Figurational

Paul Ricoeur’s Mimetic Narrativity, in Summary

2017-11-04T00:00:00Z

In the last few posts I have introduced Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of narrative, placing it over against theories of narrative derived from structuralism. He uses the term ‘mimesis’ extensively in his examination of narrative, a technical term in linguistics and philosophy that essentially means the imitative representation of the real world in art and literature. Ricoeur’s use of ‘mimesis’ and ‘mimetic’ is idiosyncratic and I’ll talk about it in more detail in the near future, as I’ve already promised.

I’ve also set out the details of Ricoeur’s narratology, describing the three moments of narrative:

I first looked at prefiguration (mimesis 1) and narrative competence, and the pre-existing experience and expectations of stories we bring with us when reading.
Next, I described configuration (mimesis 2) and narrative emplotment, about characters, events and the point of a story as a whole, about following the rules and transgressing them too.
And thirdly, I talked about refiguration (mimesis 3), understanding and transformation, as readers complete a writer’s story in restoring it to the real world of action and suffering.

A brief summary is helpful at this point.

The distinctive characteristic of Ricoeur’s philosophy of narrative is that it approaches the subject with a significantly wider view than the structuralist models that had previously dominated.¹

Structuralist narratology is solely concerned with the closed system of the story being narrated and as such it is directed almost exclusively at mimesis 2, the configuration of the narrative, and even then it is a sub-set of Ricoeur’s full proposition for mimesis 2. The fixation on deep-level structure in the structuralist models — that all stories ever told conform to set of patterns and rules, have a defined set of character types and roles, follow a systematic sequence of emotional ‘beats’, and so on — miss out on surface-level facets like characterisation, reversals of fortune, the temporality of events and the like.² It certainly has no conception of the act of emplotment or the notion of narrative tradition.³

Ricoeur’s wider view incorporates two vital extra domains discussed in those earlier posts.

Firstly, what is believable as a story is contingent on the prefigured worlds of authors and readers.

And secondly, the world of the story is restored to the real world through the refiguration of hearers and readers.

Ricoeur’s recognition and exploration of these two vastly significant arenas indicate the severe limitations of any notion of narrative built on pure structuralism, and it is the crucial role of mediation that configuration plays between prefiguration and refiguration that spotlights the poverty of structuralist narratologies.

A mimetic theory of narrative, then, pays great heed to the world that is being brought to a given story, and to the possibilities for transforming that world.

What we bring …

Hearers and readers are framed in their capacity to follow a story, and so to believe in it, by the matrix of stories they have previously heard. No two matrices are identical, though there may be huge amounts of overlap.

Certainly those raised in Western Europe, for example, will be thoroughly framed by historical stories like major international wars, fascism and religious factionalism and by political stories like democracy and capitalism. As a result they will be able to engage with each other without the need to vocalise a large number of things since so many perceptions and notions can be taken as given. However, significant differences will inevitably be present within a single society.

People being raised under a meta-story of patriarchy and the pater familias (the head of the family in classical antiquity), such as those from conservative religious backgrounds, say, will have very different reactions to a classic story like Cinderella from people influenced by feminist liberation. But even feminist perspectives pre- and post-Barbie, pre- and post-Thatcher, pre- and post-Madonna, for instance, will be significantly different from each other. And that is even before turning to more particularity due to upbringing, education, sex and gender, economic circumstances, ethnicity and so on.

Added to this is the personal narrative preferences or exposure of an individual that will add up to shape what constitutes ‘a good story’ — diets consisting of broadsheet journalism, escapist ‘beach’ novels, classic French cinema or computer game shoot ’em ups will inevitably produce strikingly distinct perceptions of narrative competence.

Or, to speak more of the era of Jesus of Nazareth, my particular field, and to highlight just a few high-level influences, though the narratives of the Maccabean uprisings would have been available as a shared set of stories, Jews persuaded more by Hellenism (i.e. Greek language, philosophy and culture), by Romanism (i.e. Roman imperialism and civil governance), by fundamentalism, by separatism, by asceticism or by ir/reverence for the Temple in Jerusalem would read them very differently.

… and how we’re affected

Mimetic approaches to narrative also take pains to assess the transformative effect of a narrative on the hearer/reader.

Of particular interest is the manner in which the world proposed by the text, the way of being-in-the-world presented by the narrative, reinforces, challenges or contradicts the world of the reader, and the reader’s response to that interplay.

The real Oskar Schindler

As a brief example, over against a naïve received opinion that all Germans were Nazis between 1933 and 1945, the film Schindler’s List presents a different view that portrays both the horror of the six million people killed in the Holocaust (without ever being able to represent the Holocaust in its entirety) and the surprise of six hundred who were not because of the actions of a German.⁴

Through this encounter with an alternative reading of a received story, the reader is able to project herself into the story and ask ‘Would I have been like Oskar Schindler? Or like Itzhak Stern, Oskar’s Jewish assistant? Or maybe like Amon Goeth, the camp commander?’

Importantly, Schindler’s List is not a documentary but a fictionalisation inspired by the life of Oskar Schindler, blurring the lines between fiction and history, and as such it clearly illustrates the mimetic nature of art imitating life.

Emplotment, mediating between what we bring and how we’re affected

Emplotment, or configuration, plays a mediating role between prefiguration and refiguration. A story can only work if it is recognisable as a story in reference to the author’s and the reader’s prior understanding of a believable story. But a story can also only work if it says something about something to somebody, if it refers afresh to the real world.

Ricoeur is particularly concerned with narrative’s ability to refigure time, especially events in time, and especially since time is so hard to understand in literal language.⁵

It is to this issue that I shall turn next.

Photo credits

Markus Spiske on Unsplash
Oskar Schindler, via Wikimedia Commons

Refiguration, Understanding and Transformation

2017-10-28T00:00:00Z

Mimesis 2, emplotment, or configuration, is the most common concern for discussion on narrative but Ricoeur is insistent that in order for mimesis 2 to become intelligible there is a requirement for a third stage to complete the cycle of mimesis.¹

This third movement of narrative is the stage in which a story is restored to the real world of action and suffering; it is in the hearer or reader that the mimetic arc reaches its conclusion.²

This means then,

… mimesis 3 marks the intersection of the world of the text and the world of the reader; the intersection, therefore, of the world configured by the poem and the world wherein real action occurs and unfolds its specific temporality.³

Without this third stage, the stage of refiguration, narration is not possible.

A brief aside …

Before progressing to looking at what happens when narratives are restored to the real world of acting and suffering, there’s a couple of important terms that should be briefly described, since they’ll get used a lot.

Ricoeur’s philosophy has always focussed on the human experience and perception of reality, a branch of philosophy called phenomenology. He soon realised that we human beings use language to express our experience of phenomena. The way we interpret and comprehend things expressed in language is a field known as hermeneutics.

In human experience, some phenomena are incomprehensible and overflow with irresolvable internal contradictions. A thing that is incomprehensible and irresolvable is called an aporia and matters related to them are aporetic.

Time, for Ricoeur, is the ultimate aporia and his work here is trying to understand how it is that human beings do not despair when confronted with the sheer vastness of cosmic time. Ricoeur’s intention in Time and Narrative is to understand how we approach the aporetic — time in this case — through language in the form of narrative. For Ricoeur, we engage with the aporetic by humanising it through narrative. Or, in other words:

We tell stories to come to terms with the incomprehensible.

Four problems for restoring narratives

Ricoeur poses four problems to explore the dynamics of refiguration.

Firstly, if the narrative arc begins and ends in the world of action, does this really mark a progression? Have we actually developed our understanding of ourselves and the world at large? Is there not, in fact, a problem of circularity, that stories are just folded in on themselves?

Next, in what way is hearing or reading related to the telling of the story? How does refiguration develop, prolong and conclude the act of emplotment?

Thirdly, the act of reading brings the narrative work into the field of communication. This allows Ricoeur to revisit questions of reference — what happens in communication as language refers to things in the real world? — that he’d examined earlier in his career and to fully examine the particular difficulties of reference in the field of narrative.

Finally, since the narrated world is refiguring a temporal world, it is necessary to examine the capacity for a ‘hermeneutics of narrated time’ (i.e. the way the story reshapes time through the plot) to comprehend the ‘phenomenology of time’, time as it is actually experienced.⁴

By developing this discussion it is then possible to extrapolate from Ricoeur’s argument on time and narrative to a wider discussion on ‘the relation between a phenomenology that does not stop engendering aporias,’ and what may be called ‘poetic “solutions” to those aporias.’⁵ The culmination of this discussion, then, is this ‘dialectic between an aporetics and a poetics.’⁶

Mimetic Circularity

Photo by Nicolas Hoizey on Unsplash

With the movement from prefiguration to refiguration via configuration there is an inevitable concern over circularity, that the ending point is no further from the starting point, or worse still that the end point is already present at the beginning in some way.⁷ If this were so then all that would exist is a vicious circle of words, no use to anyone.⁸

Ricoeur concedes that there is a circularity but he does not yield that the circularity is a vicious one.⁹ Rather he suggests that the mimetic cycle is a never-ending spiral of ever-increasing understanding, passing the same point many times but each time at a different ‘altitude.’¹⁰ A story may be about despair, or fidelity, say, and each time it returns to the theme through the characters, the actions, the events, the story has provoked the reader to understand more and more about despair, or fidelity.

The cycle of a story is a never-ending spiral of ever-increasing understanding, passing the same point many times but each time at a different altitude.

Ricoeur proposes several images to illustrate his rejection of circularity. Most immediately, human beings have an extraordinary capacity to identify narrative traits in sequences of episodes in everyday life. We are inclined to see, oxymoronically, ‘“(as yet) untold” stories.’¹¹ Surely a story is defined in part as something that is told? And yet we appear to have an innate ability to recognise a story that demands to be told.¹²

As a second example, the patient tells a psychoanalyst ‘bits and pieces’ of lived experiences, often conflictual, in a process that is designed to draw them together into a narrative structure that can give them greater and greater substance and intelligibility. Each recollection builds the narrative coherence of a life, each time a greater height of understanding.¹³ Or again, a judge or jury is tasked with trying to ‘untangle’ the layers of narratives in a court case, and each witness gives their account so that the story of the events and subjects can emerge from the melée.

A final illustration is seen vividly in the need to retain the history of the defeated, the losers, the suffering, the marginalised. Even seven decades on from the events themselves, the number of novels and movies that examine the Jewish holocaust of the Second World War is testament to a refigurative mimetic spiral, not an enclosed circle.

‘The whole history of suffering cries out for vengeance and calls for narrative.’¹⁴

This is not a one-time narration but a corpus of stories, each member of which compounds, corrects or converts existing comprehension.

The circularity of the mimetic arc is not problematic. Rather it is immensely productive, in that each pass by the ‘point’ of the story deepens its intelligibility. The spiral nature of this circular motion means that, far from being a vicious circle, the hermeneutics of narrative contributes to a healthy circle.¹⁵

Configuration, Refiguration and Reading

Photo by Jilbert Ebrahimi on Unsplash

I described previously that, for Ricoeur, emplotment is the transition between mimesis 1 and mimesis 2. In a similar way, he argues that reading is the transition between mimesis 2 and mimesis 3.

Emplotment is a collaboration between the writer and the reader.

