what is narrative representation

Visual Rhetoric/Narrative and Conceptual Representations

In their text Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design , Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen propose that all images can be divided into two classifications, narrative and conceptual. These classifications separate images into two categories: those images that have a component of action and those that possess a static, timeless essence. The following chapter defines narrative and conceptual representations within the discussion of Visual Rhetoric and provides examples of each.

• 1.1 Narrative Processes
• 1.2 A Celestial Example
• 2.1 Classificational Processes
• 2.2 Analytical Process
• 2.3 Symbolic Process
• 3 Conclusion
• 4 Works Cited

Narrative Representations [ edit | edit source ]

The first type of classification is the narrative representation. While conceptual representations "represent participants in terms of their. . . stable or timeless essence," narrative representations "present unfolding actions and events, processes of change, and transitory spacial arrangements" (59). That is, while conceptual representations show stable concepts, narrative representations show participants that are connected to one another through lines called vectors. In order for an image to be classified as a narrative representation, then, the participants in the image must be connected with a vector. According to Kress and Leeuwen, “When participants are connected by a vector, they are represented as doing something to or for each other. From here on we will call such vectorial patterns narrative”(56). Vectors represent courses or directions, and because the participants are connected by these invisible lines, the viewer understands the participants to be interacting with one another. This idea of Rhetorical Vectors relationships is the most important concept in separating narrative from conceptual representations. While narrative representations always have a vector between participants, conceptual representations never have these vectors. Despite the name, narrative representations are not always “telling” a story. Rather, the important idea is that the objects in the image are acting on and interacting with one another.

When an object in the image is viewed as being the active participant in the image, it is called the actor. In order to be an actor, the object must be either creating or interacting with a vector to convey a sense of action. The participant that the actor is interacting with, usually passive in the action process, is known as the Goal. The Goal is that object that the actor's vectors connect with to form some sort of action or interaction. While all narrative representations show some form of action, there are different types of narrative processes to consider.

Narrative Processes [ edit | edit source ]

As previously stated, the "hallmark of a narrative visual 'proposition' is the presence of a vector" (59). According to Kress and Leeuwen, vectors are "formed by depicted elements that form an oblique line, often a quite strong, diagonal line" (59). These vectors may be formed from a number of objects, from bodies to limbs to tools. There are usually two participants in a narrative representation. The "Actor" is "the participant from whom or which the vector departs" (59). That is, the "actor" is the object in the image that produces the action on the other object in the image. The passive participant in the action process is called the "goal." The "goal" is "the participant at which the vector is directed" (74). Kress and Leeuwen distinguish different narrative processes by the types of vectors and the number and kinds of participants involved.

• Action Processes are those in which "the Actor is the participant from which the vector emanates...or forms the vector" (63). That is, in order to be considered an Action Process, the Actor must either have a vector coming out of it or actually form the vector. According to Kress and Leeuwen, when an image has only one participant, that participant can be considered the Actor. This is called a non-transactional image--there is no Goal in these images and vectors are not "done to or aimed at anyone or anything" (63). If there is only a vector and a Goal shown in the image than Kress and Leeuwen call the action an Event. Lastly, when there are both an Actor and a Goal that is connected by a vector which stems from the Actor, then this process is called Transactional.
• Reactional Processes are those in which an eyeline, such as a glance, by one or more of the participants, forms a vector that connects those participants. This process differs from the Action Process in that the vectors are formed solely by the gaze of one of the objects in the image. In this case, only, the participant who does the looking is called a Reactor instead of an Actor, and the passive participant is called the Phenomena, not the Goal (67). The Reactor is the participant who forms the vector with his eyes; he does the looking. Reactional Processes can be transactional and nontransactional as well (68).

A Celestial Example [ edit | edit source ]

The following examples showcase the difference between narrative and conceptual representations. The image found on the left is a photograph taken of the silhouettes of men and women gazing up into the night sky. Between these men and women is a telescope, also pointed towards the very heavens to which the people look. Vectors are formed out of the upward gazes of the men and women. Another vector is formed by the telescope itself, which points diagonally towards the sky. Because of the vectors, the picture on the left exhibits a narrative representation.

The picture on the right also shows a telescope. However, while the telescope on the left is in use, shown by its placement in the image and the vectors that it forms, the image of the telescope on the right is more of a timeless concept. The element in the image is shown "symmetrically, against a neutral background" (45). In short, the picture of the telescope on the right can be accurately considered a conceptual representation because there is no interaction between elements in the picture. Because of the lack of vectors to visually create action, this picture can only show the timeless concept of an astrological tool. Similarly, there is no actor present in this picture.

On the left, the counter-image is a picture of a night scene in which a group of men and women gather around a telescope while they gaze upwards towards the night sky. Unlike the conceptual representation on the right, this left-hand picture portrays an action that happens between the group of star-gazers, the telescope, and the night sky. Both pictures show the same kind of technology, but the picture on the right is vastly different than the picture on the left. Unlike the picture on the right that represents static technology, the picture on the left represents "technology in action" (46). The participants in the picture on the left (group of star-gazers, the telescope, and the night sky) are represented as active and interacting because of the vectors that connect them with other elements in the image. According to Kress and Leeuwen, while the right picture is "static, this picture [on the left] is dynamic. Where the [right] picture is dry and conceptual, the [left] picture is dramatic" (46).

Conceptual Representations [ edit | edit source ]

The second type of representation brought up by Kress and Leeuwen is the conceptual representation. These differ from narrative representations in many ways. Not only do conceptual representations lack vectors that are a vital element of narrative representations, these images also have a component of timelessness and represent their participants in their generalized essence. They represent a static concept rather than engaging their participants in some kind of action. Conceptual representations have three distinct subcategories to further define the way visuals define their participants: Classificatory, Analytical and Symbolical. Each of these three types carries distinct assumptions about the way they represent the world.

Classificational Processes [ edit | edit source ]

Classificational processes often relate their participants together through a taxonomy. Taxonomies represent the world in terms of a hierarchical order. Its main concern is the ranking of ideas in terms of an overall generalization, whether it is their unifying origin or a higher power. They are grouped by a “kind of” relation (81). Classification processes attempt to present the participants in a way that is often without context and as objective as possible. This type of representation is striving for that timelessness mentioned above and often appears in advertising and textbooks. The three types of taxonomies that are found in conceptual representations are as follows:

• Covert Taxonomies portray a symmetrical equivalence between all of the elements in an image. Images are shown in an objective, decontextualized way to emphasize their timeless nature.
• Single-Levelled Overt Taxonomies introduce the importance of "superordinates" and "subordinates" an an image. The superordinate and subordinate participants in an image show a higher degree of ordering than is present in a covert taxonomy, where all of the participants are seen as equivalent. In single-levelled overt taxonomies, the participants are shown in a tree structure to indicate the hierarchal relationships.

• Multi-Levelled Overt Taxonomies are similar to the previous, except that a participant, "Superordinate," is connected to other participants through a tree structure with more than two levels. Participants in middle levels are called "Interordinates," and those at the bottom level are "Subordinates."

Analytical Process [ edit | edit source ]

Moving away from the simple objectivity of the classificatory process, the analytical process sets up a part-whole relationship between its participants to strive to make them fit together. The parts are called attributes, and these attributes are part of the whole, which is termed the Carrier (89). Kress and van Leeuwen provide the examples of fashion shots, which display the parts of an "outfit," and label both the Carrier ("easy-wearing, inexpensive cottons") and the Possessive Attributes (Laura Ashley trenchcoat, Stuart Membery sweater.)

Another example: maps. In a map of the United States of America, the Carrier is the entire country, and the possessive attributes are the individual states, and both are labeled either inside the image or in a legend or caption. In the case of the fashion shot and the map, neither has a vector or carries a narrative process.

Symbolic Process [ edit | edit source ]

Symbolical processes move beyond classificational and analytical processes in that they do not try to find relationships between concrete objective images, but they seek to establish what the images mean. Symbolic processes take two forms, symbolic attributive and symbolic suggestive(108).

• Symbolic Attributive images are composed of two parts, the carrier and the symbolic attribute. The carrier in these instances is that which has its meaning given by the symbolic attribute and the relationship between them.
• Symbolic Suggestive usually only have one participant, the Carrier, whose meaning is established in some other manner. These other ways of conveying meaning often establish the difference between an analytic process and a symbolic one. One example is that the colors in a symbolic suggestive image may be muted, blended or otherwise emphasized to create mood. That is to say, these images do not represent a specific moment in time, they are more concerned with create a timeless feeling, an essence of meaning.

Conclusion [ edit | edit source ]

This chapter on narrative and conceptual representations merely scratches the surface of the work Kress and Leeuwen have done on this topic. For further information, interested readers should consult their work, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design . The idea behind this analysis is drawn from the way humans perceive, discuss, and study language (written or verbal), signs, and symbols (See: Semiotics and Visual Rhetoric .) Those ideas about language are then transferred and applied to the study of visuals, hence the name "Grammar of Visual Design." Kress and van Leeuwen maintain that although their study of language is the backbone for finding meaning in images, the two mediums (language and images) are distinct from one another. While they find similarities between the two and attempt to create a "grammar" for images, they do not hold the idea that the two are one and the same, as other scholars may believe. The comparison of language and images creates a framework of discourse that allows scholars working from all perspectives to come together and find a common ground in the field of visual rhetoric.

Works Cited [ edit | edit source ]

Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design . 2nd ed. New York : Routledge , 2006.

• Book:Visual Rhetoric

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From Narrative Representation to Narrative Use: Towards the Limits of Definition

• David Rudrum
• The Ohio State University Press
• Volume 13, Number 2, May 2005
• pp. 195-204
• 10.1353/nar.2005.0013
• View Citation

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Narrative Definition

What is narrative? Here’s a quick and simple definition:

A narrative is an account of connected events. Two writers describing the same set of events might craft very different narratives, depending on how they use different narrative elements, such as tone or  point of view . For example, an account of the American Civil War written from the perspective of a white slaveowner would make for a very different narrative than if it were written from the perspective of a historian, or a former slave.

Some additional key details about narrative:

• The words "narrative" and "story" are often used interchangeably, and with the casual meanings of the two terms that's fine. However, technically speaking, the two terms have related but different meanings.
• The word "narrative" is also frequently used as an adjective to describe something that tells a story, such as narrative poetry.

How to Pronounce Narrative

Here's how to pronounce narrative: nar -uh-tiv

Narrative vs. Story vs. Plot

In everyday speech, people often use the terms "narrative," "story," and "plot" interchangeably. However, when speaking more technically about literature these terms are not in fact identical. 

• A story refers to a sequence of events. It can be thought of as the raw material out of which a narrative is crafted.
• A plot refers to the sequence of events, but with their causes and effects included. As the writer E.M. Forster put it, while "The King died and the Queen died" is a story (i.e., a sequence of events), "The King died, and then the Queen died of grief" is a plot.
• A narrative , by contrast, has a more broad-reaching definition: it includes not just the sequence of events and their cause and effect relationships, but also  all of the decisions and techniques that impact how a story is told. A narrative is  how a given sequence of events is recounted.

In order to fully understand narrative, it's important to keep in mind that most sequences of events can be recounted in many different ways. Each different account is a separate narrative. When deciding how to relay a set of facts or describe a sequence of events, a writer must ask themselves, among other things:

• Which events are most important?
• Where should I begin and end my narrative?
• Should I tell the events of the narrative in the order they occurred, or should I use flashbacks or other techniques to present the events in another order?
• Should I hold certain pieces of information back from the reader?
• What point of view  should I use to tell the narrative?

The answers to these questions determine how the narrative is constructed, so they have a huge influence on the way a reader sees or understands what they're reading about. The same series of events might be read as happy or sad, boring or exciting—all depending on how the narrative is constructed. Analyzing a narrative just means examining how it is constructed and why it is constructed that way.

Narrative Elements

Narrative elements   are the tools writers use to craft narratives. A great way to approach analyzing a narrative is to break it down into its different narrative elements, and then examine how the writer employs each one. The following is a summary of the main elements that a writer might use to build his or her narrative.

• For example, a story about a crime told from the perspective of the victim might be very different when told from the perspective of the criminal.
• For instance, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway were friends, and they wrote during the same era, but their writing is very different from one another because they have markedly different  voices.
• For example, Jonathan Swift's essay " A Modest Proposal " satirizes the British government's callous indifference toward the famine in Ireland by sarcastically suggesting that cannibalism could solve the problem—but the essay would have a completely different meaning if it didn't have a sarcastic tone. 
• For example, the first half of Charles Dickens' novel David Copperfield tells the story of the narrator David Copperfield's early childhood over the course of many chapters; about halfway through the novel, David quickly glosses over some embarrassing episodes from his teenage years (unfortunate fashion choices and foolish crushes); the second half of the novel tells the story of his adult life. The pacing give readers the sense that David's teen years weren't really that important. Instead, his childhood traumas, the challenges he faced as a young man, and the relationships he formed during both childhood and adulthood make up the most important elements of the novel.
• For example, Mary Shelley's novel   Frankenstein  uses three different "frames" to tell the story of Dr. Frankenstein and the creature he creates: the novel takes the form of letters written by Walton, an arctic explorer; Walton is recounting a story that Dr. Frankenstein told him; and as part of his story, Dr. Frankenstein recounts a story told to him by the creature. 
• Linear vs. Nonlinear Narration:  You may also hear the word narrative used to describe the order in which a sequence of events is recounted. In a linear narrative, the events of a story are described  chronologically , in the order that they occurred. In a nonlinear narrative, events are described out of order, using flashbacks or flash-forwards, and then returning to the present. In some nonlinear narratives, like Ken Kesey's  Sometimes a Great Notion , there is a clear sense of when the "present" is: the novel begins and ends with the character Viv sitting in a bar, looking at a photograph. The rest of the novel recounts (out of order) events that have happened in the distant and recent past. In other nonlinear narratives, it may be difficult to tell when the "present" is. For example, in Kurt Vonnegut's novel  Slaughterhouse-Five , the character Billy Pilgrim, seems to move forward and backward in time as a result of post-traumatic stress. Billy is not always certain if he is experiencing memories, flashbacks, hallucinations, or actual time travel, and there are inconsistencies in the dates he gives throughout the book—all of which of course has a huge impact on how  his stories are relayed to the reader.

Narrative as an Adjective

It's worth noting that the word "narrative" is also frequently used as an adjective to describe something that tells a story.

• Narrative Poetry: While some poetry describes an image, experience, or emotion without necessarily telling a story, narrative poetry is poetry that does tell a story. Narrative poems include epic poems like The Iliad , The Epic of Gilgamesh , and Beowulf .  Other, shorter examples of narrative poetry include "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carrol, "The Lady of Shalott" by Alfred Lord Tennyson, "The Goblin Market" by Christina Rossetti, and "The Glass Essay," by Anne Carson.
• Narrative Art: Similarly, the term "narrative art" refers to visual art that tells a story, either by capturing one scene in a longer story, or by presenting a series of images that tell a longer story when put together. Often, but not always, narrative art tells stories that are likely to be familiar to the viewer, such as stories from history, mythology, or religious teachings. Examples of narrative art include Michelangelo's painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and the  Pietà ; Paul Revere's engraving entitled  The Bloody Massacre ; and Artemisia Gentileschi's painting  Judith Slaying Holofernes .

Narrative Examples

Narrative in  the book thief  by markus zusak.

Zusak's novel,  The Book Thief , is narrated by the figure of Death, who tells the story of Liesel, a girl growing up in Nazi Germany who loves books and befriends a Jewish man her family is hiding in their home. In the novel's prologue, Death says of Liesel:

Yes, often, I am reminded of her, and in one of my vast array of pockets, I have kept her story to retell. It is one of the small legion I carry, each one extraordinary in its own right. Each one an attempt—an immense leap of an attempt—to prove to me that you, and your human existence, are worth it.

Narrators do not always announce themselves, but Death introduces himself and explains that he sees himself as a storyteller and a repository of the stories of human lives. Choosing Death (rather than Leisel) as the novel's narrator allows Zusak to use Liesel's story to reflect on the power of stories and storytelling more generally.

Narrative in  A Visit From the Goon Squad   by Jennifer Egan

In A Visit From the Good Squad ,  Egan structures the narrative of her novel in an unconventional way: each chapter stands as a self-contained story, but as a whole, the individual episodes are interconnected in such a way that all the stories form a single cohesive narrative. For example, in Chapter 2, "The Gold Cure," we meet the character Bennie, a middle-aged music producer, and his assistant Sasha:

"It's incredible," Sasha said, "how there's just nothing there." Astounded, Bennie turned to her…Sasha was looking downtown, and he followed her eyes to the empty space where the Twin Towers had been. 

