W. J. T. Mitchell
         Editor's Note: On Narrative
         The essays included in this special issue of  are a
            product of the symposium on "Narrative: The Illusion of
            Sequence" held at the University of Chicago on 26-28 October
            1979. The rather special character of this symposium was not
            fragmented into concurrent or competing sessions, and all the
            speakers remained throughout the entire weekend to discuss the
            papers of their fellow participants. Several distinguished
            participants, in fact, did not read papers but confined their
            contributions to the conversations which developed over the several
            sessions of the three-day program. The impact of these sustained
            discussions is reflected in the revisions which the authors made in
            preparing their papers for this special issue, and thus this
            collection is a "product" of the symposium in a fairly
            precise sense.
Hayden White
         The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of_Reality
         To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite
            reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the
            nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so
            inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way
            things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical
            only in a culture in which it was absent absent or, as in
            some domains of Western intellectual and artistic culture,
            programmatically refused. As a panglobal fact of culture, narrative
            and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late (and
            already profoundly missed) Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is
            simply there like life itself . . . international, transhistorical,
            transcultural."1 Far from being a problem, then, narrative might
            well be considered a solution to a problem of general human
            concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into
            telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form
            assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human
            rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to
            comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we
            have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from
            another culture, however exotic that culture may appear to us. As
            Barthes says, "narrative...is translatable without fundamental
            damage" in a way that a lyric poem or a philosophical discourse is
            not.
             
            ·  1. Roland Barthes, "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of
            Narratives,"Music, Image, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York,
            1977), p. 79.
            ·  2. The words "narrative," "narration," "to narrate," and so on
            derive via the Latin gnārus ("knowing," "acquainted with,"
            "expert," "skillful," and so forth) and narro ("relate," "tell")
            from the Sanskrit root gnâ ("know"). The same root yields γνωριμος
            ("knowable," "known"): see Emile Boisacq,
            Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque (Heidelberg, 1950),
            under the entry for this word. My thanks to Ted Morris of Cornell,
            one of our greatest etymologists.
             
            Hayden White, professor in the program of history of consciousness
            at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is the author of The
            Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, The Greco-Roman
            Tradition, and Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in
            Nineteenth Century Europe. " The Narrativization of Real Events"
            appeared in the Summer 1981 issue of . Critical
            Responses to the present essay include Louis O. Mink's "Everyman
            His or Her Own Annalist", and Marilyn Robinson Waldman's "The
            Otherwise Unnoteworthy Year 711: A Reply to Hayden White," both in
            the Summer 1981 issue of .
Roy Schafer
         Narration in the Psychoanalytic Dialogue
         The primary narrative problem of the analyst is, then, not how to
            tell a normative chronological life history; rather, it is how to
            tell the several histories of each analysis. From this vantage
            point, the event with which to start the model analytic narration
            is not the first occasion of thought Freud's wish-fulfilling
            hallucination of the absent breast; instead, one should start from
            a narrative account of the psychoanalyst's retelling of something
            told by an analysand and the analysand's response to that narrative
            transformation. In the narration of this moment of dialogue lies
            the structure of the analytic past, present, and future. It is from
            this beginning that the accounts of early infantile development are
            constructed. Those traditional developmental accounts, over which
            analysts labored so hard, may now be seen in a new light: less as
            positivistic sets of factual findings about mental development and
            more as hermeneutically filled-in narrative structures. The
            narrative structures that have been adopted control the telling of
            the events of the analysis, including the many tellings and
            retellings of the analysand's life history. The time is always
            present. The event is always an outgoing dialogue.
             
