Narrative Theories - Aristotle

Narrative Theories

Aristotle

(384 BC - 322 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great.

Every story has a beginning, a middle and an end

The "well-made" story demands a sense of closure (following human nature)

The Greek philosopher Aristotle described in his 'Poetics' a set of rules to describe an 'ideal narrative'. These broadly consist of the following:

* A story needs a plot which is constituted as a beginning, followed by a middle and closed off with an ending. These points of entry, middle and exit should be clearly defined, and should not be meddled with.

* The highest level of tension in the narrative should coincide with the actual middle of the narrative.

* The story should be about a hero/protagonist, who should be a representation of someone 'important' in the polis, because these characters are crucial for the existence of the entire polis.

* The tension in the narative comes from a conflict, which is condensed in the character of the antagonist. The plot should be aimed at working through this conflict.

* The narrative should arouse feelings of pity and fear in the spectator, who will identify with the hero and who will, from working together with the hero through the conflict, eventually get a feeling of 'katharsis' (a mental/psychic kind of 'cleansing' or an obtaining of a 'new understanding'). The whole narrative's aim is the bringing about of katharsis in the spectator.

* To be worthy of the name 'tragedy' or 'epic', the narrative should be of a 'definite magnitude'.

Tzvetan Todorov

(born 1939, Bulgarian philosopher) suggested that conventional narratives are structured in five stages:

1. a state of equilibrium at the outset;

2. a disruption of the equilibrium by some action;

3. a recognition that there has been a disruption;

4. an attempt to repair the disruption;

5. a reinstatement of the equilibrium

This type of narrative structure is very familiar to us. In the James Bond movies, for example, a megalomaniac usually creates the disruption by attempting to take over the world. Once this is recognised Bond is despatched by M and most of the film is taken up with stage four before finishing at stage five.

Claude Lйvi-Strauss

born November 28, 1908, is a French anthropologist who developed structuralism as a method of understanding human society and culture.

Constant creation of conflict/opposition propels narrative. Narrative can only end on a resolution of conflict. Opposition can be visual (light/darkness, movement/stillness) or conceptual (love/hate, control/panic), and to do with soundtrack. Binary oppositions.

Binary opposites: Protagonist/antagonist Good looking/ugly Witty/humourless

Binary Oppositions from James Bond

Bond M

Bond Villain

Villain Woman

Woman Bond

Free World Soviet Union

Great Britain Non-Anglo Saxon Countries

Duty Sacrifice

Cupidity Ideals

Love Death

Chance Planning

Luxury Discomfort

Roland Barthes

Semiotics professor in the 1950s and 1960s

Roland Barthes describes a text as being like a tangled ball of threads which needs unravelling so we can separate out the colours. Once we start to unravel a text, we encounter an absolute plurality of potential meanings. We can start by looking at a narrative in one way, from one viewpoint, bringing to bear one set of previous experience, and create one meaning for that text. You can continue by unravelling the narrative from a different angle, by pulling a different thread if you like, and create an entirely different meaning. And so on. An infinite number of times. If you wanted to.

All you need to know, again, very basically, is that texts may be 'open' (ie unravelled in a lot of different ways) or 'closed' (there is only one obvious thread to pull on).

Barthes also decided that the threads that you pull on to try and unravel meaning are called narrative codes and that they could be categorised in the following five ways:

* Enigma Code (sets up a question to be answered later)

* Semic Code (How characters, actions,events, settings etc. take on meaning within a culture.

* Symbolic Code - Binary Oppositions or Psychological symbols

* Action Code - understood