Because there is an empty space where the Twin Towers had been, the reader knows that this dialogue is taking place some time after the September 11th, 2001 attack in which the World Trade Center was destroyed. Bennie appears again later in the novel, in Chapter 6, "X's and O's," which is set ten years prior to "The Gold Cure." "X's and O's" is narrated by Bennie's old friend, Scotty, who goes to visit Bennie at his office in Manhattan:

I looked down at the city. Its extravagance felt wasteful, like gushing oil or some other precious thing Bennie was hoarding for himself, using it up so no one else could get any. I thought: If I had a view like this to look down on every day, I would have the energy and inspiration to conquer the world. The trouble is, when you most need such a view, no one gives it to you.

Just as Sasha did in Chapter 2, Scotty stands with Bennie and looks out over Manhattan, and in both passages, there is a sense that Bennie fails to notice, appreciate, or find meaning in the view. But the reader wouldn't have the same experience if the story had been told in chronological order.

Narrative in Atonement by Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan's novel Atonement tells the story of Briony, a writer who, as a girl, sees something she doesn't understand and, based on this faulty understanding, makes a choice that ruins the lives of Celia, her sister, and Robbie, the man her sister loves. The first part of the novel appears to be told from the perspective of a third-person omniscient narrator; but once we reach the end of the book, we realize that we've read Briony's novel, which she has written as an act of atonement for her terrible mistake. Near the end of  Atonement , Briony tells us:

I like to think that it isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them at the end. I gave them happiness, but I was not so self-serving as to let them forgive me. Not quite, not yet. If I had the power to conjure them at my birthday celebration…Robbie and Cecilia, still alive, sitting side by side in the library…

In Briony's novel, Celia and Robbie are eventually able to live together, and Briony visits them in an attempt to apologize; but in real life, we learn, Celia and Robbie died during World War II before they could see one another again, and before Briony could reconcile with them. By inviting the reader to imagine a happy ending, Briony effectively heightens the tragedy of the events that actually occurred. By choosing Briony as his narrator, and by framing the novel Briony wrote with her discussion of her own novel, McEwan is able to create multiple interlacing narratives, telling and retelling what happened and what might have been.

Narrative in Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, a World War II veteran who survived the bombing of Dresden, and has since “come unstuck in time.” The novel uses flashbacks and flash-forwards, and is narrated by an unreliable narrator who implies to the reader that the narrative he is telling may not be entirely true:

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn’t his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I’ve changed all the names.

The narrator’s equivocation in this passage suggests that even though the story he is telling may not be entirely factually accurate, he has attempted to create a narrative that captures important truths about the war and the bombing of Dresden. Or, maybe he just doesn’t remember all of the details of the events he is describing. In any case, the inconsistencies in dates and details in Slaughterhouse-Five  give the reader the impression that crafting a single cohesive narrative out of the horrific experience of war may be too difficult a task—which in turn says something about the toll war takes on those who live through it.

What's the Function of Narrative in Literature?

When we use the word "narrative," we're pointing out that who tells a story and how that person tells the story influence how the reader understands the story's meaning. The question of what purpose narratives serve in literature is inseparable from the question of why people tell stories in general, and why writers use different narrative elements to shape their stories into compelling narratives. Narratives make it possible for writers to capture some of the nuances and complexities of human experience in the retelling of a sequence of events.

In literature and in life, narratives are everywhere, which is part of why they can be very challenging to discuss and analyze. Narrative reminds us that stories do not only exist; they are also made by someone, often for very specific reasons. And when you analyze narrative in literature, you take the time to ask yourself why a work of literature has been constructed in a certain way.

Other Helpful Narrative Resources

• Etymology: Merriam-Webster describes the origins and history of usage of the term "narrative."
• Narrative Theory: Ohio State University's "Project Narrative" offers an overview of narrative theory.
• History and Narrative:  Read more about the similarities between historical and literary narratives in Hayden White's  Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in 19th-Century Europe.
• Narrative Art: This article from Widewalls explores narrative art and discusses what kind of art doesn't  tell stories. 

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Qualitative Research: Narrative

• Qualitative Research Texts
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What is Narrative Analysis?

Narrative research  is a term that subsumes a group of approaches that in turn rely on the written or spoken words or visual representation of individuals. These approaches typically focus on the lives of individuals as told through their own stories. Clandinin and Connelly define it as "a way of understanding and inquiring into experience through “collaboration between researcher and participants, over time, in a place or series of places, and in social interaction with milieus” ( Clandinin  & Connelly, 2000, p. 20)."

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Pictorial Representation of Stories

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Cite this chapter

• Laura Messina-Argenton 5 ,
• Tiziano Agostini 6 ,
• Tamara Prest 7 &
• Ian F. Verstegen 8  

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This chapter outlines some theoretical aspects concerning continuous pictorial narrative, as dealt with in the domains of art history, psychology and its neighbouring fields and psychology of art, focusing on selected studies useful for framing issues relevant to the study presented in the following chapters. The study was specifically designed to inquire how artists solve the problem of telling the episodes that compose a story, which have a sequential and therefore temporal progression, using static media that both perceptually and representationally are distinguished only by spatial sign-elements. More broadly, it also pursued the intention to inquire how artists’ representational intents are linked to both certain psychological ‘rules’ and certain historical-artistic conventions or constraints, trying to join two strands of research, psychological and art-historical, and two interconnected components of art-making – rules of vision and rules of composition – considering the knowledge of the artist in its cognitive entirety and the artistic work as a Gestalt, that is, in its wholeness.

• Visual narrative
• Continuous pictorial narrative
• Psychology of art
• Art history
• Representability of time
• Static media
• Temporal arts
• Spatial arts
• Narrative modes
• Compositional processes
• Perceptual reasonings
• Visual thinking
• Phenomenological observation
• Interobservation

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According to McCaffrey ( 2013 , p. 239), “the middle register of the Uruk Vase can also be read as a continuous narrative. Instead of a consecutive narrative about a file of anonymous priests transporting offerings to the temple, it can be understood as a continuous narrative that depicts the repeated actions of a single person”.

“In Assyria, the earliest example of the continuous style is a relief of Tukulti-Ninurta I from the late thirteenth century BC. The king appears twice in the scene: both facing an altar on his right with his right hand raised in front of his face in a gesture of humility” (Watanabe, 2004 , p. 105).

The image represents the weighing of Hunefer’s heart “to ascertain his worthiness to enter heaven” (Quirke & Spencer, 1992 , p. 171). Hunefer is portrayed three times: in the sequence above, Hunefer is in adoration before deities; in the sequence below, he is led by the jackal-headed Anubis towards the balance of judgement; and then he is conducted by Horus to a shrine in which Osiris sits enthroned.

It should be pointed out that, for Lessing, this issue also concerns “good taste”, since he also refers to paintings of stories, such as the “history of the prodigal son, his disorderly life, his misery, and his repentance”, painted by Titian, which, however, Lessing notes ( 1766/2013 , p. 109), “is an encroachment upon the sphere of the poet, which good taste could never justify”. This issue calls into question another one, certainly relevant and widely debated, which we cannot address here, that is, whether the single moment can be considered a narrative. For a delineation of this question, we can refer, for example, to an essay by Nanay ( 2009 ), in which a further question is addressed, that is, whether the action in the narrative must necessarily be goal-directed or not.

Some scholars go so far as to consider continuous narrative as the result of a primitive or “child-like” method (Gardner, 1917 , pp. 20–21). Gardner ( 1917 , p. 20, our italics) underlines the widespread use of “the method of continuous narration, in which a hero appears several times in the same picture engaged in various actions. It is found all over the world, among Red Indians and Eskimo, as well as in Asia and Africa. It was regularly adopted in early Egyptian painting, for example in the illustrations to the Book of the Dead . It flourishes in the first sketch-books of clever children: it is in fact a c hildish method , and wherever art is in a childish condition it may be found. Naturally, in formed Greek art, and in the painting of the Renaissance, it exists only as a survival”.

There are different interpretative perspectives on the question of the visual appearance of simultaneity in continuous narrative and also alternative proposals. For example, Small ( 1999 , pp. 562–567), in his analysis of vase painting, shows that in several cases “the painting shows not simultaneous events but rather a sequence of events determined by their location in the painting” and “arranged spatially in their order of importance to the artist”. Small, therefore, proposes to consider, in addition to “hierarchical time”, the “spatial time” – i.e. “the actual physical place where a scene occurs” – that can be connected to “geographical order” used by “classical historians”, who “in their writings often relate events out of chronological order”, proceeding by “location” (Small, 1999 , p. 562). The “geographical” organisation is also referred to by Goodman ( 1980 , pp. 111–114), regarding the “picture biography” of the Japanese Buddhist Prince Shotoku Taishi, painted by Hata no Chitei in 1069, in which the disposition of scenes could be organised “according to the place where the event occurred”.

Calabrese ( 1987 ) distinguishes four types of “temporality”, of “pictorial renderings” of time: the time of the story (succession of events), the time of the action (succession of movements), the time of the scene (frame of events), and the temporal scene (style and emotion), to which he adds two other types of time: the time of the artist (act of painting) and the time of the reader (dialogue with the painting).

Some scholars make further distinctions, for example, between story , i.e. the events that constitute it, text , i.e. their linguistic representation, and narrative , i.e. the act of narrating (Rimmon-Kenan, 1983 ), or between story , fabula , that is the narrative structure made of macro proposition, and “intreccio”, constituted by the micro propositions (Eco, 1979 ).

In the fifteenth century, for example, techniques of interior visualization – prayer as an act of imagination, an itinerary through images of places and characters – were used to train for personal prayer. Baxandall ( 1988 , p. 46) quotes in this regard a passage from Zardino de Oration , written in 1454: “The better to impress the story of the Passion on your mind, and to memorise each action of it more easily, it is helpful and necessary to fix places and people in your memory”. Italian edition: “La quale historia [della Passione] aciò che tu meglio la possi imprimere nella mente, e più facilmente ogni acto de essa ti si reducha alla memoria ti serà utile e bisogno che ti fermi ne la mente lochi e persone ” (Baxandall, 1988 , p. 163).

Ghiberti, in the Commentario terzo , expounds Alhazen’s theory: “The perception, therefore, of visual objects by the sense of sight will be in two ways: superficial perception which is a first impression, and perception by repeated looking. Perception of the first impression is uncertified perception, and attentive perception, that is by repeated looking, is perception by which the forms of visual objects are certified” (Andrews, 1998 , p. 142, n. 15). See also Federici Vescovini ( 1965 , p. 44). Italian edition: “la comprensione adonche di li visibili dal viso, serà sicondo dui modi: la comprensione superfitiale la quale è in lo primo aspecto, e la comprensione per lo risguardaminto. La comprensione per lo primo aspecto è comprensione non certificata; e la comprensione per intuitione, zioè per lo sguardaminto, è per comprensione, per la quale se certificano le forme di li visibili” (Federici Vescovini, 2003 , p. 409).

Italian edition: “Diremo addunque come il viso comprende el moto per comprensione della cosa visa mota, secondo due siti diversi in due ore diverse tra le quali è tempo sensibile” (Ghiberti, 1447–1455 /1947, III, 16, p. 93).

Italian edition: “E se tu, poeta, figurerai una istoria con la pittura della penna, il pittore col pennello la farà di piú facile satisfazione, e meno tediosa ad esser compresa. E se tu dimanderai la pittura muta poesia, ancora il pittore potrà dire la poesia orba pittura. Or guarda qual è piú dannoso mostro, o il cieco, o il muto?” (Richter, 1883 , §653).

Italian edtion: “e se tu volessi dire: che modo ho a fare la vita d’uno santo scompartita in molte storie ‘n una medesima faccia? a questa parte ti rispondo che tu debi porre il primo piano col punto all’altezza dell’occhio de’ riguardatori d’essa storia e in sudetto piano figura la prima storia grande, e poi diminuendo di mano in mano le figure e casamenti, in su diversi colli e pianure, farai tutto il fornimento d’essa storia. Sul resto della faccia, nella sua altezza, farai alberi grandi a comparazione delle figure, o angeli, se fossero al proposito dell’istoria, ovvero uccelli, o nuvoli, o simili cose; altrimenti non te n’impacciare, chè ogni tua opera sarà falsa” (Richter, 1883 , §542).

While scholars are fairly unanimous in dating the Latin and vernacular versions of Alberti’s treatise On Painting between 1435 and 1436, they are not so unanimous as to which of the two versions was written first. Some believe that the first version is the one in Latin – e.g. Spencer ( 1957 , p. 31, n. 16) or Grayson ( 1972 , p. 1) – others that it is the one in the local dialect of Tuscany, e.g. Sinisgalli ( 2011 , p. 3). Here we quote passages from this treatise contained in the versions edited by Grayson (in English, in Italian, and in Latin) and by Spencer (in English), but this does not mean that we are leaning towards the first of the two positions in this philological debate, into the merits of which we certainly cannot enter.

Latin edition: “Res omnis quae loco movetur, septem habet movendi itinera, nam aut sursum versus aut deorsum aut in dexteram aut in sinistram aut illuc longe recedendo aut contra nos redeundo. Septimum vero movendi modus est is qui in girum ambiendo vehitur. Hos igitur omnes motus cupio esse in pictura” (Alberti, 1435–1436/ 1972 , §43, p. 82). Italian edition: “Qualunque cosa si muove da luogo può fare sette vie: in su, uno; in giù, l’altro; in destra, il terzo; in sinistra, il quarto; colà lunge movendosi di qui, o di là venendo in qua; il settimo, andando attorno. Questi adunque tutti movimenti desidero io essere in pittura” (Alberti, 1435–1436/ 1973 , vol. 3, §43, p. 74).

Italian edition: “ed in effetto ciò che è nell’universo per essenza, presenza o immaginazione, esso [il pittore] lo ha prima nella mente, e poi nelle mani” (Leonardo da Vinci, 1498–1515 /2000, §9).

Some scholars, as Spencer, use the term “istoria”, others, as Grayson, “historia”. For a review of relevant studies on these terms, see, for example, Grafton ( 1999 ).

Latin edition: “Caeterum cum historiam picturi sumus, prius diutius excogitabimus quonam ordine et quibus modis eam componere pulcherrimum sit. Modulosque in chartis conicientes, tum totam historiam, tum singulas eiusdem historiae partes commentabimur, amicosque omnes in ea re consulemus. Denique omnia apud nos ita praemeditata esse elaborabimus , ut nihil in opere futurum sit, quod non optime qua id sit parte locandum intelligamus” (Alberti, 1435–1436/ 1972 , §61, pp. 102, 104, our italics). Italian edition: “E quando aremo a dipignere storia, prima fra noi molto penseremo qual modo e quale ordine in quella sia bellissima, e faremo nostri concetti e modelli di tutta la storia e di ciascuna sua parte prima, e chiameremo tutti gli amici a consigliarci sopra a ciò. E così ci sforzeremo avere ogni parte in noi prima ben pensata , tale che nella opera abbi a essere cosa alcuna, quale non intendiamo ove e come debba essere fatta e collocata” (Alberti, 1435–1436/ 1973 , vol. 3, §61, p. 102, our italics).

For the synoptic mode, see also Lowenstam ( 1992 , pp. 173–174), Snodgrass ( 1987 , pp. 135–146, 153–156), and Stansbury-O’Donnell ( 1999 , pp. 5–7).

It is appropriate to give a brief definition of the other modes added to monoscenic, synoptic/simultaneous, cyclical and continuous, that is of progressive, unified, episodic and serial, introduced by different scholars. Progressive refers to works in which there is no “repetition of characters” but “temporal progression from one part of the work to another”; unified narrative is used “for the case in which there are multiple scenes that belong to same moment of time, but each scene occupying a different space”; episodic narrative, which can be understood as a variant of “progressive”, identifies the representation of “several different episodes within a single story”; serial narrative, finally, refers to the “telling of a single myth on a series of contiguous yet self-contained panels, where the characters appear but once” (Stansbury-O’Donnell, 1999 , p. 6).

“Conflation” is a term used by Weitzmann ( 1957 ). Dehejia ( 1990 ), while citing Weitzmann at the beginning of his essay, does not link the term to Weitzman’s studies and in fact seems to intend it in a different way. For Weitzman, as we shall see later, conflation is not a narrative mode but a compositional device.

