taleworld
evaluation Algy: T h at’s supposed to be true.

Storyrealm Algy: You like that one, don’t you.

evaluation Miles: Hm.
Storyrealm
evaluation Algy: It’s lovely, too.
Taleworld Lovely straight furrows up and down
Orientation (Laughs)
You know, they’d been doing it for— all day.
Taleworld
closing Buuullwoom.
Evaluation All: [((Laughter))]
Algy: [Away he went in top.]
Taleworld Jean: There’s something magic about the hare,
coda perhaps that’s why— perhaps it cast a spell
on him.
Nor all kinds of frames turn up in each story, and only four kinds seem
co be essential to it: a preface, the beginning and end, and some sort o f
evaluation. These essential frames can all be directed to the taleworld but
not all to the storyrealm. A frame that can be directed to either realm is o f
particular interest in determining realm shift. Prefaces, for instance, can be
directed to either the taleworld or the storyrealm, thus focusing attention
at the outset on one or the other. Evaluations, turning up over the course o f
the storytelling, can closely control attention to both realms. The preface to
the already discussed “Three Brothers,” about practicing a story more than
once, is directed toward the storyrealm, and the story’s opening sustains
that direction. Frames then move into the taleworld until the ilosing,
 Fram e a n d Boundary 103

“Tchew,” which draws away hom the events to comment on them and
is in that respect evaluative. Codas and evaluations by tellers and hearers,
clustered together after the story, juggle attention between realms— on the
one hand, earthing the events in surrounding geography and contemporary
society and, on the other, charging the story with preternatural intimations.
Let me quote again the story with a fuller conversational context.
Three Brothers
Storyrealm Algy: Because you want to
Preface go through these thingsmore than oncc
before you start.
Kat: You don’t—
[What a silly idea.]
Jean: [Want some more sherry,] dear?
Have some more sherry.
Miles: Not for me, thank you.
Storyrealm Algy: [The point was,]
opening Jean: [Would you?] {{To Katharine))

Taleworld Algy: there were

beginning three
teenage
Frenchs
sleeping in one bed over here
Taleworld in the cottage— in the old house.
orientation Thunderstorm?
Father French comes down,
Taleworld Finds the center one
end struck
by lightning.
Storyrealm Three boys in one bed, center one killed,
closing
Storyrealm
closing Tchew
('losing and . . . .
evaluation
Taleworld One o f the surivors was Herman French's
i oda father—
Kat: Kxcu.se me.
Algy: Yeah?
I.ilcwoi III other one’s his utu le.
l 0 (1 ,1

I.ilcwoi Id Mill ( )|<

104 Young

Coda Fred, wasn’t it.

Algy: Fred,
yeah.
Taleworld Miles: Used to be up al Ollsbrim.
coda
Algy: [Fred was the]
cod?
Miles: [Or just at the end o f the] war-
Algy: other survivor.
Hm.
Kat: T h at’s o k . ( f lo Jean, refusing more sherry))
Storyrealm Algy: [Fantastic story, wasn’t it.]
evaluation
Taleworld Marian: [He was always a bit— ]
evaluation [H e was always a bit] funny actually, wasn’t he.
Storyrealm
evaluation Kat: [It was extraordinary.]
Taleworld Algy: Course he was funny {{to Marian)).
evaluation Dam n funny.
Taleworld Kat: T h at’s very strange.
evaluation
Storyrealm
evaluation Algy: Fantastic story, isn’t it.
Taleworld
abstract as
storyrealm
closing to strike one in a bed o f three.
The unusual layers o f storyrealm frames in “ Three Brothers” appears to be
due to Algy’s use o f that story to initiate storytelling on this occasion. Part
o f its business is to establish the storyrealm as a speech event. Once this
is accomplished, interest turns to the taleworld, which is evidenced by the
framing o f a later story, “ Foxys Crem ation,” with the taleworld frame, “ But
in more recent times— Miles will remember Foxy.” The framework o f this
storytelling occasion thus replicates the framework of a single story, moving
from the storyrealm into the taleworld and out again. The choice o f frames
can strategically manage attention to the taleworld or the storyrealm over
the course o f the storytelling occasion as well as during the telling o f one
story, thus adjudicating the ontological status o f the narrative occasion in
which tellers and hearers are participating.
Stories are enclaves in conversation, events in one realm bounded by
another (Schutz 256). The boundaries between these realms const it me
r

Fram e a n d B oun dary 105

natural junctures for presenting information about their differences in the

form of frames. Positioning frames between realms reiterates their dual
orientation: frames are oriented to the realm o f events they frame and to
the realm they frame those events for. The frames-of a story, for instance,
can be frames-for conversation. Frames are never of and for the same realm.
They can be located in the realm they frame, as beginnings and ends are
located in the taleworld or openings and closings in the storyrealm and
evaluations in each. They can be located in the realm they are frames-for, as
prefaces and codas, along with some evaluations, are located in the realm o f
conversation. Or they can be located in a third realm, as orientations to the
taleworld and for the realm o f conversation are located in the storyrealm.
Frames do not just enclose, or open and close, one realm; they specify a
relationship between two.
The taleworld, the storyrealm, the realm of conversation, indeed any
realm, can engage perceivers as an ongoing reality. Framing has the ca­
pacity to detach it from that engagement; to render it subject to reflec­
tions, attitudes, evaluations; to draw perceivers back and lodge them in
another realm, a realm from which they have a particular perspective on
the realm they had hitherto inhabited as real. That perspective is here
called a frame. In that sense frames separate as well as connect realms,
lb specify such perspectives on stories is to produce a phenomenology o f
narrative.

Transcription Devices

Line ends Pauses

From Tedlock
>= Absence o f obligatory pause
/ One-turn pause
Capital letters Start o f utterance
Down intonation at end of utterance
? Up intonation at end of utterance
Correction phenomena
() Doubtful hearings
(I lelie) Laughter
(( )) I'.ilitorial comments
[ | S i m u li. m e n u s speei li, overlaps w ith the si r i n g sim ila rly
m .lik e d on ilie next 01 p re vio us line
106 Young

Adapted by Malcah Yeagerfrom Shenkein

Up-down-middle intonation

Devised by Malcah Yeager (pers. comm., 1980)

.. . Elisions
English spelling English speaking

Notes

1. Consider also the structuralist view that redundancy draws out pattern (Bate­
son, Steps to an Ecology 130).
2. To finish a conversation, the transition property of utterance completions
must he suspended, usually by what Scheglolf and Sacks call a “terminal ex­
change”— for instance, a leave-taking sequence (256). To reinstantiate conversa­
tions after telling a story, the transition property o f utterance completions, which
has been suspended for storytelling, must be reinstituted.
3. Maurice Natanson notes that Allred Schutz used to refer to birth, death, and
aging as “metaphysical constants” (198). 1 larold Carfinkel uses the term background
expectancies (21).
4. Coffm an describes prospective and retrospective framing (543-45).

References

B arthes, R o la n d . “A n I n tr o d u c ti o n to the Stru c tu ral A n aly sis o f N a r r a t i v e . ” New

Literary History 6 (1974-75): 237—72.
Bateson, Gregory, andjuergen Rucsch. Communication: The Social Matrix of Psy­
chiatry. New York: Norton, 1968.
---------- . Steps to an Ecology o f the Mind. New York: Ballantine Books, 1972.
----------- . U n p u b li s h e d lecture. U n iv e r sity o f P e n n s y lva n ia, 1973.
G a r fi n k e l , H a r o l d . “ B a c k g r o u n d E x p e c ta n c ie s .” Rules and Meanings. E d . M a r y
D o u g la s . M id d l e s e x , E n g .: P en gu in , 1 9 7 7 .
Goffm an, Erving. Erame Analysis. New York: Harper and Row, 1974.
Labov, William. Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylva­
nia Press, 1972.
Labov, W il li a m , a n d D a v i d Fa nshel. Therapeutic Discourse. N e w Y o rk : A c a d e m i c
Press, 19 7 7 .
Labov, W illiam, and Joshua Waletzky. “ Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Per­
sonal Experience.” Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts. Ed. June Helm. Seattle:
University o f Washington Press, 1967.
Natanson, Maurice. Literature, Philosophy and the Social Sciences. The I Iague:
Martinus N ijhoff, 1962.
---------- . The Journeying Self: A Study in Philosophy and Social Rote, m a : Addison
Wesley, 1970.
 Fram e a n d B oundary 107

Prince, Gerald. Narratology. The Hague: M outon, 1982.

Ricoeur, Paul. “ Narrative l ime.” Critical Inquiry 7.1 (1980): 169-90.
Sacks, Harvey. “ On the Analyzability of Stories Told hy Children.” Directions in
Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography o f Communication. Ed. John Gum perz and
Dell Hymes. New York: Holt, Rinehart and W inston, 1972. 325—45.
---------- . Lectures on Conversation. Vols. 1-2 . Kd. Gail Jefferson. O xford, Eng.:
Blackwcll, 1992.
Schegloff, Emmanuel, and Harvey Sacks. “ Openings and Closings.” Ethnomethod-
ology. Ed. Roy Turner. Middlesex, Eng.: Penguin, 1974.
Schutz, Alfred. On Phenomenology and Social Relations. Ed. Helmut Wagner. C h i­
cago: University o f Chicago Press, 1973.
Shenkein, James, ed. Studies in the Organization o f Conversations Interaction. New
York: Academic Press, 1978.
Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. On the Margins of Discourse. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1978.
Tedlock, Dennis. Finding the Center: Narrative Poetry o f the Zuni Indians. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1978.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G . E. M. Anscombc.
N ew York: M acm illan, 1953.
 3
Gesture and the Poetics o f Prose

Justine Cassell and David McNeill

He who has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no
mortal can hide a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger­
tips; betrayal oozes out o f his every pore. Therefore, the task o f making
conscious the most hidden recesses of the mind can be solved quite
read i ly.-Sigm u n d Freu d

Spontaneous storytelling is structured on multiple levels, with subtle shifts

o f time and space, perspective, distance between narrator and narrated,
and integration o f the sequential with the nonsequential— these are its
fundamental dimensions. Much o f this structuring, however, is carried
out on the nonverbal level and is observed most clearly in the concur­
rent gestures o f the narrator. In this essay we will explore the integration
o f the verbal with the nonverbal in the real-time structuring of narra­
tive.
When we add gesture to speech, we shed light on many o f the same
questions that have been the focus of attention by narratologists. By adding
the dimension o f the hands in motion, we clarify the issue o f perspective,
in that speakers, by the way they use their hands, may convey where they
are standing vis-a-vis the event they are narrating. We elucidate the issue of
point o f view as well, because the speaker’s hands can make clear whether
the narrator is internal or external to the narrated event and whether the
speaker exists in the narrative as the speaker herself or as a. narratively
induced observer. In many ways gestures add another dimension to the
narrative— certain aspects o f events may only be conveyed in gesture and
not in speech, or vice versa, or different aspects may be conveyed in each
medium giving us a more complete view of the speakers conception ol the
event. From one gesture to the next, depicted imagery is partially the same
and is partially changed: the changes become highlighted oppositions in the
 Gesture a n d the Poetics o f Prose 109

structure o f the narrative, strengthening our understanding o f the parallels

and repetitions that make up the poetics o f prose.
Narrative language is thus not a two-dimensional affair with only in­
tersecting syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes: it has a full, rounded 3D
structure, one dimension o f which is imagistic (both visual and kinesic and
either holistic or analytic). Many of the parameters o f the basic structure
o f literary art are conveyed in gesture in spontaneous storytelling.
Our essay aims to demonstrate this point but rests on certain premises
that we had best state at the outset.

