Comprehensive Study Guide: The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative

Overview and Bibliographical Context of H. Porter Abbott's Study

  • Author and Institutional Background:

    • Written by H. Porter Abbott, Professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

    • Abbott's prior scholarly works on narrative include:

    • The Fiction of Samuel Beckett: Form and Effect

    • Diary Fiction: Writing as Action

    • Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph

    • Editor of On the Origin of Fictions: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, a special issue of the journal SubStance.

  • Publication and Publication Details:

    • Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge / Cambridge University Press (2002).

    • Major publishing centers listed: Cambridge (The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street; The Edinburgh Building, CB2 2RU), New York (40 West 20th Street, NY 10011-4211), Port Melbourne (477 Williamstown Road, VIC 3207), Madrid (Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014), Cape Town (Dock House, The Waterfront, 8001).

    • Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge, set in Bembo 11/12.5 pt typeface.

    • International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs): Hardback ISBN 0 521 65033 X; Paperback ISBN 0 521 65969 H.

    • Cover illustration: On Emergence (2001) by Siu Zimmerman.

    • Dedication: "For Jason and Byram".

    • Critical Assessment by Derek Attridge: Characterized as a lucid, practical, wide-ranging, and original introduction designed for undergraduate and graduate courses in literary theory and criticism, conveying a real voice and fascination with narrative's cross-cultural role.

  • Scope and Pedagogical Approach:

    • Descriptive rather than prescriptive: focuses on describing cognitive and cultural operations during narrative encounters rather than laying down rules.

    • Moves systematically from simple component parts (Chapters 2–3) to rhetorical power and closure (Chapters 4–5), narration and voice (Chapter 6), interpretive methods and audience collaboration (Chapters 7–8), cross-media adaptation (Chapter 9), character and identity/autobiography (Chapter 10), and narrative contestation and social negotiation (Chapters 11–12).

    • Foundational and selective terminology: restricts technical vocabulary to essential, boldface concepts included in its Glossary, acknowledging that narratology contains no complete consensus on major issues.

Chapter 1: Narrative and Life

  • The Universality of Narrative:

    • Presence in Daily Life: Narrative is not restricted to formal art forms like novels, sagas, or folktales, but is an everyday human activity performed continually from early childhood as soon as nouns and verbs are joined (e.g., "I fell down").

    • Theoretical Views on Universality:

    • Fredric Jameson: Defines narrative as the "all-informing process" and "the central function or instance of the human mind."

    • Jean-François Lyotard: Refers to narration as "the quintessential form of customary knowledge."

    • Roland Barthes (1966): Highlights narrative's transhistorical, transcultural, and international universality, present across endless genres (myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting, stained-glass windows, cinema, comics, news items, conversation) and media (spoken/written language, fixed/moving images, gestures).

    • Presence in Non-Narrative Genres:

    • Lyric poetry, traditionally considered a static form dominated by a single feeling, relies on embedded narratives.

    • Ben Jonson's "Song: To Celia" ("Drink to me, onely, with thine eyes…") utilizes conditional micro-narratives (looking, kissing, drinking) alongside a structured plot involving a sent, breathed-upon, and returned rosy wreath that flourishes and smells of the beloved.

    • Developmental and Cognitive Foundations:

    • Narrative capacity emerges in infants around their third or fourth year when combining verbs with nouns, coinciding with the earliest retained adult memories.

    • Memory and identity depend on narrative as a structural armature. Peter Brooks emphasizes that human self-definition is bound up with life stories, imposing imaginative form on life in dreams, daydreams, and fantasies.

    • Hardwired Capacity: Theoretical proposals compare narrative capability to a genetically hardwired "deep structure," analogous to universal grammar.

    • Paul Auster: Asserts that a child's need for stories is as fundamental as the need for food.

  • Narrative and Time:

    • Temporal Organization: Narrative serves as the primary mechanism by which humans organize their understanding of time, fulfilling an evolutionary necessity for a species possessing both language and temporal self-awareness.