Cutting ( 2002 , p. 1167) mentions stories, but does not seem to recognise the specificity of continuous narration: “Images in art, at least prior to the mid-nineteenth century […] are fashioned so that the composition reflects an event as it would have unfolded over some, often extended, period of time. Often multiple, related images – triptychs, chapel walls and ceilings, scroll and cloud paintings, tapestries, and the like – tell a longer story with many episodes, each of which is captured in separately portrayed moments. In this manner the representation of motion only becomes a problem if one thinks of any picture as a frozen instant in time”.

Argenton ( 1996 ) focused one of his most important studies on the analysis of the artistic phenomenon and on an in-depth examination of the two segments that make up the phenomenon itself: “artistic behaviour”, i.e. “the set of cognitive and executive processes that lead the artist to the realisation of the work and that characterise the artist→work relationship”, and “aesthetic behaviour, i.e. the set of cognitive and executive processes that lead the ‘enjoyer’ [fruitore] to establish the artistry of the work and to ‘enjoy’ it, and that thus characterise the work←‘enjoyer’ relationship” (Argenton, 1996 , p. 178), devoting an extensive treatment to the artistic work itself, which is ultimately the fulcrum on which the two behaviours hinge. Argenton uses the terms “fruire”, “fruizione” and “fruitore”, respectively translated with “enjoy”, “enjoyment” and “enjoyer”. As Verstegen specifies in editing Argenton’s book ( 2019 , p. xxi, n 1 Ed.), “these Italian terms refer not only to drawing pleasure or satisfaction from something, but also to the use of something. In this sense, ‘fruizione’ does not necessarily have only a positive characterisation but can also be connoted in an opposite sense, giving rise to an act of negative critical judgment, censure, disapproval, etc. On this question, see Argenton ( 1996 , pp. 274–275)”.

Actually, the authors use the term “synoptic” but clearly referring to continuous narrative (as the syntagma is used by us), namely, to works “in which a character, or characters, are portrayed multiple times within a frame to convey that multiple actions are taking place” (McNamara et al., 2012 , p. 63).

As McNamara et al. ( 2012 , p. 65) specify, “eleven images served as stimuli for the experiment, two of which were used for observer training”. In reality, the Authors present seven works, five of which are continuous narratives: Miraculous Draught of the Fishes by Konrad Witz, Adoration of the Magi by Gentile da Fabriano, Tribute Money by Masaccio, Story of Joseph by Biagio d’Antonio, and Landscape with Perseus and Andromeda , by an Anonymous artist, in Boscotrecase (see, for the first four, Chap. 5 ). Of the other two works, one is synoptic: Christ Taken Prisoner by Duccio di Buoninsegna; the other is a grandiose composite work, Maesta Altarpiece by Duccio di Buoninsegna, which contains the above Christ Taken Prisoner and other panels also of continuous narrative.

As Kalkofen and Strack ( 2018 , p. 4) clarify: “After repeated examinations of the coloured engravings of paintings by Piero di Puccio (fourteenth century) the thus far neglected triple appearance in La morte di Abele suddenly became apparent to the senior author”. The coloured engravings to which Kalkofen and Strack ( 2018 ) refer were realised by Carlo Lasinio in the nineteenth century (see Chap. 4 ).

The Tribute Money is a work already mentioned and studied also by psychologists. For example, the work is quoted by Kubovy ( 1986 , p. 2) to illustrate some perspectival features: “Take, for instance, Masaccio’s Tribute Money […]. The slanted lines representing the horizontal features of the building that recede into the distance, often called orthogonals because they represent lines in the scene that are orthogonal to the picture plane, converge at a point known as the vanishing point for this perspective construction […]. The vanishing point falls slightly to the right of Christ’s head, thus drawing attention to the central actor in the drama Masaccio has represented”.

Leon Battista Alberti (1435–1436/ 1972 , p. 33), in the dedication of Della Pittura to Filippo Brunelleschi, thus writes: “… I recognized in many, but above all in you, Filippo [Brunelleschi], and in our great friend the sculptor Donatello and in the others, Nencio [Ghiberti], Luca [della Robbia] and Masaccio, a genius for every laudable enterprise in no way inferior to any of the ancient who gained fame in these arts”. Italian edition: “… compresi in molti ma prima in te, Filippo [Brunelleschi], e in quel nostro amicissimo Donato [Donatello] scultore, e in quegli altri Nencio [Ghiberti] e Luca [della Robbia] e Masaccio, essere a ogni lodata cosa ingegno da non posporli a qual si sia stato antiquo e famoso in queste arti” (Alberti, 1435–1436/ 1972 , p. 32).

Leonardo is even more direct: “Afterwards this [i.e., after Giotto] art declined again, because everyone imitated the pictures that were already done; thus it went on from century to century until Tomaso, of Florence, nicknamed Masaccio, showed by his perfect works how those who take for their standard any one but nature – the mistress of all masters – weary themselves in vain”. Italian edition: “Dopo questo [Giotto] l’arte ricadde, perché tutti imitavano le fatte pitture, e così andò declinando, insino a tanto che Tomaso fiorentino, scognominato Masaccio, mostrò con opra perfetta come quegli che pigliavano per altere altro che la natura, maestra de’ maestri, s’affaticavano invano” (Richter, 1883 , §660).

Luminance refers to “the amount of light reflected by the surfaces reaching the retina”, and it “is the product of the incident light and the reflectance of the surfaces” (Soranzo et al., 2009 , p. 463; see also Agostini & Galmonte, 2002 ). The agreement of perceptionists on the term brightness is not unanimous and sometimes it is also used as an alternative to lightness . Following Gilchrist’s clarification ( 2015 , p. 342), “brightness is perceived luminance and lightness is perceived reflectance”.

With regard to style in art, considered as a relevant object of psychological research, see Argenton ( 1989 , 1996 , pp. 142–158).

With due exceptions, including a frequently cited study by Weisberg ( 2004 ), dedicated to reconstructing the compositional process of Picasso’s Guernica , in which, however, the analysis of the work follows criteria of a critical-artistic type, setting aside perceptual ones. For a different analysis of Guernica , see Arnheim ( 1962 ).

Argenton ( 1996 , pp. 261–271) introduces the construct “artistic personality” to refer to what the artists “show us about themselves in a work, through their personal style, namely through the ‘unrepeatable and very personal’ cognitive and executive manipulation – characterised by their skill and possible creativity – that each is able to perform in his executive field”. Argenton therefore makes a distinction from the general construct of “personality”, which scholars often use, in the belief that “an expert and careful reading of an artistic work provides all the data necessary to know or interpret the personality type or traits or the feelings or thoughts or eventually psychological disorders of the person who created it”. And Argenton makes this distinction between “personality” and “artistic personality”, inter alia, to underline once again how the artwork displays aspects that are closely connected with the personal, cognitive and executive activity of the artist, namely with his/her style .

A critical position, similar to Arnheim’s, is taken by other scholars, among whom Argenton ( 2019 , Chap. 1) and Pizzo Russo ( 2004 , passim ).

Argenton, in his works, has always recognised “the heuristic value” of the studies carried out during his lifetime by Arnheim; see for example Argenton ( 2004a ).

In distinguishing form and colour, Argenton ( 2019 , p. 59) specifies however that “actually everything we see, including forms, depends on colour and brightness”.

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Messina-Argenton, L., Agostini, T., Prest, T., Verstegen, I.F. (2022). Pictorial Representation of Stories. In: Showing Time: Continuous Pictorial Narrative and the Adam and Eve Story. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13662-7_1

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What narrative is

Reconsidering definitions based on experiments with pictorial narrative. an essay in descriptive narratology.

Unacknowledged by its practitioners, narratology has often been revisionary rather than descriptive when categorizing narratives. This is because definitions, expert judgment and personal intuition , traditionally the main tools for categorization, are vulnerable to media blindness and to being theory loaded. I argue that to avoid revisionary accounts of ordinary everyday practices such as narrative or gameplay of which non-experts have a firm understanding, expert categorizations have to be tested against folk intuitions as they become apparent in ordinary language. Pictorial narrative in single pictures is introduced as a specific case of categorization dispute and an experiment laid out in which non-experts assess if different pictures tell stories. As the chosen pictures correspond to different criteria of narrative to varying degrees, the experiment also serves as an implicit test of these criteria. Its results confirm monochrony compatibilism, the position that single monochronic pictures can autonomously convey stories. While the pictures rated high in narrativity correspond to traditional criteria of narrative, I argue that the way in which these criteria are usually interpreted by narratologists is problematic because they exclude these pictures from the realm of narratives. It is argued that the way marginal phenomena are categorized is essential for a sound understanding of even the most paradigmatic objects of a domain because categorizations influence definitions and definitions ultimately guide interpretations.

1 Descriptive narratology, the diversity constraint and the centrality of categorization disputes

The subtitle of this text is inspired by P. F. Strawson’s 1959 book Individuals. An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics in which Strawson (1996: 9) argues that traditional metaphysics is often revisionary rather than descriptive, inadvertently prescribing how to think about the objects in the world rather than describing how we actually think about them. I believe the same criticism applies to narratology. Many narratologists who seemed to believe that they describe what narrative is or how narrative works, have inadvertently offered revisionary accounts. They did so, among other things, because they failed to sufficiently assess the extension of expressions such as “narrative” or “telling a story” in ordinary language. Descriptive narratology can be defined as an approach that seeks to describe rather than prescribe how people think about (aspects of) narrative(s). For instance, the paradigm of narrative most narratologists operate with is still word-based, while most people would agree that there are many narratives that are not. Even though Roland Barthes (2005: 109), Claude Bremond (1964), Tzvetan Todorov (1969: 10) and many others have long argued that not all narratives are verbal and despite the “transmedia turn” in narratology, presentations on films and pictures were rare at the ENN 2017 in Prague (less than 10 % each) and less than 5 % treated wordless music. This might be linked to the fact that the existence of mimetic narrative [1] and narrative in wordless music is still under dispute. However, here like elsewhere good reasons might not be the most influential factor: As most narratologists first learn about narratives through texts ( Hausken 2004: 394), they might easily fall prey to a cognitive bias which Liv Hausken calls “media blindness”. As Hausken (2004: 392) explains, “theories that are seemingly independent of the medium are usually implicitly tied to a particular medium”. While narratology has discovered video games, newspaper articles, oral utterances and abstract comics as objects of study, its paradigm cases are still complex, verbal and often long literary narratives. This may lead narratologists to consciously or unconsciously hold that the specificities of such verbal texts – for instance double timeline – characterize narrative tout court and cause problems in categorizing less paradigmatic productions.

Even if most theorists have an opinion about what a narrative is, explicit categorization disputes only engage a handful of them. Most scholars rather focus on developing general theories or specific concepts and on analyzing paradigmatic creations. Let me start by explaining why this disinterest in categorization can be problematic. General theories need to respect the “diversity constraint” ( Lopes 1996: 32): they must be general enough to account for all entities of the kind under consideration. A theory of pictures needs to account for a child’s drawing, a cubist painting as well as a trompe-l’oeil or a photographic snapshot. Likewise, if we want to be sure that our theories of non-mimetic narratives, unnatural narratives, unreliable narration, point of view, suspense and curiosity, etc. do not only apply to a subset of narratives, for instance verbal ones, we need to know where narratives and narrativity occur. An analogue example may further clarify why correct categorization matters for interpretation.

When we define a game as “A system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome” ( Salen and Zimmerman 2003: 80), cooperative activities are excluded from the realm of games. But are badminton or volleyball not games when participants try to make it easy for their partners to hit the shuttle or ball? Our intuition seems to tell us that they are. If this intuition turned out to be stable across subjects, we could want to replace (a) “artificial conflict” by something else to account for what we can call “folk categorization dispositions”, perhaps (a') “artificial conflict or cooperation” or (a'') “artificial interaction”. Such a change will not only lead to a definition that adequately categorizes badminton and volleyball in the park and other cooperative games as games. It will have much wider implications. Making (a') or (a'') instead of (a) a central element in a definition of games implies a different understanding of what a game is and why people play games. Therefore it modifies what is considered salient in gameplay, even when we analyze games dominated by competition. Based on an understanding of games that integrates (b'), scholars of game studies will naturally start to account for cooperative elements, even in mainly competitive games. With a definition integrating (b''), which remains unspecific as to the nature of the interaction, all kinds of exchange between players can be seen as important to the game as game. Perhaps competition and collaboration are only some of the interactions that are essential. Other forms of exchange, such as hindrance or encouragement might suddenly appear to be elements of gameplay, perhaps even when they do not appear in the rules [2] . Ultimately, theorists could then relativize the importance of rules for games and develop a new theory of gaming. If discrepancies between folk categorizations and expert theories are taken seriously – and they certainly should be – they can thus have a strong impact on a discipline. This shows not only how important definitions are, but, more importantly, how definitions are important: When definitions are modified to include non-paradigmatic entities, the ways we analyze paradigmatic ones changes too. Influencing which aspects of the entities at stake appear as salient, definitions guide interpretations and can ultimately affect general theories. Therefore categorization problems are to be taken seriously, even by scholars who see their task as analyzing prototypical creations, such as verbal narratives in narratology (or competitive games in game theory).

2 Definitions and intuitions

A major reason for theorists to want to define important concepts of their domain narrowly has been that they wanted to avoid that “anything goes” (cf. Revaz 1997: 69). As Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (2006: 17) has put it: “if everything is narrative, nothing is”. But this underestimates people’s capacity to intuitively categorize ordinary things, even when they cannot provide criteria. As Wittgenstein (cf. 2009: § 68–71, § 76–77) argued, the fact that we are not able to explicitly state the criteria for applying a concept doesn’t fundamentally impair our use of it: “For how is the concept of a game bounded? What still counts as a game, and what no longer does? Can you say where the boundaries are? No. You can draw some, for there aren’t any drawn yet. ( But this never bothered you before when you used the word ‘game’ [emphasis mine].)” ( Wittgenstein 2009: § 68). In many cases, we are unable to clearly define a concept, yet we still know when it applies and when it does not. Arguably, the purpose of defining an ordinary concept such as game , narrative or story , is to provide explicit criteria for judgments we are already able to make ( Schöttler 2016: 164) [3] : “definitions need to stand the test of intuitions, not the opposite.” ( Speidel 2013 a: 179). If definitions oppose intuitions, they lead to revision, not description. The definition of narrative as “the representation of actions or events” is a textbook case of revisionary narratology because it counter-intuitively turns recipes and weather forecasts into narratives. When Tzvetan Todorov (1973, 44) declared that recipes are “imperative narratives” to save his definition, this was certainly witty, but also quite ad hoc and unconvincing. The fact is that it proved notoriously difficult to devise a definition of narrative that does not misclassify recipes and weather forecasts or exclude real narratives. At the same time, it was always easy for anyone to intuitively understand that Cinderella tells a story and that the weather forecast does not (cf. Prince 1999: 43). Intuitive categorizations by ordinary speakers should therefore guide us when we design and assess definitions. How do we learn about intuitions? By checking if definition-based categorizations match intuition-based ones. As Stephen Laurence and Eric Margolis explain:

Forming an intuition is a matter of determining how we would categorize things in a given situation. Thus intuitions correlate with categorization dispositions and categorization dispositions correlate with content. The result is that intuitions are broadly correlated with content on virtually any theory of content . For this reason, they can be used as evidence for content, that is, evidence that a concept truly applies when intuition says it does. ( Laurence and Margolis 2003: 279)

But given the reliability of intuitions, why do we need definitions at all? To put a first answer briefly: Intuitions inform us how to categorize this or that, but not why; they tell us which artifacts are narratives, but they cannot tell us what a narrative is. Intuitions can hardly be discussed, definitions can. Therefore we would not be doing science any more – at least not in the sense where most of us understand it today – if we only relied on intuitions. To understand what something is (and how it works), we need more than the ability to reliably categorize different productions (cf. Chatman 1983: 55). This is where definitions of ordinary concepts have a role to play. They provide reasons for categorizations we already know how to make. To conclude this section, we can say that intuitions not definitions are essential when we want to settle categorization disputes. Definitions certainly play important roles in research, but – as opposed to a common misconception and the ensuing misuse – being gatekeepers for a specific subject domain should not be one of them.