1. Narration has many properties that remain unchanged regardless o f

the genre. Thus, we can use storytelling from a cartoon “stimulus”
but treat our conclusions as having wider generalizability. The dis­
cussion here is based on a decade-long study o f the gestures that
spontaneously occur during videotaped narrations by children and
adults who have been shown a film or cartoon and are given the job
of recounting the story to a listener.
2. Storytelling is a social activity. To be a narrator is to fulfill a recog­
nizable social role with attendant expectations and responsibilities.
There really is, and must be, a listener, since this also is an essential
role in the storytelling “script.”
3. Spontaneous synchronized gestures are a part o f the narrative com­
municative apparatus as much as speech is. We are not referring here
to the sorts o f gestures that replace speech (known as “emblems”):
the thumb-and-index-fingcr ring gesture that signals “okay” or the
“thumbs up” gesture; or the kinds o f gestures that occur in the ab­
sence of speech, for example, “word-finding gestures” made when a
speaker is engaging in a word search; nor are we concerned with what
might be called “propositional gestures” (Hinrichs and Polanyi), such
as the use o f the hands to measure a particular space while the speaker
says, “ It was this big.” Rather, we are interested in gestures falling into
four major categories (to be described in this essay) that the speaker
makes, usually unwittingly, along with the verbal description o f the
events o f a story.
4. Gestures are partial evidence for the shape o f a speaker’s underlying
linguistic processes, in this case joining the narrators speech to give
a more complete picture o f the narrative event.

( lest 11 res o f t h e t y p e w e d e s c r i b e o c c u r o n l y w i t h s p e e c h a n d a r e c l o s e l y
l i n k e d to s p e e c h in m e a n i n g , f u n c t i o n , a n d t i m e , y e t s u c h g e s t u r e s a r e f u n -
i l a m e n i . i l l y d i f f e r e n t f r o m s p e e i h as e x p r e s s i o n s o l m e a n i n g a n d p r a g m a t i c
 1 10 Cassell a n d M c N e ill

function. This difference o f gestures from speech is a crucial fact that we

exploit.
One might suppose that the spoken word provides the most accurate
and perfect view of the events taking place at the moment of speaking.
Evidence from gestures synchronized with speech reveals, however, that this
is not so, that there is something more. Gestures are not merely a translation
o f speech into a kinesic medium. The two channels differ in fundamental
ways. Speech has standards o f well-formedness, is linear-segmented and
combinatoric, has duality of patterning, has recurrent forms that arc sta­
ble in different contexts, and is socially ratified. Gestures of the kind we
will describe are the opposite on every one of these dimensions. They are
not specifically organized into a socialized code. They do not constitute a
separate “gesture language.” They lack duality of patterning, standards of
form, a lexicon, and rules of combination. Yet these gestures are symbols
produced along with speech and supportive of its meaning and function.
Expanding our observational net thus to include speech and synchronized
gesture offers us two coordinated but distinct views of the same underlying
processes o f thinking-speaking-communicating. This is the essential point
o f our approach. It is not that gestures are uninfluenced by conventions but
that the conventions that influence the kind of gestures we study are the
conventions o f social life in general, not specific gesture conventions. Thus,
we set a conventionalized system o f linguistic code elements side by side
with a gestural performance that is not specifically conventionalized: this is
our justification for seriously studying gesture. If language is a window into
the mind, we find that it is not the only one; gesture is a second window, or,
better, a second eye, and gesture and language together provide something
like binocular vision and a new dimension o f seeing.
Spontaneous gestures accompany many types o f speech events (Rime
1983), but here we will, quite naturally, only discuss their occurrence during
narrating, in which it is the case that a representation o f events must
be conveyed to a listener and in which the imposition of coherence of
some sort— of a superordinate structure— is presumed to help the narrator
construct a story and the listener to understand it.

Competent storytelling depends upon a complex interaction of cultural

knowledge, cognitive representation, and linguistic skills. We use story­
telling or narrating to refer to the entire set of events that make up the
conveying o f a story by one person to another. Each of these events is
grist for the storytelling mill and may In* referred 10 by the storyteller.
That is, stories generally refer 10 what may be 1 ailed “emploiteil events” :

i
 Gesture a n d the Poetics o f Prose 111

incidents or occurrences that follow one another in a real or fictive world

(for example, a character climbs up a drainpipe to reach an upper story).
In addition to emplotted events, however, the stories we are conccrned
with also commonly contain references to the event o f observing the visual
text, or cartoon story (“ It was a Sylvester and Tweetie cartoon” or “ It was
an old movie, a very bad print” ), and/or to the event o f the storytelling
(“ I’m going to tell you about a cartoon I just saw” ). Reference to these
“metanarrative events” often acts to indicate junctures between the parts o f
a story. Narrative structure is provided on the verbal and the nonverbal
levels but is often more apparent on the nonverbal level (with English
speakers, at any rate). Before we discuss how gesture plays a role specifically
in narrative, however, let us lay out, first o f all, what we mean by narrative
structure and, then, what we mean by gesture.

Narratology: Stories Have Structure

The most straightforward definition o$ narrative, such as “the representa­

tion of a real or fictitious world in events or in actions which are realized
through human agents in the course o f a stretch o f time and in a specific
space” (Kloepfer 116), already presupposes a series o f semiotic structures
that interlock to form the textuality o f a narrative. That is, events, human
agents, a stretch o f time, and a specific space all presuppose a macrostruc­
ture from which those elements are chosen and in which their role in
the narration is specified as well as a discourse in which those roles are
spelled out. This is the meaning o f Jakobsons well-known statement that
“the poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis
of selection onto the axis of combination” (358). The represented events,
agents, times, and places are selected from “paradigms” o f possible such
structures, in order to be combined in the “syntagme” of discourse. No
choice is innocent: all that takes place on the linear axis o f the narrative
produced in real time draws from and also participates in a larger atempo-
ral, alinear organization that we may call simply “narrative structure.” In
addition, the notion of representation presupposes structure at the level o f
die represented (what the text refers to) and structure at the level o f the
representation (discourse structure). Narratology, although it often deals
with individual texts, more often addresses the structure of texts or kinds
ol lexts. And, indeed, in this essay we do not wish to stop with a definition
ol narrative such as that given earlier but intend to expand it in just the
diret lion ol the dimensions ol underlying structure.
We’ll si.in, however, wiili the dimensions listed by Kloepler. We will tie-
112 Cassell a n d M c N e ill

pend here on a fairly pre-theoretical model o f narrative that is simply com­

posed of: (i) the features o f some “real” world; and (2) their instantiation
in some narrative discourse. That is, the four aspects of each event o f the
narrative (action, person, time, space) are present in the world and instan­
tiated in the actual discourse. Both the “world” and the discourse have their
own constituent structure. The world of narrative may be conceivcd of as
a set o f interlocking participation frameworks, in which actors participate
in a given act. One participation framework is the telling o f a story, and
the actors are a narrator and his or her listener. Another framework is the
world of the story in which, for example, a man jealously watches his wife
through the slats o f window blinds. The units o f the participation frame­
work are represented events, each o f which is composed o f actions realized
by (human) agents over a stretch o f time and situated in a specific space.
This part o f the model represents the “seemingly adirectional, atemporal,
‘structural’ aspect” of poetic organization— in this instance, narrative. The
units o f the actual discourse are clauses, the “seemingly directional, tem­
poral ‘functional’ aspect. . . accomplishing the scmiotic work” (Silverstcin
196). In a clause each dimension o f the narrative unit is represented by
one or more grammatical choices. The parameters o f the event or action
may be marked by the verbal morphology (choice of an accomplishment or
state aktionsarten in a verb, for example); the human agent may be marked
by person on the verb and by pronouns and full-referring expressions, for
example; time may be marked by verbal inflections and temporal adverbial
phrases, such as “earlier that day” ; and space may be marked by deictic
and nondeictic locatives, such as “right here.” Each choice made in the
narrative framework thus is instantiated in the representing discourse by
way o f the speech and, as we will see, the gesture as well. For the moment
we will concentrate on the speech and will discuss gestural manifestations
o f narrative structure in the next section.
The participation frameworks and their ensuing instantiation in dis­
course occur at three narrative levels: the narrative level proper, the meta-
narrative level, and the paranarrativc level. Each o f these levels concerns a
different set of events that constitute the narrative act, and consequently
each level specifies a different value for the parameters o f action, person,
time, and space.
The narrator o f the stories that we study (stories told to a friend about
a cartoon or movie just seen) does not fill the role of narrator throughout
the storytelling process. The “narrator” is at first a viewer, face to (ace with
a television screen on which is displayed a “visual text” the representa­
tion in images of a particular story about Iweetie Bird and Sylvester or a
 Gesture a n d the Poetics o f Prose 113

murderer loose in London. After serving as die (somewhat) passive recip­

ient o f a narration, the roles are reversed, and the recipient then becomes
provider o f a narration, telling the story to someone who has never seen
the cartoon or movie. Each role entails a situational frame, or participation
framework that organizes spatial and temporal configurations of speakers
and hearers and experienced sequences of events. The sequence o f events
that constitutes the story proper is only one o f a number o f sequences o f
events that make up the narrative. The sort o f storytelling that concerns
us is composed of five “event lines” (Cassell and McNeill), or “stretches o f
time,” that make up the three narrative levels.

1. First there is the event sequcncc o f the story: plot time (Chatman,
Story and Discourse) or time of fiction (Genctte, Figures III). In the
cartoon Sylvester climbing up the pipe to his window is preceded by
the two simultaneous events o f Sylvester looking at Tweetie through
binoculars and Tweetie looking at Sylvester through binoculars.
2. This story is made available by way o f a visual text, which is the
cartoon. In the cartoon the event of Sylvester climbing up the pipe
is preceded by that o f Tweetie looking through binoculars, which is
preceded by Sylvester looking through binoculars. The story could
be transmitted by any one o f a number o f media, in any one o f a
number o f forms.
3. The viewing o f the cartoon also has its own temporal sequence of
actions: first the person watches a flickering screen and then sees
Sylvester with binoculars in his paws.
4. The person watching the cartoon forms a representation o f the visual
text that is more or less transparent with respect to the sequence o f
events depicted in the visual text. A description o f each o f the actions
performed by all o f the actors in their original temporal order is
maximally transparent, while flashbacks, or summaries such as that
expressed by “There’s some looking through binoculars that goes
on,” are less transparent.
5. Finally, there is the sequence o f recounting the cartoon to a lis­
tener: the interpersonal narrative. At this point the viewer becomes
a speaker and may say, “ First I’ll tell you who the characters are, and
then I’ll start the story for real.”

