FICTION AND THE NEWS, Part 4, Aspects of Storytelling

WATSONWORKS
Blog 10

ASPECTS OF STORYTELLING

Previous: Blogs 7, 8 and 9 have focused
triggers, props, frames, codes and character.

Blog 9 suggested that in constructing a story the Five Codes of Narrative posed by Roland Barthes might be useful to the writer, though Barthes was careful not to regard these codes as prescriptive. Just the same, the Codes offer a checksheet for writers to examine at which level a story is operating.

Vladimir Propp’s work on folktales was also examined, his key proposition being that across the board stories contain stock characters with stock functions (heroes, villains, helpers etc.). An identification between folktales, their themes and their persona, was made with the News, itself replete with heroes and villains functioning in a context that purports to be real but is not only coloured by myth, but often driven by it.

Also, see FEEDBACK from Anna Perera


PART 4:
Fiction and News
Certain parallels can be discerned between the narrative approaches of news and folktale; and also, of their function. The Cold War of the 1950s onwards was often reported, particularly in the popular press, as a cautionary folktale in which heroes (us) were on guard against the villains (the Russians): Wedom/Theydom was the dominant narrative structure. In our Red Riding Hood basket were nuclear weapons and granny in the forest might varyingly have symbolised democracy or the free world in peril.


We recognise how narrative can be used to bring about socio-cultural cohesion, uniting audiences – a generally-agreed function of storytelling. We identify with stories while at the same time feel defined by them, recognising their moral value.

Order, disorder
In Visualising Deviance: A Study of News Organisation (Open University,1987) Richard Ericson, Patricia Baranak and Janet Chan speak of news journalists as a 'deviance-defining elite' who 'provide an ongoing articulation of the proper bounds to behaviour in all organised spheres of life'.

In stories, order is disrupted; some sort of deviance has occurred, upsetting the norm: the story, fiction or news report, portrays the disorder but works towards restoration.

For John Hartley, disorder is a news value. We might argue that it is also a fiction value. Writing in The Politics of Pictures: The Creation of the Public in the Age of Popular Media Routledge, 1996), Hartley says that the 'fundamental test of newsworthiness is disorder – deviation from any supposed steady state...'.

A first principle of news media performance is to alert the public mind to visions of order by portraying the opposite: binary framing in action. For Hartley visions of order are 'photo-negativised into stories of disorder'.

‘Fictionworthiness’
If, then, 'the fact of fiction', as Ericson, Baranak and Chan put it, can be seen as central to the news, it comes as no surprise to learn that this mode of 'fact-fiction' has proved an influential model for 'fiction-fiction'.

In a paper published in the European Journal of Communication, June 1993, Milly Buonanno linked newsworthiness with what she termed fictionworthiness. She examined the ways in which Italian TV fiction has increasingly used the news as a model for its own themes and approaches.

Buonanno posed a number of criteria for fictionworthiness:
1. Substantive criteria: that is, factors concerning ‘the prerequisites likely to confer importance and interest on a story’. These could be major issues of the day.

2 . Criteria relevant to the product: that is, factors ‘concerned with specific elements of story content, in particular aspects that are considered more interesting and appealing and which maintain viewing enjoyment’. Buonanno believes that ‘in the same way that one says of journalism: “Bad news is good news” one could say of fiction that a “bad” story – that is to say a sad and tearful, violent and criminal story – is a good story’.
3 . Criteria relevant to the media. The kind of news stories that have always fascinated the press – tales of crime and misdemeanours – have long proved fictionworthy and are a staple diet of TV drama.
4 . Criteria relevant to audience.
5 . Criteria relevant to competition.


The attraction of the news-as-story is obvious: it is dramatic, contemporary, relevant and familiar. Also, it is often stranger than fiction. As Buonanno puts it, 'we live today in a reality which surpasses and challenges every fantasy'.

Noting the mutual reinforcement one text gives another, she says, ‘just as television seemingly becomes ever more a highly 'newsworthy' subject for the press, equally news becomes ever more 'fictionworthy' for television.

Shared values
On the casting-couch for fictionworthiness are stalwarts from news values. At least on Italian TV those characters of high social status, the elite, find themselves fictionworthy. Buonanno cites Dallas as an American parallel while confessing that 'the exceptions are mainly to be found in British productions, where more often working-class environments are presented'.

Proximity is a fiction value as it is a news value. A story is 'considered to be much more interesting if it possesses accessibility – geographically, temporally and culturally'. Perhaps the dominant fiction value arising out of news practices is topicality. Buonanno writes:

A story of topical interest is not simply a story set in the present, but a story which aspires to recount and testify to the reality of the present in its most relevant and significant form.

The image of TV as a mirror of society, a true reflector of realities, also appears to prevail in fiction values. As audience, we have an appetite to know 'how things are now', either by revelation or confirmation, through a process of surveillance, while a dominant aim of those assembling 'realities', in fictional or news form, is one of legitimising one definition of 'truths' against another.

Hot on questions, cool on answers
Crime series often provide us, in addition to dramatic stories, with visualisations of contemporary urban society characterised by poverty, unemployment and the loss of community values. Cops often have the role thrust upon them of social workers and social psychologists as well as law-keepers.

What such series draw back from doing is offering any formula for solutions, an institutional remedy for the socially rooted crimes they so effectively highlight. The producers will honestly and justifiably say, That is not our job. Further, if the causes of the crimes dealt with in crime series were energetically addressed and brought to resolution, crime writers would be out of a job.