3 Major positions concerning pictorial narrative and the role of examples

In order to evaluate different ways to tackle categorization disputes and explore a new way to deal with them in concreto , I here want to look more closely at the debate concerning pictorial narrative. But the approach I describe would also be relevant to assess the narrative potential of other marginal cases, such as, for instance, drama, wordless music or abstract comics. Since Lessing (1853) first distinguished the spatial and the temporal arts in 1766, suggesting that the former should only – but often misinterpreted as saying that they could only ( Speidel 2013a : 181–184) – be used to depict states, the central question concerning pictorial narrative has been: Can some single pictures be said to autonomously convey stories – and thus be classified as narratives ( Wolf 2003: 180) – and if yes, which kind of pictures? Wendy Steiner (1988, 2004), Aron Kibédi Varga (1989, 1990), Jean-Marie Schaeffer (2001), Werner Wolf (2002, 2003, 2011), Michael Ranta (2013), Klaus Speidel (2013a, 2013 b, 2018a), Peter Hühn (2015) and Tobias Schöttler (2016) have addressed this problem within a narratological framework. They all develop a compatibilist argument, arguing that there are single pictures that autonomously convey stories. Looking more closely, we can however distinguish different kinds of compatibilism and the accompanying incompatibilisms. Monochrony – or strong – compatibilists like Ranta (2013), Speidel (2013a, 2013 b, 2018a) and Hühn (2015) believe that single pictures only explicitly depicting one moment in time can autonomously convey stories. This is something monochrony incompatibilists like Steiner (2004: 172), Wolf (2002: 96), Kibédi Varga (1990: 97) and Schöttler (2016: 178) deny. These authors believe that only works that explicitly depict several moments in time, for instance by repeating figures or by juxtaposing several pictures, can communicate stories [4] . Let us call them polychrony – or medium – compatibilists . As opposed to them, Seymour Chatman (1990), Françoise Revaz (1997), Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (2006) and Jean-Marie Schaeffer (2001) are incompatibilists concerning narrative in the single picture. They embrace sequence – or weak – compatibilism , i. e. the belief that only picture series and films can convey stories. Sequence (or weak) compatibilism and polychrony compatibilism are probably the most common positions in narratology. Full incompatibilism concerning pictorial narrative, the position denying that there is any intersection between the set of pictures and the set of narratives is relatively rare, but was prominently held by Gérard Genette (1980, 1983). More recently, Paul Barolsky (2010: 112) has also attempted to show that “there is no such thing as narrative art”.

4 Arguments for and against pictorial narrative

Any categorization question can be represented in terms of set theory. To say that pictorial narrative in monochronic pictures exists is, for instance, to affirm that there is an intersection between the sets of P and N, where P is the set of monochronic pictures and N is the set of narratives. There are two recurrent strategies to find out if there is an intersection: assessing if there is any conflict between essential criteria of the definitions of Ns and Ps. If there are none, Ps can be Ns, otherwise Ps cannot be Ns. Alternatively, it is possible to try to find at least one specific example that is both P and N. If there is a P that is also an N, this implies that Ps can be Ns. Like in other categorization disputes, both the first approach, where the compatibility of criteria is assessed, and the approach where we look for examples have been frequently used in arguments about pictorial narrative. The role and importance of examples in compatibilist and incompatibilist theories however differs greatly. Incompatibilists usually suggest that there is some kind of incompatibility between the concept of narrative as properly defined and what can be communicated with pictures. Pictures are then used as illustrations without much argumentative weight [5] . As opposed to this, compatibilists usually make extended use of specific examples in their arguments. Given that incompatibilists deny that pictorial narrative of a certain kind exists, a single undisputed case of narrative in a specific kind of picture would be enough to prove that incompatibilism concerning this kind of picture is wrong. [6]

Over the years, I have identified three major strategies to establish if single pictures can tell stories.

The argument from definition has largely dominated in narratology. Theorists argue based on definition alone or use definitions and examples, trying to show that some specific single picture corresponds to the criteria of a plausible definition of narrative.

The argument from intuition suggests that we should trust our intuition that single pictures communicate stories or that they do not.

The argument from expertise urges us to rely on expert judgment concerning the existence of pictorial narrative.

These strategies are often intertwined. Thus we, as experts, can reject or embrace definitions based on our intuitions concerning specific artifacts, accept definitions because they have been developed by experts in our field or look for expert confirmation of our intuitive assessments. To get a clear sense of the specific limits of each strategy, it is however useful to discuss them separately. After doing so, I will introduce a fourth strategy: the argument from ordinary language . It claims that definitions of terms like “telling a story” or “narrative” should not be incompatible with the ways they are used in ordinary language as assessed in valid experiments. I will then expose an experiment to find out what kind of pictures are naturally said to tell a story by non-experts, with the aim of settling the categorization dispute concerning pictorial narrative.

5 The argument from definition

Definitions of narrative or the criteria of such definitions usually play such a prominent role when pictorial narrative in single pictures is discussed that we might come to believe that checking if single pictures can correspond to a sound definition of narrative is the only available strategy. Thus researchers like Gérard Genette (1980, 1983), Seymour Chatman (1990), Françoise Revaz (1997, 2009), Emma Kafalenos (1996), Jean-Marie Schaeffer (2001), Marie-Laure Ryan (2004) and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (2006) have argued that (autonomous) narrative in the single picture does not exist because according to a plausibly narrow definition such a picture cannot convey what is necessary for narrative. Marie-Laure Ryan (2004: 139) argues that “since pictures, left by themselves, lack the ability to articulate specific propositions and to explicate causal relations, their principal narrative option is [...] the illustrative mode ”. [7] She considers that pictures cannot represent causal links between story events and therefore cannot convey a story autonomously. Seymour Chatman (1990: 7) and Jean-Marie Schaeffer (2001: 15) believe like Lessing (1766) that pictures cannot convey stories because as opposed to texts, they do not have double temporality, they do not govern the order of access to their elements [8] . Werner Wolf (2002, 2003) and Wendy Steiner (2004) have argued from definition for polychrony compatibilism . I myself have also argued from definition on several occasions ( Speidel 2013 a, Speidel 2013 b, Speidel 2018a), defending monochrony compatibilism . For the reasons given in sections I and 2, I have however come to consider the strategy from definition to be problematic when it is used to settle categorization disputes. Why shouldn’t we then argue from our intuitions?

6 The argument from intuition and its problems

The argument from intuition is based on the conviction that intuitive categorizations can be trusted. In an article where the narrativity of pictures is at stake, the philosopher Nelson Goodman argues for monochrony compatibilism based on his intuitive assessment of the narrativity of different kinds of pictures. The crux of his argument is his description of The Conversion of Saint Paul (1567), a monochronic picture by Pieter Brueghel, of which Goodman (1981: 333) affirms that “[it] tells a story and tells it so compellingly that we tend to forget that nothing in the picture literally moves, that no part of the picture precedes any other in time, and that what is explicitly shown is not actions taking place but a momentary state [emphasis mine]”. It is on the basis of this experience that Goodman states that even pictures which only depict one moment can tell stories. But is the intuition of a single expert that one monochronic painting tells a story sufficient to ground monochrony compatibilism? Many narratologists are skeptical... .

Aron Kibédi Varga (1989: 108) believes like Marie-Laure Ryan (2004: 139) that the evocation of familiar stories is the only option available for single monochronic pictures. Like Jean-Marie Schaeffer (2001: 12), he believes that a painting like The Conversion of Saint Paul merely reminds viewers of a verbal narrative they already know. If the pre-text is culturally well entrenched, it may well happen that a picture which only reminds spectators of a familiar story is experienced as communicating it. Goodman, who certainly knew the story of the conversion of Saint Paul, may be a case in point. Given that his monochrony compatibilism is based on his intuition that Brueghel’s Conversion of Saint Paul tells a story and this intuition is problematic, his whole argument falls apart. This case shows that intuitions are prone to be influenced by previous knowledge, some of which can be quite specialized, and are not to be trusted under all circumstances. Therefore intuitions we have alone in an armchair are not a sound basis for our arguments. One way out of the predicament of a single-handed intuitive judgment of one expert is to look at the assessment of an expert community .

7 The argument from expertise and its problems

The argument from expertise is based on the conviction that categorizations by domain experts can be trusted. Bence Nanay (2009) has thus argued for monochrony compatibilism concerning pictorial narrative based on the fact that art historians often consider it unproblematic that certain monochronic pictures tell stories. Like Göran Sonesson (1997), Nanay holds that the representation of a single action is sufficient for pictorial narrative [9] . More precisely, Nanay’s theory of what he calls “narrative pictures” is based on the identification of “goal-directed actions” in representations ( Nanay 2009: 125). In Nanay’s account, the representation of such actions comes quite close to a necessary and sufficient condition for narrative. However, this criterion is essentially backed by his appeal to expertise, namely “the way the term ‘narrative picture’ is used by art historians” ( Nanay 2009: 123) [10] . Art historians’ categorization dispositions then become the tortoise on which the elephant of Nanay’s definition of narrative stands [11] . There are both specific and general reasons that make it relatively shaky ground. First of all, many theorists have called art historical expertise concerning matters of narrative into question. Wendy Steiner (1988: 2) notes that “the general art historical use of the term ‘narrative’ seems incomprehensible to literary scholars.” The art-historian Lorenzo Pericolo writes: “Art history, which has mostly emerged from the early modern debates about the istoria , has stubbornly continued to appraise visual narratives with criteria that are frankly obsolete” ( Pericolo 2011: 94) and according to Werner Wolf (2002: 24), “ questionable narrativisations [ fragwürdige Narrativierungen ]” are frequent in art history, and the use of “narrative” in most texts about art is “purely intuitive and accordingly vague.” Again, I do not believe that the use of intuitions is a problem per se , but I do believe that just like the intuitions of narratologists, those of art historians may be defective because of their professional background. Art history students are taught to quickly grasp which narrative, if any, a picture refers to. A naked couple with a snake is likely to evoke the Fall of Man not only to Christian audiences but also to most art historians and by just looking at a figure’s pose a well-trained art-historian can often tell what character and story is referenced. However, depicting a pose or a few clues and attributes does certainly not amount to autonomously conveying a story in the ordinary sense of the expression. While narratologists are more theory-conscious, we have already seen in section 1 that they are prone to media-blindness. This is likely to influence intuitions as much as definitions. Further more, both the intuitions and the language of art-historians and narratologists are likely to be theory-loaded.

As Thomas Kuhn (1996), Norwood Hanson (1958) and other theorists of science have shown, observation is influenced by the paradigms dominating a scientific community. As Hanson (1958: 19) puts it, “seeing is a ‘theory laden’ undertaking.” As expertise in most disciplines is linked to possessing theoretical knowledge and even holding theoretical beliefs, we may be particularly ill-advised to rely on expert intuitions concerning ordinary objects of inquiry. The way art historians or narratologists use phrases like “this painting tells a story” could be problematic precisely because they are experts. As Eugen Fischer recently explained, expert use of ordinary language may be particularly problematic:

Psycholinguistic findings reveal that some ordinary language is privileged – not normatively but psychologically: The uses of words a subject employs and encounters most frequently shape associative memory processes that duplicate semantic and pragmatic inferences [...]. In many cases, philosophers will use and encounter well established terms most frequently in certain familiar senses. When they give such terms a new use without realizing its novelty, they will hence unwittingly continue to make leaps of thought which duplicate semantic and pragmatic inferences licensed by the terms’ familiar use. ( Fischer 2014: 132–133)

In other words: as philosophers, narratologists and art historians who specialize in narrative, we are particularly prone to using expressions like “telling a story” inconsistently because we cannot entirely forget the meaning of such terms in ordinary language while we theorize.

Given that experts can be affected by media-blindness, theory-leadenness and inconsistency, the approach which seems the most promising is working with non-experts, whose use of ordinary language is likely to be less biased. Working with a sufficiently high number of people should help compensate possible idiosyncrasies and the influence of theoretical knowledge some of them might have acquired.

8 Ordinary language as a basis for descriptive narratology

The idea that ordinary language use is a valuable indicator of the extension of concepts is quite old. P. F. Strawson’s (1996: 9) descriptive metaphysics, which we evoked above is based “upon a close examination of the actual use of words”, which he says to be the “the best, and indeed the only sure, way in philosophy”. Ludwig Wittgenstein (2009: § 43, § 92) and John Austin have also suggested that analyzing the ways ordinary people use words may help us to either solve or dissolve philosophical problems. Wittgenstein (2009: § 43) famously held that rather than abstract criteria, the “use in the language” is essential for the meaning of a word. The most articulate defense of this approach has been provided by Austin:

Our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing and the connexions they have found worth marking, in the lifetime of many generations: these surely are likely to be more numerous, more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of the survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in all ordinary and reasonably practical matters, than any that you or I are likely to think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoon – the most favoured alternative method. ( Austin 1961: 130)

According to this, we should rely on the meaning terms have in ordinary language rather than the special meaning they sometimes receive in theoretical contexts. What is often overlooked by both critics and advocates of Austin’s approach is the fact that he speaks of ordinary and reasonably practical matters only. This seems to be a reasonable restriction as non-expert categorizations are likely to be useless for subjects like molecular biology. Even the nature of being or the freedom of will might not be sufficiently ordinary for non-experts to have much to say about them. Narrative, however, is quite different in this respect. After all, “all classes, all human groups, have their narratives” ( Barthes 2005: 109) and storytelling performs many functions in society. It is thus both ordinary and practical. Looking at when ordinary people use the expression “to tell a story” should then be a relatively trustworthy indicator of what kind of representations really tell (or communicate ) stories. Given that representations that tell stories are usually considered to be narratives ( Gaudreault 1988: 84; Wolf 2003: 180; Currie 2010: 6), such investigations also teach us about what narratives are [12] . The information obtained can then be used to evaluate our definitions and the ways they are usually interpreted.

9 Narratives in single pictures: Designing an experiment

Based on what has been said so far, an interesting approach to pictorial narrative emerges: taking pictures of a certain kind, for instance monochronic pictures that depict goal-directed actions, and asking people with no particular scholarly expertise on either narrative or pictorial art if they think that they tell stories. If categorizations obtained with such experiments oppose those based on theory, the burden of proof then lies with the theorist.

A well-designed and well-conducted experiment on pictorial narrative will, first of all, check whether participants agree that certain kinds of pictures tell stories. As storytelling is likely to be a question of degrees rather than categories alone ( Currie 2010: 34; Prince 2012: 26), Likert scales seem more adapted than simple yes/no answers, where certain thresholds, above which an answer counts as a “yes” can be defined.

We should also make sure that participants are not misled by previous knowledge of the story communicated by a picture, which could systematically falsify their intuitions. A simple way to avoid this pitfall is to choose pictures that communicate stories that the participants are not acquainted with. Pictures that convey new stories and do not have a verbal pre-text or pictures that communicate relatively unknown stories can be chosen [13] , where works that are unknown to participants are preferable. As the latter cannot be determined beforehand, the effect of familiarity on other judgments will have to be assessed in the experiment. [14] By choosing relatively unknown pictures while also showing a sufficient number of pictures to a sufficient number of participants, we can hope to find at least a few cases where the picture and story is unfamiliar to most viewers.

If previous knowledge of the story that is evoked was a condition for pictorial narrative, as different theorists (e. g. Kibedi-Varga 1989; Schaeffer 2001) have argued, there should be a strong correlation between knowing a picture beforehand and considering that it communicates a story.

Given that general reflections have to be applicable to diverse sets ( Lopes 1996: 32), pictures should be chosen to reflect the diversity of picture-making and narrativity. Viewers should see pictures from different times and contexts. However, of course, one example of a kind of picture, where viewers agree that it does convey a story, would be enough to prove wrong the corresponding incompatibilism. To verify if viewers apply an “every-picture-tells-a-story” rule, which might arguably call into question the reliability of their intuitions, at least one picture that belongs to a genre traditionally considered to be low in narrativity by art historians (landscape, portraiture, allegory) and with a level of narrativity that is expected to be lower according to narrative theory should be included for each viewer.

A study also ought to include polychronic pictures which explicitly depict several moments, for instance by showing the same actors more than once, because, as mentioned above, theorists like Aron Kibedi-Varga (1989, 1990), Wendy Steiner (2004) and Werner Wolf (2002, 2003, 2011) consider polychrony to be a necessary criterion for pictorial narrative. If participants implicitly embraced this concept of narrative, the polychronic pictures should turn out to be the only ones with high storytelling ratings.