I hese narrative event lines are important because all o f them may equally
well form the subject of the narrative that the listener hears. That is, not
only (In' events ol Sylvester chasing Tweetie Bird and then not catching
him are conveyed in a narrative, but also the event ol watching the ear-

L.
114 Cassell a n d M cN eill

toon and then describing it arc described to the interlocutor. The event
sequence of the story (i) is the narrative level o f the discourse. The visual
text (2), viewing (3), and representation (4) form the mctanarrative level
o f the discourse— the part of the narrative that is about narrating. The
interpersonal narrative (5) is what we are referring to as the paranarrative
level o f the discourse: the part o f the story in which the narrator steps out
and speaks in his or her own voice to rhe listener.
Given this, it is not enough to say that the order of the story follows the
order of events, unless we specify which narrative events are being referred
to and which level o f the discourse (narrative, metanarrative, paranarrative)
is doing the referring. Order, and the other phenomena that narratolo­
gists commonly take as objects o f study (among them duration, frequency,
mode, and voice [Genette, Figures III]) have always been difficult to isolate
in the stream o f discourse. In speech there is rarely a clear-cut distinction
between reference to Sylvesters actions and reference to the narrator’s own
actions. The same linguistic devices serve. In gesture, however, distinctions
are drawn between these two levels o f the narrative. Likewise, distinctions
are drawn between the point of view of the narrator and that of the charac­
ters. In what follows we will show how gesture, taken in conjunction with
narrative speech, can elucidate these narrative phenomena in the text and
in the theory.

Typology o f Gestures

When people talk, they can be seen making spontaneous movements called
gestures. These are usually movements o f the hands and arms (although
occasionally the rest o f the body participates, especially so with child speak­
ers), and they are closely synchronized with the flow' of speech.
While many schemes have been proposed for categorizing gestures (for
example, Freedman; Ekman and Friesen; and Kendon, “ Some Relation­
ships” and “ Gesticulation and Speech” ), we find that the following semiotic
classification— a method that takes into account the relation o f gesture
forms to meaning and function— best reveals the gestural contribution to
narrative discourse. We list here four major types o f gesture recognized in
this scheme (see McNeill and Levy) and provide examples o f each. The four
types are iconic, metaphoric, beat, and (abstract) deictics.

Iconics
Iconic gestures bear a close lormal relationship to the semantic content
of speech. That is, in their lorm and manner ol execution they exhibit
 Gesture and the Poetics of Prose 1 15

F ig u re 3 .1 . A holistic iconic gesture with “and she dashes out of the house.”.

aspects o f the action or events described by the accompanying narrative

discourse. Iconic gestures can be holistic or analytic. An example o f the
lormer comes from a speaker describing a character from a comic book
story (fig. 3.1). As the speaker described a character leaving, saying, “And she
dashes out o f the house,” his right hand pulled back to form a fist and then
shot forward with the palm outstretched and facing down. This speaker’s
hand represents all o f the character’s body, with the arm representing the
path of his movement. The gesture is holistic in that the entire character is
represented as an undifferentiated whole. An example o f the latter comes
Imm the same speaker recounting another incident in the comic book story
dig. 3 -2)-
The narrator described a scene in which one o f the characters bends
a tree back to the ground by saying, “And he bends it way back” (cf.
Marslen-Wilson, Levy, and Tyler, for further analysis of this narrative).
As he described this event, his right hand rose upward and appeared to
grip something and pull it back toward himself. In this case the speaker’s
hand represented the hand o f the character he described. The relationship
between the gesture and referent is part-part. Iconic gestures thus reveal
not only speakers’ memory image of an event but also their point of view
mward it— whether they are participating as a character or observing the
ac 1 inns of another.

Metttjtliorics
Sin h gestures are like iconics in that they are representational.The pictorial
1 uiiieni ol a meiaphorie gesture, however, corresponds to an abstract idea,
116 Cassell and McNeill

not to a concrete object or event. A metaphoric gesture displays the vehicle

of a metaphor (Richards), such as using the two hands to depict a scale o f
judgment when saying the verb decide. A wide variety of different kinds
o f metaphoric gestures appears during narrative discourse in which space,
shape, and movement all take on metaphoric value. One specific type o f
metaphoric gesture that plays an important role in the framing o f the
narration is the “conduit” metaphoric (named after a similar linguistic
metaphor [see Reddy; Lakoff and Johnson]). vSome verbal examples o f the
metaphor, which represents information as a substance to be transferred,
are “Never load a sentence with more thought than it can carry” or “This
passage conveys a feeling o f excitement” (from Reddy 288, 313), but in
narrative discourse the conduit metaphor often appears only in gesture
form. Conduit metaphoric gestures most often have the appearance o f a
cupped hand that seems to contain the narrative and offer it to the listener.
An example is a speaker stating that he has just seen a cartoon and is about
to recount it to the listener (fig. 3.3).
The speaker creates and supports with his two cupped hands an “object”
that is metaphorically the cartoon and his upcoming narration. Gesture
thus complements speech, adding its own metaphoric image of the* narra­
tive event.
 Gesture and the Poetics of Prose 117

Heats
( >1 all rhe gestures, heats are the most insignificant looking, but appearances
.ire- deceptive, for beats are among the most revealing o f gestures for uncov­
ering the speakers construction o f the narrative discourse. In performing
beats, die hand moves with the rhythmical pulsations o f speech, often
.11 hieving downward or outward strokes along with the stress peaks o f the
.u i ompanying speech. Unlike iconic s and metaphorics, beats tend to have
die s.ime form regardless ol die coiiieni (McNeill and Levy). I he typical
118 Cassell and M cNeill

F ig u re 3 .4 . A beat gesture with “whenever she looks at him, lie tries to make monkey noises.”

beat is a simple flick o f the hand or Angers up and down or back and forth;
the movement is short and quick (fig. 3.4).
The scmiotic value of a beat lies in the fact that it indexes the word or
phrase it accompanies as being significant not purely for its semantic con­
tent but also for its discourse-pragmatic content. The beat is particularly
sensitive to the momentary indexing of the larger discourse structure or
narrative situation as a whole. Examples are marking the introduction o f
new characters, summarizing the action, introducing new scenery, and so
on. Thus, beats may accompany information that does not advance the
plot. With beats these events on the meta-level ol discourse can be inserted
 Gesture and the Poetics o f Prose 119

Figure 5.5. An abstract pointing gesture with “where did you come from before?” (speaker
on the left).

into the narrative, signaling the fact that they depart from the chain o f
events that constitute the plot line.

Abstract Pointing
1 V iciic gestures, or points, have the obvious function o f indicating objects
around the narrator, but they also play a part in narrations in which there
is nothing objectively present to point at. Although the gesture space may
120 Cassell and M cNeill

look empty, to the speaker it is filled with discourse entities. Deictic gestures
establish in space the participants o f a narrative and the participant events.
An example o f the former is a speaker who said, “The artist and Alice
are walking by,” pointing first to his right and then straight in front of
him, before making an iconic gesture for walking by. An example of the
latter comes from a speaker who asked his interlocutor, “ Where did you
come from before?” and accompanied that w'ith a point vaguely to one side
(fig. 3.5). The specific kind of abstract pointing, to be discussed later, often
occurs at the beginning of new' narrative episodes and scenes, in which it is
the dominant gesture. In this context pointing may mark the establishment
o f a new focus space (Grosz).
In narrations o f cartoon stories about three-quarters of all clauses are
accompanied by gestures o f one kind or another; o f these about 40 percent
are iconic, 40 percent are beats, and the remaining 10 percent are divided
between deictic and metaphoric gestures. In narrating films, the propor­
tions o f metaphoric and deictic gestures increase at the expense o f iconic
gestures (statistics from McNeill and Levy; and McNeill).

Function of Gestures in Narratology

Different kinds o f gesture appear depending on where in the narratological

structure the speaker is operating at any given time. The major associa­
tions o f gestures and narratological structures are summarized in figure
3.6. The chart shows the gesture situation reached by traversing the dif­
ferent combinations o f narratological features. Note that there arc missing
combinations, for example, there are no iconics and no perspectives at the
metanarrative or paranarrative levels. There are, however, different voices
throughout the chart: a character, an observer, the narrator as a narratively
created role or the narrator as herself in the experimental situation. Thus,
the different gesture occurrences are genuinely distinctive additions to the
narrative structure, and, by tracking them, along with speech, we can un­
cover the narrative structure exactly as it is being unfolded in real time.
In this section we will discuss the relationship between speech and
gesture in narrative and the function that gesture may serve as a part o f the
narrative process. We will concentrate on how gesture marks the various
elements o f a story: that is, how gesture participates in the depiction o f
action, person, space, and time; and also how gesture participates in the
processes or articulations o f the discourse— that is, the role of gesture in
narrative phenomena such as voice, perspective, and order that take a given
set o f abstract story components and realize them in a particular way, into
 Gesture and the Poetics o f Prose 121

Narrative level

Narr. Paran.

Iconic Metaph. No Gesture

or Deictic or Deictic
(Beat signal shifts
between levels)
Focal ization

Char. Obs.

Agent Other In scene Outside

All iconic
I
All iconic
I
C-VPT C-VPT O-VPT O-VPT
(Gesture acts (Gesture either
out specific surrounds narrator
character) or is in front)

I'ignre $.6. Gestures and narrarological structures ( c - v p t refers to “character viewpoint”

o vi>T refers to “observer viewpoint").

.i particular story. We pursue this program as part of an effort to investigate

i lie interactive aspects o f narrative— the process o f narrating. Attention has
U rn paid to the linguistic devices that “allow the linguist to recognize how
i lie narrator gradually comes to materialize his verbalization plan, how the
i ognitive story is organized linguistically” (Giilich and Quasthoff 175), but
liilie attention has until now been paid to the gestural devices that achieve
1 liese ends.

Narrative Story Level

I lu* narrative level is not an undifferentiated progression o f descriptive
11.1list's. It pivscnts events, real or fictive, in a text order that is taken by the
Ii'iicikt to be the same as ihc order of world events, but within this general
II onii sequence variaiions ol distance between events and the narrator can
.uni do appear. ( ies lures have theii part 10 play in this enrichment of the
tiai 1.11 ive Iinc. 11 011 it gesi tires aie 1 he 1 hi el .u 1 ompa 11 intents ol 1 he narrat ive
122 Cassell and M cNeill

level, but they change depending on narrative voice and perspective and
the distances implied by the different options within these parameters. In
parallel, the grammatical form o f speech also changes, and we see in speech
itself a further illustration o f iconicity, since multiple clauses are used to
depict narrative distance, as is gesture.

