WATSONWORKSblog 9
This is Part 3 of a series on aspects of storytelling. Blog 8 looked at the role of props in stories, while Blog 7 focused on triggers that give stories direction and momentum. Part 3 welcomes on board a couple of authors whose ideas have influenced the theory of narrative .
The following is a summary and adaptation of Chapter 6, Narrative: The Media as Storytellers in Media Communication: An Introduction to Theory and Process(UK: Palgrave/Macmillan, 3rd edition).
Frames, codes and characters
Every story has its narrative format or frame. In some stories the narrator, the storyteller, is evident. First-person narrative is admitting that the story is to be told from a single point of view. It is a subjective account. Third-person narrative distances the author from what goes on in the story.
The author is like the Holy Spirit, intangible but ever-present. We are aware that this is a contrivance. Yet if our disbelief is suspended by artful storytelling we forget authorship and find ourselves adopting the 'real' world of characters and action 'free' of authorial strings. In fact, that is one of the criteria of effective narrative, to make the strings invisible.
Equilibrium, disequilibrium
What is common to all stories is the transition from a state of order, of equilibrium, to disorder, disequilibrium. In every story something has happened, is happening or is about to happen which levers the story in to action. When, or if, equilibrium is restored, the story has closure.
Sit-coms by and large have closure, while soaps shut down one narrative only to open up others. In sitcoms, each 'upset' has to be 're-set' by the end of the programme. With soaps, however, disequilibrium is a constant. Though some story-lines are resolved, the 'whole' story of the soap remains in a permanent state of disequilibrium – of new dramas, new crises, new twists of fate.
For a soap opera time is a key element in the framing process. There are 30-minute slots to be filled, each to conclude with unfinished business, preferably dramatic and suspenseful, while not being so dramatically 'final' that the series cannot continue into an endless blue yonder.
Soaps need time, to bed down, unfold, and in their own time they reflect the timescales of audience. In some cases, the time-frame of the soap is as important as the timeframes within it.
The soap 'frame', thus presented with time in largesse, requires many characters and many plots. Soaps are full of talk, of gossip; we generally learn of action by report rather than see it occur.
The action is largely in the cutting, the quick-bite scenes that frame both the story and the time in which it takes place. Soaps move through time but they also suspend it to suggest simultaneity, of actions taking place at exactly the same moment.
One suspects that the template or mould out of which soaps emerge is not all that different from the one which produces popular narratives of all kinds, including the news. They must attract and hold attention. They must gratify both cognitive (intellectual) and affective (emotional) needs. They must facilitate identification and personal reference as well as diversion; and they must convince us of their fidelity.
The power of the frame rests both in its capacity to exclude and to structure the 'storyworld' in terms of dramatic contrasts; what is termed binary framing. Things are defined in relation to their opposite – heroes-villains; good-evil; kind-cruel; tolerant-intolerant; beautiful-ugly.
Genre, codes and character
In the maelstrom of available stories narrative modes interact and overlap as never before, but for convenience they continue to be classified under the term genre. We recognise common characteristics governed by codes that regulate form and content. Variety works within a frame of sameness.
Each genre contains a range of signifiers, of conventions that audiences come to expect while at the same time readily anticipating experiment with those conventions. Knowledge of the conventions on the part of audience, and recognition when convention is flouted, suggests an active 'union' between creator and consumer.
Audience, as it were, is 'let in on the act'; and this 'knowingness' is an important part of the enjoyment of narrative genres.
When the hero in a Western chooses not to wear a gun (a great rarity), audience (because we are familiar with the traditions of the genre) recognises the salience of this decision. Such recognition could be said to constitute a form of participation.
We use our familiarity with old 'routines' as a frame for reading this new tweak of narrative. We wonder whether convention will be flouted altogether as the story proceeds or whether the rules of the genre will be reasserted by the hero finally taking up the gun to bring about resolution.
Barthes’ narrative codes
We can explore the difference between narrative forms and we can assess their similarities. In his book S/Z Roland Barthes writes of a number of codes, or sets of rules, which operate in concert in the production of both 'real' and fictional stories; and he argues that all stories operate according to these five codes 'under which all textual signifiers can be grouped' in a narrative.