10 Experimental evidence

10.1 introduction and participants.

A study was designed according to these reflections in order to test if non-experts consider some pictures to tell story, while considering others to do so to a lesser degree. To avoid choosing visual stimuli at random, pictures were chosen in accordance with criteria that often appear in definitions of narrative and categorized as higher, medium and lower narrativity.

Two hundred and twenty eight individuals recruited through social networks, groups of interests and mailing lists participated in the experiment (mean age: 31; 139 female; 89 male; 4 no indication; 1 other). Participants came from various domestic, cultural, social and educational backgrounds and they were not experts in the field of arts.

10.2 Stimuli

Fifteen paintings served as the stimuli. Three contemporary street art paintings (i. e. Banksy, 2006, 2011; Dran, n.d.), three paintings from the XVII century (i. e. Greuze 1777; Hogarth 1742; c.1743), three Baroque art paintings (i. e. Domenichino c.1615, c.1617, c.1635), three history paintings from the XIV century (i. e. Lorenzetti 1341; Lorenzetti 1332, 1339), and three pages without words from picture books for children (i. e. Nordqvist 1991, 1997, 2008) were used. All materials used were in a digital form and the entire experiment was set up on Social Science Survey ( Leiner 2014).

The twelve art paintings and the three pages from the children’s books were chosen for diversity, because they are commonly unknown to non-experts and according to major criteria commonly used to define narrative in narratology, interpreted in such a way that they are compatible with monochronic single pictures. They are i) representation of humanlike agents , ii) event representation , iii) conveying the timeline of story events , iv) extraordinariness / eventfulness of these events , v) conveying causal connections between the events. I expected all of these to contribute to narrativity. Based on Speidel (2013a), the representational timeline criterion that is regularly used by incompatibilists, e. g. Christian Metz, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan or Jean-Marie Schaeffer, was excluded. If this was problematic, none of the 10 pictures in the medium and high narrativity groups should appear as telling a story to the participants. I should here mention a last point concerning definitions: they usually leave room for interpretation. There are thus two ways different narratologists might fail less paradigmatic narratives: their definitions might be too narrow or the way they interpret and apply the defining criteria might be too restrictive given the ordinary concept of narrative. As mentioned in section 5 above, criteria iii) and v) have previously been used to justify monochrony or full incompatibilism. I believe that the underlying interpretation is problematic ( Speidel 2013 a, 2013 b, 2018a). I consider that monochronic pictures can convey causality and several events of a story by showing different states and events that form part of a causal continuum, where viewers spontaneously use story scripts and world knowledge to reconstruct the rest. According to my interpretation, Hogarth’s Bagnio Scene corresponds to criterion v) because it conveys a causal relationship between a man who is bleeding, a bloodstained sword laying on the ground, a second man fleeing through the window (and many other picture elements). This picture is not at odds with iii) because it conveys previous events through traces or by showing states that are so unstable that viewers will most certainly think of past and, possibly, future events (cf. Speidel 2018 c: 441–443).

Criteria influencing narrativity as used in experiment

Based on these criteria according to my liberal interpretation, degrees of narrativity were defined, namely higher, medium and lower (Figure 1 ). While all pictures showed human-like agents, only the higher and medium pictures made it possible to systematically reconstruct temporal and causal relationships and showed extraordinary events. The events in higher pictures were considered to be more extraordinary than those in medium pictures. Extraordinariness was used to separate medium from higher narrativity pictures because since Artistotle’s peripeteia , conceived as an unexpected turn (para doxan) , so many definitions have insisted that for ideal narratives, there needs to be some kind of disruption in the chain of story events ( Herman 2009: xvi; Todorov 1992: 121) or that at least one of the represented events has to appear as “significant” ( Schmid 2010: 8) or “extraordinary” ( Hühn 2009) in the storyworld.

Pictures of lower narrativity either showed states rather than events or multiple disconnected events. They also tended to show more ordinary situations, such as a market scene, people resting by a river, children posing for a portrait, or an old man contemplating objects.

To clarify how our interpretation of the criteria motivates our classifications, let us look at the XVIII century painting style (Figure 2 ) with paintings by William Hogarth and Jean-Baptiste Greuze. William Hogarth’s “Marriage à la Mode: The murder of the count” (c. 1743) was chosen as a picture higher in narrativity because it represents human agents and several events (such as a woman interacting with a man who has been hurt, armed men coming through the door, while another person is escaping through the window). In accordance with Speidel (2013a: 181, 189–190, 2018a), it was also predicted to cue interpreters to draw inferences about the temporal and the causal relationships of the depicted events. The depicted scene is obviously high in extraordinariness – in fact it is a crime scene. This was contrasted to “The ungrateful son” (Greuze 1777), which also represents agents and events , namely a dispute. However, its timeline seemed less obvious and the causal relations more difficult to perceive (Did the father first get angry and the son decide to leave because of this or the opposite? What is the role of the man by the door?). Given this and the fact that a dispute is less extraordinary than a crime, this painting was assumed to be medium in narrativity. The third picture in the group was The Graham Children (Hogarth 1742). Being a group portrait, it contains human agents , who interact somewhat, but has no clear timeline , shows few events , few strong causal relations and nothing that had to be considered as extraordinary by a non-expert public given the context. It was therefore predicted to be lower in narrativity, according to theory.

Pictures of style 2 (XVIII century) classified in order of narrativity from higher to lower

For each style of pictures, similar possibilities were evoked, and choices and assignments were made and discussed in groups of experts in art history and psychology at the CReA and EVA labs of the university of Vienna respectively, thus combining art historical and psychological expertise.

10.3 Questionnaire

Two Seven-point (1-not at all through to 7-absolutely) Likert scales were devised on SoSci Survey ( Leiner 2014) to correspond to degrees of storytelling (“How strongly do you agree with the following statement: This picture tells a story.”). The scale included the option to answer “I can’t tell.” Values from 1 to 3 were considered as “No,” 4 as neutral and 5 to 7 as a “Yes.”

In addition, participants were asked to respond to the item “Did you know this picture before” by choosing among “Yes,” “I’m not sure,” and “No.” For “Yes” answers there was the additional item: “If applicable, indicate the painter or the title, or tell us about the context where you saw the image before.”

10.4 Procedure

Participants received an invitation link to the survey through social networks and mailing lists. When participants clicked on the link, it redirected them to the SoSci Survey platform. In the first screen, they read a debriefing statement that explained the aim of the study and general instructions. No mention of storytelling or narrative was included. At the bottom of the first page they were asked to press “Next” when they were ready.

When they pressed “Next” they were presented with the picture considered of medium narrative value for fifteen seconds and they were asked to respond to a series of questions. At the end of the first part participants read a short thank you note and were informed that in the second and final part they would view the picture of the painting again for as long as they wished and reply to additional questions. Following the picture of medium narrative value each participant was required to repeat the same procedure for the higher and for the lower narrative pictures. The storytelling question was asked at the end of the second part of the questionnaire when participants had already engaged with the pictures in multiple ways and had, among other things, been invited to sum up the content of the picture.

10.5 Design

Data was analyzed by a 3x5 mixed design. “Style” of painting was the between-subjects factor with five levels, namely Style 1: Street art (XXI century), Style 2: XVIII century, Style 3: Baroque (XVII century), Style 4: XIV century and Style 5: Pictures from children’s books (XX century). Additionally, Narrativity (i. e. predicted degree of narrativity) was the within-subjects factor with three levels: “Higher,” “Medium,” and “Lower.”

The dependent variable “Storytelling” was the narrativity scores participants gave when asked if the picture tells a story ( see above: Questionnaire ).

“I can’t tell” responses were assigned the value of -1, were removed and analyzed separately. In total, twenty two cases of participants were removed pairwise according to the “I can’t tell” criterion.

Participants were randomly allocated to the five groups defined by “Style” (SoSci Survey presented different styles to different participants at random). Also, participants always viewed the pictures in the following order: Medium-Higher-Lower, to first familiarize them with the procedure before they saw the picture predicted to be highest in narrativity according to narrative theory as interpreted in the study. As mentioned before, the last picture mainly served the purpose of determining if participants would apply an “every-picture-tells-a-story” rule. There were forty-five, forty-six, forty-five, forty-five and forty-seven participants in groups 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, respectively.

Last but not least, responses to the question “Did you know this picture before” were first analyzed according to their frequencies before they were treated as an additional factor.

All statistical analyses in the current study were conducted using IBM SPSS v.24 (2016).

Frequencies were calculated for the independent variable Knowing. Only twenty-five out of six hundred and eighty-four responses were “Yes” which account for only 3.7 % of the observations. Seventy-three responses were “I am not sure” and the remaining five hundred and eighty-six responses on that question were “No”. Therefore, Knowing was not included in the analysis for further investigation.

10.6 Results

“Predicted degree of narrativity” that reflects higher, medium and lower in narrativity pictures will be referred to as “narrativity” from hereon, the ratings by participants as “storytelling”.

In general, pictures that were higher and medium in narrativity received higher storytelling scores than pictures lower in narrativity across all styles of paintings (Table 1 ).

Means (μ) by Narrativity

The mean scores of higher, medium and lower in narrativity pictures were μ=5.79 (SE=0.96), μ=5.86 (SE=0.102) and μ=3.84 (SE=0.129), respectively.

Frequencies were calculated for “I can’t tell” responses of the storytelling question. Participants could not tell if a picture was narrative or not, most frequently, when the picture was of lower narrativity.

There were significant differences between the scores of higher, medium and lower narrative street art paintings at the 5 % level using the Huynh-Feldt correction (F (1.571,64.415) = 3.866, p=0.035), among the scores of higher, medium and lower XVIII century paintings at the 1 % level using the Huynh-Feldt correction (F (1.672,70.213) = 111.946, p<0.001, among the scores of higher, medium and lower Baroque paintings at the 1 % level (F (2,80) = 32.292, p<0.001), among the scores of higher, medium and lower XIV century paintings at the 1 % level (F (2,78) = 76.697, p<0.001) and among the scores of higher, medium and lower narrative pictures from children’s books at the 1 % level (F (2,86) = 8.308, p=0.001).

For street art paintings, LSD comparisons revealed significant differences in the scores between pictures of higher and lower narrativity (p=0.022, Cohen’s d=0.239) only. In addition, Bonferroni post-hoc pairwise comparisons revealed significant differences between the scores of lower and higher XVIII century paintings (p<0.001, Cohen’s d=1.24) and the scores of lower and medium paintings of the same style (p<0.001, Cohen’s d=1.26). With regard to Baroque paintings, Bonferroni post-hoc comparisons revealed significant differences between the scores of lower and medium (p<0.001, d=0.819), lower and higher (p<0.001, Cohen’s d=0.527) and medium and higher paintings (p=0.005, Cohen’s d=0.469). In XIV century paintings, Bonferroni post-hoc comparisons revealed significant differences between the scores of lower and medium pictures (p<0.001, Cohen’s d=1.17) and lower and higher pictures (p<0.001, Cohen’s d=1.40). Finally, post-hoc Bonferroni pairwise comparisons revealed significant differences between lower and medium pictures (p=0.004, Cohen’s d=0.414) and between lower and higher pictures from children’s books (p=0.007, Cohen’s d=0.414).

Mean narrativity scores across styles

10.7 Discussion

These results suggest that according to non-experts some single monochronic pictures tell stories. Several medium and higher monochronic pictures in the experiment obtained mean storytelling scores of over 6 out of 7, where significant differences with pictures predicted to be lower in narrativity according to theory were also observed. The two polychronic pictures of middle and higher narrativity in the children’s book group and the polychronic picture of higher narrativity in the XIVth century group did not get higher storytelling ratings than the monochronic pictures in the other groups. As opposed to what polychrony compatibilists like Kibédi-Varga, Steiner or Wolf have argue, polychrony is not a condition for pictures that convey stories nor does it even seem to have a significant positive impact on levels of storytelling. It is even possible that monochronic pictures, where knowledge of causal relationships can be applied to determine timelines (quite like when we enter a room and discover a specific situation) more robustly convey causal relationships and timelines than pictures where two events that have not simultaneously occurred are shown in a continuous space. It proved sound to exclude the representational timeline criterion held by authors like Christian Metz (1968: 27), Seymour Chatman (1990: 7) or Shlomith Rimmon-Kenon (2006: 16) from our list. If all goes well it will soon be little more than a reminder of the kind of revisionary narratology that media-blindness can lead to.

Participants also quite consistently rated pictures considered to be of lower narrativity according to narrative theory as significantly lower in storytelling than pictures hypothesized to be higher. This makes it difficult to disqualify the participants’ assessments as being one of “wild narrativization”. As opposed to what some psychologists might have expected, participants do definitely not apply an “Every-picture-tells-a-story-rule”.

This indicates that – if applied as suggested – most criteria used in narratology are consistent with criteria implicitly used by non-experts and that definitions of narrative are, in fact, acceptable by and large. What seems to count for participants is that pictures actually convey event timelines, causal relationships, etc. where it does not matter whether they are entirely explicit. More generally, our results suggest a reception-based interpretation of the criteria of narrative, which also seems to be in accordance with cognitive narratology. It appears that high degrees of narrativity can be achieved when major story events, timelines and causal links are implicated. This clearly hints at one place where media-blindness, theory-leadenness and inconsistency can lead to a breakdown: rather than the criteria themselves, it is particularly narrow ways of interpreting them that narratology needs to give up. Our results further oppose criteria of narrative such as the language criterion held by Genette (1966: 152) and Barolsky (2010: 111) and the complication-resolution criterion as interpreted by Françoise Revaz (1997: 95), where pictures have to explicitly show a complication and resolution.

Knowing the picture beforehand played no part and as the stories conveyed by the pictures that got the highest average ratings (Street Art and XVIII century) did not have literary pre-text, knowing the story beforehand is no condition for considering a picture to convey a story. Thus Ryan’s and Kibédi Varga’s thesis that monochronic single pictures can only illustrate stories that are already known beforehand has been falsified. Here, it must however be noted that this does not exclude that viewers used generic story scripts such as a surprised lover script for Hogarth (1743–1745) or a catastrophe and rescue script for Bansky (2006) when interpreting the pictures.

If our argument for the validity of experiments with non-experts is sound, all this is strong evidence for monochrony compatibilism, the thesis that pictures only explicitly depicting one moment can indeed convey stories. To reject this result and to maintain different, theory-driven categorizations, is of course a theoretical possibility, but if my argument is correct, it implies that we leave the realm of description and enter the domain of prescription. Taking up Walter Dubislav’s (1981: 2) distinction, we could say that theorists who define ordinary concepts in ways that oppose non-expert use, make assignments ( Festsetzungen ) rather than assessments ( Feststellungen ), in sum, they engage in what I have called revisionary narratology, rather than its descriptive counterpart (see section 1 ).

The way pictures convey causal and temporal relationships might provide insights for narrative in other media and the results seem to encourage that we give a more prominent role to narrative implicature , as pictures rated high in storytelling such as the painting by Hogarth (Fig. 1) convey many story events (e. g. the infidelity or the fight) only implicitly , more specifically through traces (cf. Speidel 2018 c: 441–443, for the concept of trace-based narrative). Thus the results could be considered to speak for reception-based definitions of narrative such as Didier Coste’s (1989: 65), who suggests that narrative texts are texts where “the quest for narrative significance is the first satisfied and the most rewarding”.

10.8 Problems and open questions

Based on the criterion of extraordinariness alone, it proved difficult to distinguish representations that have a high degree of narrativity from depictions where viewers assigned medium degrees. There are two possible explanations for this: either our initial assessment of the extraordinariness of the events depicted in the different pictures was problematic or the extraordinariness criterion alone is insufficient to distinguish medium from high narrativity. Perhaps represented timelines and causal relationships are sufficient for storytelling and extraordinariness is less important than has often been suggested or the fact that the lower pictures corresponded strongly to other criteria compensated for the lack of extraordinariness in what they depicted. For instance, a picture from a children’s book that depicts a man and a cat engaging in gardening activities may not be extraordinary . Nonetheless, other criteria (such as the clear timeline and causality involved in gardening activities) may explain the relatively high storytelling scores it received. Similarly, in street art paintings extraordinariness may not have been the most influential among different criteria that led to the high storytelling scores of virtually all pictures of that style, where the difference between lower and medium levels was not statistically significant. While a depiction of three boys standing around a third seems indeed much less extraordinary than, say, an image of a girl who survived a catastrophe that is “attacked” by the media as in Banksy (2006), the former picture may still evoke frames such as bullying and corresponding event scripts. While causal chain and event timeline may have been unclear, the constellation may still have been too extraordinary not to reward a quest for narrative significance. It may also have corresponded to a criterion which I had not considered when classifying the pictures according to narrativity, experientiality , i. e. “highlighting the pressure of events on real or imagined consciousnesses affected by the occurrences at issue” ( Herman 2009: xvi).