Voice
Voice— who is narrating at the moment— is interred from the form and
space o f the iconic gesture. We infer the character as the voice when the
depiction is dispersed over the narrators body in the appropriate way: the
narrators hand plays the part o f a characters hand, her body the part of- this
characters body, and so on. The gesture enacts the character, and we infer
that this character is the one who is narrating at the moment. Conversely,
if the depiction is concentrated in the hand, the character being shown
only as a whole in the hand, the voice is that of an observer/narrator.
The narrator’s body is an onlooker, and the voice is this onlooker, possibly
the “omniscient observer” o f fiction theory (Brooks and Warren) or the
narrator herself replicating her earlier role o f onlooker at the video screen.
The use o f space also differs for these voices, and this provides another clue
to differentiating them. With the character voice the space envelops the
narrator— it is a space for the enactment of the character and includes the
locus o f the speaker at its center. With an observer’s voice, in contrast, the
narrative space is localized in front o f the narrator— as if it were an imag­
inary stage or screen— and in this space the narrator moves the relatively
undifferentiated figures.
The following example illustrates both the observer and character voices.
The extract begins with the observer voice (fig. 3.7), shifts to the character
then back to the observer, and ends with the character once more. The
voices shift back and forth in this manner, but the shifting is not, we will
later show, random ( o - v p t , or observer viewpoint, is the observer voice;
c - v p t , or character viewpoint, is the character voice).

1. he tries going [up the inside of the drainpipe and]1 o - v p t iconic showing
blob rising up.
2. Tweetie bird runs and gets a bowling ball
3. [and drops it down die drainpipe] c-vpr iconic showing Tweetie shoving
bowling ball down.
4. [ a n d . . . as h e ’s c o m i n g u p a n d t he ] o - v p t iconic with t h e r i g h t h a n d f o r a
b l o b r i s i n g u p w h i l e t h e left h a n d f o r t h e b o w l i n g ball is f l o a t i n g m o t i o n l e s s l y

in t h e u p p e r p e r i p h e r y .
5. [ b o w l i n g b a l l ’s c o m i n g d o w n | o - v p t iconic w i t h th e I d i h a n d f o r (lu- b o w l i n g
 Gesture and the Poetics o f Prose 123

b al l c o m i n g d o w n , w h i l e t h e r i g h t h a n d f o r t h e c h a r a c t e r f l o a t s in t h e l o w e r
periphery.
6. [lie s w a l l o w s it] o - v i > t ic o n ic w i t h t h e left h a n d ( b o w l i n g bal l) p a s s i n g i n s i d e

t he s p a c e f o r m e d b y o p e n i n g t h e r i g h t h a n d ( c h a r a c t e r s m o u t h ) .
7. [ a n d h e c o m e s o u t th e b o t t o m o f t h e d r a i n p i p e ] o -v p t ic o n ic in w h i c h b o t h
h a n d s p l a c e r o u n d ball i n t o o w n s t o m a c h .
K. [anti he’s got this big bow ling ball inside him] c - v r r in w hich both hands
place round ball into own stoma*. h.

I he lu ru to i began with n Vl’ i, shilled immediately to <: Vl’ i, reverted

124 Cassell and M cNeill

to o - v p t again, and ended with another c - v p t . In terms o f distance the

narrator was at first remote from the fictive world, then inside it, then
remote, and finally inside again. These are not random wobblings but
apparently motivated movements to and from the narrative line to encode
the degree o f centrality o f the event at each moment, c - v p t and near
distance appeared exactly with events that are the causes and effects in
the chain leading to the grand finale o f the episode: the character ending
up with a bowling ball inside him; this is the effect. The cause was the
other character dropping the bowling ball down the pipe. These two events
were narrated in close-up, as it were, with c - v p t gestures. The rest o f the
events are relatively peripheral, supporting this chain but not directly causes
and effects (the character entering the pipe, the ball and the character
at opposite ends of the pipe, and the ball entering the character are all
secondary to the main causal chain), and they were marked with O - v p t
gestures and far distance. All gestures are iconic, and all clauses are narrative
level, but events and clauses are not equal in terms o f their importance for
advancing the story line, and this difference in centrality motivates changes
of distance, depicted in the gesture voices o f the narrative.
Statistical confirmation of this distinction between the charactcr and
observer viewpoints is contained in table 3.1, which is based on an analysis
of three cartoon narrations by Church and others. Working from story
grammar categories, Church and her colleagues classified story events as
“central” or “peripheral” : central meant (1) initiation o f goal actions; (2)
main goal actions; and (3) outcomes o f goal actions; while peripheral meant
(4) setting statements; (5) subordinate actions; and (6) responses to actions
and outcomes (a further category— describing a goal— was never depicted
in gestures and was rarely described in speech). Using these definitions,
the tw'o viewpoints can be shown to appear in quite different contexts:
C - v p t (voice) dominates with central events; o - v p t is mainly used with
peripheral events. Phis functional separation suggests that the character
voice appears when events are salient. The narrator begins to play the part
of the characters directly, and this shifts the gesture mode to the c - v p t ,
altering the meaning o f the hands, limbs, movement, and space.
Linguistic form also encodes distance. Once we have taken note o f
gestural voice, we also notice that, in fact, there are co-expressive linguistic
manifestations of voice as well. These linguistic manifestations, however,
are not always obvious. The c - v p t tends to appear with sentences that,
in their own grammatical construction, get close to the narrated action.
These are simple single-clause sentences that use, where possible, active,
transitive verbs. An illustration is “and drops ii down 1 lie drainpipe,” which
 Gesture and the Poetics oj Prose 125

Table 3 . 1 . Percentage o f narration events of each type

I'.vent Type C-VPT O-VPT Uncodable Number of Events
■aural 71 24 5 66
IViipheral 6 93 1 72

was accompanied by a c - v p t gesture in which the hand appeared to grasp

the ball and shove it down into the pipe. The very form of the sentence
expresses the same kind o f proximity to the story line. The second c - v p t
gesture appeared with an intransitive verb (“and he comes out the bottom
ol the drainpipe”) but in a simplex sentence. From this we can say that
c - v p t is not simply a gestural analogue to verbal transitivity but is, rather,
,i manifestation o f a style o f narration that has its other manifestations in
sentence structure and verb transitivity when the lexicon allows it.
The o - v p t conversely tends to appear with complex sentences (multiple
11 a uses)— syntactic structures that, in their own configuration, interpose
distance from the action. Distance is introduced because the action is in the
embedded clause and the higher clause expresses a narrative attitude that
implies an observer. In the o - v p t examples given earlier, for example, the
speaker said, “he tries going up the inside o f the drainpipe,” in which the
narrative event is going up, and this was embedded in a clause expressing
die judgment o f a noncharacter observer (“ he tries” ). Likewise, the other o-
vp i s were accompanied by two subordinate clauses that interpose distance
si nicturally between the narrator and the action (“as he’s coming up and the
bowling ball’s coming down”). The third clause, “ he swallows it,” looks as
il it should have been accompanied by a c - v p t gesture but was not because
ibis was a minor outcome compared to the major outcome presented next
with a c - v p t gesture (“and he comes out the bottom”). Note that the effect
ai ibis point ofTweeties dropping the bowling ball is revealed only in the
I'esiure.

The examples so far have presented a single voice. Dual voice was a
key concept in Bakhtins notion o f dialogue, or hybrid construction, in
which, for example, “the subordinate clause is in direct authorial speech
ami die main clause is someone else’s speech” (304). In gesture a very similar
M i u . u i o n emerges, in which two voices are simultaneously heard or seen;

in 1 he following example a character is simultaneously depicted from two

viewpoints, die perspective of the character himself and the perspective of
an outside observer (lig. $.S).

1. and 11u- j’,iabs Iweelie Mini . . . and as he| I land appears to grip som ething
ai eye level (tli.it is, ( vi'T).
126 Cassell and M cNeill

I'igure 3.8. A dual v ie w po in t iconic gesture. The left panel show s the character vie w po in t
with “ he grabs Iweetie Bird as he" and the right panel the dual vi ew p o i n t w it h “com es
back d o w n . ” T h i s second gesture retains the character v ie w po in t wh ile a d d i n g the observer
vi e w p o i n t in the form o f the d o w n w a r d trajectory (the speaker co n tin ue d w it h the dual
vi e w p o i n t in a third gesture and moved her hand, still in a grip, to the right to s h o w Sylvester
r u n n i n g away).

2. [conics back] down he lands on the ground Hand still gripping something
(that is, c - v p t ) plunges straight down (that is, o - v p t ).

The gesture in figure 3.8 at (t) depicts grabbingTweerie Bird from Sylvester’s
perspective; the concurrent sentence likewise minimizes distance with its
simplex construction and transitive verb (“he grabs . . . and so on). The
gesture at (2) continues the c - v p t o f (1) while adding a downward plunge as
seen from the perspective o f an outside observer; this sentence also increases
the distance by adopting a complex structure (subordinated under as in
“as he comes back down . . . ,” and so on). As in Bakhtin, the dual voice
enables the narrator to present two narratives, two styles, two semantic and
axiological belief systems, at oncc. We can speculate that it occurs when,
as here, one voice is contrasted to the other to produce an ironic effect
(in this case the observer watches the character at a moment when the
character believes he has conquered, but it is a moment that actually is, as
the observer knows, a prelude to disaster).

Perspective
Perspective— where the observer stands- also is revealed in the narrator’s
r

Gesture and the Poetics of Prose 127

gestures (a ll with an o - v p t ) . This is a separate question from voice; it

is not who is speaking hut where the narrator speaking for the observer
is standing as she observes the scene. Two forms o f perspective appear,
the most common being the outside observer who was described in the
bowling ball scene. 1'he other is common among children but is rather
infrequent with adults, and it places the observer inside the scene, a kind
o f resident eye that cannot participate but can see. The following examples
from two different speakers present the same event from these contrasting
perspectives— the first the outside observer perspective, the second the
uncommon inside observer perspective.

AN OUTSIDE OBSERVER.
i. a n d h e tries to s w i n g f r o m a n u p p e r - s t o r y w i n d o w o f o n e b u i l d i n g [ r ig h t
i n t o j T w e e t i e ’s w i n d o w . B l o b m o v e s f r o m ri gh t s i d e to le ft s i d e o f g e s t u r e

space.

This perspective focused on Sylvester swinging from the side, apparently

simulating the experience o f the narrator herself watching the cartoon ( the
right-to-left direction of the gesture was the same as the trajectory shown in
the cartoon). The syntactic structure of the utterance is again multi-clause,
with the upper clause implying an observer (“ he tries” is the narrators
assessment o f the characters lack of success; it is probably not a description
o f his goals).

AN INSIDE OBSERVER.
i. a n d y o u see h i m s w i n g i n g d o w n [ a c r o s s a r o p e ] . B o t h h a n d s c l a s p e d t o g e t h e r
m o v e f r o m a l o c a t i o n in f r o n t o f t h e n a r r a t o r ’s r i g h t s h o u l d e r co t h e f r o n t

a n d left.