S/Z is a singular and highly readable volume. It takes the form of a detailed deconstruction of a 23-page story, Sarrasine, written by Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) in 1830. Each line in the story is linked, by Barthes, to one or more of the five codes of narrative.
The Action (or Prioretic) code portrays the events that take place in a story. It is the code of 'what happens', detailing occurrences in their sequence.
The Semantic code or code of the seme deals with character; with characterisation, which Barthes names the Voice of the Person. Actions are explained by character. Essentially the semantic function is to make clear, to explain, to bring about understanding; and thus in a story it can be instrumental in bringing about revelation.
The Enigma (or Hermeneutic) code, the Voice of Truth, involves the setting up of mystery, its development and finally its resolution. A good detective story usually contains many enigmas, some of them deliberately placed there by the author to mislead – clues which take Sam Spade or Inspector Morse on a wild goose chase, enjoyable to the audience, before further clues bring them back into the 'frame' of discovery (of who committed the murder).
The Referential (or Cultural) code, what Barthes refers to as the Voice of Science, has the function of informing and explaining. In a historical novel or drama the referential code operates to explain to us how people dressed, what their homes looked like, how they travelled from place to place. The French film term, mis en scene, meaning ‘placed in scene’, detailing the ‘staging’ of the story, is an equivalent of the referential code.
As the term suggests, the Symbolic code works at the ‘meaning’ level of imagery where elements of the story – character, incident – are transformed into symbolic representations such as justice, reward, love fulfilled, good triumphant.
The hand of fate
Symbol works at every level of the story. In a Hollywood-style gangster movie of the 1940s and 50s, the gangster's (invariably blonde) moll symbolises in her dress, speech, body language, not only her own relationship to a patriarchal world, but to that of all women 'under the thumb' of males.
In Westerns (almost invariably) the dress, hair and demeanour of women, and the context (bar or chapel) in which we encounter them, will symbolise what their ranking order is in the social milieu of the story.
They will also signify the woman's fate: in George Marshall's Destry Rides Again (1939) the saloon-bar singer Frenchie, played by Marlene Dietrich, falls in love with the hero, played by James Stewart (who doesn't wear a gun). Love is not permitted to overcome her dubious past and her criminal present except by sacrifice. Frenchie is shot in the back while protecting Destry/Stewart. She fulfils destiny and at the same time opens the way for the hero to marry the 'nice' girl in the story.
Symbols employing metaphoric forms illuminate and enrich the texts of stories and they work in unison with semantic codes. The TV Inspector Morse drove an old red Jaguar. This symbolised the kind of person Morse was – cultured, somewhat oldy-worldy, resistant to the more traditional brashness of policing. It also helps to explain how such a detective, from whose car stereo emerged the strains of opera, never pop or jazz, went about his profession.
Driving the action
Symbolic coding not only fills out our view of character, it propels the action. In a Western, when the hero buckles on his gunbelt, we know that the villains have pushed their luck one notch too far. Confrontation lies ahead: resolution will be brought about by violence exercised in the name of justice.
How we decode such a story is another matter, and this will obviously depend, among other things, on who we are, male or female, what our attitude is to the use of guns and the degree of openness or closure that the text of the story permits us: are we intended to cheer when the heroine blows away the villain, or are we to be left with the nagging doubt that there might have been another way to arrive at a resolution of the situation?
The look of the thing
A case can be made for an addition to the codes Barthes discusses – a code of aesthetics, that is, the artistic, compositional, stylistic element of expression. We talk of writers or artists finding their voice, their uniqueness manifested in the artefacts they create.
For example, the work of the Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) is recognisable not only for its politically oriented narratives but because of his narrative style, characterised by innovative editing or montage.
We relish films such as Battleship Potemkin (1925) or Alexander Nevsky (1938) for the sheer beauty of the composition, of lighting, of the handling of movement. It is fact, it is drama, but it is also poetry.
Gender coding
Being aware of different narratives codes helps us in our appreciation of texts. The action code in a number of genres (and in real life too) is traditionally associated with male characters.
Maleness equals action suggesting decisiveness that may further indicate dominance. Enigma codes traditionally relate more to women: femaleness is associated with mystery; often suggestive of a secret, victimised past.