In future research, the possibility of a weighed contribution of different criteria on the storytelling ability and degree of storytelling should be assessed and experientiality might be added as a criterion.

11 Conclusion and future research

It has been argued that at least in the case of ordinary concepts, the validity of definitions should be assessed through intuitions as reflected in categorization dispositions. Definitions as well as expert intuitions and language use were shown to be problematic for categorizations because they are prone to media blindness ( Hausken 2004), can be theory-loaded ( Hanson 1965: 54–62) and can mesh-up ordinary and theoretical meanings ( Fischer 2014: 132–133). Categorizations by non-experts as assessed in large-scale experiments were presented as an alternative. It was argued that in narratology and other fields concerned with describing and analyzing ordinary everyday practices, studying the categorization dispositions of laypeople can and should ground decisions concerning the conditions of subject domain membership. An experiment around pictorial narrative was introduced and its theoretical implications were presented. Using such studies as the basis of our definitions and theories, we can avoid that we inadvertently try to revise how terms like “narrative”, “story” or “game” are used rather than describing what they mean . In the future, it would be interesting to perform similar experiments with other marginal cases, e. g. wordless music and so-called non-mimetic narratives, where abstract figures seem to interact with each other, for instance in comics (see Baetens 2011, 2013). I believe that we would encounter substantial narrativity differences between, say, a rather static Mondrian painting such as Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue (1930) and dynamic Malevich paintings such as Suprematist Painting (1916) or even Red and Black Square (1915). Is it not likely that “the degree of narrativity of an ‘unstable’ constellation (with non-parallel edges, not-centered in the image, etc.) of different shapes (of unequal sizes and colors, of divergent geometric shapes, etc.) generally tends to be higher than that of a stable constellation of identical shapes” ( Speidel 2018 b: 120)? The hypothesis remains to be tested. There is thus plenty of room for future experiments in descriptive narratology.

Acknowledgements

The research for this publication was made possible through a grant from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) within the scope of my two-year project “M1944: Towards an Experimental Narratology of the Image” at the Lab for Cognitive Research in Art History (CReA) at the University of Vienna. I would like to thank CReA founder Raphael Rosenberg for his trust and support. The members of CReA and the EVA Lab at the university of Vienna have helped me develop the experiment and Pamela Heilig has played an important role in implementing it. Neil Cohn, Laura Commare, Michael Forster, Helmut Leder, Dominic Lopes, Matthew Pelowski, Françoise Revaz, Marie-Laure Ryan, Maria Schreiber as well as Werner Wolf have given helpful feedback on first versions of the survey, and Eva Specker has helped with data cleanup and a first draft of the statistics. Dominik Leiner from SoSci Survey has been very responsive while I conducted the survey and following the completion of the experiment. Rena Katikos has edited a first, Shatila Mehraeen a later version of this essay. Nicolas Kleinschmidt has given helpful feedback on an earlier version from a philosophy of science perspective. Theodosis Evgenikos has done the statistical calculations. I assume responsibility for all remaining errors.

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Banksy, Los Angeles , 2011

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William Hogarth, Marriage A-la-Mode 5, The Bagnio , 1743-1745

William Hogarth, The Graham children , 1742

Jean-Baptiste Greuze, The ungrateful son , 1777

Domenichino, St. Cecilia , 1615-1617

Domenichino, Diana and her Nymphs , 1616-1617

Dominichino, Landscape with a Fortified Town, c. 1634-1635

Pietro Lorenzetti, Saint Humility transports Bricks to the Monastery , c. 1341

Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Scenes from the Life of Saint Nicholas , c. 1332

Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Allegory of Effect of Good and Bad Government, detail: market scene, c. 1339

Gardening scene in Nordqvist, S. (1991). Aufruhr im Gemüsebeet . Hamburg: Oetinger.

Cat and Rooster scene in Nordqvist, S. (1997). Findus und der Hahn im Korb . Hamburg: Oetinger.

Grandpa looking at object in Nordqvist, S. (2008). Die verrückte Hutjagd . (A. Kutsch, Ed.) (1st ed.). Ham: Ellerman.

William Hogarth, Marriage A-la-Mode: 5, The Bagnio (1743–1745), Wikimedia Public Domain

Jean-Baptiste Greuze, La malédiction paternelle – Le fils ingrat (1777), © Musée du Louvre/A. Dequier – M. Bard

William Hogarth, The Graham children (1742), Wikimedia Public Domain

© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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5 – Narration

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5.1 Defining Narration

So far, we have analyzed the main constituents of the story, or, as we have called them, the existents of the storyworld : events , environments , and characters . But the storyworld only comes to exist because someone (a narrator ) tells a story to someone else (a narratee ). This is what we call narration , a communicative act that does not happen in the storyworld or at the level of the story. Narration is part of discourse , which constitutes the second level in our semiotic model of narrative.

Narrative discourse is the communication between the implied author and the implied reader of a narrative (see #Fig. 1.5 ). The ‘implied author’ 1 is implied because it does not have an explicit or independent reality, as the real author does, but must be reconstructed by the reader from the narrative itself. It is important in this sense to distinguish the implied author from the narrator of the story. The implied author does not tell anything; it does not have a voice. It is simply the organizing principle of discourse, which includes the narrator and the other aspects of the narration. 2 Every narrative has an implied author , even if it does not have a real author (e.g., a computer-generated text) or it has many of them (e.g., collaborative fiction ). Similarly, every narrative has an implied reader, which is the ideal reader addressed by narrative discourse. 3

Ben’s Bonus Bit – Why Narrative Theory? Avoiding Common Pitfalls

What is gained by adopting this onion-like, semiotic model of storytelling? Why bother distinguishing implied authors from real or from narrators? This is the most jargon-heavy section of our textbook, but narrative theory provides a few key benefits to students studying fiction. First, insisting on division between real author, implied author, and narrator avoids the authorial or intentional fallacy —the notion that an author’s intentions should limit or control the ways a text is interpreted—which can severely restrict the creativity of student essays. As we discussed in the case of J. K. Rowling’s controversial tweets and blog posts in the previous chapter, the relative importance of the author in shaping our understanding of a text is a matter of some debate and has been a salient point of contention among scholars since the rise of New Criticism in the 1940s. The New Critics, including T.S. Eliot, insisted that close textual analysis is the key to making successful interpretive claims. While New Criticism eventually gave way to Feminism, Structuralism, Deconstruction theory, Reader-Response, and other movements in literary criticism, the practice of close reading remains essential to essay writing at the collegiate level . Narrative Theory encourages close reading by insisting on division between author’s biography and analysis of implied author or narrator. Score one for the New Critics.

Second, students are occasionally tempted to draw moral or moralistic conclusions about an author based on the ideas or behaviors of a narrator. This is almost always a grand interpretive mistake, leading to judgmental essays with non-academic tones. These novice readers severely underestimate the creativity of writers , who often invent unreliable or even evil narrators. We have already mentioned Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel Lolita and its horrible narrator Humbert Humbert. To ascribe any of Humbert’s vile ideas to the novel’s real author amounts to slander or defamation and gives aid and intellectual cover to censorship efforts. Students, who are often not creative writers themselves, have difficulty imagining that an author could write so eloquently from the perspective of a pedophile without himself owning those impulses, yet Nabokov condemned pedophilia repeatedly throughout his life. Indeed, Nabokov’s disdain for Lewis Carroll, a writer who has been accused of pedophilia, bleeds through in Lolita itself. Narrative theory allows us to escape these tempting misreadings by acknowledging fiction-writing as a craft and the artifice of storytelling from the jump. If we wish to write sophisticated, intellectually generous academic prose (and we should wish this), building a theoretical wall between judgment and analysis is an important psychological step. This advice does not preclude moral judgment or consideration for morality in answering the “so what?” question in any essay, but it does ward off students from non-academic rhetorical moves, which are common in Introduction to Fiction courses.

In this chapter, we will examine in some detail the different elements of narration . Then, in the next chapters, we will look at other key aspects of discourse, namely language and theme . Of course, the questions raised by the analysis of discourse often cross over to the story. Therefore, we must always keep in mind the distinction between these two levels of narrative.

This is particularly important when we discuss narration because the object of narration is the story itself. We can only interpret the storyworld (with all its events, environments, and characters) from the story told by the narrator to the narratee. While neither the narrator nor the narratee need to exist as such in the storyworld, these figures of discourse can also be characters in the story, a complication that we will try to clarify in the following pages.

First, we need to define more precisely what we mean by narration and the relationship between narration and the story being narrated. Then we will look more closely at the two figures of discourse involved in narration, the narrator and the narratee, outlining the types most commonly found in prose fiction. We will then examine the concept of focalization , an important and closely related aspect of narration, which refers to the point of view or perspective adopted by the narrator of the story. Next, we will discuss in more detail the basic means by which narrators can represent events, characters, and environments: telling and showing . But narrators, besides representing the existents of the storyworld, often also make comments about them. To conclude the chapter, therefore, we will consider the use of explicit and implicit commentary in prose fiction.

5.2 The Expression of Narrative

Narration is the communicative act of telling a story . The figures of discourse involved in this act are the narrator (who tells the story) and the narratee (who listens to, or reads, the story). The story is what is being told. Narration is how it is being told. This involves a series of prior decisions, attributed to the implied author (and, ultimately, to the real author) about who the narrator will be, what kind of knowledge the narrator will have about the existents of the storyworld, what narrative techniques the narrator will employ to convey the story, and so on. All these decisions, taken together, define the expression of narrative , that is, the process of communicating the story.

Here, we are mostly concerned with the narration of a story, which is an instance of narrative discourse. But prose fiction can also include narration within the story itself. 4 For example, in One Thousand and One Nights a narrator tells the story of a sultan who kills all of his new wives after the first night, until Scheherazade keeps him in suspense for 1,001 nights by telling him different stories (see Fig. 5.1). The narrator of these stories is of course Scheherazade herself. But many of the stories she tells include characters who tell other stories in their turn. Inception ! The result is an intricate structure of embedded or subordinated narratives. While most short stories and novels are not as complex as One Thousand and One Nights , the technique of embedding narratives, also known as ‘a story within a story,’ is a common literary device. Such a technique, however, does not affect the general framework of our semiotic model of narrative. Regardless of how many embedded stories we find in a narrative, every story is framed by a higher level of discourse, which includes its narration. 5 If that narration is part of another story, then the whole structure is repeated, until we reach the highest level of narrative , which links an implied author with an implied reader .

Fig. 5.1 Édouard Frédéric Wilhelm Richter, Scheherazade (before 1913), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edouard_Frederic_ Wilhelm_Richter_-_Scheherazade.jpg

In some cases, short stories and novels consciously play with the different levels of narrative, either to transgress them or simply for comic effect. For example, Laurence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy is narrated by the eponymous character, who supposedly tells his life story. But the narrator constantly crosses the boundaries of narration to directly address the reader (‘breaking the fourth wall’ in film) or to call into question the verisimilitude of the narrative itself. In postmodernist fiction of the late 20th century, there are quite a few examples of this sort of transgression, often using the so-called “ mise en abyme “ device, in which embedding stories within stories creates unresolvable paradoxes, as in André Gide’s The Counterfeiters , where one of the characters intends to write the same novel in which he appears. Other types of frame tales have existed in prose or narrative poetry for millennia, with Homer’s The Odyssey , Dante’s “The Divine Comedy,” and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales among them.

All these self-conscious devices, rather than contradicting the general framework of narrative that we have been presenting here, are exceptions that confirm the rule. The fact is that most fictions establish, explicitly or implicitly, a clear distinction between the level of discourse and the level of story. Narration, which occurs at the level of discourse, is the communicative act between a narrator and a narratee responsible for expressing or representing all the elements of the story.

5.3 Narrators and Narratees

The narrator of a story is the figure of discourse that tells the story . This definition seems simple enough, but in practice there are several complications. Similarly, the narratee is the figure of discourse to whom the narrator tells the story . Again, there are quite a few practical considerations about this figure that we need to clarify.

In most short stories and novels, the narrator can be easily identified by asking the question: ‘who speaks?’ (or ‘who writes?’ when the story is supposedly told in writing). Often, however, this narrator does not have a name or a clear identity, so we speak of an unknown narrator, even though we can sometimes infer details about his or her life, personality, or opinions from the narration itself. In other cases, the narrator is just a voice with no subjective dimension whatsoever.

One aspect of this voice that is usually obvious from the narrative is the person status of the narration. Founded on a grammatical distinction, the notion of person allows us to discern the underlying relationships between the narrator, the narratee, and the characters in the story :

• First-person narrator : the narrator tends to use the first person quite often (“I went out at five o’clock”), even if other grammatical persons exist in text. This kind of narrative voice is commonly found in stories told by a narrator who is also the protagonist, or at least a relevant character, in the plot. The narratee may or may not be explicit. For example, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (Fig. 5.2) is narrated by its seventeen-year-old protagonist, Holden Caulfield, who naturally tends to talk quite a lot about himself
• Second-person narrator : the narrator uses the second person most of the time (“You went out at five o’clock”). The second person explicitly refers to the narratee, which in some cases might be the narrator himself. This kind of voice is difficult to sustain throughout the narrative and has generally been tried only in experimental novels, such as Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller , where the framing narrative directly addresses a reader of the novel (narratee). It is more common in short or flash fiction (Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” or Akwaeke Emezi’s “Muzik di Zumbi”)
• Third-person narrator : the narrator uses the third person most of the time (“The marquise went out at five o’clock”). This is, by far, the most common narrative person in prose fiction. The narrator may or may not be a character in the story. Similarly, the narratee may be explicit or implicit. There are countless examples of this perspective. One of them is John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath , told by a narrator who does not participate in the story.

Fig. 5.2 First-edition cover of The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J. D. Salinger, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia. org/wiki/File:The_Catcher_in_the_Rye_ (1951,_first_edition_cover).jpg

It is also important to make a distinction related to the previous classification between two kinds of narrators:

• External narrator : the narrator only exists as a figure of discourse . She is not a character in the story and only speaks from outside of the storyworld. Once again, The Grapes of Wrath is a good example.
• Internal narrator : on the other hand, besides being a figure of discourse, an internal narrator is also an existent in the storyworld . Whether he is actually a character depends on his participation in the story, which can be extensive (e.g. a narrator who is also a major character, like the husband in Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral”) or limited (e.g. a narrator who is just a secondary character, like Dr. Watson in “A Scandal in Bohemia” and many other Sherlock Holmes stories). While it is also possible for the narrator to be part of the storyworld without being a character in the story, this is rare and not easy to distinguish from an external narrator.

There are also certain types of narrative that seem to lack a narrator, for example epistolary novels like Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses , which consists entirely of letters exchanged between the different characters. But even in such cases there is an implicit figure of discourse , a narrator, who has arranged and edited the letters to tell a certain story. What is lacking here, therefore, is not the narrator, but the narrative voice or an explicit narration.

Finally, we should not forget that narration is itself a process, a communicative act carried out by a narrator at a certain time and place. The spatial relationship between the narrator’s environment and the environments of the storyworld is usually only relevant if the narrator is internal to the storyworld. But the temporal relationship between narration and the events of the story has some influence on the form of narrative discourse, even if the temporalities of the narrator and the storyworld belong to different levels. When considered in relation to the events arranged in the plot, there are basically three kinds of narration: 6

• Ulterior narration : events are supposed to have already happened when the narrator tells the story. This is the most common form of narration, which uses past tense as a standard narrative tense. Most short stories and novels are narrated using this convention.
• Anterior narration : events are not supposed to have happened yet when the narrator tells the story. This form, which tends to use the future tense, is rare in prose fiction. We generally only find it in prophecy or visionary narratives , for example in the Bible.
• Simultaneous narration : events are supposed to happen while the narrator tells the story. This form is usually only found in diaries or novels that experiment with narrative voice, as in Michel Butor’s Second Thoughts , narrated in present tense and addressed by the narrator to himself.