From this trajectory we infer the perspective of an observer who is standing

in the middle o f the space that the character is swinging through and is
watching him swing from rear to front. The space was thus inside the fictive
world, with the narrator not as one of the characters but as a participant
observer. The speaker in this framework is playing the role o f a fictive entity,
the narrative observer. The gesture puts the narrator right in the middle of
the action, while the speech, as with other o - v p t gestures, distances him
with reference to the viewing o f the event with “and you see . . . .” The
shift to inside observer status is apparent only in gesture, therefore.
In both examples the issue of perspective is fleshed out by reference to
the speaker’s gestures, with significant aspects o f perspective only apparent
in the nonverbal channel. In this gesture a dual viewpoint is adopted:
both ill.ir.n lei .itul inside observer. *I'lie narrator's clasped hands represent

L
128 Cassell and M cNeill

Sylvester’s paws, while the swinging movement across space is one that only
an observer could recount. This double viewpoint may stem from the ironic
contrast o f two axiological belief systems, the character’s confidence in the
triumphant swing and the observer’s wry awareness o f an upcoming disaster
(the character smashes into a wall). The inside observer’s perspective— by
bringing the observer into the scene— may enhance this contrast.

Movement to Other Narrative Levels

Choices about voice and perspective are made within the narrative level
proper, but a story is very rarely entirely narrated at that level (except
perhaps by young children). In the same way that a narrative would be
barely comprehensible if it were entirely composed o f reported speech
without framing clauses, a story is easier to understand when parts o f its
structure are made explicit. Thus, narrators move from the narrative to
the metanarrative (and the paranarrative) level throughout the discourse.
The shifts o f level can be seen most clearly through two different gestural
phenomena: the use o f beats to mark movement and the semiotic value of
deictic gestures found within levels.
As described earlier, the narrator of the stories that we are studying
does not fill the role o f narrator throughout the storytelling process. The
narrator is at first a viewer, face-to-face with a television screen on which
is displayed a “visual text”— the representation in images o f a particular
story about 'Iweetie Bird and Sylvester. After serving as the (somewhat)
passive recipient o f a narration, the roles are reversed, and the recipient
then becomes provider of a narration, telling the story to someone who
has never seen the cartoon. Each role entails a situational frame, or partici­
pation framework (called a “framei” in Hanks), which organizes spatial and
temporal configurations of speakers and hearers and experienced sequences
o f events. The sequence of events that constitutes the story proper is only
one of a number o f sequences of events that make up the narrative. The sort
o f storytelling that concerns us is composed o f five event lines, or sequences
o f events. One of these event lines contains narrative information, three
come under the rubric of metanarrative information, and one final event
line gives paranarrative information. The importance o f these different
frames or event lines is threefold: (i) that particular gestures are found
marking the movement between event lines; (2) that different kinds ol
gestures are found at each narrative level; and (}) that the gestures that
are found have a different value depending 011 the event line in which they
participate.
 Gesture and the Poetics of Prose 129

Gestures That Mark Narrative Movement

The following excerpt is from the very beginning o f a cartoon narration by
an adult speaker. It demonstrates how gestures function to indicate the kind
o f narrative information that is given in the clause that they accompany.

1. Um have you [seen any of the uh] Bugs [Bunny cartoons]?

beat beat
2. [Right],[ok this one][actually wasnVja Bugs Bunny cartoon
beat beat beat
3. [It was one o f the— the series]
metaphoric: object in a series of objccts
4. and it had [Tweetie Bird and Sylvester]
heat
5. [so so so you know] [the cat right]
beat beat
6. right un huh
7. and uh [the first scene you see is uh]
iconic: window ledge
8. [this this window'][with birdwatchers society underneath it]
iconic: window ledge iconic: sign
9. and [there’s Sylvester peeking] around the window
iconic: enacts Sylvester peeking

'.I’he first clause o f this narration does nothing to describe the story but
does function to involve the listener; it has an interpersonal function.
This participation frame is signaled by twro beats. The second and third
clauses still do not describe the story but classify the visual text (cartoon)
as an example o f a genre: the event line indexed here is the representation
o f the cartoon, and it is signaled by three beats. The third clause is also
accompanied by a metaphoric representing the nature o f the series (we will
discuss this choice o f gesture later in the essay). The first introduction o f
the protagonist o f the story, Sylvester, is also indexed by a beat, at line 5.
Generally, in the flow of a narration, beats take place when the narrator
withdraws momentarily from the narrative plot line and enters another par­
ticipation frame either to repair a lexical item (a metalinguistic function),
to introduce a new character (a metanarrative [representational] event), or
to add new information about an already introduced topic in the narra­
tion (also a metanarrative function). That is, beats can be said to signal
a momentary increase of distance between the narrator and the narrated
event. Thus, a clause in which a beat is found often performs not the ref­
erential Intu lion ol describing the world but the metapragmatic function
ol indexing.1 relationship between the speaker and the words uttered. The
130 Cassell and M cNeill

relationship indexed in the previous example was one of" objectification:

the story was being described not yet in terms o f a series o f events in
the world but as an object with external contours. The metaphoric, then,
in clause 3, appropriately depicts the story-as-object. Thus, beat gestures
can signal movement between narrative levels, and between participation
frames within levels, even when this movement is not consistently marked
in the speech channel.

The Value of Narrative Space

We have described the gesture space in front of a listener as an active arena
in which the actions o f characters in a story are enacted and in which
a narrative observer may be depicted as watching those actions. Another
feature o f the gesture space, however, is its changing semiotic value. That
is, the same physical space can be, at different points during the narration,
occupied by Sylvester and Tweetie Bird, by a television screen and a viewer,
or by the actual narrator and her listener. These changes in value are marked
by deictic gestures, which point out the participants in the current frame
o f interpretation. 'The following excerpt comes from a narration o f a full-
length Hitchcock movie (Blackmail 1929).
1. (it— its sort of a fade-out]
Metaphoric: fade out (curl and uncurl hand)
2. [y’know Frank obviously mad] [stalks oil ]
Deictic: over right shoulder
Iconic: stalks off
3. and then the next time we see [anyone] [involved . . . ]
Deictics: point down right
4. Frank and Al— [not Frank]
Metaphoric: negation (closing hand)
5. [the artist) [and Alice] are [walking by]
2 Deictics: points towards right & then center
Iconic: walking center to left (away from Alice’s space).
Several deictic gestures are found in this segment o f the narration, but,
although the deictics look morphologically identical, their semantic value
is different with each occurrence. The first deictic gesture indicates the
location of a character in the story, at the narrative level proper. Frank,
whose previous position has been shown by an iconic made in center
space, directly in front o f the narrator, is now shown to be leaving the
stage rightward in the first deictic gesture described here. The next deictic
gesture, occurring in clause 3, also points toward the right (this time front
and down rather than up and back), but this time the point occurs at the
metanarrative level, indicating in span- the position ol a new .scene (or
 Gesture and the Poetics of Prose 131

new focus space [Grosz]). The metaphoric gesture for a fade-out has been
made moving from the left to in front o f the narrator; by contrast, the new
scene is introduced to the speakers right. It is fairly common in full-length
narrations o f this sort for an invisible timeline to be established in front
o f the narrator, with events moving forward into time from left to right.
The third deictic, although it indicates the same place in space, refers back
to the narrative level and to the position o f two new actors, the artist and
Alice. The spatialization of their position is used in the subsequent iconic,
which shows the two of them leaving from the right and walking left.
Deictics also occur at the paranarrative level, as shown in the next excerpt
from the very beginning o f a Sylvester and Tweetie Bird narration.
1. Well ++ fit was one of the alini Tweetie Pie and ahm] ++ the cat ++ [cartoons]2
Beats
Metaphoric: hands present cartoon to listener
( l i s t e n e r : Sylvester)
2. [Sylvester] right ++
Deictic: points at listener
In this example a deictic gesture serves to point out the participants of the
interpersonal participation frame, who share a common piece o f informa­
tion— the name of a cartoon character.
Deictic gestures are part o f the way in which narrators seem to diagram
the plot structure o f their story. Physical space becomes a space o f referential
possibilities, and any refocusing o f the referent space brings out pointing.
In terms o f the narrative model this abstract pointing marks new characters,
at the narrative level proper; new events, at the metanarrative level; and a
relationship between speaker and hearer, at the paranarrative level.

Gestures at the Metanamative Level

Within each narrative level there are characteristic patterns of gesture oc­
currence. In our corpus o f stories, beats are evenly distributed between the
narrative and the extranarrative level (a category that collapses metanarra­
tive and paranarrative). But metaphorics and iconics show a skewed distri­
bution: metaphorics arc much more frequent on the paranarrative levels,
deictics on the narrative level. Here we will therefore focus on metaphoric
gestures. •'

M etaphoric Gestures in M etaiutrrative

In an earlier section o f the essay we described metaphoric gestures as having
a representational function for ideas expressed in the accompanying speech
that do not have a physically depic table lorm. This (unction is most olten
132 Cassell and M cNeill

called into play in metanarrative speech, in which the cartoon narration

may be objectified and commented on in the verbal channel and presented
as an object in the gestural channel. A prototypical example comes from
the beginning o f a cartoon narration quoted earlier.
i. Well ++ [it was one of the ahm Tweetie Pie and ahm] ++ the cat ++ [cartoons]
Beats
Metaphoric: hands present cartoon to listener
The narrator here forms a largish bowl shape with his two hands and raises
this bowl from his lap toward the listener. This is a conduit metaphoric
gesture: the speaker presents information as if contained in a bounded
object that can be passed to the listener. In this example speech and gesture
work together to make clear the metanarrative level at which the narration
begins. The speech presents the cartoon as an example of a type (“ it was
one o f the”), while the gesture represents the narrator not as an observer
but as the conveyor o f this object, which is the cartoon.
A similar example comes from an episode boundary in a cartoon narra­
tion.
i. and . . . of course the next [develop]ment in the plot is
Metaphoric: Both hands present an object to listener
Conduit metaphorics are frequent at these episode junctures in the cartoon.
H ie speaker in the first example is not referring to a specific event; he is
referring to the cartoon as a whole and to his upcoming narration o f the
cartoon— in our terms, to events in the metanarrative and paranarrative
participation frames. In both o f the narrative and meta- or paranarrative
uses o f the metaphoric gesture, time is instantiated as a bounded entity,
the time o f the next event in the plot line, the time o f the viewing of the
cartoon (as manifested in speech in a past tense verb was). Thus, narrators
localize the various narrative times in the gesture channel.
Process metaphorics are also fairly common in narrative. The next ex­
ample (fig. 3.9) also comes from the beginning o f a cartoon narration.
1. Now we get into the film proper
Metaphoric: both hands rotate toward listener
Here the narrator is concentrating on the continuity between events lead­
ing into the cartoon, as opposed to the singularity o f this particular cartoon.