The obvious alternative for a novelist, playwright, film maker, creator of a comic strip, TV commercial or story for children is to switch the conventions so that females appropriate 'male' codes.
This generally means breaking with social conventions, shaking a subversive finger at the rules. The outcome may underline cautionary messages as happens in Ridley Scott's movie Thelma and Louise (1991) where the rebellion of the two protagonists against a world dominated by men's demands, men's expectations and men's abuses is resolved only by their suicide: cold comfort for such a spirited lunge for personal freedom.
No hard rules
It is important to note that Barthes, in positing his five codes, is not claiming to fix narratives within prescriptive rules. On the contrary; he writes in S/Z, 'The code is a perspective of quotations, a mirage of structures; we know only its departures and returns'.
Just when we think we understand the symbolism of 'blondeness' in narratives, we find that it has been extended or transformed by new encoding. In Alfred Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief (1955), the blonde Grace Kelly is the epitome of refinement, sophistication and distinction.
Indeed attempts to link blondeness with dumbness have often turned out to be witness to the opposite. Marilyn Monroe was often cast 'dumb' and often played dumb, but we know she was an altogether more complex personality, and an altogether more talented actress than the stereotype allowed.
Propp's people
In a study of Russian folk tales, Vladimir Propp classified a range of stock characters identifiable in most stories. These may be individualised by being given distinguishing character traits or attributes, but they are essentially functionaries enabling the story to unfold.
In Morphology of the Folk Tale Propp writes of the following archetypal story features:
· the hero/subject whose function is to seek
· the object that is sought
· the donor of the object
· the receiver, where it is sent
· the helper who aids the action and
· the villain who blocks the action
Thus in one of the world's best-known folk tales, Red Riding Hood (heroine) is sent by her mother (donor) with a basket of provisions (object) to her sick granny (receiver) who lives in the forest. She encounters the wolf (villain) and is rescued from his clutches, and his teeth, by the woodman (helper).
Story levels
This formula can be added to and manipulated in line with the requirements of the genre, but it does allow us to differentiate between story level and meaning level, between the denotive and the connotative, between the so-termed mimetic plain (the plain of representation) and the semiosic plain (the plain of meaning production).
The tale of Little Red Riding Hood, examined at the connotative level, is rich in oblique meanings and in order to tease these out we begin to examine the characters and events as symbols. We may perceive the story as a parable; that is, a tale with a moral: little girls should not be allowed in the forest on their own, however great their granny's needs.
But then we begin to ask more questions – why did Red Riding Hood's mother send her on such a perilous journey in the first place; does the wolf stand for more than a wolf, granny more than a granny; and what is the significance of the stones which in some versions of the story end up in the wolf's stomach?
We are seeing that even the simplest of stories, long part of the cultural heritage of many countries, is a moveable feast, its connotative richness varying from reader to reader and context to context; and stories produced in contexts are significantly modified by new contexts.
Read it on the ads…
It would be instructive to select a number of popular narrative forms to see how far they conform to Propp's formula, then turn to the primary folklorists of our age – the advertisers. In a commercial, the subject is the character who stands in for the consumer. The object is what the product being advertised can do for the subject/hero/heroine, such as bringing happiness, satisfaction, fulfilment, glamour, enviability.
The donor or giver is the originator of the advertisement. And the villain? – any factor that deprives the subject of his/her desires (like dandruff, bad skin, obesity, thirst, hunger or irritable bowel syndrome).
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In Blog 10, I’ll be having a look at the connection between values underscoring fiction and those which direct and rule the news; a connection which prompts exploration of the notion of proximity and overlap between fictional and real life narratives. It remains to be acknowledged that fiction, particularly that on the printed page, is as likely to disconnect from reality as connect with it.
Notes in passing: that handkerchief…
Blog 8 looked at props in stories. Listening to the excellent production of Othello on Radio 4 the other day, I got to thinking how significant and central was the handkerchief given to Desdemona by Othello, passed on to his mother by an Egyptian, with ‘magic in the web of it’.
What’s interesting is how the same object is viewed through contrary perceptions. Othello’s attitude to the handkerchief is one of reverence and superstition.