    • Abstract Time vs. Narrative Time:

    • Abstract/Regular Time: Measured by mechanical timepieces (clocks/watches emerging in the Middle Ages), solar cycles, lunar phases, and seasonal years. Provides an external grid of regular, self-referential intervals (seconds, minutes, hours, nanoseconds).

    • Narrative Time: Internal temporal order created directly by events and incidents. It is fluid, expands or contracts based on detail density, and relates specifically to human action.

    • Paul Ricoeur: Formulates that time becomes "human time" when organized in the manner of a narrative, and narrative becomes meaningful through portraying features of temporal existence.

    • Dynamic Duration Examples:

    • Expanding Time: Inserting micro-details into an event sequence (e.g., examining scraped skin, looking for a mother) expands narrative duration without adding clock time.

    • Compressing Time: Summarizing long spans with broad strokes (e.g., "In the following months…") reduces years of repeated falls into a concise historical arc of acquired poise.

    • Contrapuntal Interplay: Narrative time constantly interacts with abstract calendar/clock time counterpoints (e.g., referencing "months" or "days").

  • Narrative Perception:

    • Brian De Palma: Observed that people do not see the world before their eyes until it is put into a narrative mode.

    • Visual Art and Narrative Perception:

    • Static Image Processing: Looking at static pictures reflexively triggers a search for narrative sequence (e.g., interpreting a photograph of a wrecked ship in Jim Gibbs' Disaster Log of Ships as a present outcome of past temporal events).

    • Historical/Biblical Climax Depictions: Rembrandt's Belshazzar's Feast depicts Daniel Chapter 5 at its climax—King Belshazzar seeing the divine handwriting ("Mene mene tekel upharsin") after profaning holy gold vessels from Jerusalem, capturing motion and impending doom hours before Babylon's fall to Darius.

    • Narrative Templates in Visual Art: Michel Garnier's La douce résistance (1793) prompts immediate reconstruction of preceding events (holding the bow while playing) and anticipation of future outcomes (resisting or succumbing to the young man).

    • Narrative Jamming:

    • Andrew Wyeth's Dr. Syn (1981 tempera on panel): Jams narrative perception by presenting contradictory clues (a seated skeleton lacking floor clothing) that arouse and refuse to satisfy the need for narrative resolution.

    • Francis Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944): Evokes painful emotional intensity while deliberately obscuring causes, tortures, and background logic, creating cognitive pain through unfulfilled narrative desire.

    • Etymology and Dual Nature of Narrative:

    • Hayden White (The Content of the Form): Traces "narrative" to the Sanskrit root gna ("know"), passing into Latin as gnarus ("knowing") and narro ("telling").

    • Narrative acts as a universal instrument for acquiring, organizing, and transmitting knowledge, problem-solving, as well as transmitting false or misleading information.

Chapter 2: Defining Narrative

  • The Bare Minimum:

    • Core Definition: Narrative is the representation of an event or a series of events.

    • Indispensability of the Event: Without an event or action, a text is a description, exposition, argument, or lyric (e.g., "My dog has fleas" is a description; "My dog was bitten by a flea" is a narrative).

    • Theoretical Positions on Event Count:

    • Single Event Minimum: Supported by H. Porter Abbott, Gérard Genette, and Barbara Herrnstein Smith.

    • Two or More Events Minimum: Required by Roland Barthes and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan.

    • Causally Linked Events Minimum: Required by Mieke Bal, David Bordwell, and Brian Richardson.

    • Minimal vs. Complex Narrative Forms: Works containing abundant micro-narratives can strain overall narrative identity (e.g., John Bunyan's Grace Abounding [1666], T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land [1922], Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable [1953], Tom DeHaven/Tom McHarg's The Late-Nite Manuels of the Ultramundane [1993]).

    • Representation vs. Narration Debate:

    • Gerald Prince: Defines narrative strictly as the recounting of real or fictitious events by one or more narrators to narratees, explicitly excluding dramatic stage performances.

    • Abbott's Inclusive Stance: Encompasses drama, film, and visual art, viewing narrators, actors, camera angles, and paint as diverse instruments mediating story representation.