Gestures at the Paranarrative Level

The striking characteristic o f gesture use at the paranarrative level is how
reduced it is. When narrators speak as themselves, outside of a necessar­
ily narrative situation but adopting the role- of a participant in a socially
defined situation of speaker and hearer, they make- only a small number
 Gesture and the Poetics o f Prose 133

F ig u r e 3.9. A process metaphoric gesture with “now we get into the film proper.”

o f gestures o f a restricted kind. Iconic gestures are virtually absent, as are

metaphoric gestures. Deictic gestures are found, as described earlier, when
1 hey index knowledge shared by speaker and hearer. The role o f deictic
gestures here is to point out (so to speak) the participants o f the event. Beat
gestures are also found when they mark the inception o f a paranarrative
port ion o f the discourse or when they signal repairs or other metalinguistic
work. This is not to say that the nonverbal channel is inactive at the para­
narrative level. Gaze, for instance, plays an important role in structuring
1 lie participation ol a speaker and hearer in a narrating event. Note also
that outside ol narrative discourse (in conversations) gestures are highly
abundant. Thus, reduction ol gesture in paranarrative contexts seems to
In- a spec ific clue lor this level of narrative organization, opposing it to the
narrative and melananai ive levels.
134 Cassell and M cNeill

Conclusion

The contemporary analysis of narrative texts has in the past fifteen years
begun to take place along multiple intersecting axes, such as those o f per­
spective and mode, voice and person. Rut the analysis still remains in the
one dimension of the temporal linearity of the text. When, by studying
the concurrent gestures of the narrator, we add the nonverbal level to this
picture, we find ourselves in a cross-cutting world of imagery that coexists
with the linear timeline of the narrative. A written text may include hints
o f this atemporal structure, but in a written text it is an implied dimension
and often cannot be isolated in specific linguistic structures. Rather, the un­
derlying structure of the text must be inferred from a pattern o f usage that
is inherently imprecise as to locus. A spoken text, through its gestures, may
make this imagery and discourse structure explicit. Gestural distinctions
show the exact moment at which the narrator shifts voice and perspective
and changes distance between herself and the narrative text.
We can raise the question o f why gestures do these things. It is possi­
ble that gestures smooth the way for the articulatory processes o f speech
formation itself (Freedman), though this is not the kind o f gesture aid
that we have in mind. For the speaker gestures offer the advantages o f an
externalization o f the narrators relationship to the events being conveyed,
in pure form. A speaker who wants to convey the “essence” o f a story can
externalize this concept in a directly sensible manner, in a gesture that
creates a small, bounded, tightly contained space. The speaker’s sense o f
the perceived centrality versus peripherality of the events in a narrative
takes on concrete form in gesture voice and perspective. Narrative distance
may be represented here by the actual physical distance o f a narrator from
the narrated. These images do not only come out of but also can have
real ongoing consequences for the speaker’s thoughts and, therefore, for
narrative and memory. Thus, for both the speaker and the listener, gestures
help to build a representation of the narration, at all o f its levels, and play
an important part in the “ telementation” of the story.

Notes

Preparation o f this article was supported by grants b n s 8211440 and b n s 8518324

from the National Science Foundation, by grants in 198T and 1989 from the Spenccr
Foundation, by a 1989-90 dissertation research grant from the National Science
Foundation, and by a 1989-90 dissertation grant from the Spenccr Foundation. We
wish to thank Anna Bosch and Faura I’cdelty foi commenting on the manuscript.
The accurate and expressive drawings are the work ol I .aura I’eilclty.
 Gesture and the Poetics o f Prose 135

Table 3.2. Frequency o f gesture types in narrative contexts

Type of clause Iconic Beat Metaphoric Deictic None Total

N a rr a tiv e 226 134 1 25 146 543
H x tra n arra tivc 35 134 31 3 44 247
T o ta l 261 268 43 28 190 790

1. Square brackets mark the extent o f the gest ure.

2. Plus signs (++) stand for pause length.
3. Table 3.2 shows the frequency o f gesture types on the narrative and extranar­
rative levels. It was tabulated on the basis o f Sylvester and Tweetie Bird cartoon
narrations by six adults.

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L
2. Still Pictures

What does it take for static images to evoke a story that extends over time?
The need to acknowledge the narrative potential o f visual media is one of
the main reasons for transmedial narratology to recognize a wider variety
of narrative modalities than the unmarked case o f diegetic, autonomous,
determinate narration. Since pictures, left by themselves, lack the ability
to articulate specific propositions and to explicitate causal relations, their
principal narrative option is what I call in the introduction the illustrative
mode. In the words of A. Kibedi Varga, “The image is not a second way of
telling the tale, but a way of evoking [that is, recalling it from memory] it”
(204; emph. added). This statement applies not only to the vast majority of
narrative paintings but also to ballet and musical compositions. It is bccause
the spectator o f the ballet Sleeping Beauty has a well-formed mental image
of the fairy tale that she can recognize the plot in the gestures o f the dancers.
The same is true o f religious medieval paintings or o f musical compositions
inspired by stories (for example, Telemanns Don Quixote suite). Compared
to the ability to articulate new stories, illustrative narrativity is admittedly
a rather weak and subordinated mode, but this does not mean that it
should be dismissed as entirely parasitic. In the best of cases illustrations do
not simply evoke preexisting narrative images but also create a symbiotic
relation with the verbal version. Whereas they import logical relations and
psychological motivation from the known story, they return visualizations,
emotional coloring, or facial expressions that may provide a clue to the
motivations o f characters. In the most successful cases (here 1 am thinking
o f Sir John Tenniel’s illustrations to Alice in Wonderland) the verbal and
visual version blend in the mind of the reader-spectator into one powerful
image, each version filling the gaps of the other.
But illustrative narrativity is not the only mode available to visual media.
Silent film and pantomime can articulate simple tales, for instance, the
story ol a rejected lover; present-day comics strips represent original mini­
dramas without using .1 single word; and post-Renaissance genre painting
140 Still Pictures

rejects traditional mythological and biblical subjects in favor o f previously

untold stories from everyday life. Wendy Steiner observes in her contribu­
tion to this volume, “ Pictorial Narrativity,” that genre scenes are usually
low in tellability and that they rely on what cognitive psychologists regard
as standard narrative schemata: the market script; the drinking party script;
the music-making script. The familiarity of the schemata makes genre
painting almost illustrative. But some works within the breed rise to a more
autonomous and more interesting form o f narrativity. A case in point is the
painting Breakfast Scene by William Hogarth. The picture is actually part
o f a series titled Marriage a la Mode, but it tells a self-contained story, and
it does so without relying on the verbal resources o f its rather bland title.
We see a couple of newlyweds in an elegant house, the man collapsed in a
drunken stupor, the woman laughing, squirming, and looking very tipsy.
The floor is littered with upturned furniture, and a servant is trying to clean
up the mess while yelling at a debt collector who is leaving the scene with
a gesture o f total despair. Behind the intoxicated couple, on the fireplace
mantelpiece, the bust o f an elderly woman frowns her disapproval. The
painter has caught the couple at the end of a night of excesses, just before
they sober up and face the consequences o f their irresponsible lifestyle. The
tellability of the story asserts itself in an inescapable moral: these people will
not live happily ever after, nor will the society that breeds and nurtures their
kind.
Whether they tell or merely illustrate stories, still pictures can chose
between two strategies. The technique exemplified in Breakfast Scene is the
selection of what Gotthold Ephraim Lessing calls a “pregnant moment.”
Drawing on the Russian formalist distinction between fabula and sjuzhet
(itself equivalent to the better-known distinction o f story, the told events,
and discourse, their medium-based presentation), Emma Kafalenos argues
that narrative paintings compress the sjuzhet Into a single scene, leaving it to
the spectator to unfold this shot into a plot, or fabula: “A painting or pho­
tograph with narrative implications offers the perceiver an experience that
is comparable to entering a narrative in medias res; we ask ourselves what
has happened, what is about to occur, and where we are in the sequence o f a
narrative” (59). The pregnant moment technique is particularly well suited
to the presentation o f original stories, but the price o f narrative autonomy
is often a loss of determinacy. A work that defines only one point on the
narrative trajectory presents the spectator not with a specific story but with
an array o f narrative possibilities. Every spectator will plot a different story
line through the fixed coordinates of the pregnant moment, and this story
tends to fray toward the edges, since Ilit* network of possibilities increases
 Still Pictures 141

in complexity the farther one moves away from the climactic moment.
It is only in cartoons without caption {sans paroles), a genre much more
popular in French than in American culture, that the technique allows the
transmission of a fairly determinate narrative: since humor resides in very
narrowly definable features, the readers who get the point must reconstruct
closcly similar stories.
The other narrative strategy available to still pictures consists o f dividing
the picture into several distinct frames. By plotting many points on the
narrative timeline, segmentation restores some determinacy to the story
line. This approach prefigures the frames o f moving pictures, but, instead o f
depending on a projector to animate the show, it uses the eye o f the specta­
tor moving from panel to panel to keep narrative time running. The reader
(for the eye movement amounts to an act o f reading) constructs a story
line by assuming that similar shapes on different frames represent common
referents (objects, characters, or setting); by interpreting spatial relations as
temporal sequence (adjacent frames represent subsequent moments); and
by inferring causal relations between the states depicted in the frames. The
selected moments need not be pregnant, but they should be easily con­
nectable and narratively significant: they must represent a change o f state
(or the lack of an expected change) that affects the goals o f the characters.
We associate this technique with present-day comic strips— for instance,
some of the speechless graphic stories published in the New Yorker by the
French humorist Sempe— but, as Wendy Steiner’s essay demonstrates, it
has been used in Western art at least since the Italian quattrocento and
perhaps as early as ancicnt Egyptian civilization.
Steiner’s essay takes us back to a time when narrative pictures had an es­
sential cultural function to perform: they inscribed stories permanently for
those who could not read. Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque Catholic
churches, and even more Russian Orthodox cathedrals, were designed to
transport the faithful into the sacred space and time of biblical or hagio-
graphic stories. Through their rich iconography churches were the site of
a virtual, though spiritually live, encounter with religious figures. In order
to immerse the spectator in the storyworld, pictures had to do more than
illustrate: they had to take the spectator through storytime, as does a verbal
telling. This means that they had to simulate the movement of the plot and
the evolution o f the narrative world by visual means. As Steiner shows in
her essay, pre-Renaissance Italian paintings achieve this effect by represent­
ing several distinct moments in the plot. But, rather than creating a linear
sequence ol discrete Irames, as do comic strips, these paintings gather the
various narrative moments in a unified landscape. The frames that separate
142 Still Pictures