            Roy Schafer is clinical professor of psychology and psychiatry at
            Cornell University Medical College, adjunct professor of psychology
            at New York University, and a supervising and training analyst at
            Columbia University's Center for Psychoanalytic Training and
            Research. He is the author of A New Language for Psychoanalysis,
            Language and Insight,and Narrative Actions in Psychoanalysis:
            Narratives of Space and Narratives of Time.
Jacques Derrida
         The Law of Genre
         The law is mad. The law is mad, is madness; but madness is not the
            predicate of law. There is no madness without the law; madness
            cannot be conceived before its relation to law. Madness is law, the
            law is madness. There is a general trait here: the madness of law
            mad for me, the silhouette of my daughter mad about me, her mother,
            etc. But La Folie du jour, An (accountless)Account?, carrying and
            miscarrying its titles, is not at all exemplary of this general
            trait. Not at all, not wholly. This is not an example of a general
            or generic whole. The whole, which begins by finishing and never
            finishes beginning apart from itself, the whole that stays at the
            edgeless boundary of itself, the whole greater and less than a
            whole and nothing, An Account? will not have been exemplary.
            Rather, with regard to the whole, it will have been wholly counter-
            exemplary.
             
            The genre has always in all genres been able to play the role of
            order's principle: resemblance, analogy, identity and difference,
            taxonomic classification, organization and genealogical tree, order
            of reason, order of reasons, sense of sense, truth of truth,
            natural light and sense of history. Now, the test of An Account?
            brought to light the madness of genre. Madness has given birth to
            and thrown light on the genre in the most dazzling, most blinding
            sense of the word. And in the writing of An Account?, in
            literature, satirically practicing all genres, imbibing them but
            never allowing herself to be saturated with a catalog of genres,
            she, madness, has started spinning Peterson's genre-disc like a
            demented sun. And she does not only do so in literature, for in
            concealing the boundaries that sunder mode and genre, she has also
            inundated and divided the borders between literature and its
            others.
             
            Jacques Derrida is professor of history of philosophy at L'Ecole
            Normale Supérieure in Paris. His greatly influential works include
            Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology, Spurs: Of Nietzsche's
            Styles, Positions, and Dissemination. Avital Ronell teaches German
            at the University of Virginia and is the author of Poetics of
            Desire and Principles of Textuality in Kafka's "Das Schloss."
Frank Kermode
         Secrets and Narrative Sequence
         The capacity of narrative to submit to the desires of this or that
            mind without giving up secret potential may be crudely represented
            as a dialogue between story and interpretation. This dialogue
            begins when the author puts pen to paper and it continues through
            every reading that is not merely submissive. In this sense we can
            see without too much difficulty that all narrative, in the writing
            and the reading, has something in common with the continuous
            modification of text that takes place in a psychoanalytical process
            (which may tempt us to relate secrets to the condensations and
            displacements of dreams) or in the distortions induced in
            historical narrative by metahistorical considerations.
             
            All that I leave to Roy Schafer1 and Hayden White. My immediate
            purpose is to make acceptable a simple proposition: we may like to
            think, for our purposes, of narrative as the product of two
            intertwined processes, the presentation of a fable and its
            progressive interpretation (which of course alters it). The first
            process tends toward clarity and propriety ("refined common
            sense"), the second toward secrecy, toward distortions which cover
            secrets. The proposition is not altogether alien to the now classic
            fabula/sujet distinction. A test for connexity (an important aspect
            of propriety) is that one can accurately infer the fable (which is
            not to say it ever had an independent existence). The sujet is what
            became of the fable when interpretation distorted its pristine,
            sequential propriety (and not only by dislocating its order of
            presentation, though the power to do so provides occasions for
            unobvious interpretations of a kind sequence cannot afford).
             
            ·  1. Not forever, I hope; his essay and its "refined common sense"
            have powerful implications for a more general narrative theory.
             