In reading, the reader undertakes to ‘grasp together’ the elements of the plot and construct them into an intelligible whole.¹⁶ Emplotment, then, is not the sole domain of the writer but is a collaboration between the writer and the reader (or the teller and the hearer).¹⁷ The guidelines of traditionality and schematisation govern the story’s capacity to be followed.

On the other hand, it is the act of reading that accompanies the narrative’s configuration and actualizes its capacity to be followed. To follow a story is to actualize it by reading it.¹⁸

This is the joint work of the text and the reader.¹⁹

The reader is also the locus within which the narrative innovation of the story is able to be realised.

In the act of reading, the receiver plays with the narrative constraints, brings about gaps … and enjoys … the pleasure of the text.²⁰

And in reading the reader ‘completes’ the work, since the text provides a ‘sketch for reading.’²¹

Reference

Photo by Prasanna Kumar on Unsplash

The notion of reading is the beginning of a fully-fledged description of mimesis 3, as far as Ricoeur is concerned. The interaction between the reader and the text demands that both have their feet under the table. A theory of reception (i.e. the ways that stories have been read throughout their history) must, however, also incorporate an understanding of reference if it is to have any merit, for ‘[i]f narrative did not have this referential function, its purpose would be lost, and we would not “understand” it in any deep sense.’²²

Ricoeur’s foundational definition of mimesis 3, the ‘intersection of the world of the text and the world of the reader,’²³ incorporates the starting point for his examination of reference, that the text projects a ‘world’ that constitutes its ‘horizon.’²⁴

An ability to communicate, the capacity to refer

The ‘world of the text’ is an idea that picks up where The Rule of Metaphor left off. Ricoeur’s earlier project on metaphor had indicated that broadening the view from the word to the sentence enabled the critic to grasp that the primary intention of language is to say something about something to someone.²⁵ The point of saying something, verbally or in writing, is not just to say something to someone but to ‘bring a new experience to language and share it with someone else. It is this experience, in turn, that has the world for its horizon.’²⁶

The primary intention of language is to say something about something to someone.

This means that language does not constitute a world for itself, and it is not a world in itself.²⁷ Rather, because ‘we are in the world and are affected by situations, we try to orient ourselves in them by means of understanding,’ and this we do by bringing experience to language, by having something to say about something to someone.²⁸

Reception thus incorporates simultaneously both an ability to communicate and the capacity to refer.²⁹ In reading a reader receives both the sense of the work and its reference, that is, ‘the experience it brings to language and, in the last analysis, the world and the temporality it unfolds in the face of this experience.’³⁰

The Rule of Metaphor urges us to expand not only from the word to the sentence but also to the whole work. In doing so, similar things can be said about the literary work as a whole, that it brings an experience to language and thereby comes into the world. We can thus speak of the ‘world of the text,’ but this poses the problem of the relation of the world of the text with the world of the reader and the interaction or fusion of two horizons, the question of how literature affects everyday experience.³¹

The resolution to this problem begins with Ricoeur’s argument in The Rule of Metaphor that:

… ‘language’s capacity for reference was not exhausted by descriptive discourse and that poetic works referred to the world in their own specific way, that of metaphorical reference.’³²

A correlation can then be established between the metaphorical notion of ‘seeing as’ and the literary work’s capacity to propose ‘being as,’ i.e. to present a way of being in the world.

In my field of Biblical Studies, in the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant (Matthew 18: 21–35), for example, the king and the servant both present a way of being-in-the-world and the narrative is constructed in such a way that the contrast of those modes of ‘being as’ is of key significance.

Kevin Vanhoozer is wary of the notion of ‘being as,’ concerned that its ambiguity allows Ricoeur to fall down the slippery slope to ‘as if’ that privileges the poetic over the actual and fiction over history.³³ As a theologically motivated reader, this makes Vanhoozer nervous because he perceives that it would allow the Gospels to be read as fictions not as histories, even to the point of destabilising a historical root or claims to literality in the canonical narratives of Jesus.³⁴ I shall explore this in further depth in future posts on criticisms of Ricoeur’s theory of narrative, but for now it raises a question about whether Ricoeur privileges fiction over history.

Photo by Nick Karvounis on Unsplash

The metaphoric quality of poetic works, including narratives, means that the world of the text includes descriptive and non-descriptive references. The point of this is not that hermeneutics should expose the author’s intention behind the text but that it exposes the ‘movement by which the text unfolds, as it were, a world in front of itself.’³⁵

For example, in recent times there has been a substantial number of books, films and TV series that re-examine Tudor England, with Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl being notable examples. These stories characteristically approach well-known stories from the viewpoint of fairly ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances, such as Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall. In the modern era of increasing distance between the lives of ordinary people and those of the wealthy, powerful and autocratic class, these works allow ordinary readers to project their own (differing) experiences and conceptions of being into the story and measure them against those of the story’s characters — the actions and motivations of Thomas Cromwell, Thomas More or Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, for example — weighing the merits and values of the story’s proposal for ‘being as’ against their own.

In narrative, what is reconfigured is the temporal dimension of the world, the place and significance of events in time

As a consequence, it can be said that ‘what is interpreted in a text is the proposing of a world that I might inhabit and into which I might project my ownmost powers.’³⁶ In particular, Ricoeur argues, in narrative what is reconfigured is the temporal dimension of the world, the place and significance of events in time, such that actions are shaped by the literary work’s design.

A further level of referential complexity is encountered in narrative in that it includes two classes of discourse, historical and fictional narratives.³⁷ I will return to this in more detail at a later date, but for now a few words will help.

Historical narratives alone can claim to refer to things that have actually happened, and this presents an asymmetry in the referential quality of the two forms. In this discussion the notion of the trace is crucial.³⁸ Historical narratives rely on the traces of events in the past in the present (documents, testimonies and the like). Even if the past is inaccessible, these traces allow the past to be reconstructed through the imagination. Historical narratives therefore have fiction-like qualities.

Fictional narratives, on the other hand, share the notion of the trace, written ‘as if’ the events they describe had happened. This reciprocal borrowing illustrates that the referential dynamic of both fictional and historical narratives interweave. And this interaction occurs precisely in the realm of human action.

Narrated Time

The drip of a tap takes a moment. The poetic, narrative description of a drip can takes pages. Photo by Luis Tosta on Unsplash

To speak of the intermingling of historical and fictional narrative in the realm of human action requires that the temporal dimension is properly understood, Ricoeur argues. And in order to understand the temporal dimension of narrative it is necessary to discuss the aporetic character of a pure phenomenology of time.³⁹

As I have briefly indicated, Ricoeur is impressed by Augustine’s notion of the threefold presence of time, that the present contains the present memory of things that have passed, the present anticipation of things to come, and the presence of things that are now present. For example, when one listens to someone talking a memory of the words just spoken lingers whilst the current word is being voiced in order that it can have context and significance, and the present word creates an expectation of the likely words to follow. Augustine’s description, as elegant as it is, never specifies what time actually is, so whilst it is phenomenological, it is not a pure phenomenology, which would make time appear so that it can be measurable. This inability to actually say what time is remains, despite the best attempts of descriptive language, and time is therefore an aporia.⁴⁰

Non-descriptive language is the appropriate response to the aporia of time

The inescapable aporetic quality of time is crucial to Ricoeur’s theory of narrative because it incorporates his ‘thesis that the poetics of narrativity responds and corresponds to the aporetics of temporality.’⁴¹ Non-descriptive language is the appropriate response to the aporia of time, in other words.

Being-as and Being-toward-death

Ricoeur is in specific conversation here with Heidegger and his work in Being and Time. Heidegger supersedes Augustine’s threefold present with his notion of being-toward-death. The particular gain from Heidegger’s analysis is that human experience of temporality ‘is capable of unfolding itself on several levels of radicality,’ and that being human includes that capacity to traverse these levels, whether ‘from above or below,’ (i.e. from ‘authentic and mortal time toward everyday and public time where everything happens “in” time’) or the reverse, ‘from below to above.’⁴²

The direction of travel here is less important than the revelation that temporal experience has a hierarchy — that the time of the cosmos is at one end of the hierarchy, and the time of lived experience is at the other. Whilst this is an immensely important insight, Heidegger’s future-oriented analysis through the lens of being-toward-death has the unintended consequence of actually making the relationship between time and the human sciences, history in particular, more difficult by withdrawing the basis for a concept of history common to historians.⁴³

Being-towards-death also presumes a radically privatised time that does not allow space for interaction in the common time of characters in a narrative or the public time of history. Heidegger’s thesis, then, helps overcome some problems in describing a phenomenology of time, but creates a whole raft more, and does nothing to resolve the aporetic quality of time. Religious traditions and great works of art also speak to an eternity that further problematise the phenomenon of time.⁴⁴

A poetic and non-descriptive response to the aporetic character of temporality

It is to this set of problems that Ricoeur’s notion of narrated time addresses itself. Time itself is aporetic; it is indescribable and irresolvable; it is enigmatic. That does not mean it is unapproachable, but it does imply that purely descriptive language will continue to fall short in its attempts to encapsulate it.

Thankfully, descriptive language is not the end of language.

The enigmatic is still approachable through non-descriptive language (i.e. poetic language), and with regard to time this is precisely what narrative attempts to do.

Narrative constructions, both historical and fictional, explore time: they configure and reconfigure time by selecting events and presenting them in a particular order through the narrative’s emplotment. Reading or hearing these configurations projects a world, with time shaped in the particular form determined by the configured world, from the text into the world of the reader. The reader then has to judge the quality and the merit of this way of configuring time, and to respond to it by allowing her world to be reconfigured in the light of the world as proposed.

Narrated time, then, is a poetic and non-descriptive response to the aporetic character of temporality.

I will return to this subject of the aporetic shortly.

Photo Credits

Lily Lvnatikk on Unsplash
Nicolas Hoizey on Unsplash
Jilbert Ebrahimi on Unsplash
Prasanna Kumar on Unsplash
Nick Karvounis on Unsplash

Time, Narrative and the Aporetic

2017-11-05T00:00:00Z

Ricoeur’s work is not focussed primarily on setting out a theory of narrative and its significance for philosophy, but rather on how human beings live with the enigma of time. A theory of narrative is a bi-product of his examination of how humans exist within time.

The Problem With Time

The problem with time arises in trying to describe it. What actually is it? Is it something? Or is it not something? The being or non-being of time is the fundamental underlying aporia of the whole enigma, the thing that makes it incomprehensible and irresolvable.¹

If it exists then it can in some way be measured, but measuring time is difficult, ironically so since we have so many devices to do it.

The problem with measuring it is that ‘the future is not yet, the past is no longer, and the present does not remain,’ Ricoeur argues.²

As soon as one tries to ascribe some sort of length to time then it has gone directly from the present into the past and is no longer. Obviously, then, the only time that can be called present is a point-like instant, but as soon as that is present it has gone. The present has no duration, so it cannot exist, and time has no being.³ Yet, of course, that does not accord with everyday experience, and experience holds sway over this profound skepticism.

It is language, in collaboration with experience, that resists skepticism.

It is language, in collaboration with experience, that resists skepticism. Language sustains the things that have passed and the things that are still to come; language gives them body, but it gives them body in the present. It is not the past and the future that exist in themselves but ‘the temporal qualities that can exist in the present, without the things of which we speak, when we recount them or predict them, still existing or already existing.’⁴ In other words:

The present contains an anticipation of what is to come, a memory of what has just passed, and the experience of what is presently occurring, all equally present, all necessarily present.