    • Presentation vs. Representation: Aristotelian perspectives view theatrical acting as immediate "presentation" and written storytelling as "representation." However, all narratives are mediated re-presentations of events that appear to pre-exist their vehicle.

  • Story and Narrative Discourse:

    • Seymour Chatman's "Chrono-Logic": Narrative features a doubly temporal logic combining two distinct temporal orders:

    • Story: The internal sequence of events (action/plot) taking place in chronological order from earliest to latest.

    • Narrative Discourse: The external rendering or presentation of those events (duration/order of reading, viewing, or listening).

    • Malleability of Narrative Discourse:

    • Reordering: Events can be presented chronologically, in reverse, or via flashbacks/flash-forwards.

    • Duration Modification: Discourse can compress a long timeframe into a single line or expand a single instant into lengthy descriptions.

    • Perspective Changes: Discourse can shift focus, focalization, and grammatical person (first vs. third person).

    • Exceptions in Drama and Film:

    • Dramatic Unities: Dramatic performance sometimes aligns story time with real presentation time (adhered to by Corneille, Racine, Jean-Luc Godard, John Cassavetes, and Andy Warhol).

    • Off-Stage Story Reconstruction: Even in real-time plays like Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus, the audience reconstructs an extensive off-stage story.

    • Terminology Variations:

    • Russian Formalism: Fabula (story) vs. Sjuzet (narrative discourse / plot arrangement).

    • Classical Greek / Aristotelian: Muthos or Mythos (plot).

    • Subdivisions of Story:

    • Events: Actions or reactions.

    • Entities: The subjects participating in events.

    • Characters: Entities possessing human or human-like qualities.

    • Setting: The spatio-temporal environment (optional component).

  • The Mediation (Construction) of Story:

    • Audience Construction: Stories are never perceived directly; they are inferred and constructed by the audience through the lens of narrative discourse.

    • Jonathan Culler's "Double Logic": Narrative exhibits an inherent paradox where story appears to exist prior to discourse, yet story can only come into existence through discourse.

    • Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina: Writing in the past tense, Tolstoy discovered during discourse creation that Vronsky was unexpectedly preparing to commit suicide.

    • Adaptability Across Media:

    • Claude Bremond: Formulates that a story consists not of words, images, or gestures, but of the events, situations, and behaviors signified by them.

    • Structural Persistence: Stories like Cinderella retain recognizable identity across over 1,100 collected versions, Disney's 1950 film, or structural variants like Shakespeare's King Lear (comparing Cordelia's virtue and isolation under Goneril and Regan).

    • Reality of Stories:

    • Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea, 1938): Claimed there are no true stories, arguing that humans impose narrative order onto an unstructured world flux.

    • Counter-Perspectives: Narrative models accurately mirror real-world biological lifecycles (birth, life, death) and scientific explanatory processes.

  • Constituent and Supplementary Events:

    • Terminology Framework:

    • Roland Barthes: Nuclei (noyaux) vs. Catalyzers (catalyses).

    • Seymour Chatman: Kernels vs. Satellites.

    • Constituent Events (Nuclei / Kernels):

    • Essential structural turning points that drive the narrative chain forward; removing a constituent event breaks story coherence.

    • Supplementary Events (Catalyzers / Satellites):

    • Non-essential to story logic; can be removed without destroying the fundamental sequence of events.

    • Crucial for discourse texture, thematic resonance, cultural commentary, and emotional power.

    • Illustrative Examples:

    • James Whale's Frankenstein (1931): Greatly expands Mary Shelley's 1818 novel by introducing high-tech lab equipment and supplementary micro-events, reframing 19th-century scientific anxieties into 20th-century technology fears.

    • Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion (1938): Omits the major constituent event (the plane shot down by General von Rauffenstein) and focuses extensively on supplementary dining/conversational micro-events between Captain Boeldieu and Lieutenant Maréchal to evoke a disappearing aristocratic culture.