As with any communicative act, narration involves a sender, the narrator, but also a recipient, the narratee . The narratee is situated at the same level as the narrator. But narratees are generally not as easy to identify as narrators . While they are sometimes explicitly mentioned in the narrative, most often they are only implicit figures, never mentioned or even acknowledged.

Like narrators, narratees can be external or internal to the storyworld. External narratees are generally left implicit and could easily be mistaken for implied or real readers. Even when the narrator addresses the narratee as “reader,” for example in Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre , it does not mean that she is in fact addressing the real (or even the implied) reader. In this case, the label “reader” is simply the term employed by the narrator to address an otherwise undetermined external narratee. Certainly, it seems that the (implied) author has chosen to put in the mouth of the narrator a term that refers to the (implied) reader. But such transgression of the levels of narrative (see Chapter 1 ) is only superficial. In fact, the narrator of a story can never address the implied reader , which is necessarily external to the discourse that brings the narrator herself into existence.

Internal narratees can also be left implicit, in which case it is difficult to distinguish them from external ones. When they are identified during the narration, internal narratees tend to be minor characters (e.g. the stranger who listens to the story told by Jean-Baptiste Clamence in Albert Camus’ The Fall ) or other existents in the storyworld (e.g. the unnamed individual to whom the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” addresses his plea). There are also instances of collective narratees, when the narrator addresses an audience instead of a single recipient (e.g. the sailors who listen to Marlow’s story in The Heart of Darkness or the academic public of the ape Red Peter in Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy”), as well as cases where the narrator and the narratee are identical, for example when the story is narrated in an intimate diary (e.g. Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary ).

Finally, we should not forget that narration in prose fiction is sometimes shared by multiple narrators and can address multiple narratees, with the different parts of the narrative presented as a sequence of chapters, as in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury , or intertwined in more complex arrangements, as in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire .

5.4 Focalization

Identifying the narrator of a story is generally not enough to properly understand the mechanism of narration. Some narrators seem to move in and out of different characters’ consciousness with ease, while others remain attached to a single character’s perspective or constrain themselves to narrating observable events, without ever penetrating any character’s consciousness or presuming to know their thoughts. These differences can be better grasped with the concept of focalization , a technical term that is commonly used in narratology to replace the more ambiguous, but still popular, concept of point of view .

If the response to the question ‘who speaks?’ in a narrative is ‘the narrator,’ focalization responds to the additional question ‘from which perspective or point of view?’ Focalization can be defined as the perspective adopted by the narrator when telling the story , which is basically determined by the position of the narrator in relation to the characters in the storyworld. We can identify two fundamental types of focalization: 7

• Inward focalization : The narrator tells the story from the subjective perspective of a focal character, revealing her inner thoughts and feelings as if he could somehow enter inside or read her mind. In the case of a first-person narrator, of course, focalization tends to be inward, even if the narrator might be speaking from the perspective of his younger or infant self, as in many autobiographical narratives, such as Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations . A third-person narrator, even one that is external to the storyworld, can also be inwardly focalized , when he adopts or tells the story from the subjective perspective of one of the characters. A classic example is Henry James’s novel The Ambassadors , narrated by an external narrator from the perspective or point of view of its protagonist, Lambert Strether.
• Outward focalization : The narrator tells the story without presuming to know or have access to the subjective perspective of any character, simply reporting what can be observed from the outside. When the narrator is internal to the storyworld, even if she doesn’t participate directly in the events of the story, outward focalization usually involves a certain degree of subjectivity, given that the narrator herself is a focal character. It is difficult in those cases to determine with precision whether the narration is outwardly or inwardly focalized. If the narrator is external, on the other hand, it is much simpler to sustain an outwardly focalized narration, where the narrator acts like a camera , recording everything that happens in the storyworld without entering the consciousness of any of the characters. Examples of this type of focalization can be found in Dashiell Hammett’s detective novels and short stories, such as The Maltese Falcon (Fig. 5.3).

Inward and outward focalization may be fixed throughout the narrative, as in the examples provided above. But focalization can also be variable , for example when the narrator alternates between inward and outward focalizations (e.g. Stendhal’s The Red and the Black ), or multiple, when the narrator uses different focal characters to tell the story (e.g. George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire ).

Fig. 5.3 Promotional still from the 1941 film The Maltese Falcon, published in the National Board of Review Magazine, p. 12. L-R: Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Barton MacLane, Peter Lorre, and Ward Bond, Public Domain, https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maltese-Falcon-Tell-the-Truth-1941.jpg

Another important aspect of narration, which is related (and often confused) with focalization, is the degree of knowledge that the narrator has about the existents of the storyworld, in particular about the inner thoughts and feelings of the characters. Here, we are implicitly asking the question ‘how much does the narrator know?’ In this sense, we can distinguish three types of narrators:

• Omniscient : The narrator is like a God of the storyworld, knowing everything about its existents, including the internal or psychological states of all characters and the unfolding of events. In this case, focalization is often variable and multiple, changing from outward to inward and from one character to another as the narrator thinks appropriate, which might give the impression that there is in fact no focalization at all. Many classic short stories and novels are narrated with this sort of God-like narrator, for example J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings .
• Limited : The narrator has only limited knowledge about the internal or psychological states of one or some of the existents in the storyworld. This is quite common in inwardly focalized fictions, where the narrator only knows what the focal character or characters think and perceive, while having no access to the consciousness of other characters. When the focal character is the narrator himself, as in first-person narratives, his perspective is generally limited. An example of this kind of narration may be found in Jorge Luís Borges’s short story “Funes the Memorious,” where an unnamed first-person narrator recounts his relationship with a man who remembers absolutely everything.
• Objective : The narrator has no knowledge about the internal or psychological states of any of the characters in the storyworld and can only report what can be observed from the outside. The perspective of an objective narrator, which tends to be outwardly focalized, can be compared to that of a movie camera. While both the camera and the objective narrator need to select and frame their perceptions, they can only record what can be externally perceived in the storyworld, but not what characters think or feel. Ernest Hemingway’s “The Killers” is a minimalist short story about a pair of criminals in a restaurant which is narrated with this kind of camera-eye perspective.

5.5 Telling and Showing

Already established in Classical poetics, particularly by Plato and Aristotle, the distinction between ‘telling’ ( diegesis ) and ‘showing’ ( mimesis ) can help to clarify key aspects of narrative discourse. Telling refers to the representation of the story through the mediation of a narrator , who gives an account and often interprets or comments on the events, environments, or characters of the storyworld. Showing , on the other hand, is the direct representation of the events, environments, and characters of the story without the intervention of a narrator, leaving readers or spectators to make their own inferences or interpretations.

The distinction between these two concepts is clear when we compare a story told by a third-person narrator (telling) and the same story represented as a dramatic play, with a stage imitating the environments, actors playing the characters, and events being enacted as if they were happening in the storyworld (showing). However, using this same pair of concepts to distinguish between different forms of narration is not so straightforward.

We have already seen that all narratives have a narrator, even if the narrator can adopt an outward focalization (e.g. camera-eye perspective) or even lack a perceptible narrative voice (e.g. the editor of a set of letters).

In this sense, all narration is a form of telling (diegesis), not showing (mimesis). But we have also seen that there can be different forms of narration. In some cases, the narrator conveys the words of characters using his own voice, as in “The detective claimed that he never suspected his girlfriend wanted to kill him.” In other cases, the narrator quotes the words that were supposedly spoken by the characters themselves, as in “‘How could I suspect she wanted to kill me?’ said the detective.” The first type of narration can be qualified as telling, while the second is a derived form of showing. In this case, the distinction is not based on the presence or absence of a narrator, but rather on his prominence or degree of involvement in the narration.

In prose fiction, telling and showing usually involve the use of two different narrative methods to represent the events of the plot:

• Summary : A summary narrates events by compressing their duration. For example, a narrator might tell about a long war by saying, “Battles were won and lost, many died, and at the end no one felt victorious.” A single sentence summarizes years of war, with all its battles and other significant events. In general, summary brings narration closer to the ideal of telling . In the same way that description is the telling of environments and characters, summary is the telling of events.
• Scene : A scene narrates a sequence of events in enough detail to create the illusion that they are unfolding in front of the narratee (and ultimately, the reader). Usually, the illusion is created by quoting dialogue in direct speech, intersected with brief descriptions of the environment and the characters, as well as some narration of the characters’ actions . This method, which is already found in Ancient epic, is called “in-scene storytelling” and seems to be inspired by drama, which has traditionally been considered the most lifelike method of representing a story (see Fig. 5.4). Thus, scene brings narration closer to the ideal of showing.

Fig. 5.4 Theatre scene: two women making a call on a witch (all three of them wear theatre masks). Roman mosaic from the Villa del Cicerone in Pompeii, now in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale (Naples). By Dioscorides of Samos, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pompeii_-_ Villa_del_Cicerone_-_Mosaic_-_MAN.jpg

Despite the recurrent debates that oppose telling to showing, the fact is that both forms of narration are commonly found in most short stories and novels. Neither of them is superior to the other, and both have their own uses and limitations.

Ben’s Bonus Bit – Telling of Emotions

In the instruction of creative writing, novice writers are encouraged to avoid the direct telling of character emotions 8 . “John was sad,” for example, misses opportunity to reach in-scene storytelling. What behaviors do sad people exhibit? What posture, gestures, and other nonverbals display sadness? What things do sad people say? If the narration has an inward focalization, attached to John, what might he think other than “I am sad” that would reveal his blooming depression? Each choice to “show” preserves reader’s role as arbiter of meaning . Direct telling of character emotions runs the risk of infantilizing readers, robbing them of one of the principle pleasures of reading.

Of course, this is an over-simplification of a truism: that readers prefer showing to telling, in-scene storytelling to summary, and in medias res action to exposition . Telling of emotions exists prominently in didactic fiction, first-person narratives, and in epiphany moments. Some of the most memorable lines in fiction are “telling.” We have already mentioned the boy’s epiphany at the end of Joyce’s “Araby” (“ I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger “). Consider the opening lines of Ralph Ellison’s classic story (and novel chapter) “Battle Royal”: “ It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!” Nary an in-scene moment to be found. All exposition, telling, symbolism, and internal focalization. Where is the significant, sensory detail that marks “good writing”? Truth is that strong prose contains a mixture of showing and telling, even if there are moments where narrators suppress readers’ “interpretive rights.”

For students of fiction, there’s real analytical hay to make out of distinguishing between showing and telling moments. Essays about point of view, focalization, narration, or even characterization occurring in the first-person may successfully speculate about reader response by considering how and when authors shift the interpretive burden to readers. Essays that make broad claims about “the reader” without the aid of textual analysis are invariably less successful.

 5.6 Commentary

Narrative discourse can do more than just tell a story through the voice of a narrator. It can also contain commentary , which consists of any pronouncement of the narrator that goes beyond a description or account of the existents of the story. While commentary, like the rest of narration, is expressed by the narrator’s voice, it can also include messages sent by the implied author to the implied reader through the narrator’s voice, even if the narrator is unaware of them. These moments can be critical in stories that otherwise emphasize “showing” via in-scene, linear, real-time storytelling. Commentary, which is certainly “telling,” may nudge readers toward consideration of theme.

There are two basic forms of commentary: explicit and implicit . 9 Explicit commentary is easier to recognize and understand, as it consists of a straightforward message found in the narration. There are three types of explicit commentary that the narrator can make about the story and one about the narration itself:

• Interpretation : the narrator explains the meaning, relevance, or significance of the existents in the storyworld. In Balzac’s series of novels The Human Comedy , for example, narrators often provide interpretations that contextualize and analyze the social implications of the various behaviors of the characters, almost like a sociologist would do
• Judgement : the narrator expresses a moral opinion or another form of personal evaluation of the existents in the storyworld. In Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones , for example, the narrator constantly gives his opinion about the events and characters of the story, in keeping with his moralizing intentions
• Generalization : the narrator extrapolates the existents of the story to reach general conclusions about his own world (or the lifeworld of the reader). This is most common in philosophical novels, such as Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being , where the narrator comments on the characters and reflects on the events in the novel by connecting them with philosophical notions or events in European history
• Reflection : the narrator comments on his own narration or other aspects of narrative discourse. This form of self-reflective commentary is already found in early examples of the novel, for instance in Cervantes’ Don Quixote , where the narrator often pauses to reflect on the task of narrating his story, particularly in the second part of the book, when he feels the need to defend his creation from a plagiarizer. Vladimir Nabokov, who we’ve already mentioned, uses this device frequently in both Lolita and Pale Fire . If reflection bleeds into discussion of the fiction as fiction, the device is metafiction .

Implicit commentary is a form of irony , a use of discourse to state something different from, or even opposite to, what is actually meant. The irony might be at the expense of the characters or at the expense of the narrator herself. Depending on which levels of narrative it crosses, we can distinguish two basic kinds of implicit commentary in prose fiction:

• Ironic narrator : the narrator makes a statement about the characters or events in the story that means something different, even the opposite, to what is being stated. Thus, the narrator is being ironic. In this case, the irony is at the expense of the characters in the story but can be understood by the narratee (and eventually by the reader). A classic example of this form of irony is the first sentence in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice : “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” In fact, the narrator thinks that this is far from a universal truth, except under the assumptions of a narrow-minded bourgeoisie—the kind of people worthy of Lizzy Bennet’s scorn—as is made clear in the rest of the novel
• Unreliable narrator : the narrator makes statements that contradict what the implied reader can know (or infer) to be the real intention or meaning of the narrative discourse. In this case, it is the implied author who is being ironic, by communicating indirectly with the implied reader at the expense of the narrator. The narrator in this case is said to be unreliable. 10 In Nikolai Gogol’s short story “Diary of a Madman,” for example, the narrator, a minor civil servant, becomes increasingly unreliable as he descends into madness, making statements whose irony (and comic effect) are only accessible to the implied reader (Fig. 5.5). Another celebrated example of an unreliable narrator is Gulliver in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels , where irony turns into satire , as the gullible narrator tells of his misadventures amongst exotic creatures without ever suspecting that they are meant to ridicule the absurdities and pretensions of human society.

Narrators may be unreliable because they are naive, ignorant, braggadocious, mad, or morally bankrupt . Pi Patel in Yan Martel’s The Life of Pi separates himself from reality in order to survive. Alex in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange is deluded and lies to readers. Huck in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn tells readers that helping the runaway, Jim, is wrong. Implied readers know Huck, a child in antebellum times, is naive and indoctrinated by a racist society. Mark Twain, both the real author and the implied conception of him in the novel, counts on readers to see Huck’s naivete as part of a larger condemnation of slavery.

Fig. 5.5 Illustration of Nikolai Gogol’s short story ‘Diary of a Madman’ (1835) by Ilya Repin, Public Domain, https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Repin_IE-Illustraciya-Zapiski- sumasshedshego-Gogol_NV4.jpg

Ben’s Bonus Bit – Abuse of “The Reader”

For students writing essays about narration, especially unreliable narration, the Narrative Model’s insistence on distinction between implied readers and real readers with modern lifeworlds is vital to acknowledging how readers’ values and attitudes change over time. Mark Twain’s implied reader of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is certainly quite different from you, a college student in the 21st century who is aware of post-Newtonian physics (Einstein, relativity, and quantum theory), DNA, vaccines, blood types, electronics, neuroscience, man’s impact on the environment in the Anthropocene, and all of the historical events inaccessible to literate 19th-century Americans. Your racial attitudes are almost certainly an order of magnitude more progressive and tolerant than even the most forward-thinking reader in 1884. Despite Samuel Clemens’ implied author’s compassion for Jim, Twain himself expressed a seemingly hypocritical racism towards Native Americans 11 .

The semiotic model encourages readers to avoid misuse of the ubiquitous “the reader,” which implies a monolithic, universal response to fiction, flattening legitimate difference in interpretation. The best essays engage with ambiguity in fiction, which naturally produces disagreement among readers. Indeed, your essay might not have reason to exist without interpretive dispute. Using “readers” instead of “the reader” is a small but generous concession that preserves student authors’ ability to make reader response claims while avoiding over-generalization or marginalization of minority voices. Even better is to draw distinction between the likely attitudes/reactions of implied readers (as imagined by a text’s author) and meaning-making by modern/current readers of different backgrounds. At the very least, student authors should consider and preempt alternative-but-plausible interpretations in Rebuttal Sections (often arriving just before a concluding paragraph or scattered throughout an essay). Just as it aids in avoiding the intentional fallacy, adopting the semiotic model in analyses prevents rhetorical missteps when considering the other end of the communication chain (receivers, or readers).