This is Ricoeur’s notion of the threefold present.

The Aporia Remains

The aporia arises because this description is not applied to the thing itself, time, but to the way language gives an account of the experience of time. It is not a pure phenomenology of time, even though it is phenomenological in its description of human experience.

Time itself is aporetic, indescribable.⁵

The Aporia Intensifies

The aporia is intensified in contrasting the dimensions of time in human experience.

Living within cosmic time. Photo by David Huang on Unsplash

Firstly, humans live within the context of ‘cosmic time,’ the implacable, unyielding, remorseless passage of time, untouched by the to-and-fro of humanity.

And yet, secondly, human beings do not live with their eye on the time of the cosmos, what Ricoeur calls the ‘time of the world,’ but rather within ‘human time,’ the time of an ordinary human life, with memories, ancestors, traces, anticipations, expectations, plans and the like, what Ricoeur calls the ‘time of the soul.’⁶

One of the primary functions of narration is to play with time in order to make it habitable, responding to the aporia of time with a poetic solution.

Looking too hard at the former illustrates so starkly the inconsequence of an ordinary human life that despair would be an inevitable consequence, and yet human beings do not habitually despair. Instead, we humanise cosmic time in order that it becomes habitable.⁷

This is one of the primary functions of narration, to play with time in order to make it habitable, responding to the aporia of time ‘with a poetic solution.’⁸

Narrated time selects certain events as ‘of importance’ for the story being told, and rejects others as irrelevant.⁹ Each narrator chooses their own set of events, even if they are narrating the same occurrence, because what one person deems to be significant is different for another person.

The prefiguration of a story narrated is determined by the sum of the stories, novels, plays, newspaper articles, jokes, and all other tales that have gone before in that person’s experience. It determines how they go about selecting which events are worthy of inclusion and which are not. In short, the prefiguration of the story determines the particular configuration of time in the story.¹⁰

Narrated time changes the structure of the cosmos, making its shape more human, choosing some events to leave in, others to leave out, joining some together in sequence which in another story have no connection at all.¹¹

In this way, poetic language is able to describe the indescribable, and this is the key point for this study.¹² Narratives shape and reshape time and in doing so describe what purely descriptive language can never do: help us to understand what time is.¹³

This phenomenon of a solar eclipse is poetically called the ‘diamond ring’, humanising the inhuman cosmos. Photo by Micah Williams on Unsplash

It seems logical to suggest that if the poetic language of narrative is the appropriate response to the impassable enigma par excellence of time, narrative would be a similarly pertinent response to other aporias, like death, love, suffering, happiness, solidarity, truth, inequality, fidelity, sin or forgiveness.¹⁴

We tell stories to try to bring meaning at a human scale to the implacable time of the cosmos.

For Ricoeur, they are always stories about time — trying to bring meaning at a human scale to the implacable time of the cosmos — yet they also help us to bring meaning to to that which cannot be understood with purely descriptive language.

With that in mind, having considered the aporetic nature of time and poetic language as the necessary response, we must next examine how Ricoeur explores the way narratives wrestle with time.

Photo credits

Nathan Anderson on Unsplash
David Huang on Unsplash
Micah Williams on Unsplash

The Limits of Narrative

2017-11-27T00:00:00Z

One final aspect of Ricoeur’s approach to narrative is important to highlight.

There is a problematic weakness inherent in a hermeneutic, an approach to language and interpretation, derived from structuralist assumptions of narrative. The weakness lies in the presumption of structuralist narratology of the pervasive presence of unitary deep-level structure in narratives, which then impairs the consequences of that conception, in particular that specific stories and narrative more generally are universally present.

Tautological repetition

It is a postulate — the assumed existence as a fact of universal underlying narrative structure that forms the basis of subsequent reasoning — that verges on a tautology: the argument ‘proves’ the original postulate, magically finding to be true what it originally assumed was true.

As a consequence, it is very easy to confuse and even conflate structuralism’s postulate of deep-level structure with pervasive deep-level story. Greimas’s actantial model that I described in my previous post asserts that there is a patterned relationship between defined actants universally present at a deep level in all stories. Other structural approaches do similar, as I said previously.

They assert that there is only 6 or 9 or 35 basic character types, or always 5 acts, or a defined rhythm or pattern of story ‘beats’, the flow of conflicts and climaxes, towards the final crescendo, or whatever. Writers, sensing a shortcut to assured success, base their writing on these models … and, lo! The mighty narrative god has commanded it, and it is so: there’s a matching cache of stories that obey the structural rules of narrative. But of course, that’s merely self-fulfilling.

Holding to the full force of this assertion is problematic, as I previously argued. There is, though, an even more perilous trap door if one were to take this notion as read.

Controlling stories, conformity and bias

Structural approaches to understanding and interpreting narratives make it easy to present a general overview or broad-brushstroke picture of a specific story, to summarise it in a few sentences. It is a short move from here to talking instead of narrative as substructure, as allusion, as implied, as ‘controlling’ story, as I described previously. However, and maybe in fact as a direct result of this, it is easy to mistakenly read a general ‘underlying structure’ as a specific ‘underlying story,’ and then to assert that the specific story is consistently present in the narrative substructure of every utterance, expression, argument or text thereafter.

It is easy to mistakenly read a general ‘underlying structure’ as a specific ‘underlying story.’

That makes sense in a large-scale fictional saga like Star Wars, where subsequent editions are reframed, recreated or resolved versions of the original. Here, then, certain trigger words are used that allude to the whole story, framed as it was in the very beginning: the pursuit of dominance over The Force by The Dark Side, for instance.

At first sight, this is not such a problem with fiction writing. It is, however, rather dangerous in political, religious or other polemic contexts, where readers are vulnerable to group dynamics, manipulative herd psychologies, groupthink and the power of conformity.

Social experiments on conformity are well-established. When these dynamics are allied to repeated assertions of a specific underlying story, they are downright damaging. We are living through a political era where this is being actualised.

In the US in recent years, the specific story of ‘The Swamp’ and everything associated with it led to one sphere of groupthink. On the other side of the political spectrum, repeated assertions of their candidate’s experience and steady leadership restated the story of bureaucratic liberal democratic governance by elites and led to a near-complete consensus in polling organisations, news media and pundits on the outcome of the election.

In the UK, Brexit and the withdrawal from the European Union are being fought over assertions of very specific stories. For one side, Britannia is the narrative symbol of a strong, independent, redoubtable nation taking back control so that, finally, the British people can determine their own destiny. For the other side, the story of continental unity is about overcoming differences that previously led, twice, to war, that the country is stronger, safer and better off working together with its friends and neighbours.

There’s two sides to every story, they say. Well, in both of these examples, the same events are assumed to be accounted for by a controlling story. And in both illustrations, there are two very different stories. So it’s not that there’s one story with two sides. It’s that there’s two stories that give a complete, self-contained and internally consistent account of the same events. But if there’s two stories, well surely there could be three. Ooh, and there’s a fourth story over there, listen. And a fifth. And … well, you get the picture.

Tacit agreements and consequent conformity are perilous products of structural approaches to story.

In my field, in Biblical studies, a similar move is made in asserting that ‘the gospel story’ informs all of the writings of the apostle Paul, for instance. Whilst Paul’s epistles are undoubtedly shaped by the Early Church’s oral stories of Jesus of Nazareth, questions like ‘What gospel?’ or ‘Whose gospel?’ underlies the Pauline writings does not accompany this scholarship in sufficient depth. Instead, scholars all too frequently proceed on the assumption that their readers have a tacit agreement about the nature of the underlying ‘gospel story,’ only for it to become clear that the assumed ‘controlling story’ is the scholar’s gospel that is masquerading as Paul’s gospel or Early Christianity’s Gospel — the underlying story proceeds from the scholar’s own presumptions.

The ‘controlling story’ problem

These sorts of tacit agreements and the consequent conformity are perilous products of structural approaches to story. This vulnerability is easily exposed in non-fictional accounts of ‘real events,’ but fiction is written and read by real people who are susceptible to being hoodwinked by the notion of a singular specific controlling story. That means that fiction is just as vulnerable as non-fiction to the ‘substructural’ and ‘controlling’ story problem.

Structural narratology does not have the philosophical tools in the bag to understand that things happen outside the bounds of the text.

By way of example of the consequence of fiction proceeding on the presumption of a tacit agreement of a controlling story, you may like to watch the outstanding film critic, Mark Kermode, review two recent films: Sex and the City 2, and Entourage.

Famous though he his for his occasional rants at awful films, in these reviews Kermode pointedly challenges the assumption that ‘everyone thinks like this, everyone wants this’ that is a natural consequence of the ‘controlling story’ notion. Structural narratology smuggles in the presumption that ‘everyone thinks like this,’ and that is pernicious.

Structural narratology does not have the philosophical tools in the bag to understand that things happen outside the bounds of the text, that the things explored in stories are not necessarily universals. Ricoeur’s theory of narrative, on the other hand, and specifically his understanding of refiguration, the third moment of narrative, equips us to perceive how the proposed world of the text and the lived world of the reader interact in just the manner seen in Kermode’s reviews above. On this, more below.

The multiple mishaps of universal narrative

One of the most problematic manifestations of the controlling story problem is the ubiquitous use of the terms and concepts of narrative in non-narrative contexts. The problem of thinking this way is multi-layered.

Firstly, narrative is ever-present — where it is not explicit, it is understood as being alluded to or substructural.

Secondly, it is a singular narrative that lies underneath everything else — there is a unitary worldview formed by many stories that draws them all together into one meta-narrative.

Thirdly, that narrative is not only ever-present but also ubiquitous. Phrases like ‘British values’ or ‘the American way’ or ‘… like any good Canadian’ indicate a presumption of universalisation. This recapitulates the idea we encountered above that structural narratology assumes everyone thinks like this i.e. ‘ … like every good South African … ’. But that then begs questions about whether being an Italian, Indian, Iranian, whatever citizen is a good/bad binary, whether someone could be a semi-good Australian, a goody-goody Spaniard, or maybe mostly a good Argentinian but with a few bad bits, and whether that would sway to what degree individual citizens hold to the universalised substructural story. What is the lived experience of a semi-good Norwegian, Mexican or Zambian?

Fourthly, with narrative being ever-present, unitary and ubiquitous, it is also tyrannical such that all other genres or modes of discourse are subordinated beneath it — narrative is the only game in town, as it were, and every letter, song, speech, philosophy or whatever is saturated with the underlying story.

This is clearly deeply problematic. It allows the scholar or critic or campaigner or spin doctor to assert that almost any text conforms to the ever-present, universal, ubiquitous and ultimately tyrannical substructural narrative.

It is my contention that this problematic position is a direct consequence of a narratological hermeneutic derived so directly from structuralism. But, and it is an important but, a more chastened approach to narrative, a post-structural and post-classical narrativity, does not have to suffer from this totalitarianism. In particular, Ricoeur takes pains to express the limits of narrative.

The game being played

Photo by Warren on Unsplash

A first avenue of response is built on a reorientation from narrative to interpretation as the game being played.

Interpretation is an interaction between the text and the reader.