the scenes are not artificial boundaries but natural features or architectural
details intrinsic to the global view captured in the painting. Since there is
no room on a canvas for a large number o f scenes, the moments selected
have to be able to reach out toward one another. The narrativity o f these
quattrocento paintings thus combines the two techniques of segmentation
and reliance on a pregnant moment.
In a fascinating survey o f aesthetic and theoretical positions concerning
the desirability and possibility of pictorial storytelling, Steiner attributes
the decline o f the narrative technique of quattrocento paintings to the rise
of illusionism and realism, which assimilates pictorial representation to a
“window on the world” and restricts the content of the window to what
can be seen from a specific point o f view, at a specific time. Even if the
point o f view is sufficiently elevated to embrace several distinct areas, the
requirement o f verisimilitude prohibits multiple appearances o f the same
figure, since an individual cannot be in several places at the same time.
But I would like to suggest that the emancipation o f art from religion
is as much to blame for the loss of the multi-episodic narrativity of the
quattrocento as the emphasis on a realistic perspective, for, when painting
loses the function of bringing the Holy Scriptures to life, of immersing
the spectator in a sacred reality, the picture is no longer responsible for
the integrity o f the story. Deprived of its spiritual dimension, narrative
becomes a pretext for dramatic composition, the display of the human body
in action, the representation of female beauty, and the expression of erotic
desire— all o f which are better realized through the depiction of a single
pregnant moment.
Whether the representation o f several episodes is a necessary condition
o f pictorial narrativity, as Steiner maintains, or whether temporal sequence
can be condensed into a single pregnant scene, as Kafalenos argues, the
multiple frame technique allows the representation of more complex stories
and projects a clearer narrative intent than single-frame pictures. Whereas
the representation o f a frozen moment makes us think of a story, the paint­
ings analyzed by Steiner invite us to attend to the dynamic unfolding o f
narrative time. Even so, however, their narrativity is not fully autonomous.
A spectator totally unfamiliar with the biblical text would not be able to
reconstruct the story of Salome from the painting by Benozzo (iozzoli that
forms the focus o f Steiner’s essay; this spectator may, for instance, read the
picture from left to right and assume that the beheading of John is the
first event in the plot. After the execution Salome would present the head
to her mother, Herodiad (but how could our unknowing spectator infer
family relations?), and later that evening she would dance in celebration
 Still Pictures 143

at the king’s banquet. Or Salome and her mother could be grieving over
the saints death in the central scene, and the dancing Salome on the
right would be hiding her sadness, while Herodiad openly mourns the
beheaded saint. (She looks rather sad in the banquet scene, and her eyes
arc symbolically directed toward the beheading.) To the spectator already
familiar with the story, on the other hand, (iozzoli’s painting does much
more than merely call to mind the biblical text: as Steiner demonstrates,
the picture offers an original interpretation o f its textual source. By creating
a visual parallelism between Salome and each o f the two figures in the
execution scene, the painting presents the heroine as an ambiguous figure
who oscillates between two roles: now dancing executioner, now kneeling
victim of her mother’s tyrannical desire. More than an illustration, since
it actively plots a narrative trajectory, but less than an explicit and self-
sufficient telling, Gozzoli’s painting offers a creative retelling that deeply
affects our understanding of a familiar story.
Add language to the multi-frame graphic narrative, and we have the
modern comic strip, a semiotic combination vastly superior in narrative
versatility (though, of course, not necessarily in aesthetic value) to the
most eloquent of narrative paintings. In contrast to France, where la bancle
dessinee has long been recognized as a form o f art, comic strips tend to be
regarded in the United States as a genre o f popular culture. Their lowbrow
reputation has prevented them from receiving the theoretical attention
that their unique blend o f graphic and verbal signs deserves. It did not
help that most comics were just that— comic— for humor has long played
second fiddle in the mind o f critics to “serious” (tragic, dramatic) forms
o f expression. It wasn’t until the recent development o f a new genre, the
graphic novel, that the literary potential o f comic strips began to receive
widespread recognition. But, as Jeanne Ewert observes in her study of Art
Spiegel man’s Holocaust novel Mans, the language channel o f comic strips
tends to eclipse in the mind of readers and critics the contribution o f the
pictures. Many readers tend to rush to the next frame as soon as their eyes
have scanned the text and their mind has understood the logical connection
with the preceding frame.
Ewert’s essay is a truly ^ -o p e n in g reading lesson that reveals the extraor­
dinary sophistication o f Spiegelman’s use of graphic elements. In Spiegel-
man’s novel many narratological functions normally performed by lan­
guage are delegated to visual items: variations in the size o f the frames
operate changes in narrative pace; the embedding of an image within an­
other signal llash-lorwards; the elimination of the lines that frame panels
suggest an expansion of space; identical panels set wide apart create a musi­
144 Still Pictures

cal effect of thematic repetition; and the visual appearance o f characters—

Germans are cats, Jews are mice, and Poles are pigs— functions as a literal-
ized metaphor. Most impressive about Maus, as Ewert demonstrates, is how
the graphic novel exploits the contrast between its two channels to create
contrapuntal voices that relativize each other. Subtle visual clues may cast
doubts about the reliability of the character who is currently speaking, or
small graphic details may be used to introduce counterplots that play in
the background of the main, verbally assisted story line. Maus illustrates a
phenomenon that we also see at work in the musical (as analyzed in Peter
Rabinowitzs contribution): a channel o f lower narrative potential subtly
undermining a channel with higher resources. The opposite would not
work, because the channel o f higher narrativity automatically represents the
dominant, assertive voice and cannot therefore relativize the background
story. While the cinema could in principle achieve a similar doubling o f
narrative voices— the background image, or even the soundtrack, telling a
different story than the dialogue-supported action— the very fact that its
images are moving prevents the close inspection o f the visual element that
Mans requires o f its reader. In the hands o f an artist like Spiegelman, less
truly becomes more, as the stillness o f the pictures is turned into a powerful
narrative resource.

References

Kafalenos, Emma. “ Implications o f Narrative in Painting and Photography.” New

Novel Review 3.2 (1996): 53-66.
Kibedi Varga, A. “ Stories 1’old by Pictures.” Style 22.2 (1988): 194—208.
 4
Pictorial Narrativity

Wendy Steiner

Nature knits up her kinds in a network, not a chain; but men follow only
by chains because their language can’t handle several things at once.-
Albrecht von Haller, trans. Howard Nemerov

Ariadne’s thread unwinding through the labyrinth, Hansel and Gretels

pebbles marking out the trackless woods— these and other mythic im­
ages echo von Hallers contrast between nature and human understanding.
Knowledge is a path cut through a maze, a line attempting adequacy to a
plane, a mere chain seeking dominion over a network. As such, knowledge
is necessarily incomplete, yet the drawing o f lines, the chaining o f links, is
the only way to reach the point at the center and to find one’s way home
again.
Von Haller blames this fact on language, chainlike in the very structure
o f its syntagms, and thereby he suggests another object of his analogy,
narrative. For narrative, made of language, also lives by concatenation—
both in its medium and in its temporal subject matter. Event follows event;
scene follows scene. The connection between knowledge and narrative is
apparent even in its etymology: Latin narmre, to tell; gnarus, knowing, ac­
quainted with;, anci ultimately Indo-European^//, to know.1 Narrative, as
knowledge, is victimized by its diachrony yet seemingly requires diachrony
in order to be knowledge in the first place.
But if narrative in this metaphor is the chain of knowledge, painting is
traditionally the natural network— not sequence but pure configuration.
It is iconically adequate to the labyrinth o f nature but incapable of cutting
through it— -of functioning propositionally, Sol Worth would say, o f serv­
ing as a form o f knowledge. The inability o f painting to include temporally
or logically distinct moments is, o f course, the basis o f Lessings distinction
hnw ivn the sp.iti.il .iiul ilie temporal arts (/Mocoori). It is a distinction that
146 Steiner

explains the iconic limitations o f each art: “the catalogue o f Western arts
is . . . a list o f renunciations: with sculpture, of texture and colour; with
painting, o f volume; with both, o f time” (Bryson xvi). One might add:
with literature, o f visuality and referential density. As Leonardo da Vinci
put it, “ If you call painting mute poetry, poetry can also be called blind
painting” {Treatise on Painting 18).
But much as mythic imagery and neoclassical thought would support
this split and its acquiescence to the impoverishment o f each art, the ne­
cessity that lies behind the division is not as absolute as one might think.
It is refuted most clearly by modern linguistics. The view o f narrative (and
language) as a mere sequence is not tenable in light o f recent theory. It is
the mistake o f the proponents o f “spatial form ,” who identify the novel
and narrativity with pure temporal sequence and then are surprised to find
other forms o f cohesion in the twentieth-century novel (and elsewhere). -
Virtually every narratologist finds narrative dependent on both its sequen­
tial and its configurational qualities.
But no similar body o f theorizing is available to the visual arts. In fact,
the narrativity o f pictures is virtually a nontopic for art historians.3 Not
only is the concept poorly understood, but the pictures that are suppos­
edly governed by it are now out o f fashion. The last association that one
would have with modern art is the adjective narrative, and in the formalist
criticism o f recent years the term has had a distinctly negative value.4 Yet
the narrative potential o f the visual arts is an enormously revealing topic.
As we shall discover, it can explain some of the most essential facts about
Western painting and the imaginative place of art in the literary romance.
The typical art historical usage o f the term narrative painting is very
loose by literary standards. Sacheverell Sitwell (i) characterizes it as “the
painting o f anecdote” but applies it to what would more often be called
“genre painting”— typical scenes, homely incidents, instantiations o f a
theme, perennial activities, and pictorial sequences such as Hogarth’s Rake’s
Progress. Nancy Wall Moure uses the term not only for genre scenes but
for historical and mythological subjects as well, and she contrasts it sys­
tematically to portraits and allegories. And a symposium of specialists on
ancient art agreed to define pictorial narrative as “the rendering o f specific
events, whether mythological, legendary, historical, or fictional, involving
recognizable personages” (Kraeling 44). It is disconcerting to note that the
same term applies contradictorily to both typical scenes and specific events.
But the contrastive value of the term to the allegory is interesting. It alerts us
to a perennial, though largely unexplored, association between narrativity
and realism.
 Pictorial Narrativity 147

In this essay I would like to use developments in the study o f literary

narrative to consider the preconditions for pictorial narrative and, once
having done so, to examine the “ knowledge potential” ol a particular nar­
rative painting. I realize that this is a somewhat dangerous procedure, since
a theory ol narrative developed for verbal art may have only a procrustean
bearing on visual narrative. 1 hope that such will not be the case. Nar­
ratologists intend many of their notions to apply regardless of medium.
Moreover, they propound a syndrome o f narrative characteristics, all o f
which need not be in evidence for us to take a text as a narrative. One would
thus be able to speak o f “stronger” or “weaker” narratives according to the
number and selection o f these characteristics in a work. I hope to show
that many of the traits producing strong literary narratives are the same as
those producing strong pictorial ones but that historical developments have
made strongly narrative paintings extremely rare. It is not the medium o f
painting but its conventions that have reduced narrativity to an apparently
peripheral concern for art historians.
From a narratological point of view pictures o f typical scenes and peren­
nial activities, the sort Sitwell terms narrative paintings, would be consid­
ered particularly low' in narrativity. As Gerald Prince points out:

narrative prefers tensed statements (or their equivalent) to untensed

ones:
something like
Every human being dies
is fine (and may well appear in a narrative) but something like
Napoleon died in 1821
is better or, at least more characteristic o f narrative.