In his chapter on Narrative in The Media Studies Book: A Guide for Teachers (Routledge, 1992), edited by David Lusted, Adrian Tilley remarks that, 'narratives are about the survival of particular social orders rather than their transformation. They suggest that certain systems of values can transcend social unrest and instability by making a particular notion of 'order out of chaos'. This may be regarded as the ideological work of narrative.

The implication here is that narrative is about rendering things 'natural': What happens on screen is 'the ways things are'; natural, and therefore to be expected, put up with, coped with: c'est la vie! Such a standpoint deserves to be analysed and challenged, hence, in Tilley's view, the importance of narrative analysis which 'can make the "natural" relations between narratives and social orders not only less natural but possibly even open to change'.

Fiction and public debate: the ‘Jordache Story’
This is a moment to remind ourselves that the 'work' as Barthes defines it only becomes 'text' when it is 'read' by audience. Whether texts are straight fiction, straight documentary or docu-dramas, audiences respond both to narratives and to the issues framed by those narratives. Soaps in particular prompt individual, group and public responses that modify or alter attitudes and certainly raise issues higher on public agendas.

Few stories alerted public interest in Britain during the late 1990s as the 'Jordache Story' which unfolded in the British soap Brookside between February 1993 and May 1995. This brought incest to public attention perhaps more dramatically than ever before.

After serving in prison for domestic violence, Trevor Jordache persuades his family to take him back. Once more he is violent towards his wife Mandy. He has in the past already sexually abused his elder daughter, Beth. Now it is 14-year-old Rachel's turn. Mandy and Beth plot his death. They bury his body in the garden. Prison follows for both of them. Beth takes her own life. Rachel gives evidence of how Trevor raped her. Mandy is released from prison.

Such was the interest, controversy and serious debate which the Jordache Story provoked that Channel Four Television commissioned Lesley Henderson of the Glasgow University Media Group to investigate public responses. In the Conclusion to her report, Incest in Brookside: Audience Responses to the Jordache Story (Channel Four TV/Glasgow Universiity Media Group, 1996), Henderson affirms the significance of contemporary popular story-telling in relation to issues of social importance:

This study reveals that Brookside’s child sexual abuse storyline communicated complex and important messages about the issue...[it] increased knowledge and understandings about the language, reality and effects of abuse...By addressing the difficult topic of child abuse Brookside illustrates how a traditionally 'entertainment' genre can be used to enhance knowledge and understandings about a social problem.

Lesley Henderson's research also identified important areas of audience resistance, to the way the events were handled, to the way characters responded to those events; and also to the way other media, in particular the press, attempted to 'get in' on the story.

Giving the game away
By announcing beforehand what was going to happen next in the story, the press provided an additional 'frame' around the actual drama as it appeared on screen.
This served as a secondary text to the primary text of the programme itself and inevitably influenced the 'reading' of the story. The Daily Mirror (23 June 1995) reported that Beth would commit suicide. Under the headline BETH US DO PART, the Mirror declared, 'Beth, jailed in the body-under-the-patio cliff hanger, can't face another five year sentence. Although an appeal is pending, she decides to end it all'.

The Mirror became part of the story, and its sensationalist announcement, Henderson points out, 'provoked distress and anger' particularly among those groups tested in research who themselves were 'survivors' of child abuse.

That Beth should not face things out, and thus fail to prove an inspiring example, was bad enough; but to be told so bluntly in the press made matters worse. Indeed the reports in the press, Henderson says, 'sparked protests and demonstrations'.

Not only did newspapers 'give the game away' by telling readers what was going to happen, they imposed their own judgmental attitude. TV Quick (22-28 July, 1995) announced – BETH: A WASTED LIFE. 'Such coverage,' believes Henderson, 'presented "Beth's" death in a way which undermined all the positive strengths of the character and placed her firmly in the category of "victim scarred for life".’

* * *

Some time ago on radio, a ‘realist’ storywriter was asked whether she believed stories could ‘make a difference’. Her response was unequivocal and, for writers, film makers etc., depressing. She said ‘No!’ Lesley Henderson’s research seems to indicate otherwise. Part 5 of ASPECTS OF STORYTELLING will turn attention to THE POWER OF STORIES.


**FEEDBACK on Blog 9**

From ANNA PERERA

Hi Jim,
I've been reading your storytelling blogs with fascination. Thank you. Particularly enjoyed the examination of Barthes’ intense deconstructions into a comprehensible and usable way of understanding narrative and loved your investigation into the significance of the handkerchief in Othello. Wish I'd read this or come to the same conclusions before I began my last book because I could have added another layer to the story. Are you aware of what you're doing when you write? My method is to access a particular feeling that vibrates with authenticity and when I'm unable to get that hum, I delete and sit back until it comes. In a way I'm unaware of what I'm doing while being rigidly connected to everything I've ever learnt, read and felt.

Aren't we lucky to be doing what we love? Your statement [referring to Iago pressing ahead with his revenge on Othello, even though he had already received his wished-for promotion to lieutenant], 'For some people the game is everything,' jumped out at me.

All the best,
Anna

*Anna is the author of Guantanamo Boy (Puffin, 2009, paperback, £6.99) one of the best and most powerful novels for Young Adults that I’ve read in years. But forget the teen label. It will grip and disturb any reader, fifteen or fifty.

*The May issue, Blog 11, will also spotlight Michael Scammell’s biography of the remarkable Arthur Koestler, Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual (Faber, 2010).