Discovery and decision

An editor once told me narrative is about something happening and something else happening and so on. At the time, this diagnosed a problem with a story I'd written. The story had stalled in description and exposition that attempted, in vain, to provide a glimpse into a character's motivations. And I'm still grateful for the insight.

But the first stories I tried to write suffered from the opposite problem. All that happened was one thing after another, but with no meaningful change taking place. They were like stenographer's account of courtroom events, but less interesting.

Janet Burroway diagnoses this earlier problem with writing by making the distinction between movement and action. Of course, this is to an certain extent an arbitrary choice of words -- I actual reversed their meaning when I first encountered her usage in this context -- but the distinction is important.

Basically, the problem with my earlier stories was a lack of action. There was movement, but not action. The characters were doing things, but their was no drama or significance to the things they were doing. Burroway writes:

The significant characters of a story must be both capable of causing an action and capable of being changed by it...Some force outside the the character presents itself in the form of information or accident or the behavior of others or the elements. The unknown becomes known, and then the discoverer must either take action or deliberately not take action, involving the reader in the tension of the narrative query: and then what happens?

Every story is a pattern of change (events connected, as the author E.M. Forster observed, primarily by cause and effect) in which small and large changes are made through decision and discovery.

One important difference then between movement and significant action is that action creates tension -- the reader anticipates action, understands or feels its necessity (remember that inaction is a form of action once a decision must be made.) Burroway abstracts to call this a process of discovery and decision.

She analyzes passages in which movement is used to characterize and set the scene, and then either a discovery or a decision or both are interjected to create anticipation.

For instance:

Bob boarded the train to Newark, putting his rolling suitcase on a storage rack near the door.

So far we've got movement that establishes character and scene (albeit briefly). Then we get a significant discovery:

Bob walked along the car looking for his seat number. When he came to his seat, an elderly woman was sitting in it. He double checked his ticket. It was the right seat.

This generates anticipation. What will Bob do? Will he confront this fragile woman? Will he move on and find an empty seat?

Bob takes makes a decision and takes action:

Bob looked around the train. Numerous seats remained empty. The train was scheduled to leave in 30 seconds. "Excuse me, ma'am, I believe you're in my seat."

Bob's decision to confront the woman both resolves a previous tension (What will he do?) and generates a new tension (Why did he do it, and what will happen next?). It also tells us something about Bob: that sitting in the correct seat for him is important enough that he would consider making a little-old lady move. Also, he did it in a brusque manner -- another choice -- that helps to characterize him (we don't think his manner is very polite, do we?).

Larry David comes to mind. In Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, David's characters make a series of decisions the dig them further and further into a comic hole so that seemingly small decisions have dramatic import - think George on Seinfeld and David's eponymous character on CYE. Which brings us to the related concept, which Burroway discusses, of how tension in a story builds.

The cycle of discovery and decision, decision and discovery, ratchets up the level of tension, which could be defined as the reader's desire to know what happens next. The actions, Burroway tells us, are a window into the soul.

...it turns out that the internal or mental moment of change is where the action lies. Much movement in a story is mere event, and this is why descriptions of actions, like stage directions in a dull play, sometimes add little or nothing. When the wife picks up a cup of coffee, that is mere event. If she finds that the lipstick on the cup is not her shade, that is a dramatic event, a discovery; it makes a difference. She makes a decision to fling it at the woman with the Cherry Ice mouth. Flinging it is a action, but the dramatic change occurs with the second character's realization (discovery) that she has been hit -- and so on.

Synecdoche: Measuring the drapes

I came across this example of metonymy in an blog post by the New York Times, Stanley Fish (bold is mine):

Weeks later, the pattern continues, but in an even more intense form. The McCain campaign huffs and puffs and jumps from charge to charge: Obama consorts with terrorists; he’s a socialist; he’s a communist; he is un-American; he’s not one of us; he’s a celebrity; he’s going to take your money and give it to people who never did a day’s work; he’s going to sell out Israel; he’ll cozy up to foreign dictators; he’s measuring the drapes.

Measuring the drapes. This is an example of synecdoche: the kind of metonymy where the part is used to refer to the whole. Measuring the drapes is part of the process of taking over the White House which is an important - and symbolic - part of becoming president.

Measuring evokes anticipation. It is metonymy that suggests something that will happen in the future.

Genette summary table

I found this terrific chart on Signosemio.com


Lucie Guillemette and Cynthia Lévesque (2006), “ Narratology ”, in Louis Hébert (dir.), Signo [on-line], Rimouski (Quebec)

Narrative time

I'm just about to finish the chapters in Gerard Genette's Narrative Discourse that deal with aspects of time in stories.