As I described previously when discussing refiguration, the signs, symbols and structure, the characters, events and the plot of the narrative text propose a world and a way of being-in-the-world. They speak of a way of understanding and configuring the world:

‘what is to be interpreted in a text is a proposed world, a world that I might inhabit and wherein I might project my ownmost possibilities.’¹

Structuralist narratology does not account adequately for the world of the text: semiotic analysis makes the story conform to the structure and does not allow the story to speak for itself. Rather, the interplay between these two worlds — the world of the text and the world of the reader — enables narratology to concern itself with the ‘meaning’ of a narrative.

Structural narratology makes a story conform to the structure and does not allow it to speak for itself.

Ricoeur argues that the ‘“meaning” is not confined to the so-called inside of the text. It occurs at the intersection between the world of the text and the world of the readers. It is mainly in the reception of the text by an audience that the capacity of the plot to transfigure experience is actualized.’² When working with texts, the game (in which narrative is a player) is interpretation.

Postmodernity, narrative, history and novels

Ricoeur indicates a couple of other arenas in which narrative is at its limit. Working with history, he acknowledges that the model of emplotment he had derived from Aristotle is pushed close to breaking point and should be expanded to talk of quasi-characters, quasi-events and quasi-plot, lest history lie beyond the reaches of narrative.³ (By way of illustration, The Allies are a quasi-character in the quasi-event of the D-Day Normandy Landings of the Second World War, in the quasi-plot of Operation Overlord.)

Ricoeur also notes that postmodernism may have had a similar effect on the novel such that ‘we no longer know what narrating means,’ but, through arguing for the centrality of reference in narrative refiguration, he rebels against ‘the fatal mutation that would result from the passage of humanity to a stage where no one any longer had any experience to communicate to someone else.’⁴

Narrative and the aporetic

However, a more significant area of limitation for narrative is encountered as it addresses the aporetic: those things that are incomprehensible and irresolvable.

The issues raised by history and the postmodern novel are both concerned with narrative’s ability to narrate — its capacity to refigure time through its internal mechanism, emplotment. The aporia of time presents a whole other level — ‘the very limits of such a refiguration of time by narrative.’⁵

This limit has two senses: an internal and an external limit.

It has an internal limit in that narrativity exceeds itself to the point of exhaustion as it attempts to describe the indescribable. At moments of extreme concentration on an aporetic theme [narrative finds itself at limit-experiences]/configuration/how-not-to-understand-a-story/ — places at the extremes of being human — and in doing so encounter the transcendent.

With the aporia of time, these limit-experiences are ‘worthy of being placed under the sign of eternity.’⁶ Each narrative multiplies these limit-experiences, and in each instance, ‘it is in a different possible world that time allows itself to be surpassed by eternity.’⁷

It has an external limit in that narrative must, at the limit, overflow into other genres and modes of discourse that have the capacity to speak about time (or whichever aporia is being addressed). In other words, there comes a moment ‘where we must admit that narrative is not the whole story and that time [poverty/justice/grief/love/etc.] can be spoken of in other ways, because, even for narrative, it remains inscrutable.’⁸

Ricoeur notes that the Hebrew Bible has been for him a particular focus of attention for this conjunction of genres,⁹ being as it is a library of texts of different modes: stories; songs; poetry; letters; polemics; propaganda; edicts; laws; histories; theses; and so on. He further points out that just as this necessary confluence of genres to speak of the aporetic occurs in the Bible, so it is also with other texts.¹⁰

The limits of narrative

In Ricoeur’s theory of narrative, then, we have two important dimensions:

a more developed, comprehensive and thoroughgoing understanding of narrative, formed through a phenomenological approach to philosophy (i.e. paying close attention to real human experience), and,
a more chastened apprehension of its applicability, and a more humble conception of narrative’s place amongst other modes of communication in language.
These are indications that this approach may offer a way of working with narrative that is closer to the way real human beings use and encounter narrative than the structural methodologies that are so problematic.

In particular, Ricoeur’s theory incorporates in its essence an understanding of the nuances, the complexities, the variations and contradictions in the way real people both tell and respond to stories.

That is promising.

Photo credits

Sweet Ice Cream Photography on Unsplash
Warren Wong on Unsplash

The Surface and the Depths: Characters, Character and Stories

2019-02-18T00:00:00Z

Characters are at the core of stories. The events in characters’ lives, and the reasons those events are connected, unfurl the patterned cloth of the plot. Without characters in whatever form they take, animal, vegetable or mineral, events happen without meaning. Characters have a point of view; characters are able to make meaning; characters have and express feelings; characters can and do suffer. Characters allow writers and readers to express their creative imagination in perceiving another’s life, to transgress the limitations of their own life and to realise the finite quality of their life.¹ Characters allow us to see life from someone else’s perspective, to live in another’s shoes.

Many assumptions and presumptions follow along, unbidden and mostly unvoiced, with readers’ and writers’ concepts of characters, character and characterisation. These presumptions channel the way writers write and the way readers read. These presumptions, I suggest, are about the tension between the two interacting dimensions of a story: what it says, and what it is talking about; the surface and the depths.

Problems arise, though, in confusing which way round these two things should go — from the depths up to the surface; or from the surface down to the depths. In examining these two, we must take great care in our steps lest we put ourselves into difficulties with our focus and our priorities.

The Surface

The surface of a story is what it says, the words on the page, the prose and dialogue, the cut and thrust.

Photo by Brooklyn Morgan on Unsplash

At the surface of a text, characters are the embodiment of a persona, a point of view: they are living, breathing citizens, acting and suffering in the world of the story.

Characters are the specific personalities in the story.

They are Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester; Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler; Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion; Deckard and Batty; Captain Ahab and the white whale; Napoléon Bonaparte and Joséphine; Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy; Marlin, Nemo and Dory; Hazel and Bigwig; David Bowman and HAL 9000.

They are the specific personalities in the story, whether fictional or historical.

At the surface, in the narrative as told and as read, characters have personalities. They have things they want to do in life, motives for their behaviour, and reasons for acting or speaking in a particular way. They have vulnerabilities, flaws and failings that hamper the way they act and speak. They have a personal history that has shaped them and their views of the world and the way they react and respond to it.

Characters speak.

That is, when a character speaks in a story there is someone who is speaking. A whole person. Each character is not a mere manifestation or embodiment of the narrator, or a dimension of the author’s psyche. As far as the reader is concerned, someone is speaking. And, being a whole person, characters speak in contradictions and inconsistencies, where there is a surplus of meaning.

At the surface, we see a person.

The Depths

If the surface is what the story says, the depths of a story is what it is talking about, the themes and ideas, the questions and problems that it is wrestling with.

Photo by Almos Bechtold on Unsplash

In the depths, though, things get indistinct. This is the realm of allusion and inference, where the surplus of meaning is overflowing. It is much harder to talk about characters and we tend more to characterisation.

Humans create patterns to bring order out of confusion

In the depths, where individuality and specificity are harder to distinguish we try to recognise things, we try to gain our bearings, to retain a sense of which way is up, which way is down. We humans suffer terribly from pareidolia: we create patterns and search for the recognisable (often finding things that are not necessarily there, a face in the pattern of a burnt piece of toast, say) to bring order out of confusion, to bring familiarity and regularity in a murky and indistinct world.

In the depths are traits, qualities, types and tropes that help the reader and the writer to understand more, to perceive similarities, repetitions and embodiments, to see limitations and boundaries that constrain and compel the ways characters behave.

Monsters from the Deep

However, the way the depths and the surface interact causes all manner of problems. Pareidolia, our subconscious urge to find the familiar, leads us to jump to conclusions that are maybe unjustified. When we spot a pattern it’s all too easy to leap, without justification, to asserting that the pattern is everywhere.

Photo by Jacob Waldrop on Unsplash

In storytelling, this results in talking about roles. Characters in stories are manifestations of an underlying set of roles, so the thinking goes, roles that are finite in number and clearly definable. There’s a hero and a villain; there’s helpers and opponents; there are false heroes, gatekeepers, gift-givers; and so on.

Moreover, those roles are universal, the argument goes. Every story has them, these underlying roles, and every story can be analysed to expose characters with these roles within them.

Roles, Models and Structuralism

The structuralist movement that began in the first half of the 20th Century systematised this thinking for narratives, forming several theories of structural narratology.² These theories attempted to create a universal model that defined the set of character roles and the structure of narratives of all types, at all times, in all places.

The most well-known is Vladimir Propp’s Morophology of the Folktale, based on his analysis of Russian folk stories. Others notable structuralist narratologies were developed by Tzvetan Todorov (who coined the term ‘narratology’), Claude Lévi-Strauss (derived from his structural anthropology), Roland Barthes (his ‘mythologies’), and Algirdas Greimas (his ‘actantial model’).

These theories caught like a virus at the time. This was an age when the significance and importance of science and scientific thinking was rising to preeminence in the academic world, the political world and ultimately in society at large. In order to assert their relevance, other disciplines needed to portray themselves as scientific, or science-like, so in the mid and late 20th Century a scientism fever took hold in academic disciplines. (When I was at school, we learned cooking but it was called ‘domestic science.’) Linguistic study of narratives was not immune and structural narratology was a firm part of the zeitgeist.

Structural narratology is not just a relic of the past, however. A contemporary descendant of 20th Century structural narratology is Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey, often called the ‘monomyth’ (a very revealing subtitle), popularised in Hollywood in Christopher Vogler’s famous 7-page memo to cinema executives, A Practical Guide to The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

Structural approaches are very appealing. There is something beguiling about a simple analytical model: its apparent explanatory power and universal application is seductive. But, they create a rose-tinted view of stories: that there is something in their depths, in their substructure, that connects them all, something that can be grasped and defined. We, like archaeologists, can dig through the surface detritus and uncover the true structure hidden below. We, like particle physicists, can smash things together to get at the smaller elemental parts and define the laws that determine how they work.

We humans like rules and models. They make complicated things simple. They are important in the right context. They are enormously attractive in difficult situations, because they help us to bring order amongst disorder.

Take, for example, the number of methods for defining personality types, from Galen’s ‘Four Temperaments’ to Carl Jung’s Psychological Types to Myers-Briggs to socionics to enneagrams and many more besides. All of them claim some analytical, scientific basis and scientific methodology in application. Most of them have substantial criticisms that often point to flaws in their scientism.

For writers, this is an enormous problem. Writing a story is a difficult thing to do; writing a good story, a believable story with a plausible plot and compelling characters is extremely difficult. And because it is so difficult, writers fall back on models and methods and structures to make it a bit easier. Search the web and you can find a myriad of models and systems and books and courses that supposedly guarantee writing success. And because it is so expensive to make a film, Hollywood falls back too easily on formulas for a surefire success.

Systematising human behaviour, creating rules and models, especially when they try to rationalise the way humans behave and interact is deeply problematic, and there is a very simple reason.

We humans are irrational. We are full of contradictions and conflicting motivations. And we are adaptable, plastic, contextual, paradoxical, inconsistent beings. We react and behave and speak differently in different places and environments and situations, according to our mood, our stress, our tiredness, our preoccupation. Physical pain changes how we feel and behave. The weather and the season makes us behave differently. We behave differently in a crowd from when we’re with friends or loved ones from when we’re alone. We change as we age, as people and experiences shape us.

That is not to say that analysing human behaviour is futile. Not at all.

It is, however, to question the direction of travel.

But Every Story Has a Hero, Right?

One of the fundamental problems of having a model for human behaviour, a structural model for narrative in this case and, more specifically, a substructural character role to embody, is that model gets overlaid on a narrative. The model is placed on top of a story and the story is made to fit the model.