            Frank Kermodeis King Edward VII Professor of English at Cambridge
            University. The author of The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the
            Theory of Fiction, Continuities, and Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne:
            Renaissance Essays, his works also include The Classicand The
            Genesis of Secrecy. His previous contributions to 
            are "Novels: Recognition and Deception" (Autumn 1974), "A Reply to
            Denis Donoghue" (Spring 1975), and "A Reply to Joseph Frank"
            (Spring 1978).
Nelson Goodman
         Twisted Tales; or, Story, Study, and Symphony
         In sum, flashbacks and foreflashes are commonplace in narrative,
            and such rearrangements in the telling of a story seem to leave us
            not only with a story but with very much the same story.1 . . .
            Will no disparity between the order of telling and the order of
            occurrence destroy either the basic identity or the narrative
            status of any story? An exception seems ready at hand: suppose we
            simply run our film...backwards. The result, though indeed a story,
            seems hardly to be the same story in any usual sense . . . Does
            cinematic narrative actually differ this sharply from narrative in
            a series of snapshots or in words? I think not. Our first impulse
            with any tale when the order of telling is clear is to take the
            order of occurrence to be the same as the order of telling; we then
            make any needed corrections in accord with temporal indications
            given in the narrative and with our antecedent knowledge both of
            what happened and of causal processes in general. But discrepancy
            between order of telling and order of occurrence cannot always be
            discovered instantaneously or at all. If our series of
            snapshots is shown in reverse order at normal speed, we readily
            detect the reversal; for we know that a race begins at the starting
            gate, ends at the finish line, and so on. Even if the pictures do
            not show the starting gate or finish line or other identifiable
            parts of the track, we are not deceived, for we know that horses do
            not run backward. But when the film is run backward, such clues and
            considerations usually cannot be brought to bear soon enough, and
            we momentarily mistake the direction of the actions filmed. A
            little time is needed to make the correction. What seemed like a
            drastic difference between film and other forms of narrative
            amounts to nothing more than this lag.
             
            ·  1. In an obvious and important sense. Of course, whether two
            version are properly said to be of the same story or of the
            same world depends upon which of many permissible
            interpretations of sameness is understood; but that need not
            trouble us here.
             
            Nelson Goodman is emeritus professor of philosophy at Harvard and
            the founder of both Project Zero and the Harvard Dance Center. His
            works include The Structure of Appearance; Fact, Fiction, and
            Forecast, and Ways of Worldmaking. His contributions to Critical
            Inquiryare "The Status of Style" (Summer 1975), "Metaphor as
            Moonlighting" (Autumn 1979), and "The Telling and the Told" (Summer
            1981).
Seymour Chatman
         What Novels Can Do That Films Can't (and_Vice_Versa)
         The key word in amy account of the different ways that visual
            details are presented by novels and films is "assert." I wish to
            communicate by that word the force it has in ordinary rhetoric: an
            "assertion" is a statement, usually an independent sentence or
            clause, that something is in fact the case, that it is a certain
            sort of thing, that it does in fact have certain properties or
            enter into certain relations, namely, those listed. Opposed to
            asserting there is mere "naming." When I say, "The cart was tiny;
            it came onto the bridge," I am asserting that certain property of
            the cart of being small in size and that certain relation of
            arriving at the bridge. However, when I say "The green cart came
            onto the bridge," I am asserting nothing more than its arrival at
            the bridge; the greenness of the cart is not asserted but slipped
            in without syntactic fuss. It is only named. Textually, it emerges
            by the way. Now, most film narratives seem to be of the latter
            textual order: it requires special effort for films to assert a
            property or relation. The dominant mode is presentational, not
            assertive. A film doesn't say, "This is the state of affairs," it
            merely shows you that state of affairs. Of course, there could be a
            character or a voice-over commentator asserting a property or
            relation; but then the film would be using its sound track in much
            the same way as fiction uses assertive syntax. It is not cinematic
            description but merely description by literary assertion
            transferred to film. Filmmakers and critics traditionally show
            disdain for verbal commentary because it explicates what, they
            feel, should be implicated visually. So in its essential visual
            mode, film does not describe at all but merely presents; or better,
            it depicts, in the original etymological sense of that word:
            renders in pictorial form. I don't think that this is mere purism
            or a die-hard adherence to silent films. Film attracts that
            component of our perceptual apparatus which we tend to favor over
            the other senses. Seeing, after all, is believing.
             