So I thought I'd briefly summarize. Very briefly, for these chapters go into far more detail than I've been able to either fully understand or recall.

Genette breaks his discussions of time down to three major headings: order, duration and frequency.

These distinctions assumed the fundamental temporal duality between narrative and story, which I've written about in previous posts. Here's one passage in which I discussed it:

Gennete makes this distinction by calling the totality of events the “story” and the expression of those events the “narrative.” Thus “I walked to the car” is the extremely simple abstracted narrative of my trip to the car this morning (the actual event, or "story"), during which I gave away an extra piece of plywood, noticed a pair of women dumping junk from their minivan on the ground and received a phone call from someone wanting to rent my condo.

Here I'm only going to focus on order, which refers to how the writer organizes the continuous chronological events of the story into narrative sequences. I can narrated my morning walk to the car beginning with seeing the women dumping junk out of their minivan, even though that's not the way it happened in real life. Then I might flashback to when I first came down stairs and gave the plywood away.

A writer generally has three options when it comes to order. The first is to simple travel forward through time at varying speeds (speed being a matter of duration), with one event following another in chronological order.

The other two options come under general heading of what Genette calls anachrony, which I've also written about before. Analepsis (flashback) is narration of events that comes earlier in the story. Prolepsis (flashforward) is narration of events that come later in the story. (Genette uses a term for "first narrative" for the real time of the story, the dominate chronology in which the anachronies are, by definition, subordinate temporal anomalies.)

Genette identifies two metrics of anachrony that help distinguish qualitative demarcations: reach and extent. Here is what Genette says:

An anachrony can reach into the past or the future, either more or less from the “present” moment . . . : this temporal distance we will name the anachrony’s reach. The anachrony itself can also cover a duration of story that is more or less long: we will call this its extent

Thus reach refers to the distance in time a flashforward or flashback takes the reader from the dominant story-time. It is essentially quantitative. The reach of a flashback that takes the reader from a story playing out in 1954 back to events that happened in 1944 is ten years. Thus its reach is less than if it had taken the reader back to the 1800s.

This brings us to the concept of extent. Extent is the length of time traversed by a particular anachrony. An analepsis that returns to 1905 and brings the reader to 1910 before returning to the first narrative, has an extent of 10 years.

Flashbacks can be catagorized based on reach and extent.

A flashback that reaches outside of the limits of the narrative's extreme ends and stays there - say a flashback that returns to the 1800s in a story where the dominant timeline is 1960 to 1965 - is called an external analepsis.

One that remains within the bounds of the narrative is called an internal analepsis (or homodiegetic).

When one begin as external then bring the reader forward into the first narrative, thus breaching the distinction between flashback and the dominate story, it is called a mixed analepsis.

External analepses . . . never at any point risk interfering with the first narrative . . . . [but] with internal analepses: since their temporal field is contained within the temporal field of the first narrative, they present an obvious risk of redundancy or collision.

Genette also identifies particular category of analepses based on its function: the completing analepses or returns. These, he says, serve to "fill in, after the event, an earlier gap in the narrative." Thus the first narrative can skip forward in the chronology of "real" events - an ellipsis - then later return to recount what was missed.

The type of return depends on the type of ellipsis. When the ellipsis is a true gap - what Genette calls an ellipsis pure and simple - the completing analepes just fills in the missing events.

However, another type of internal return, a repeating analepses, or recall, call flesh out paralypsis a kind of ellipsis that is an "omission of one of the constituent elements of a situation in a period that the narrative does generally cover".

A good example of this is in the Life of Pi [SPOILER ALERT], when the Indian man retells the story of his ordeal on the lifeboat, but tells it from realist point of view as opposed to his initial allegorical account. He's been over this ground before, but we learn new things about what happened. Genette says this kind of iterative storytelling is a defining characteristic of Proust's Recherche du temps perdu.

Finally for analepses, Genette designates a flashback that ends where the first narrative begins, forming a smooth return, a complete analepses. One that ends in an ellipsis, thus skipping the story through time and over events, back to the first narrative, is a partial analepsis.

Genette identifies this last structure as a defining characteristic of the modern novel.


Reach and extent define prolepses as well.

External prolepses, Genette says, "function most often as epilogues, serving to continue one or another line of action to its logical conclusion."

Internal prolepses, like internal analepses, become entangle with the first narrative, and Genette sees them as serving at least two functions, to provide advance notice and advance mention. Thus they may result, and often do, in repeating prolepses, that give advanced notice of what will be narrated later.