    • Historical Story Persistence and Evolution:

    • Faust Narrative Sequence: Demonstrates structural core retention despite radical alterations across the German Volksbuch Faustbuch, Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (1604, 1616), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust (1808, 1831), and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus (1947).

  • Narrativity:

    • Definition: The felt degree to which a narrative presentation feels like a story being actively performed or told for its own sake.

    • Factors Influencing Narrativity:

    • Not strictly dependent on word count or event count.

    • Adding character interiority or emotional state (e.g., changing "She ate lunch" to "Brooding, she ate lunch") significantly heightens narrativity.

  • Key Scholarly and Textual Resources:

    • Secondary Theoretical Works:

    • Gérard Genette (Narrative Discourse)

    • Gerald Prince (A Dictionary of Narratology)

    • Brian Richardson (Unlikely Stories)

    • Seymour Chatman (Story and Discourse; Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film)

    • Roland Barthes ("Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives")

    • Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea; What is Literature?; The Words)

    • Jonathan Culler (The Pursuit of Signs)

    • Philip J. M. Sturgess (Narrativity: Theory and Practice)

    • Primary Experimental Texts:

    • Laurence Sterne (Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, 1759–67)

    • Virginia Woolf (Jacob's Room, 1922)

    • James Joyce (Finnegans Wake, 1940)

    • Samuel Beckett (The Unnamable, 1953)

    • Alain Robbe-Grillet (In the Labyrinth, 1959)

    • William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch, 1959)

    • Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49, 1966)

    • J. G. Ballard (The Atrocity Exhibition, 1970)

    • Carolyn Guyer (Quibbling, 1993)

    • Shelley Jackson (Patchwork Girl, 1995)

Chapter 3: The Borders of Narrative

  • Framing Narratives:

    • Definition: A containing or surrounding narrative within which one or more secondary narratives are embedded.

    • Classic Multi-Story Frame Collections:

    • Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron (1351–53)

    • Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (1387–1400)

    • A Thousand and One Nights (c. 1450): Frame story features Sultan Schahriah (who resolves to marry a new wife daily and execute her at sunrise) and Scheherazade (who delays execution by telling night-time stories that pause at climactic moments).

    • Single Embedded Narrative Framing:

    • Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898): Opens with an eight-page framing narrative detailing how a governess's manuscript was obtained. The frame narrator describes her as "the most agreeable woman I have ever known in her position," providing evidence for readers who view her as a heroic figure rather than an unreliable, hallucinatory protagonist.

    • Frame Theory vs. Framing Narratives:

    • Erving Goffman (Frame Analysis, 1974): Formulates "frame theory," analyzing cognitive frames of reference brought by audiences to interpret social situations and texts, distinct from structural framing narratives.

  • Paratexts:

    • Coined by Gérard Genette: Material occupying the threshold of a text that shapes reception and interpretation without being part of the primary story sequence.

    • Categories of Paratexts:

    • Textual/Visual Components: Chapter headings, running heads, tables of contents, prefaces, afterwords, illustrations, book jackets, back-cover blurbs.

    • Performance/Production Components: Program notes, posters, marquees, promotional advertising.

    • Contextual/Extratextual Components: Author interviews, public correspondence, biographical notes.

    • Transformative Power of Paratexts:

    • Physical Aesthetics: Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray describes Dorian purchasing nine large-paper copies bound in distinct colors to match fluctuating emotional moods.

    • Expectation Framing: Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot was advertised for its American premiere in Miami as "the laugh sensation of two continents," leading confused upper-middle-class theatergoers seeking light comedy to abandon the theater during Act 1.

    • Textual Perception Alteration: W. N. P. Barbellion's The Journal of a Disappointed Man (1919) concluded with the entry "Barbellion died on December 31 [1917]." Following immense popularity across five printings, public discovery that the author survived to read reviews created widespread feelings of betrayal, casting the work into obscurity without altering a single word of the narrative text.

  • The Outer Limits of Narrative:

    • Explores boundary conditions where narrative discourse dissolves or transitions into non-narrative modes, modernist abstraction, or interactive digital media.