5.7 Summary

• An element of narrative discourse, narration is the communicative act between a narrator and a narratee that expresses or represents all the existents of the story (characters, events, and environments).
• Narrators (as well as narratees) can be external or internal to the story. Moreover, narrators can speak in the first , second , or third person . And they can narrate events that have already happened, have not yet happened, or are happening at the same time as they are being told.
• When telling a story, narrators can adopt the subjective perspective of one or more of the characters ( inward focalization ) or limit themselves to observable events without entering any of the characters’ consciousnesses ( outward focalization ).
• Similarly, narrators can know everything about the inner thoughts of characters and the unfolding of events ( omniscient ), or they can have only partial information about one or more of the characters ( limited ), or they can only know what can be perceived with the senses ( objective ).
• Depending on the prominence or degree of involvement of the narrator in the narration, we can distinguish two different narrative methods: telling ( summary ) and showing ( scene ).
• Beyond telling and showing, narrators can also make explicit and implicit commentary on the story, sometimes at the expense of characters ( ironic narrator ) or themselves ( unreliable narrator ).
• In essay writing about narration, avoid confusing authors (real and implied) from narrators and to avoid over-generalization of reader response (by using “readers” and including rebuttal ).

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Ignasi Ribó, Prose Fiction: An Introduction to the Semiotics of Narrative. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2019.  https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0187

Version History: Created new verso art. Added quick links. Bolded keywords. Made minor phrasing edits for American audiences. Adopted MLA style for punctuation. Changed paragraphing for PressBooks adaptation. Moved footnotes to endnotes. Added references to Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl,” Akwaeke Emezi’s “Muzik di Zumbi,” Yan Martel’s The Life of Pi , Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange , and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . Added vocabulary: in-scene storytelling and metafiction. Included “Ben’s Bonus Bits,” with a host of new vocabulary. Altered end-of-chapter Summary to include “Ben’s Bonus Bit” material, October, 2021.

Linked bolded keywords to Glossary and improved Alt-image text for accessibility, July, 2022.

• Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
• Seymour Benjamin Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), pp. 147–51.
• Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
• Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London, UK: Routledge, 2002), pp. 94–97, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203426111
• See Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 25–32.
• Rimmon-Kenan, pp. 90–102.
• Based on Genette, pp. 189–211.
• See “Showing and Telling” in Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction .
• Chatman, pp. 228–60.
• Booth, pp. 149–68.
• See Joseph L. Coulombe, “Mark Twain’s Native Americans and the Repeated Racial Pattern in ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'” in American Literary Realism Vol. 33, No. 3 (Spring, 2001) , pp. 261-279 (19 pages).

Booth, Wayne C., The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

Chatman, Seymour Benjamin, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).

Coulombe, Joseph L. “Mark Twain’s Native Americans and the Repeated Racial Pattern in ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'” in American Literary Realism Vol. 33, No. 3 (Spring, 2001) , pp. 261-279

Genette, Gérard, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).

Iser, Wolfgang, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London, UK: Routledge, 2002), https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203426111

The world of the story, which includes different types of existents (events, environments, and characters).

A change of state occurring in the storyworld, including actions undertaken by characters and anything that happens to a character or its environment. Also called a “plot point.”

Everything that surrounds the characters in the storyworld.

An entity with agency in a storyworld.

The figure of discourse that tells the story to a narratee.

The figure of discourse to whom a story is told by the narrator.

The means through which a narrative is communicated by the implied author to the implied reader.

The projection of the real author in the text, as can be inferred by the reader from the text itself.

The virtual reader to whom the implied author addresses its narrative, and whose thoughts and attitudes may differ from an actual reader.

A form of writing where two or more authors share creative control of the narrative.

A relevant meaning identified by an interpreter in narrative discourse.

From film studies, the perspective or point of view adopted by the narrator when telling the story.

The representation of a story through the mediation of a narrator, who gives an account and often interprets or comments on the events, environments, or characters of the storyworld.

The direct representation of the events, environments, and characters of a story without the intervention (or, in the case of narrative showing, with minimal or limited intervention) of a narrator.

Any pronouncement of the narrator that goes beyond a description or account of the existents of the storyworld.

Semiotic representation of a sequence of events, meaningfully connected by time and cause.

A literary device that embeds self-reflecting or recursive images to create paradoxical narrations (from French, ‘placed into an abyss’).

A narrator or narratee who is a figure of discourse but not an existent of the storyworld.

A narrator or narratee who, besides being a figure of discourse, is also an existent of the storyworld, particularly a minor or major character.

Narration from the subjective perspective or point of view of one or more focal characters.

Narration that avoids taking the subjective perspective or point of view of any of the characters.

A narrator who knows everything about the existents of the storyworld, including the internal or psychological states of all characters and the unfolding of events.

A narrator who has only limited knowledge about the internal or psychological states of one or some of the existents in the storyworld.

A narrator who has no knowledge about the internal or psychological states of any of the characters in the storyworld and can only report what can be observed from the outside.

A category of fiction where a story is recounted through narration. While all stories contain at least implied narrators, diegetic fiction “tells” through a distinct perspective.

A classification for literature that attempts to mimic the real world. Fiction that seeks verisimilitude.

The narrative representation of events by compressing their duration.

The narrative representation of an environment, set of characters, and sequence of events in enough detail to create the illusion that the events are unfolding in front of the narratee (and ultimately, the reader).

Use of discourse to state something different from, or even opposite to, what is meant.

A narrator who makes statements about the characters or events in the story that mean something very different, even the opposite, of what is being stated.

A narrator who makes statements that contradict what the implied reader knows (or infers) to be the real intention or meaning of the narrative discourse.

Similar to parody and caricature, a genre of fiction or a specific tone/mood in narrative that lampoons the status quo or powerful societal interests or people.

Prose Fiction Copyright © by Miranda Rodak and Ben Storey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Art imitates nation: A conversation with Hank Willis Thomas, artist behind ‘The Embrace’

Date: , location: .

The American national narrative relies on stories of overcoming a racial past — presenting a country continuously outwitting injustice. Integral to the successful adoption of this narrative is the hypervisible representation of Black people and culture in the public eye.

Award-winning conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas experiments with representation and national narrative. His art shows that if aesthetic representation is necessary to craft a national narrative, it can disrupt one just as well. Thomas’ works — which span photography, sculpture, installation and textile — interrogate how art, systemic racism and the commodification of Black struggle became intertwined with American culture. Among his permanent installations is ‘The Embrace’, memorializing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King in Boston Commons.

On April 8, join us for a conversation between Hank Willis Thomas and Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

In the style of a fireside chat, this conversation will explore questions including: How does art shape and reflect narratives around race in the United States? How does power affect the way we express ourselves? And how might art contribute to a more just, equitable society?

This conversation is hosted by the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project (IARA) and the Institute of Politics at the JFK Jr. Forum — Harvard’s premier arena for political discussion.

Register here

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Does the Mormon Church Empower Women? A Social Media Storm Answers.

A church Instagram post tapped into a long-running seam of discontent among some women, who have chafed at restrictions.

By Ruth Graham

On Sunday night, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints encouraged women around the world to gather to celebrate the Relief Society, a women’s organization in the church that was observing its 182nd anniversary.

In a video produced for the event, J. Anette Dennis, a leader in the Relief Society, spoke glowingly about women’s roles in the church. “There is no other religious organization in the world, that I know of, that has so broadly given power and authority to women,” she said.

But when the church’s official Instagram page posted an excerpt from Ms. Dennis’s speech, including that quote, the response was immediate, overwhelming and largely negative. “What a joke!” one commenter wrote. “The sexism in this organization runs deep.” The post had more than 14,500 comments as of Friday morning, with some critical comments receiving thousands of approving likes.

Anger had flared a couple days earlier when comments were deleted before being restored. In a comment on the post and in emails to The Times, the church blamed an Instagram glitch. A spokesman for Meta, which owns Instagram, said there was no issue that had affected comments.

The conversation quickly burst out of the bounds of the church’s comments section and into a flurry of text messages among L.D.S. women, who shared accounts of feeling marginalized and belittled in their interactions with church leaders.

The Instagram post had tapped into a long-running seam of discontent among some women in the church, who have chafed at the church’s restrictions and say that its discussion of empowering women is essentially hollow. Women are not eligible for the church’s priesthood, a designation of God-given authority that applies to only men.

The church makes a distinction between “priesthood authority,” accessible only to men, and “priesthood power,” available to all. As in many other religious traditions, women are barred from specific leadership roles, and from some meetings.

“We are collecting and reading the comments on all the posts and appreciate knowing these heartfelt messages, concerns, thoughts and experiences,” the global president of the Relief Society, Camille N. Johnson, said in an email sent by a spokesman for the church. The church provided the comments by Ms. Johnson in response to a request to interview Ms. Dennis.

Ms. Johnson noted that hundreds of thousands of people watched a broadcast of the Relief Society’s celebration. “The intense interest we experienced demonstrates the importance of these issues to women of faith,” she said.

The current groundswell began last fall, when a regional authority cracked down on a practice in the San Francisco Bay Area of inviting women leaders to sit on “the stand,” a raised seating area facing the congregation during Sunday services. The stand is a place of status, reserved for “presiding authorities,” roles for which only men are eligible, along with any others participating in a specific service, including women and children. Local leaders had extended that invitation to some women leaders who were not participating in services.

When the church took away this gesture of representation, Amy Watkins Jensen was indignant. She has three daughters and is a lifelong church member, who had been able to sit on the stand in her capacity as a volunteer leader. “We do this labor and it should not be invisible,” she said.

She spoke with her bishop, and continued up the chain of authority, all of whom were men. Nothing changed. She wrote a public letter , which almost 3,000 Latter-day Saints signed, and started an Instagram account, Women on the Stand, asking for clarity and consistency on the issue for the global church.

Ms. Watkins Jensen’s immediate concern was local but spread quickly to other communities.

In Seattle, a therapist and lifelong church member named Kierstyn Kremer Howes was awake with her newborn in the middle of the night when she read about the removal of women from the stand in Ms. Watkins Jensen’s region.

“I was just like, ‘I’m so tired of this,’” she recalled.

“You go to church and all you see are male leaders, and all the people we talk about in the scriptures are male,” Ms. Kremer Howes said. “Everything good and glorious and wonderful is in the male voice or looks male.”

She dashed off a fiery opinion essay (“I call it pissy, my mom calls it saucy”) calling for L.D.S. women to stay home from church on March 17, the anniversary of the Relief Society.

“We do a lot of work, and when we ask for representation for that work, we get denied,” she said. “So let’s just stop doing it.”

Ms. Kremer Howes doesn’t believe many women actually stayed home from church on Sunday. (Several women said they supported the idea but realized if they stayed home they would have to ask other women to cover their volunteer responsibilities.) But the church’s Instagram post kept the discussion going.

“There’s not one single decision a woman can make in this church that cannot be overruled by a man,” said Cynthia Winward, a co-host of the podcast “At Last She Said It,” which focuses on women in L.D.S. culture.

She said that the discussion of women’s access to the stand is a notable milestone in the ongoing conversation about women in the church, because it is being driven by women who by definition are deeply involved in the church. The women given access to the stand had been seated there because of their volunteer work and leadership. “It’s not fitting the narrative anymore of, ‘It’s just fringy feminists,’” Ms. Winward said. “These are mainstream women.”

For some women, the backlash over the post does not capture their own experiences. “I’ve never been in a situation where I’ve been with a male leader or a male counterpart in the church and felt like they didn’t hear me because I’m a woman,” said Hayley Clark, who lives in Utah. She compared her experience in the church favorably with the condescension she has occasionally faced as a female business owner, and said she was encouraged by the quote posted by the church.

For others, the contretemps reminded them of deeper disagreements they have with the church. About a quarter of American Latter-day Saints say they have thought about leaving, compared with 16 percent of the population overall who have considered leaving their religion, according to a 2022 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute.

Sarah Schow is pregnant with her second child, a boy. As a preteen, her son “will have more authority in the church than I will ever have,” she said, referring to a rule allowing boys to be ordained to the all-male priesthood the year they turn 12.

Ms. Schow, who now lives in Canada, belonged to wards in Montana, California and Washington as a child. She recalled being taught as a child that she had a “divine nature,” of which femininity, procreation and nurturing were essential pieces.

Now, however, she wonders about the church’s vision for her. Is her only role to be silent and supportive? She cited an emotional ballad from the movie “Barbie” in describing her disillusionment with the institution she has belonged to her whole life: “What was I made for?”

Ruth Graham is a national reporter, based in Dallas, covering religion, faith and values for The Times. More about Ruth Graham

Gege Akutami Addresses Racism within the Anime Industry in Jujutsu Kaisen Chapter 255

T he anticipation for Jujutsu Kaisen chapter 255 reaches new heights with the revelation of its leaked spoilers, hinting at significant developments and social commentary within the narrative.

At the heart of the upcoming chapter lies Miguel, poised to take center stage amidst the escalating conflict between Ryomen Sukuna and the amazing figure. As the tension mounts and battle lines are drawn, readers are primed for a riveting confrontation that promises to leave a lasting impact on the storyline.

However, what sets this chapter apart is the unexpected intervention of manga creator Gege Akutami, who utilizes a flashback exchange between Miguel and Satoru Gojo to address pertinent issues of racism within the anime industry.

Through this narrative device, Akutami sheds light on the complexities and challenges faced by creators and characters alike, transcending the confines of fiction to confront real-world societal issues.

As the manga goes deeper into its storyline, exploring the intricacies of power dynamics and personal struggles, the inclusion of such social commentary adds layers of depth and relevance to the overarching narrative.

With each chapter, Jujutsu Kaisen continues to amaze readers not only with its gripping plot and dynamic characters but also with its thought-provoking exploration of broader themes and social issues.

Confronting Stereotypes: Jujutsu Kaisen Chapter 255 Explores Themes of Discrimination and Representation

The leaked spoilers for Jujutsu Kaisen chapter 255 reveal a thought-provoking exchange between Satoru Gojo and Miguel, shedding light on themes of discrimination and racial stereotypes within the narrative.

In this flashback scene, Gojo acknowledges Miguel’s formidable physical prowess, acknowledging it as truly remarkable. However, his attribution of Miguel’s abilities to his racial background sparks immediate contention.

Miguel, rightly indignant, rebuffs Gojo’s assertion, denouncing it as racist and discriminatory. He asserts that his abilities are not defined by his race, challenging the assumption that his physical prowess is inherently tied to his identity as a black individual.

This confrontation highlights the insidious nature of racial stereotypes and the importance of confronting and challenging them. Miguel’s refusal to accept such reductive categorizations underscores the need for individuals to be recognized and valued beyond superficial characteristics such as race.

Gojo’s swift apology upon realizing his mistake serves as a crucial moment of acknowledgment and growth, demonstrating a willingness to confront and rectify instances of prejudice.

As Jujutsu Kaisen goes into these complex issues, it continues to offer a nuanced exploration of societal dynamics and the impact of discrimination within its fictional world.

Through its characters and narrative arcs, the series encourages readers to critically examine and challenge harmful stereotypes, fostering greater understanding and empathy in the process.

The observation regarding the portrayal of physically strong black characters in anime and manga, and the potential implications of stereotypes therein, raises important questions about representation and cultural sensitivity within the industry.

Characters like Sado Yasutora, Kaname Tōsen, A, Killer B, Yasuke, Afro Samurai, and Ogun Montgomery exemplify a trend where black characters are often depicted as physically formidable individuals.

While these characters may possess unique abilities or combat skills, the association of physical strength with their racial identity can perpetuate stereotypes and reinforce harmful misconceptions.

Yasuke and Afro Samurai, in particular, stand out as examples where their strength is emphasized without clear context or explanation, potentially contributing to a one-dimensional portrayal of black characters in anime.

The characterization of Ogun Montgomery in Fire Force, with his ability tied to tattoos and physical strength, highlights the risk of relying on simplistic or superficial attributes to define a character’s identity.

Gege Akutami’s decision to address racial commentary through Miguel’s confrontation with Gojo in Jujutsu Kaisen chapter 255 underscores the importance of challenging stereotypes and promoting nuanced representations in storytelling.

By acknowledging and critiquing instances of racism within the narrative, Akutami encourages reflection and dialogue on broader issues of diversity and inclusion within the anime and manga industry.

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