Not lost, but what if it were?
Desdemona had dearly cherished it, but with her husband’s sudden coldness towards her on her mind plus her determination to have Cassio reinstated as the Moor’s lieutenant, she is tempted to relegate it in significance: ‘It is not lost; but what if it were?’ A position that is sensible but disastrously mistimed.
Meanwhile Emilia, in possession of the handkerchief, is less mindful of its value to Desdemona and more of the imperious demands of her husband, Iago, who ‘hath a hundred times woo’d me to steal it’. For her it is an object of placation. She demeans its value by calling it a ‘napkin’. She acknowledges that Desdemona ‘loves the token’ yet immediately decides, ‘I’ll have the work ta’en out’.
Thus the same object, the same prop, means different things to different people, according to the situation they perceive themselves in. For the audience, the missing handkerchief signifies the beginning of a tragic outcome.
Why, what’s that to you?
‘Do not chide; I have a thing for you’, is Emilia’s response to Iago’s demand for the handkerchief. She is curious enough to ask her husband what he intends to do with the handkerchief only to receive the curt response, ‘Why, what’s that to you?’ She lets the matter rest for, like all the members of the cast, Emilia cannot begin to imagine Iago’s evil purpose.
The issue of the handerchief matches Shakespeare’s two grander themes, the first concerning reputation. Iago considers this ‘an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving’. But to Cassio it is ‘the immortal part of myself’.
Yet it is not so much respect for reputation that governs the plot of Othello but trust, the misinvestment of it. Othello trusts Iago; Cassio trusts Iago, Desdemona trusts him and so, amazingly, does Emilia.
One ounce of doubt on their part and Iago’s plan would be done for. It could be said that none of those involved in the tragedy actually, or deeply, trusts the others – enough. Iago meanwhile trusts no one but himself.
And the green-eyed monster?
Looming over all the other ‘properties’ is, of course, Othello’s jealousy; but it could also be described as his insecurity concerning his own persona and background.
A general of Venice he may be, but the attitude and response of Desdemona’s father, Brabantio, would have been widely shared. He trusted in his daughter and that trust has been set at nought – ‘O treason of the blood!-/Fathers, from hence trust not your daughters’ minds’.
Brabantio calls Othello ‘thou foul thief’ and can only believe that Othello ‘hast enchanted her’. By marrying Desdemona without her father’s consent, Othello must have known he might not have won that consent voluntarily. Othello later confesses his wonderment at Desdemona’s choice.
Brought before the Duke of Venice, Othello eloquently makes his case, but what really wins it is Venice’s military necessity, a Turkish fleet ‘bearing up to Cyprus’, consequently the importance of Othello’s generalship.
The Shylock connection
It’s no mere coincidence that Venice is the setting both for the ‘sooty bosom’ of the Moor (as Brabantio puts it) and another member of a persecuted minority, Shylock in the Merchant of Venice.
Ultimately, in matters of the heart rather than war, Othello has a brittle self-view. The ‘green-eyed monster’ thus has him at its mercy, aided by some diabolical tweaking from Iago. In his case, career-opportunism might actually be considered only the part-motivator of his actions.
After all, following Cassio’s disgrace, Iago becomes the Moor’s lieutenant. Careerwise, he has got what he wanted. He could have handed back the handkerchief, heading off, for Othello, ‘such perdition/As nothing else could match’; and everyone would have lived happily ever after! Alas, for Iago, the game is everything.
He will have been well-content with the human devastation he has caused. One wonders how far his genius for manipulation might have carried him in the modern world.
To feed back on the above or correspond on like matters, please contact the author on Watsonworks@hotmail.co.uk
On previous blogs:
HISTORY’S NEGLECTED WOMEN (No.4, October 2009)
IN PRAISE OF WOMEN’S SOCCER (No.5, November 09)
LAST FLIGHT OF THE HEYFORD K6875 (No.6, Dec 09)
TRIGGERS & PROPS IN STORYTELLING, 1 (No.7, Jan 10)
PROPS PROPEL, Part 2 (No. 8, Feb.10).
THANKS FOR READING THIS!
JIM.