Prince goes on: “ If narrativity is a function o f the . . . specificity o f the

(sequences of) events presented, it is also a function o f the extent to which
their occurrence is given as a fact (in a certain world) rather than a possi­
bility or a probability. The hallmark of narrativity is assurance. It lives in
certainty. This happened then that; this happened because of that; this hap­
pened and it was related to that” (“ Narrativity” 74-75). It would seem clear
that the genre scenes in question— typical scenes and perennial activities—
lack such specificity and actuality or certainty. They are deliberately not
show'n as singular events; the scenes, in fact, are often not events at all
but what might be termed “ humanized landscapes.” Indeed, Martin Mciscl
notes a prejudice among audiences against such specificity: “The modern
view assumes, paradoxically, that realism is better served by scenes and fig­
 148 Steiner

ures whose individuality does not reach beyond generic activity, by mowers
in a hayfield rather than Ruth standing amid the alien corn” (352).
The low narrativity o f the genre scene also follows from its lack of
what William Labov calls an “evaluation” : “the means used by the narrator
to indicate the point of the narrative, its raison d’etre” (366). Although
Labov considers the evaluation a nonessential characteristic of narrative—
temporal sequence being the necessary trait— he does say that a narra­
tive without an evaluative component leaves itself open to the wither­
ing rejoinder “ So what?” “ Evaluative devices say to us: this was terrify­
ing, dangerous, weird, wild, crazy; or amusing, hilarious, wonderful; more
generally, that it was strange, uncommon, or unusual— that is, worth re­
porting. It was not ordinary, plain, humdrum, everyday, or run-of-the-
mill” (Labt)v 3 7 1).s Genre paintings explicitly present themselves as or­
dinary, plain, humdrum, everyday, and run-of-the-mill, and, though the
insistence that we attend to the unremarkable might itself be seen as a
paradoxical or witty statement— perhaps the only piece o f wit proper to
naturalism— nevertheless one would hardly respond to such works as nar­
ratively compelling. Indeed, they appear to be exactly the opposite o f what
we normally take narrative to be. Periods such as eighteenth-century neo-
classicism, which elevated history painting over other genres, insisted on
the representation of “significant action and strong passions” and down­
graded “subject matter wholly devoid o f these, such as bowls o f fruit,
view's of countryside without human figures, portraits of unknown men
and women, [and] genre scenes in which humble persons engage in trivial
activities” (Fried 73). (Neoclassicism, however, did not go so far as to allow
more than one episode to be represented in history paintings.)
Art historians are perhaps closer to literary usage in including the so-
called conversation piece among narrative paintings, since these are spe­
cific.6 They are a fusion o f genre and portrait, showing particular people
engaged in characteristic acts such as walking before their ancestral homes
or playing with their children. Yet even here the activity is generic and the
narrativity low. We can now understand the insistence of the ancient art
symposium that an artwork render “specific events . . . involving recogniz­
able personages” if it is to be termed “narrative” and also the common use
o f narrative art as a contrast to portrait and allegory.
So far, then, we might agree that narrativity is strongest in paintings
depicting specific (though not necessarily existent) personages engaged in
some singular (in both senses) act. “A story is a specific event carried out
by particular characters in a particular place at a particular time,” stresses
one student of Flgyptian art (Gaballa 5). The addition ol .1 specific place

i
 Pictorial Narrativity 149

and rime introduces another o f Labov’s narrative components, the “orien­

tation.” Speaking o f verbal narratives, he describes the orientation as that
section o f the narrative, often at the beginning but also placed strategically
throughout, in which the text identifies “the time, place, persons, and their
activity or the situation” (Labov 364). Now we would expect this kind o f
information to be the realm in which pictorial narrative would excel, since
place, circumstance, and atmosphere are those factors for which a picture
is indeed worth a thousand words. Even the less “natural” information for
painting of specific names, dates, and so forth can be conveyed through
iconographic symbolism, and where this is still inadequate, the painting
has a title. Judith and Holofemes, Washington Crossing the Delaware, Cupid
and Psyche, The Dance o f Salome— titles provide crucial information for
the orientation as well as functioning as what Labov terms the “abstract,”
a summary of the story.7 The title is actually a good analogue to Labov’s
abstract, since the latter is a combination o f narrative functions. As Labov
describes it, “the reference o f the abstract is broader than the orientation
and complicating action: it includes these and the evaluation so that the
abstract not only states what the narrative is about, but why it is told” (370).
Thus, paintings do contain some o f Labov’s narrative structures, even if
they seem far from the literary category o f narrative.
The distance between paintings and literary narratives is convention­
ally explained by the fact that temporal sequence, what Labov calls the
“complicating action,” is the single most essential narrative trait. Without
it there is no verbal narrativity. The insistence on temporality is part o f
every definition o f narrativity, regardless of its philosophical orientation.
Thus, where Gerald Prince claims in his formalist, linguistic definition
that narrative is “any representation o f non-contradictory events such that
at least one occurs at time t and the other at time tn following time f
(“ Narrativity,” 61), Paul Ricoeur’s revisionist phenomenological definition
states: “ 1 take temporality to be that structure o f existence that reaches
language in narrativity and narrativity to be the language structure that has
temporality as its ultimate referent” (169).
But temporal reference in and o f itself is not enough to qualify a dis­
course as narrative. The temporal events narrated must be multiple. Again,
as Prince argues, “although many things . . . take time, at least some of
their representations do not necessarily constitute a narrative. A fight can
take a few minutes and a trip can take a few days yet neither ‘There was
a figlu yesterday’ nor ‘ It was a beautiful trip’ constitute narratives: they do
not represent the light or the trip as a series o f events but as one event;
they d o 1101 i c c o i i m .1 sequence ol events . . . narrative is a representation
 150 Steiner

o f at least two real or Hctive events in a time sequence” (“Aspects” 49-

50). This representation of an event in terms of its temporal unfolding is
what Prince calls “discreteness” (“ Narrativity” 64), the division of the event
into distinct, ordered parts. The chain, to be a chain, must have discrete
links.
It is here, o f course, that the visual arts seem least narrative, indeed, def-
initionally antinarrative. Virtually all post-Renaissance works— however
specific or particular their action, characters, place, or time— represent an
event through an isolated moment. This mode o f representing temporal
events as action stopped at its climactic moment, or at a moment that
implies but does not show' what preceded and what follows it, Lessing
called the “pregnant moment.” It gave rise to the literary topos o f ekphrasis
in which a poem aspires to the atemporal “eternity” o f the stopped-action
painting or laments its inability to achievc it.8 Like rhe statement “There
was a fight yesterday,” ekphrastic painting and poetry refer to temporal
events without being strongly narrative. Thus, one might speak of David’s
Oath o f the Horatii as a powerfully historical painting without feeling that it
was a particularly narrative one, although its narrativity is certainly stronger
than that o f a typical still life, portrait, or genre scene.
The discreteness o f temporal events is still not enough to create the
equivalent o f literary narrativity. Events must also be susceptible to a double
ordering. The narrative posits an ordering o f events independent o f its
telling them.1* Any change in the order o f story events would thus create a
different narrative,1(1 although the order in which those events are told is
not fixed.11 The two orderings at issue here are the chronological order o f
the events referred to and the order in which they are narrated. This is the
famous Russian formalist distinction between fabula and sjuzet, 12 which is
the basis o f virtually every subsequent account of literary narrative. Sey­
mour Chatman names his book on narrative Story and Discourse— English
equivalents of the French equivalents o f Shklovsky’s Russian terms— and
states that this double ordering is definitional for narrative in any medium:
“A salient property o f narrative is double time structuring. That is, all
narratives, in whatever medium, combine the time sequence o f plot events,
the time o f the histoire (‘story-time’) with the time o f the presentation of
those events in the text, which we call ‘discourse-time.’ What is fundamen­
tal to narrative, regardless o f medium, is that these two time orders are
independent. In realistic narratives, the time o f the story is fixed, follow­
ing the ordinary course o f a life . . . But the discourse-time order may In­
completely different” (“ What Newels” 122). Since storytime in all but (In­
most deviant modern narratives is tied to the chronological llow ol real lile,

1
 Pictorial Narrativity 151

narrative can again be seen as dependent on our ideas o f the extra-artistic

world, which are institutionalized in art as realism.
It is just this dual temporal structuring (the order o f telling versus the
chronological order in the told) that has led Chatman and others to con­
sider pictorial narrative as inevitably a contradiction in terms. “ We may
spend half an hour in front o f a Titian, but the aesthetic effect is as if we
were taking in the whole painting at a glance. In narratives, on the other
hand, the dual time orders function independently” (Chatman, “ What
Novels” 122). Certainly, this contention would tend to reinforce Lessings
absolute split ol the spatial from the temporal arts. What is seemingly
missing in pictorial narrative is some way ol ordering the visual medium.
Fven if it is clear that temporally distinct moments are being represented,
if no order is indicated among them they will not function narratively.
I'he characteristic response to such works is always that they are symbolic
or allegorical. For example, Nelson Goodman describes Hans Memling’s
Panorama of the Passion as a narrative painting “without beginning or end
or marked route [from one depicted scene to the next]. This pictorial
organization ol events o f a lifetime is spatial, atemporal, motivated perhaps
both by considerations o f design and by regarding these events as eternal
and emblematic rather than as episodic or transient” (no). Such works,
then, fail in realism because they fail to pose a pictorial order against the
order o f events in Christs life. They are the proverbial labyrinths, without
a linear path marked through them.
Visual artists have contrived several conventions to create this double
ordering. In F,gyptian art the surface was often divided into separate reg­
isters, with base lines linking figures in each event or linking one event to
the next; the base line established a unified plane of action distinct from
the others. Figures can also be oriented so as to be looking toward the
next event in a series, their eyes in effect directing the movement of ours.
Another strategy is to arrange events as stages along a path (fig. 4.1): this
procedure invokes the metaphor o f the “path of life,” the same metaphor
contained in Stendhal’s definition o f the novel as “a mirror carried along
a road.” In many paintings scenes are presented as the various rooms of
a building, with their order conforming to either the writing system of
the culture involved— left to right and up to down in the West— or some
special ordering implicit in the architectural features o f the building.
Sometimes technical features o f the pictorial medium support the dou­
ble ordering of narrative. Architectural friezes and frescoes are often too
large to be “ read” all ai once, so that any of the forms o f division mentioned
earlier can separate the various scenes of an unfolding narrative progression.
152 Steiner

ligure 4.1. Sassetta and Assistant, Meeting of St. Anthony and St. Paul. Photograph ©
Board ol Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Samuel I I. Kress Golleaion.
Reproduced by permission ol the National Gallerv of Art.
 Pictorial Narrativity 153

The Friezes on rhe Parthenon and the Arch ofTitus are paradigmatic cases,13
as are the Stations o f the Cross fixed along the walls o f cathedrals. The
additive structure o f diptychs and triptychs is also conducive to narrative
sequence, the order in the latter often not a simple left-to-right progression
but, rather, a left-to-right-to-middle sequence with the center hierarchically
weighted to bear the climactic ending.
The medium most obviously suited to pictorial narrative, however, is the
book. Its division into pages provides a “ natural” discreteness that other pic­
torial media are forced to achieve metaphorically (the walls separating nar­
rative “rooms”) or arbitrarily (the frames o f triptych panels or the modern-
day comic strip). Kurt Weitzmann describes the historical progression o f
ancient narrative art as in fact culminating in the invention of the book:

Creek artist