            Seymour Chatman, professor in the department of rhetoric at the
            University of California, Berkeley, is the author of The Later
            Style of Henry James and Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure
            in Fiction and Film. His contribution to , "Reply
            to Barbara Herrnstein Smith" appeared in the Summer 1981 issue.
Victor Turner
         Social Dramas and Stories about Them
         Although it might be argued that the social drama is a story in
            [Hayden] White's sense, in that it has discernible inaugural,
            transitional, and terminal motifs, that is, a beginning, a middle,
            and an end, my observations convince me that it is, indeed, a
            spontaneous unit of social process and a fact of everyone's
            experience in every human society. My hypothesis, based on repeated
            observations of such processual units in a range of sociocultural
            systems and in my reading in ethnography and history, is that
            social dramas, "dramas of living," as Kenneth Burke calls them, can
            be aptly studied as having four phases. These I label breach,
            crisis, redress, and either reintegration orrecognition of schism.
            Social dramas occur within groups of persons who share values and
            interests and who have a real or alleged common history. The main
            actors are persons for whom the group has a high value priority.
            Most of us have what I call our "star" group or groups to which we
            owe our deepest loyalty and whose fate is for us of the greatest
            personal concern. It is the one with which a person identifies most
            deeply and in which he finds fulfillment of his major social and
            personal desires. We are all members of many groups, formal or
            informal, from the family to the nation or some international
            religion or political institution. Each person makes his/her own
            subjective evaluation of the group's respective worth: some are
            "dear" to one, others it is one's "duty to defend," and so on. Some
            tragic situations arise from conflicts of loyalty to different star
            groups.
             
            Victor Turner is professor of anthropology and a member of the
            Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Virginia. His many
            publications include Schism and Continuity in an African Society,
            The Forest of Symbols, The Ritual Process,and, with Edith Turner,
            Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture.
Paul Ricoeur
         Narrative Time
         The configurational dimension, in turn, displays temporal features
            that may be opposed to these "features" of episodic time. The
            configurational arrangement makes the succession of events into
            significant wholes that are the correlate of the act of grouping
            together. Thanks to this reflective act in the sense of
            Kant's Critique of Judgment the whole plot may be translated
            into one "thought." "Thought," in this narrative context, may
            assume various meanings. It may characterize, for instance,
            following Aristotle's Poetics, the "theme" (dianoia) that
            accompanies the "fable" or "plot" (mythos) of a tragedy.1 "Thought"
            may also designate the "point" of the Hebraic maschal or of the
            biblical parable, concerning which Jeremias observes that the point
            of the parable is what allows us to translate it into a proverb or
            an aphorism. The term "thought" may also apply to the "colligatory
            terms" used in history writing, such terms as "the Renaissance,"
            "the Industrial Revolution," and so on, which, according to Walsh
            and Dray, allow us to apprehend a set of historical events under a
            common denominator. (Here "colligatory terms" correspond to the
            kind of explanation that Dray puts under the heading of "explaining
            what.") In a word, the correlation between thought and plot
            supersedes the "then" and "and then" of mere succession. But it
            would be a complete mistake to consider "thought" as a-
            chronological. "Fable" and "theme" are as closely tied together as
            episode and configuration. The time of fable-and theme, if we may
            make of this a hyphenated expression, is more deeply temporal than
            the time of merely episodic narratives.
             
            ·  1. It may be noted in passing that this correlation between
            "theme" and "plot" is also the basis of Northup Frye's "archetypal"
            criticism.
             