This is a cardinal sin for a reader or critic. A text — whether it’s a novel, a short story, a film, a newspaper article, or whatever — must be allowed to speak for itself. The story-as-told cannot be relegated to a subservient position, and yet structuralist narratology keeps the narrative structure preeminent. The story-as-summarised dominates.

This overlaid model is precisely what happened in Hollywood following Campbell’s book and Vogler’s famous memo. The creators of Star Wars used the hero’s journey model in developing the story, and Vogler’s memo led directly to The Lion King, both of which broke new ground in their time. But their success and popularity led to other film makers to ascribe their triumph to their use of the hero’s journey model and so followed a slew of films that also used the model, movies that felt too frequently predictable, formulaic and boring.

And which model is being overlaid? Is it Propp’s narrative structure, with 31 functions and 7 character roles? Or is it Cambell’s with his 17 stages? Or Vogler’s with his 12 stages and 8 character ‘archetypes’? Or Greimas’s, with his 6 actants?

To this day, writers, courses and critics continue to assess films and novels according to the hero’s journey model, asserting that they all fit.

Life At the Extremes: When Heroes Fail

Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

These two criticisms — a dominating substructural model that forces a story to conform to the model and does not allow it to speak for itself; and the consequent formulaic predictability — are the key criticisms of structuralist narratives and substructural character roles.

There are further problems, though, that can be clearly demonstrated.

At the extremes of human experience, normality and order break down. Roles are no longer rigid and well-defined; they start to falter and ultimately collapse.

This is liminality — being at the thresholds and boundaries, the limits of life.

In The Matrix, Cypher betrays Morpheus and precipitates the final showdown, and Agent Smith pursues, ambushes and kills Neo in the Matrix. Both characters are Neo’s opponents, Agent Smith being the great villain. But both their actions ultimately help Neo. Cypher’s betrayal of Morpheus provokes Neo to try to rescue him and doing so gains greater confidence in his ability. Agent Smith’s pursuit and execution of Neo is the ultimate situation that allows Neo to become The One.

Liminality, the extremes of human experience where normality and order break down

In Macbeth, Macbeth starts as the classic hero, on his way home from winning the war, but the witches prophesy and it’s not long until he’s killed the king and numerous others. The witches don’t tell MacBeth to kill to fulfil the prophecy; he and Lady MacBeth do that all by themselves.

In Schindler’s List, Amon Göth orders the liquidation of the ghetto. Oskar Schindler witnesses the slaughter, is profoundly moved, and is spurred to use his previous exploitation of Jews as cheap labour as a façade for saving as many as possible from the concentration camps.

In Anna Karenina, Vronsky’s passionate love for Anna induces her to leave her husband, leaving her son behind and ultimately committing suicide.

In Pride and Prejudice, Mr Darcy is Elizabeth Bennet’s adversary at every turn. Standoffish, judgemental, insulting her at the dance and rude throughout the story, he even tries to break up Mr Bingley and Jane. We eventually discover that he is desperately in love with Elizabeth and he becomes dashingly heroic.

In Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff is a poor orphan, then a romantic hero consumed with his love for Cathy, then leaves so he can make enough money to one day win her over. She dies, and Heathcliff spends the rest of his life making everyone else’s lives miserable, abusing his family.

In (the film adaptation of) The English Patient, after Almásy has recounted his story to Hana she injects him with an overdose of morphine to euthanise him.

In Frankenstein, Frankenstein is the doctor, not the monster … except he is the monster, as well. He is a scientific genius wracked with grief at the death of his mother. He creates a living being out of dead body parts, essentially a baby … and then abandons it, fearing and hating his offspring.

In the Harry Potter saga, Professor Snape is consistently Harry’s nemesis, thwarting him in every year at Hogwarts, even killing Dumbledore, until Harry discovers that he was completely wrong about Snape all along.

Opponents are helpers, helpers are opponents, all at the same time in liminal experiences. Heroes are villains are heroes; villains become heroes become villains.

What is possibly more important, though, is a vital trait of this brief excursion: we have already returned to the surface, to the realm of specific characters and embodied, whole people in these iconic stories.

Omitted and Overlooked

One final question should be raised. Advocates of essential roles, basic character traits and substructure narrative models give examples of characters and stories that fit the model but do not talk about characters or stories that do not fit the model.

Moreover, as things are pointed out that do not fit then advocates of these essential roles and substructural models do very slippery things.

The Wikipedia summary of the hero’s journey/monomyth, for example, gives this get-out-of-jail card to the model: ‘Not all monomyths necessarily contain all 17 stages explicitly; some myths may focus on only one of the stages, while others may deal with the stages in a somewhat different order. So anything goes, any variation, any order, any number — it all fits the model. We’ll make it fit, dammit! Similar contortions happen in other models of story, character and personality.

Similarly, brilliant stories that do not have any sense of a heroic journey nor characters that fit a given personality mould are simply ignored. Take, for example, Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong or William Boyd’s Any Human Heart, episodic stories that follow the way characters change and develop over time as they encounter sublime and horrific experiences in the worlds they inhabit. These are not heroic journeys. They are simply lives.

Coming Up for Air

Photo by Jordan Whitfield on Unsplash

I am not arguing here that the depths do not exist. Rather, I would suggest that it is the surface of characters that we encounter first, the real embodied personalities, people who are acting and suffering in the world of their story. And as we encounter the actual characters in the surface of the story — what the story actually says about them — then we start to think about similarities with other characters, which prompts us to look a little deeper, to the traits, qualities and tropes they share.

When we encounter George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, for example, we encounter George Bailey the person, first and foremost. He is not the embodiment of a hero who is about to depart on a metaphorical journey, but a real person struggling to find himself amongst the limitations of his family and his provincial town. The irony of George Bailey’s life is precisely that it lacks any journey and adventure — he is desperate to travel, to escape Bedford Falls and see the world, and yet the expectations on him combined with his instinctual selflessness and his sense of what’s right prevent him from going on a hero’s journey. There are certainly plenty of attempts to analyse It’s a Wonderful Life according to the ‘monomyth’ or hero’s journey story structure thesis, but they all end up forcing George to be a hero when the story is presenting us with the opposite.

What we get, though, in encountering George Bailey, or Elizabeth Bennet, or Shere Khan, or Miss Havisham, or George Smiley, or Mary Poppins, or Luke Skywalker or whoever is a prompt to gaze into the depths. They urge us to look deeper, past their surface, to see within them patterns of behaviour, to see traits and types and qualities.

The way that a character embodies traits and types and qualities is not a repetition, but it does rhyme.

When characters help us look into the depths, they set us thinking about forthright daughters and feckless sons and drunk fathers and self-denying mothers and dominating bosses and naïve apprentices and abused women and gullible voters and power-crazed officials and voyeuristic recluses and timid prodigies and concealed charlatans and aloof billionaires and credulous disciples. We get to ruminate on the power of hope, the terror of loneliness, the corruption of money, the lust of ambition, the comfort of companionship, the joy of triumph, the grip of obsession, the wonder of discovery. They help us reflect on what love will drive us to do, how fear can immobilise, what we will do to pursue justice, the desolation when justice escapes us.

Each character is an embodiment of traits and types and qualities but none are an instance of a role. The way that a character embodies those traits and types and qualities is not a repetition, but it does rhyme. It is not a repetition because each character, whether human or otherwise, is an individual, a unique person with their own hopes and abilities, fears and failings, shaped by a distinct set of events peculiar to them and them alone. But it rhymes because we human beings are social, we are impressionable, we are affected by each other and inspired by each other and we emulate each other.

From the Surface to the Depths
In summary, then, models of character types and theories of personality are abundant, but they are deeply problematic. They presume an underlying order to the human psyche, a pre-existing systematic regularity without adequate evidence or reasoned justification. They can help us begin to understand but they are a pale imitation and a dull reflection of the complexity and fecundity of being human.

Rather, when we read we encounter characters on the page (or the silver screen, the newsprint, etc.). We see them in the surface of the story as they are presented in the text, as people, with the richness of real lives and real histories, real hopes and struggles. We must let them, and the textual world in which we find them, speak for themselves, from their own experiences, with their own personality.

As we encounter characters in the surface of the text we are drawn down below, into the depths, where we are confronted with the things that we share, the things that are common, the ways we are alike. And that kicks us back up to the surface where we can breathe again in the reality of the lives of the characters in our stories.

Prefiguration and Narrative Competence

2017-10-21T00:00:00Z

How can a story-teller start to tell a story?

How can an audience or reader of a story begin to engage with the story being told?

What is happening, indeed what has happened, before the story is even told?

Whatever else may be going on in the composition or reception of a plot, the experience of it is grounded in the real world, the world of action, of structures, of symbols and of temporality. Narratives describe something recognisable by comparison with the real world, and a story’s world-like features are described in the plot (rather than deduced).¹

Paul Ricoeur argues that, if this is true, three things must exist for mimesis 1, prefiguration, to function.

Narrative Competence

Firstly, the composer or audience must have existing experience in order to recognise descriptions of world-like features; in other words, ‘if it is true that plot is an imitation of action, some preliminary competence is required: the capacity for identifying action in general by means of its structural features.’²

Secondly, a further level of competence is required: ‘an aptitude for identifying … the symbolic mediations of action.’³

And thirdly, the symbolic features are wrapped in temporal elements, ‘from which proceed more directly the very capacity of action to be narrated and perhaps the need to narrate it.’⁴

A competence in recognising and working with these three — the structural, the symbolic and the temporal — provides the basis for narrative competence, a necessary quality for narration.

Narrative competence is, of course, a dynamic, not static, quality: one does not ‘arrive’ at competence but rather continues to develop and extend one’s competency as one is persistently exposed to stories — stories of all kinds, narratives of all types.⁵ Ricoeur’s view is not limited to merely ‘literary’ stories here. Every form of story helps progress one’s narrative competence, from someone recounting a memory or relaying the story of their day at work, through newspaper accounts, movies, video games, social media posts, non-verbal stories, all the way through to the more orthodox form in published books. All exposure to narrative and narrativity develops one’s narrative competence.

Photo by Sebastián Villegas on Unsplash

Rather than defining action in a narrow sense — i.e. as what someone does — Ricoeur acknowledges that action is always bound within a broader structure of concepts that distinguishes action from mere physical movement. Actions have goals, goals which are anticipated and which have results. But actions toward goals imply motives, the reasons for engaging in the actions that allow one event to be connected to another. These motives are held by agents who are culpable for the consequences of their actions, and consequently a network of interactions is constructed, each item complementing the other.

These elements, and more besides, allow narrators and listeners to answer questions like ‘what’, ‘why’, ‘who’, ‘how’, ‘with whom’ and ‘against whom’ with regard to any action.⁶ By invoking any one of these terms, moreover, it is possible and even necessary to link that term to any or all others in this network of narrative actions. Mastering the network as a whole and each element within it ‘is to have that competence we can call practical understanding.’⁷

This practical understanding is necessary for a theory of narrative for two reasons. Firstly, a familiarity (frequently subliminal) with the elements of the network, through concepts such as agent, goal, situation, help, opposition, conflict, success, failure and so on is presupposed in any narrative.⁸ Secondly, narrative is not limited to a familiarity with the conceptual network of actions, but also includes discursive and analytic elements that elevate it from a mere sequence of actions and give it a transformative capacity.