Advance notice, is distinguished from more subtle analepses that Genette calls advanced mention, and what I think most American's would refer to as foreshadowing. Advance notice then might be called a flashforward - a more explicit hint at what's to come.

One very interesting part of Genette's analysis is that he sees Proust using so many layers of prolepsis within analepsis and vice versa, so many distortions of time, that he uses the word achrony to describe it. He says of achrony that and "anachrony deprived of every temporal connection . . . is an event we must ultimately take to be dateless and ageless."

The truth is that the narrator had the clearest of reasons for grouping together, in defiance of all chronology, events connected by spatial proximity, by climatic identity . . . , or by thematic kinship . . . : he thus made clear, more than anyone had done before him and better than they had, narrative’s capacity for temporal autonomy.

Thus Proust let elements other than time, things that he thought needed to be together in the narrative but weren't in rigid chronology of the "real" story, dictate the structure of his narrative.

Parenthesis

As I was reading tonight I came upon a word related to my last post on interpolation: parenthesis. Perhaps this is a more technical term for inserting something extraneous in a sentence or passage or chapter, or maybe it is a subclass of interpolation.

Like other words I previously associated only with punctuation marks- e.g., ellipsis - it can be used in a broader sense, or "scaled up," to refer to long passages of text that break the march of a narrative or essay.

Wikipedia tells us the words rhetorical roots of parenthesis (as opposed to its use to denote punctuation) are a Greek word (which I couldn't read because it was in Greek letters)that means "alongside of" and "to place."

It defines parenthesis as an "explanatory or qualifying word, clause, or sentence inserted into a passage with which it doesn't necessarily have any grammatical connection, and from which it is usually marked off by round or square brackets, dashes, or commas."

It's fascinating that words used to describe punctuation might be used to describe the macro-structure of narrative. Ellipsis: things left out. Parenthesis: things inserted.

So a story that skips several years between two successive chapters, can be said to contain an ellipsis. A chapter that recounts an event outside the flow of the narrative contains a parenthesis. A flashback might even be considered a parenthesis. So the portion of the story that was skipped earlier between chapters, could be recounted later parenthetically.

By the way, the structure of the current story I'm working on follows this pattern. It's three parts. The first part begins in media res, then flashes back to a summary of the stories history prior to that first scene, then comes forward to the "current time" again.

The second part begins weeks after the first part ended, then flashes back to summarize the ellipsis between the end of the first part and the beginning of the second part, then jumps forward a couple of weeks to another scene.

The last part, which I'm still writing, you'll be happy to know, and I'm happy to do it, though I've been writing it for a while and it's wearing on me a bit, like the time I barely finished high school and afterwards had nightmares of uniformed men coming to my house and dragging me back to school...that last part will follow the same structure as the second part.

Interpolate

Interpolate - to introduce (something additional or extraneous) between other things or parts; interject; interpose; intercalate.

This seems like an important term for literature. It’s been used to describe passages in which a character in one part of a story, takes over the narration of another part - the “twice-told tale.”

But at a more fundamental level it could refer to anything that is interjected into “pure” narrative - extraneous information, perspective (of which the twice-told tale is an example), footnotes (e.g., David Foster Wallace, RIP), flashbacks, flashforwards. The purpose in all these cases, of course, is to build or revise meaning in the story.
October 7
Imagism

Imagism

Ezra Pound’s defines an image as “that which presents an itellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”

Nantucket

Flowers through the window
lavender and yellow

changed by the white curtains -
Smell of cleanliness -

Sunshine of the late afternoon -
On the glass tray

a glass pitcher; the tumbler
turned down, by which

a key is lying - And the
immaculate white bed

William Carlos Williams, 1934

Imagism, according to Williams: “No ideas but in things.”

Morning after the move

beep, beep, beep
sun splits the blinds

beep, beep, beep
a truck rumbles past

I roll on my back
cold air slips under
the cumulus comforter

cell phone: 6:45

clothes spill from
carboard boxes
onto the carpet

a real mattress
leans on a wall

cell phone: 6:56

sun splits the blinds
out the window
light on leaves
yellow and red

me

Main Street vs. Wall Street

“I think Senator McCain’s absolutely right that we need more responsibility„” Barack Obama said during the first presidential debate,” but we need it not just when there’s a crisis. I mean, we’ve had years in which the reigning economic ideology has been what’s good for Wall Street, but not what’s good for Main Street.”