            Paul Ricoeur is professor of philosophy at the Université de Paris
            (Nanterre) and John Nuveen Professor at the University of Chicago.
            Some of his works to appear in English are Husserl: An Analysis of
            His Phenomenology, Main Trends in Philosophy,and The Conflict of
            Interpretations: Essays on Hermeneutics. His previous contribution
            to , "The Metaphorical Process as Cognition,
            Imagination, and Feeling," appeared in the Autumn 1978 issue.
Ursula K. Le Guin
         It Was a Dark and Stormy Night; or,_Why_Are_We_Huddling_about_the
            Campfire?
         It was a dark and stormy night, in the otherwise unnoteworthy year
            711 E.C. (Eskimo Calendar), and the great-aunt sat crouched at her
            typewriter, holding his hands out to it from time to time as if for
            warmth and swinging on a swing. He was a handsome boy of about
            eighteen, one of those men who suddenly excite your desire when you
            meet them in the street, and who leave you with a vague feeling of
            uneasiness and excited senses. On the plate beside the typewriter
            lay a slice of tomato. It was a flawless slice. It was a perfect
            slice of a perfect tomato. It is perfectly boring. I hold out my
            hands to the typewriter again, while swinging and showing my
            delicate limbs, and observe that the rows of keys are marked with
            all the letters of the English alphabet, and all the letters of the
            French alphabet minus accent marks, and all the letters of the
            Polish alphabet except the dark L. By striking these keys with the
            ends of my fingers or, conceivably, a small blunt object, the aging
            woman can create a flaw in the tomato. She did so at once. It was
            then a seriously, indeed a disgustingly flawed tomato, but it
            continued to be perfectly boring until eaten. She expired instantly
            in awful agony, of snakebite, flinging the window wide to get air.
            It is a dark and stormy night and the rain falling in in the
            typewriter keys writes a story in German about a great-aunt who
            went to a symposium on narrative and got eaten in the forest by a
            metabear. She writes the story while reading it with close
            attention, not sure what to expect, but collaborating hard, as if
            that was anything new; and this is the story I wrote . . .
             
            Ursula K. Le Guin, distinguished novelist, poet, and essayist, is
            the author of The Left Hand of Darkness, Malafrena,and The
            Dispossessed, for which she won both the Hugo and the Nebula Award.
            Her novel The Lathe of Heaven was made into a film by the Public
            Broadcasting System.
Paul Hernadi
         On the How, What, and Why of Narrative
         Why, then, do we huddle in the dark around the campfires of our
            flickering narratives? There are obviously many different reasons
            for doing so. Yet, having heard various récits whether
            "stories" or "accounts" during the narrative conference, I am
            more inclined than ever to see self-assertive entertainment and
            self-transcending commitment as two kinds of ultimate motivation
            for our countless narratives. Stories and histories and other
            narrative or descriptive accounts help us to escape boredom
            andindifference ours as well as that of other people. Those
            nearly vacant states of mind at the zero degree of entertainment
            and commitment bring us frightfully close to the experience of
            nonexistence. Hence our desire to replace boredom by thrilling or
            gratifying entertainment (remember Edmund Burke's contrast between
            the Sublime and the Beautiful?) and to replace indifference by the
            social or cosmic commitment either to change the world or to change
            ourselves. In a world of unmixed colors and pure literary genres,
            tragedy, comedy, satire, and romance might answer distinct needs
            for thrill, gratification, indignation, and admiration. But, as Roy
            Schafer and Victor Turner have reminded us, the private and social
            dramas underlying psychoanalytical and anthropological accounts are
            even less pure than most works of literature. Couldn't we conclude
            that life's internal and external dramas stem from a compound
            desire for self-assertion and self-transcendence a desire
            which, in the realm of literary entertainment and commitment,
            motivates the emergence and appreciation of tragicomedy?
             