Narrative competence therefore requires a familiarity with the (unwritten) rules that determine the diachronic composition of a plot, i.e. how the plot evolves, how the story develops through time. These two together — a relation of presupposition (the action-terms) and a relation of transformation (the rules of emplotment) — are fundamental for narrative competence, argues Ricoeur:

‘[t]o understand a story is to understand both the language of “doing something” and the cultural tradition from which proceeds the typology of plots.’⁹

With these two in synchrony one is able to engage with the structural dynamics of narrative.

The Symbolic

Photo by Dora Reis on Unsplash

Ricoeur’s second essential dynamic in developing narrative competence is concerned with the symbolic dimension. Symbolism is elemental to Ricoeur’s hermeneutic philosophy, his philosophy of interpretation, especially so in the field of narrative.

‘If, in fact, human action can be narrated it is because it is always already articulated by signs, rules and norms. It is always already symbolically mediated.’¹⁰

Ricoeur prefers to speak of ‘symbolic mediation,’ rather than simply of symbols, in order to distinguish, amongst cultural symbols, those that underlie action and give it its primary signification before it becomes detached from the practical level.¹¹

Symbolic mediation creates a network of interacting symbols, expanding from the specific act, through the ritual and the system of behaviours up to ‘the whole set of conventions, beliefs, and institutions that make up the symbolic framework of a culture.’¹² This then provides the symbolic context within which an action is situated, and subsequently through which an action can be interpreted.

The same gesture of raising one’s arm, depending on the context, may be understood as a way of greeting someone, of hailing a taxi, or of voting. Before being submitted to interpretation, symbols are interpretants internally related to some action.¹³

As a result of this context-making function, symbols enable actions to be ‘readable’. In other words, symbolic mediation creates the cultural rules of meaning by which an action can be interpreted. To be clear, these rules are not the rigid laws of science but the adaptive norms of a culture.¹⁴ Nonetheless, they powerfully shape the interpretive realm that actions inhabit.

One of the qualities of cultural norms is that they allow an action to be qualified or measured against them, evaluated against some moral scale and so given a relative value: this action is preferable to that one because it has a greater moral value in this cultural context. This is, of course, not limited to the actions themselves but can extend to any element in the narrative structural network — the goals, motives, agents, and so on — allowing them to be called, for example, ‘good’ or ‘bad’.¹⁵

Moreover, this moral quantifying is inevitable, and every action or agent is praised or condemned, overtly or not, in the development of a plot.

‘There is no action that does not give rise to approbation or reprobation, to however small a degree, as a function of a hierarchy of values for which goodness and wickedness are the poles.’¹⁶

The morality of the actions or actors may as much praise or condemn (or indeed celebrate, compliment, parody, satirise or denigrate) the morality of the culture in which they find themselves as be praised or condemned.

Poetic composition creates an ‘ethical laboratory’ that allows the poet to experiment with the values and morals of a culture.

In this sense, poetic composition creates an ‘ethical laboratory’ that allows the poet to experiment with the values and morals of the culture in which the work is situated (and ‘poet’ here is a poetic designation for any creative writer, of course). Thus, the symbolic aspect of narratives gives rise to morally ambiguous, complex or conflicted characters, such as, say, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre, Han Solo in Star Wars, Batman in The Dark Knight, or, in my particular field, Peter in the Biblical Gospel narratives of Jesus’ arrest. Examples are, of course, endless.

Symbolic mediation injects the ethical dimension into narrative competence.

The Temporal

Photo by Curtis MacNewton on Unsplash

The third element concerns the temporal dimension within which narrative time is situated. I shall discuss the question of time in more detail in a separate post, but a brief discussion is warranted at this stage.

Ricoeur defers the opportunity to define what he believes is a relatively simple correlation between the components of the conceptual network of action just described and the components of a concept of time, or for discussing the possibility of a pre-narrative structure of experience, in preference for an analysis of the human experience of living within time.¹⁷

Ricoeur is impressed by Augustine’s response to the problem of describing time. Rather than speaking of time as a series of moments moving from the future, through the present and into the past, Augustine postulates that time has a threefold present: there is a present of future things; there is a present of present things; and there is a present of past things.¹⁸

The present contains an anticipation of what is to come, a memory of what has just passed, and the experience of what is presently occurring, all equally present, all necessarily present.

Ricoeur notes that there is some kinship here with Heidegger’s notion of within-time-ness — time is that within which we ordinarily act.¹⁹ This is an apt description of his own argument for a temporality of action, for example, and the experience of this within-time-ness, or being-within-time as Ricoeur offers, is a pre-condition for narrated time.²⁰

With Heidegger’s approach, temporality is the root form and most authentic experience of time, and in this form is portrayed as coming to be, having been and making present.²¹ In this dialectic the words ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ evaporate as time itself is ‘desubstantialised’ into ‘the exploded unity’ of the three temporal forms.²² This is the temporal instantiation of Heidegger’s notion of Care; the grounding of being is in temporality.²³

Drawing more heavily on Heidegger, Ricoeur argues that it is through the embodiment of being-within-time in language that temporality cannot be simply reduced to the representation of linear time.²⁴ It is ‘something other than measuring the intervals between limit-instants.’²⁵ Being-within-time also incorporates a ‘reckoning with time,’ and as a result ‘we must have recourse to meaning, not vice versa.’²⁶

By having recourse to public language that describes things within-time (then, after, later, since, when, until, now that, etc.), we are able to reckon with time and talk publicly of the time of preoccupation.

In other words, being-within-time is the beginning of being able to narrate.

In breaking with the linear representation of time — a simple succession of nows — it is possible to start on the path of narrative configuration, and to see a connection between the realm of narrative and being-within-time.

Gaining Competence

The first stage of mimesis, mimesis 1, cannot be underestimated. To have the required competence with narrative, familiarity with the semantic structures, symbolism and temporality of the narrated human condition is vital. The act of emplotment is predicated on this preunderstanding, and the richer the preunderstanding the richer the encounter with the plot.

The sheer volume of narratives in everyday life is so vast that every person is schooled in the ability to discern and weigh stories from their first moment.

Ricoeur’s analysis does little to describe the genesis of this narrative competence.²⁷ His repeated shorthand of, for example, ‘poets and their readers’²⁸ does not indicate whether he has in mind only skilled narrative composers or audiences, the literary or academic elite, say, or whether he is describing ordinary human experience. However, the sheer volume of narratives in everyday life is so vast that every human being is schooled in the ability to discern and weigh stories from their first moment.

From our earliest years as children we are told stories, beginning our lifelong education in narrative. From the mundanities of ‘how was your day?’ or ‘what are you up to this weekend?’ to the more formal narratives of books, newspaper articles, films, television programmes, computer games or plays, or the challenge of a job interview or recounting one’s personal formation, say, the human world is saturated with emplotment.

Each encounter with a story being told extends and redefines one’s previous experiences of narrative.

Each recital shapes and reforms what makes a ‘good story,’ what makes a story believable and what does not.

Each performance increases one’s capacity to receive a narration.

Each rendering teaches us more about selecting (or excluding) events and (re)describing actions.

As humans, our prefiguration is constant, overt and subliminal, unavoidable and utterly innate. Human beings narrate. We are shaped by every story we hear.

We cannot avoid it.

Photo credits

Benny Jackson on Unsplash
Sebastián Villegas on Unsplash
Dora Reis on Unsplash
Curtis MacNewton on Unsplash

How (not) to Understand a Story

2017-11-14T00:00:00Z

Narrative is everywhere. Whether reading overt stories, both fictional and factual, or reading texts that are not explicitly narrative, such as a scientific paper, say, narratives pervade.

Narrative (Sub)structure is Slippery

Previously I wrote about how we develop narrative competence through our exposure to stories, which Ricoeur calls our ‘prefiguration,’ and one legacy of that in our minds as writers and readers is that we are often formed by specific stories. These are the stories to which we keep returning or inadvertently refer in our everyday lives, so that we forget that phrases like ‘the milk of human kindness’ come from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and ‘something wicked this way comes,’ (also Macbeth) gets recycled in the score of the Harry Potter films.

Often, we are referring to explicit narrative structures, either certain story elements — Luke Skywalker’s climactic confrontation with Darth Vader in Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back, when Vader utters those four profound words … well, watch it for yourself if you don’t already know — or whole stories — Elizabeth and Mr Darcy’s decent into and overcoming of their pride and prejudice in Pride & Prejudice, say. This is frequently so with references to stories from history, where, for example, a business journalist may refer to a multinational retailer deciding to stop trading in a particular country as a ‘Dunkirk’ moment for the company.

Oftentimes, though, those references are less explicit. As I said in previous posts, writers are informed by social and political narratives that shape the vocabulary and idioms they draw on when composing their text, and readers bring their narratively-formed view of the world to the texts that they read. Those narratives may not appear explicitly in the texts themselves, but without a distinct reference those narratives still shape the text. However, some critics take a further step and suggest that later texts conform to the narrative world, rhythm and even structure of those formative texts such that they exist, in some sense, in the foundations of the text at hand. In narrative criticism (especially narrative critical approaches that descend from the structuralist movement) this is referred to as narrative substructure.

Here be Dragons!

Photo by Patrick Brinksma on Unsplash

This, for me, is the beginning of the dangerous territories of structuralist approaches to analysing and describing narratives. The term ‘narrative substructure’ is a slippery one — beware, here be dragons!

It enables the reader or critic to assert that a story contains a narrative presence of another informing narrative, especially a political, social, economic or religious narrative, without requiring the rigour of proving it.

That means that stories can easily be hijacked for ideological means, or made to conform to, to confirm or to validate a pre-existing ideology.

This matters with non-fiction and polemic texts, especially the religious texts of my field. But it also matters with fiction, since every story projects a world and asks you to believe in it. Take, as a fairly blatant example, the fiction writings of Ayn Rand, which many on the political right-of-centre regard highly for the narrative substructure they read. A more interesting example might be Dr Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham, which was banned in China from 1965 to 1991 for its ‘portrayal of early Marxism’ in its narrative substructure.

Working Out (Badly) How Stories Works

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

It is one thing to be able to spot a narrative text or a narrative substructure to a text. It is another thing to say how that narrative functions, what impact it has on the text, the author and readers, and the way(s) of perceiving the world it is proposing.

To progress, structuralist narrative critics proceed from the notion of narrative substructure to assert that all narratives share an underlying structure. The most significant proposals of story structure have come from Vladimir Propp (it mystifies me that his work in Morphology of the Folktale [1928] is still influential now, but I keep seeing him being positively referred to now, almost 100 years later), Roland Barthes, Claude Bremond, Tzvetan Todorov and, closer to the boundary between structuralism and its successors, Gérard Genette.

One of the most significant proposals on narrative structure, though, is that of A J Greimas.¹ Greimas’s narratology is derived from structuralism, and follows particularly from his work on structuralist semantics.

This is how Greimas’s narratology works.

In sentences, predicates need a subject, particularly a subject able to act in accordance with the predicate. (The predicate is the part of the sentence that contains a verb saying something about a subject — ‘went home’ in the phrase ‘Jane went home.’)

These Greimas calls actants: subjects able to play an active role.² Actants do not have to be animate actors: inanimate objects, abstract concepts, character traits, signs or portents often take a subjective or symbolic part in a narrative.

