Telling Stories to Ourselves

A contribution to a thread on "story" and "narrative" by William Fear et al., on the Narrative-L:

One can also "see a story" in a given situation, the moment one interprets it as having a narrative structure, as being tellable (in whatever form). Potential communication, the potential articulation of a story is "always already" narrative, because we are inherently communicative and social beings, Our ability to tell narratives, and even our ability to "see" narratives in situations or states of affairs has much to do with this sociality which is internalized, we are always in dialogue with a potential receiver, to make the story clear to him or her, even if that receiver is sometimes just another part of our brain, a role we play in self- interaction.


W.J. fear answers:

Interesting and I'll try if you can provide evidence to support your statement '...other living beings are notoriously bad at communicating
narrative patterns...'  WHat is the basis of this statement and what is the evidence for this?  All the evidence I am aware of from work with Bees up to what we falsely refer to as 'higher mammals' suggests that they are expert in communicating narrative patterns through a wide variety of means - indeed, in many cases probably through more means than humans.  So I'd be interested to know the basis of you statement and interested to see the challenges it presents to my understanding and the evidence I am aware of.

I don't want to go into huge explanations here - actually I do but the list is not really the place so I'll see if I can provide a simple example.

An acorn falls to the ground.  It germinates (inciting incident). It has a branch broken, it survives storms and droughts (rising conflict).  It becomes an adult tree (middle).  During this time nothing much happens.  It becomes older.  More droughts.  the landscape changes (conflict continues to rise).   A big storm.  (Climax).  Tree is blown over. It struggles to survive but in the end loses that struggle (resolution of events).  it decays.  little trees grow form the acorns (denouement).

The pattern is there.  There is purpose without human intervention etc etc.

Importantly, the objects leave traces that show a pattern regardless of the existence of humans and the constructs imposed upon that pattern of marks.

If someone comes along and cuts across the grain of the fallen tree they can read the sequence of events left as traces. etc. etc.

If the tree comes to an end 'before its time' so to speak then that is a case of foreclosure, which is a naturally occurring risk.

While we cannot be certain of the natural life span of all objects, and especially not of objects we assume to be non-sentient, we know that all objects have life spans and some are distinctive.

And so on and so forth but that drifts into discussion from the example and becomes extended.

—And I reply:

William, in your acorn example, most of the narrativity comes from the implied observer's viewpoint—which is ourselves, not a tree. There are natural processes involved, we can identify sequences of events, etc., but they become a story (or indeed "events" in one) from the moment there is a human mind involved. Lower minds may process simpler patterns of relationships—e.g. a bee knows nothing about the growth of trees—but at a very elementary level. Bees are indeed an interesting case, being able to convey information about objects not immediately present, but by no stretch of the term can they be said to be "narrating" their experience to other bees. Indeed the flowers etc. they refer to are in a way bodily present since the bees only indicate a direction and distance. Though I agree we need to know more about animal communication, the onus of the proof rests with you, who seem to assume animals tell stories to one another—not with me!  I think it is usually agreed that animals have feelings, emotions, intentions, etc., which are ingredients for the emergence of story, but what they lack is a sign system which allows them to articulate stories. They do have sign systems which allow them to do other things, send signals, etc.—but they can't refer to the past, or to the future, in their communications. At least I know of no experiment in animal psychology which shows an animal telling a story to another animal, or to a human. Far from being common knowledge and pervasive, what you seem to assume about animal communication is not in the least part of the consensus—at least among students of communication!


On another example of "natural narrative"—the growth rings in a tree as "a record" of a previous process:

There is a potential for story in the tree rings, but the telltale word is "record". They are not a record of anything unless they are interpreted by someone as being a record. Therefore the implied (human) observer keeps creeping in... such stories without humans are actually elements within a fully humanized (i.e. semiotized) world, which is at the very basis of their possibility of meaning.


Noam Scheindlin adds a significant contribution:

I suppose that the question is less that of the proverbial tree falling in the forest, but rather, that what constitutes a story can only be construed through the act of observation, and of delimiting the frame.  We could think of a story in the sense that Heidegger traces the etymology of the word "thing" [Ding, Res, Causa] as that which concerns humans in some respect, that which is talked about.  So, what happens (the tree creating its rings) only becomes something to talk about when a relation is perceived, when there is someone to care.  So, I would say, there's no story without someone to tell it, some narrative agency.  The story, then, is the story of this relation, of this why it is important to tell.

Narrative, and the willful act of narration, then, would be the act of telling the story.  This, it seems, is inherent in the various distinctions that have been made (though all with somewhat different emphasis) between fabula and syuzhet; story and discourse (Chatman); or the threefold distinctions that Genette and Bal make from out of this, etc.

Narration, then, would take its position as a perspective on the story, indeed one possibility of telling the story (Queneu's Exercises in Style is an excellent depiction of this).  This, it seems to me would be the case even when the narrative produces the story in the telling.  From the perspective of the narrative, the narration remains anterior/exterior to the story. 

So when someone asks you to "tell me the story of" x, rather than, "tell me the narrative of" x  (the question that Matthew Clark brought up), it is because the story is understood to be already in existence.  What one is being asked to do then is to narrate (a perspective on) a story.

This doesn't seem to me to change when the observer becomes the object of his or her observations, turning his or her acts of observations into objects: the frame between teller and told, perceiver and perceived, remains intact, as the locus of observation shifts.  One could think of homodiegetic narration as the realm where this issue is brought to the forefront, but also why such structures as Lejeune's autobiographical pact come into play.

I associated narrative with "possibility" then, because, ultimately, one can never step out of the frame of one's own story in order to tell it, and when we do, in order to try to tell it anyway, what it yields, is a possible world (see the work of Thomas Pavel and M-L. Ryan).  Thus, fiction.

De una bellota crece un arbolito

—oOo—