            Paul Hernadi teaches English and comparative literature at the
            University of Iowa. He is the author of Beyond Genre: New
            Directions in Literary Classification and the editor of What is
            Literature? and What is Criticism? His previous contribution to
            ,"Literary Theory: A Compass for Critics," appeared
            in the Winter 1976 issue.
Robert Scholes
         Language, Narrative, and Anti-Narrative
         This long digression into language was necessary because we cannot
            understand verbal narrative unless we are aware of the iconic and
            indexical dimensions of language. Narrative is not just a
            sequencing, or the illusion of sequence, as the title of our
            conference would have it; narrative is a sequencing of something
            for somebody. To put anything into words is to sequence it, but to
            enumerate the parts of an automobile is not to narrate them, even
            though the enumeration must mention each part in the enumeration's
            own discursive order. One cannot narrate a picture, or a person, or
            a building, or a tree, or a philosophy. Narration is a word that
            implicates its object in its meaning. Only one kind of thing can be
            narrated: a time-thing, or to use our normal word for it, an
            "event." And strictly speaking, we require more than one event
            before we recognize that we are in the presence of a narrative. And
            what is an event? A narrated event is the symbolization of a real
            event: a temporal icon. A narration is the symbolic presentation of
            a sequence of events connected by subject matter and related by
            time. Without temporal relation we have only a list. A telephone
            directory is a list, but we can give it a strong push in the
            direction of narrative by adding the word "begat" between the first
            and second entries and the words "who begat" after each successive
            entry until the end. This will resemble certain minimal religious
            narratives, even down to the exclusion of female names from most of
            the list (the appearance of nonpersonal listings in the phonebook
            complicates things, of course).
             
            Robert Scholes is professor of English and comparative literature
            and director of the semiotics program at Brown University. He is
            the author of Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction,
            Fabulation and Metafiction, and Reading, Writing, and Semiotics.
            "Toward a Semiotics of Literature," his previous contribution to
            ,appeared in the Autumn 1977 issue.
Barbera Herrnstein Smith
         Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories
         . . . I should like to review and summarize the preceding general
            points:
             
            1. For any particular narrative, there is no single basically basic
            story subsisting beneath it but, rather, an unlimited number of
            other narratives that can be constructed in response to it or
            perceived as relatedto it.
            2. Among the narratives that can be constructed in response to a
            given narrative are not only those that we commonly refer to as
            "versions" of it (for example, translations, adaptations,
            abridgements, and paraphrases) but also those retellings that we
            call "plot summaries," "interpretations," and, sometimes, "basic
            stories." None of these retellings, however, is more absolutely
            basic than any of the others.
            3. For any given narrative, there are always multiple basic stories
            that can be constructed in response to it because basic-ness is
            always arrived at by the exercise of some set of operations, in
            accord with some set of principles, that reflect some set of
            interests, all of which are, by nature, variable and thus multiple.
            Whenever we start to cut back, peel off, strip away, lay bare, and
            so forth, we always do so in accord with certain assumptions and
            purposes which, in turn, create hierarchies of relevance and
            centrality; and it is in terms of these hierarchies that we will
            distinguish certain elements and relations as being central or
            peripheral, more important or less important, and more basic or
            less basic.
            4. The form and feature of any "version" of a narrative will be a
            function of, among other things, the particular motives that
            elicited it and the particular interests and functions it was
            designed to serve. Some versions, such as translation and
            transcriptions, may be constructed in order to preserve and
            transmit a culturally valued verbal structure. Others, such as
            adaptations and abridgements, may be constructed in order to amuse
            or instruct a specific audience. And someversions, such as
            "interpretations," "plot summaries," and "basic stories," may be
            constructed in order to advance the objectives of a particular
            discipline, such as literary history, folklore,
            psychiatry or, of course, narratology. None of these latter
            versions, however, is any less motivated or, accordingly, formally
            contingent than any of the other versions constructed to serve
            other interests or functions.
             
            Barbara Herrnstein Smith is professor of English and communications
            and the director of the Center for the Study of Art and Symbolic
            Behavior at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of
            Poetic Closure and On the Margins of Discourse. "On the Margins of
            Discourse" was also contributed as an essay to  in
            the June 1975 issue. Responses to the present essay are Nelson
            Goodman's "The Telling and the Told" and Seymour Chatman's "Reply
            to Barbara Herrnstein Smith". Both appear in the Summer 1981 issue
            of .