Greimas identifies six actants with narrative functions:³

sender;
object;
receiver;
helper;
subject;
opponent.

These six actants are conceived so as to encompass and exhaust the narrative possibilities.⁴

In Greimas’s model, a sender wishes to transmit or communicate an object to a receiver. The sender gives a subject the mandate to perform this communication. The opponent is a figure(s) or force(s) that tries to prevent the subject from carrying out the commission. The helper, conversely, is a figure(s) or force(s) that tries to aid the subject in fulfilling the mandate.

Greimas suggests a diagrammatic formulation to describe the relationships between these six actants.

Greimas’s ‘actantial’ model of narrative

Greimas argues that the strength of the model lies with its focus on the object of desire aimed at by the subject, in transmission from the sender to the receiver.⁵ The helper and the opponent moderate the desire of the subject for the object.

This model is stated only once in his Structural Semantics, though much of the rest of the work is spent developing the model and methods for applying it. (Patte and Calloud later offered more detailed versions of the actantial model than Greimas himself.) The conceptual simplicity of the actantial model is its most attractive quality that has allured scholars to use it, including notable figures in my field of Biblical Studies. Its simplicity, though, is a siren song.

These approaches follow Greimas’s conceit that narratives are governed by ‘invariant principles’ of construction such that narrative units can be identified and isolated, their relations determined and rendered in diagrammatic form. Narrative criticism derived from Greimas sees a profusion of actantial diagrams like that above, defining the six actants in the story being examined. This systematic approach is very seductive — it looks structured, methodical, almost scientific, and our modern world if it looks like science then it must be valid. But, It’s also very damaging.

The same thing happens all over the place in the field of narrative: unhealthy systemisation. You may never have come across Greimas or his actantial model of narrative, but his vision is everywhere in the world of narrative. Approaches to narrative that draw on Vladmir Propp’s theory tries to define his 31 narrative functions for the story at hand. Others follow Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. Others don’t mention any specific theory of narrative but still argue that there are 9 or 7 or 3 or 15 or whatever basic plots, 8 or 6 or 11 basic character types, and argue for a structural, systematic format to all stories, all plots.

In my view, these are a delusion. There are simply too many stories, told by too many people in too many places and too many contexts, to ever conform to a defined structure. They are snake oil. They’re an idea sold to writers wanting a cast-iron guarantee that their novel or play or film script will be successful. They’re proposed by theorists who prey on that vulnerability, on people who want to believe that it’s easy if you just follow the system, academics, literary critics and practitioners.

Take the famous shortest story ever written, apocryphally attributed to Ernest Hemingway:

For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.

A perfect story, but it contains none of the narrative structure required by structuralism whatever.

Le Bien, Le Mal

Photo by João Alves on Unsplash

So, my view is that there is merit in structural approaches to narrative. There are many important things that it teaches us, like the importance of structure (whilst being ever conscious of resisting systemisation), and the importance of tropes and typology (whilst focussing on surface-level characterisation and figuration, not the recurrence of deep-level roles), and so on.

But there are also enormous drawbacks, and if we’re not aware of these flaws then we end up with predictable, repetitive and fundamentally boring stories.

Structuralism and structural narratology has been amply criticised for:

its tendency to heavy-handed systematisation: the zealous belief that everything fits the system so everything has to fit the system. The consequence is that things are either a) lauded as exemplars of the system, b) shoehorned to fit the system, or c) quietly ignored or overlooked since they don’t fit the system.
the deterministic force of the perceived structures in the texts: structure is seen everywhere … ‘Look, it fits the system — it must be true!’ … that ultimately does not allow stories to just speak for themselves but must speak as models of the system.
an inclination to ahistorical readings: that ignore or overlook the significance of the time and place of the story, both in its origins and in its reception, assuming they are coherent throughout time.

These matters are very problematic. There is a beguiling explanatory expedience of structuralist narratology, but it means that problematic, inconsistent or inconvenient elements have to be subsumed within the rubric of ‘narrative’ and made to serve the substructure.

Although superficially structural narrative seems powerful, the apparently advantageous harmony of this approach is not in fact justified and is actually rather dangerous in the way that heterogeneities — the things that do not fit — are smoothed out. There is a nasty homogenising habit of structuralism.

And there’s more …

Two further short criticisms should be noted.

Firstly, structuralist narratology is attempting to analyse the narrative as a closed system — the inside of the story itself. However, Ricoeur argues that the ‘“meaning” is not confined to the so-called inside of the text. It occurs at the intersection between the world of the text and the world of the readers. It is mainly in the reception of the text by an audience that the capacity of the plot to transfigure experience is actualized.’⁶

Secondly, it is in the context of limit-situations — the extremes of human experiences, forms, phrases and articulations that ‘intensify’ meaning in language to the point where it ‘dislocates our imagination and turns it away’ from its previous conceptions and towards new horizons⁷ — that the fragility of structuralist narratology is exposed.

Luke Skywalker is in a limit situation when he has his final showdown with Darth Vader in Cloud City in the scene of The Empire Strikes Back I mentioned above. At that moment, Luke is not merely the subject actant of the plot, he is a valiant warrior, an apprentice, an orphan and a son, a student, a prophet, a resistance fighter, and so on. Vader is the ultimate baddy, but he also opens the path to the ultimate good, making him both an opponent and a helper; he is Goliath; he is a father; he is a machine of the Empire; he is a pawn of the Emperor.

In these limit situations, the rules of structural approaches to narrative break down. In limit situations, characters can no longer be categorised. It is the character as a character that is vital, not as a manifestation of a type.

Mimetic Narrative and Structural Narrative

Mimetic narrative’s riposte to structuralist narratology demands that the conception of narrative expands beyond the horizon of the story being told. Ricouer’s three moments of narrative — the prefiguration, configuration and refiguration — his dogged attention to the actual figuration of the story itself — the characters, events, reversals, symbolism, causes and effects, the flow of time, etc. — and his great insight that the configured story itself mediates between that which precedes it (the constantly developing narrative competence) and that which follows it (the impact of the world of the story on the world of the reader) offers a profound and fundamental challenge to structuralism.

That is not to say that structural approaches are wholly redundant, as Ricoeur sees them. Instead, they are considerably less exhaustive, coherent and comprehensive than they claim. Structuralism can help interpret a narrative, but it cannot provide the comprehensive understanding of a narrative and moreover it is not even the right place to start.

A Venn diagram mimetic narrative

As a result, in the imaginary Venn diagram of theories of narrative, structural narrative and Ricoeur’s mimetic narrative I am advocating, structural narrative is sited wholly within the mimetic narrative circle.

Mimetic narrative is larger and more comprehensive in that its vision encompasses the pre-, peri- and post-narrative experiences.

Structural narrative does not go away. It must, however, become more diminished and restrained. Ricoeur’s critique is that structural narrative criticism’s claim to interpretive universalism should be rather more modest.

Photo credits

Sanwal Deen on Unsplash
Patrick Brinksma on Unsplash
Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
João Alves on Unsplash

What is figuration?

2026-07-08T10:39:17Z

Although the study of narrative began in earnest in the middle of the Twentieth Century, the last three or four decades has seen a significant surge in academic interest in narrative. Much of the work on narrative in recent years has seen exciting interdisciplinary cross-fertilisation and the vocabulary of narrative criticism is of such common currency for scholars across the spectrum today in a way that would have been almost unthinkable just a couple of decades ago.

For example, cognitive science has used narrative criticism as an important tool in the development of the discipline. Since the the 1970s there has been burgeoning and fruitful multidisciplinary research into the mind and cognition, collectively referred to as the cognitive sciences, and in 1999 a landmark guide to the cognitive sciences was published, The MIT Encyclopaedia of the Cognitive Sciences (MITECS).¹ The six introductory essays in MITECS serve as a roadmap to the major disciplines of cognitive science: philosophy; psychology; neurosciences; computational intelligence; linguistics and language; and culture, cognition, and evolution.

By way of a definition, cognitive theory 'investigates the relations between perception, language, knowledge, memory, and the world; cognitive narratology is interested in the roles of stories within the ranges and intersections of these phenomena.'² In particular, cognitive narratology focusses on 'the mental states, capacities and dispositions that provide grounds for — or, conversely, are grounded in — narrative experiences.'³

Biblical Studies, my field of particular interest, has benefitted from fresh examinations of familiar problems by applying narrative critical techniques.

Between the reader and the text

This has coincided with a growing interest in what happens 'in front of the text', the dynamics of the interactions between the reader and the text. Historical criticism has not gone away in any sense, but the dominance of both the world 'behind the text' and the qualities of the texts themselves has diminished as the reader has steadily come more into focus.

Narrative analysis engages with texts in a different manner from historical-critical approaches. Literary textual studies are not so concerned with the history or redaction of a text, or the settings of the authors or audiences of the text. Rather, they look to engage with the text as a text, in the form we have it. By working with the literary aspects of a text fresh engagements with familiar problems are possible.

Indeed, Paul Ricoeur suggests even more strongly that literary engagements with a text can form an 'important corrective' to historical-critical readings, 'insofar as it dynamizes the text, makes meaning move, and gives rise to extensions and transgressions.'⁴ This does not usurp or negate historical approaches at all. In fact by approaching the text from a different direction it may, in the long run, actually benefit historical-critical studies.

Narrative and figuration

Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash

My particular interest in narrative studies has been Paul Ricoeur's theory of narrative, set out largely in his seminal work, Time and Narrative.⁵ Time and Narrative is Ricoeur's investigation of the philosophical 'problem' of time — what actually is it, and how do we human beings come to terms with it? — and he argues that stories are the things that we use to understand time.

In order to do this, though, he critiques existing notions of narrative, which at the time largely meant structuralist narratology, indicating the limitations he observes with structuralist approaches within the larger task of describing what is perhaps the most comprehensive philosophical theory of narrativity.

Ricoeur recognises that structural and semiotic analysis has its uses but it is severely limited in its value and applicability and, in a hypothetical Venn diagram of narrative criticism, should be seen as a small element wholly subsumed within a much larger perspective.

Ricoeur's theory of narrative is sufficiently thoroughgoing and longsighted that it bears striking resemblance to many of the concerns of the current themes in narrative research.

Ricoeur argues that the human urge to construct plots from disjointed events is a privileged way of coming to terms with lived experience. It is the mimetic quality of the plot that is the key factor in this reconciliation. Ricoeur's understanding of the term 'mimesis' — a term critics use in substantially different ways, which essentially means imitating but which Ricouer uses in a more thoroughgoing way— is essential to his understanding of narrative. It's a technical term, of course, and I'll explore it, and especially Ricoeur's use of it, in detail and in less technical language in future posts.

Prefiguration, configuration, refiguration

This site is a detailed examination and exploration of Ricoeur's understanding of mimetic narrative, so a full explanation is not needed at this point.

For now, it is enough to say that Ricoeur notes three mimetic moments in the process of interpreting narratives, which he refers to in shorthand as mimesis 1, mimesis 2 and mimesis 3 in order to indicate their distinctive-yet-mutual identity, but describes rather more poetically as prefiguration, configuration and refiguration respectively.⁶

Prefiguration has to do with the narrative competence we develop through our exposure to stories. We bring that pre-existing experience and expectation with us to each story we encounter.

Configuration corresponds to narrative in its most commonly-understood sense: that act of telling or receiving a story, the actual configuration of a given plot, the story as told, or as read. It has to do with emplotment, the active and dynamic quality of putting events into an order. Emplotment mediates between the reader's 'pre-understanding' of narratives and the 'post-understanding' they have after reading a given story.

Refiguration is the stage in which narrative is restored to the real world of action and suffering; it is in the hearer or reader that the mimetic arc of a narrative reaches its conclusion. Ricoeur is insistent that in order for a story to become intelligible there is a requirement for this third stage to complete the cycle of mimesis.

Photo Credits

Katie Chase on Unsplash
Matthew Henry on Unsplash

Configuration and Narrative Emplotment

2017-10-23T00:00:00Z

The second stage of mimesis, mimesis 2, but which Ricoeur rather more floridly calls configuration, corresponds to narrative in its most commonly-understood sense: that act of telling or receiving a story, the actual configuration of a given plot — the story as told, or as read.

The ‘configuration’ stage of mimetic narrative is the stage of writing and reading a story — the story as told, or as heard.

However, Ricoeur’s model of emplotment emphasises the requirement that this sense of narrative is placed between the two other senses, mimesis 1 and mimesis 3: this stage of mimesis follows an early stage and precedes a later one.

Though that sounds obvious, it has significant implications.

Finding itself in between, mimesis 2, configuration — the act of emplotment — plays a mediating role between the other two.¹

Mediation is a significant feature of Paul Ricoeur’s approach to philosophy, and he often examines the mediating function of an idea between two opposing positions.

Here, the mediating function of narrative configuration leads Ricoeur to prefer the term emplotment to plot because it implies an active and dynamic quality to mimesis 2 that stresses its mediation between the ‘pre-understanding’ already discussed and the ‘post-understanding’ that I shall address presently.²

Ricoeur offers three ways in which emplotment mediates.

1. Mediating between individual events or actions and the plot as a whole

Mediating between the parts and the whole: a deconstructed typewriter. Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash

Firstly, it mediates between individual events or actions and the plot as a whole. It makes a meaningful narrative from an assortment of events.³ Or, conversely, emplotment draws together a set of diverse events into a meaningful whole to create a story.⁴

There is something synecdochic about this interaction. The singular event gets its meaning only in relation to the whole story and the part it plays in developing the plot.

At the same time, the whole story cannot be just a collection of events put in an order but a weaving into an organised and intelligible whole.

‘In short, emplotment is the operation that draws a configuration out of a simple succession.’⁵

2. Mediating between characters, events and actions to develop the plot

Mediating between the characters and the plot: young people at a festival. Photo by Aranxa Esteve on Unsplash

Secondly, emplotment draws together agents, events, actions, goals, results, circumstances, and so on such that they work in synchrony to develop the plot.

Mediating between these diverse elements enables initially simple plot configurations to be subsequently extended and embellished. Emplotment also includes features such as sudden reversals of fortune (known as ‘peripeteia’), recognitions and such like within the complexities of a plot, and consequently narrative is able to move the paradigmatic prefigured world (i.e. the language and narrative elements in isolation, familiar to writers and readers from the previous narrative experience, their ‘narrative competence’, as previously discussed) into the syntagmatic order of a story (i.e. the language and narrative elements working together in this specific narrative).

Emplotment ‘constitutes the transition from mimesis 1 to mimesis 2. It is the work of the configurating [sic] activity.’⁶

3. Mediating through temporality: judging and selecting

Mediating through temporality: which events are meaningful? Photo by Nataniel Susantoputra on Unsplash

Thirdly, emplotment is able to mediate through its temporal characteristics. Emplotment includes ‘in variable proportions’ two temporal qualities, ‘one chronological and the other not.’⁷

The chronological dimension incorporates the episodic nature of a story — the fact that it is made of a sequence of events.

The other dimension is the quality of configuration: that is, in configuring a story one is judging and selecting which events to grasp together, and how to arrange them, into the unified temporal whole of the plot. From a sequence comes a configuration through this twin action of selection.⁸

The result of this multiplicity of mediation is that the act of emplotment ‘reveals itself to the listener or the reader in the story’s capacity to be followed.’⁹

To follow a story is to move forward in the midst of contingencies and peripeteia under the guidance of an expectation that finds its fulfilment in the ‘conclusion’ of the story. This conclusion is not logically implied by some previous premises. It gives the story an ‘end point,’ which, in turn, furnishes the point of view from which the story can be perceived as forming a whole. To understand the story is to understand how and why the successive episodes led to this conclusion, which, far from being foreseeable, must finally be acceptable, as congruent with the episodes brought together by the story.¹⁰

But is it believable … ?

The degree to which a story’s progression to its conclusion is ‘acceptable’ is of course an expression of how ‘believable’ a listener or reader finds a story. The writer’s plot in a given story sits amongst all the plotted stories the reader has previously read.

Ricoeur’s notion of the mediating interaction of mimesis 2, configuration, with mimesis 1, prefiguration, expresses that a reader’s prefiguration (both in terms of narrative competence and the narratives that have been prefigurative for the reader) is every bit as significant in the reader’s capacity to follow the story as the story’s own configuration.

Further, the fact that the story can be followed allows the dichotomy of (individual) event and (unified) story to be resolved by converting the paradox into a poetic ‘living dialectic.’¹¹

A story’s capacity to be followed means that an entire plot can be brought together under one ‘thought,’ the narrative’s ‘theme.’ It also means that in following a story the end is always in mind, and, especially with a well-known story, the way in which the events lead towards the ending gives a fresh quality to time.

So much for the interaction of mimesis 1, prefiguration, into mimesis 2, configuration. What about the relation of mimesis 2 to mimesis 3, refiguration? Here, Ricoeur offers two features: schematism and tradition.

Schematism, and the productive imagination

Photo by Jose Maria Cuellar on Unsplash

The first feature, schematism, illustrates the close relation of metaphor and narrative in hermeneutics, in particular because the act of grasping together diverse events into a meaningful and intelligible whole engages the productive imagination in a profoundly synthetic manner.

The productive imagination ‘connects understanding and intuition by engendering syntheses that are intellectual and intuitive at the same time.’¹²

In a similar way, emplotment ‘engenders a mixed intelligibility between what has been called the point, theme or thought of a story, and the intuitive presentation of circumstances, characters, episodes, and changes of fortune that make up the denouement.’¹³

This function of emplotment relies on a framework of rules within which the intelligibility resides, and as a consequence ‘we may speak of a schematism of the narrative function.’¹⁴

As with all schema, this one ‘lends itself to a typology,’ most frequently encountered under the rubric of genre.

About Figuration.al

2025-03-21T14:54:32Z

This site is a thorough examination of figuration, Paul Ricoeur's mimetic theory of narrative, and an exploration of practical applications of this thesis to real-world narrative studies.

It is based on work from my PhD in Biblical Studies at Bristol University, Narrative, Sin and Forgiveness: An Assessment of N T Wright's Narrative Criticism Through the Hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur, completed in 2017.

I write more about stories, writing, narratology and narrative figuration over on my personal website:

For my day job, I am a delivery principal and fractional Chief Delivery Officer for creative agencies and SaaS product businesses, with 25 years' experience in professional services and technical delivery.

Find out more on Helios360.co.uk, where I am authoring The Chief Delivery Officer's Handbook, an essential guide to leading delivery projects, teams and programs.

See my Linktree for more.

Figurational

Paul Ricoeur’s Mimetic Narrativity, in Summary

What we bring … #

… and how we’re affected #

Emplotment, mediating between what we bring and how we’re affected #

Photo credits #

Refiguration, Understanding and Transformation

A brief aside … #

Four problems for restoring narratives #

Mimetic Circularity #

Configuration, Refiguration and Reading #

Reference #

An ability to communicate, the capacity to refer #

Narrated Time #

Being-as and Being-toward-death #

A poetic and non-descriptive response to the aporetic character of temporality #

Photo Credits #

Time, Narrative and the Aporetic

The Problem With Time #

The Aporia Remains #

The Aporia Intensifies #

Photo credits #

The Limits of Narrative

Tautological repetition #

How (not) to Understand a Story

When reading and writing stories, it is tempting to use a system to reduce the story to a structure. It’s beguiling, but it is fundamentally problematic. Beware!

The ‘controlling story’ problem #

The multiple mishaps of universal narrative #

The game being played #

Postmodernity, narrative, history and novels #

Narrative and the aporetic #

The limits of narrative #

Photo credits #

The Surface and the Depths: Characters, Character and Stories

The Surface #

The Depths #

Monsters from the Deep #

Roles, Models and Structuralism #

But Every Story Has a Hero, Right? #

Life At the Extremes: When Heroes Fail #

Omitted and Overlooked #

Coming Up for Air #

Prefiguration and Narrative Competence

Narrative Competence #

The Symbolic #

The Temporal #

Gaining Competence #

Photo credits #

How (not) to Understand a Story

Narrative (Sub)structure is Slippery #

Prefiguration and Narrative Competence

Paul Ricoeur’s mimetic narratology sees three moments in narratives. Mimesis 1, prefiguration, is the first moment, all about our pre-existing experience and our expectations.

Here be Dragons! #

Working Out (Badly) How Stories Works #

Le Bien, Le Mal #

And there’s more … #

Mimetic Narrative and Structural Narrative #

Photo credits #

What is figuration?

Between the reader and the text #

Narrative and figuration #

Prefiguration, configuration, refiguration #

Photo Credits #

Configuration and Narrative Emplotment

1. Mediating between individual events or actions and the plot as a whole #

2. Mediating between characters, events and actions to develop the plot #

3. Mediating through temporality: judging and selecting #

But is it believable … ? #

Schematism, and the productive imagination #

About Figuration.al

Joe Baker | J S Baker

My writer's journal, for my writing projects, as well as the reading and thinking that support them.

Delivery leadership consultancy for ambitious businesses | Helios360

Fractional Chief Delivery Officer. Delivery leadership for creative agencies and SaaS businesses.

What we bring …

… and how we’re affected

Emplotment, mediating between what we bring and how we’re affected

Photo credits

A brief aside …

Four problems for restoring narratives

Mimetic Circularity

Configuration, Refiguration and Reading

Reference

An ability to communicate, the capacity to refer

Narrated Time

Being-as and Being-toward-death

A poetic and non-descriptive response to the aporetic character of temporality

Photo Credits

The Problem With Time

The Aporia Remains

The Aporia Intensifies

Photo credits

Tautological repetition

The ‘controlling story’ problem

The multiple mishaps of universal narrative

The game being played

Postmodernity, narrative, history and novels

Narrative and the aporetic

The limits of narrative

Photo credits

The Surface

The Depths

Monsters from the Deep

Roles, Models and Structuralism

But Every Story Has a Hero, Right?

Life At the Extremes: When Heroes Fail

Omitted and Overlooked

Coming Up for Air

Narrative Competence

The Symbolic

The Temporal

Gaining Competence

Photo credits

Narrative (Sub)structure is Slippery

Here be Dragons!

Working Out (Badly) How Stories Works

Le Bien, Le Mal

And there’s more …

Mimetic Narrative and Structural Narrative

Photo credits

Between the reader and the text

Narrative and figuration

Prefiguration, configuration, refiguration

Photo Credits

1. Mediating between individual events or actions and the plot as a whole

2. Mediating between characters, events and actions to develop the plot

3. Mediating through temporality: judging and selecting

But is it believable … ?

Schematism, and the productive imagination