Wall Street. Main Street.

I recently learned what the term “metonymy” means, so I feel pretty smart every time I hear the pols (over)use these labels terms to contrast bad ole’ big business with the little guys.

Websters defines metonymy as a “figure of speech consisting of the use of the name of one thing for that of another of which it is an attribute or with which it is associated (as ‘crown’ in ‘lands belonging to the crown’)

This political season Wall Street has come to represent the greedy corporate types running the country into the ground. Main Street: the rest of us who vote and haven’t faired so well (in part because some of us spent too much - doing our patriotic duty - and overreached on our home purchases, but we’ll overlook that for now.)

My personal metonymic nemesis: Joe Sixpack. I drink six packs - regularly. But I do not want to live in a land belonging to the Joes - not Palin’s Joes anyway.

Fitures of speech: schemes

I pilfered the concise info below on schemes from Wikipedia, and put it here so I can find it easily. Another good source, with examples, can be found here.

“In linguistics, scheme is a figure of speech that changes the normal arrangement of words in a sentence’s structure. A good example of a playwright who was notorious for his use of schemes and tropes was William Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Julius Caesar).

Structures of Balance

* Parallelism - The use of similar structures in two or more clauses
o Isocolon - Use of parallel structures of the same length in successive clauses
o Tricolon - Use of three parallel structures of the same length in independent
clauses and of increasing power
* Antithesis - The juxtaposition of opposing or contrasting ideas
* Climax- The arrangement of words in order of increasing importance


Changes in Word Order

* Anastrophe - Inversion of the usual word order
* Parenthesis - Insertion of a clause or sentence in a place where it interrupts the natural flow of the sentence
* Apposition - The placing of two elements side by side, in which the second defines the first

Omission

* Ellipsis - Omission of words
* Asyndeton - Omission of conjunctions between related clauses
* Brachylogia - Omission of conjunctions between a series of words
* Polysyndeton - Repetition of conjunctions

Repetition

* Alliteration - A series of words that begin with the same letter or sound alike
* Assonance - The repetition of vowel sounds, most commonly within a short passage of
verse
* Polyptoton - Repetition of words derived from the same root
* Antanaclasis - Repetition of a word in two different senses
* Anaphora - The repetition of the same word or group of words at the beginning of
successive clauses
* Consonance - The repetition of consonant sounds without the repetition of the vowel sounds
* Epistrophe - The counterpart of anaphora
* Symploce - Combination of anaphora and epistrophe
* Epanalepsis - Repetition of the initial word or words of a clause or sentence at the end of the clause or sentence
* Anadiplosis - Repetition of a word at the end of a clause at the beginning of another
* Climax - Repetition of the scheme anadiplosis at least three times, with the elements arranged in an order of increasing importance
* Antimetabole - Repetition of words in successive clauses, in reverse order
* Chiasmus - Reversal of grammatical structures in successive clauses

Twisted tales, revised meanings

M. Knight Shyamalan knows how to twist the truth. Two words: Sixth Sense.

Guy tries to cure boy who’s haunted by ghosts, guy (SPOILER ALERT) realizes he himself is a ghost. The kids talks to dead people. Kid talks to him. He’s a dead person. Nooooooooo…

The rest of Shymalan’s movies - at least the ones I’ve seen, which aren’t very good, with the exception of Unbreakable - use a similar technique. I’ve heard it called a “paradigm shift.” Some key information is revealed late in the narrative that recasts everything that came before.

Many jokes work the same way. The punchline tweaks the meaning of the set up, often in a way that’s surprising.

For instance:

A young reporter went to a retirement home to interview an aged but legendary explorer. The reporter asked the old man to tell him the most frightening experience he had ever had.

The old explorer said, “Once I was hunting Bengal tigers in the jungles of India. I was on a narrow path and my faithful native gunbearer was behind me. Suddenly the largest tiger I have ever seen leaped onto the path in front of us. I turned to get my weapon only to find the native had fled. The tiger leapt toward me with a mighty ROARRRR! I soiled myself.”

The reporter said, “Under those circumstances anyone would have done the same.”

The old explorer said, “No, not then - just now when I went ROARRRR!”

We learn at the end the truth about what happened earlier in the joke.

I bring this up, because it relates to Gerard Gennette’s take on the order of narrative. Specifically, it relates to his assessment that Marcel Proust differs from other authors in his extreme use of prolepsis - flashing forward. Gennette points out that the essential nature of the narrator’s perspective in À la recherche du temps perdu is retrospective, a view backwards at his life. As such, the narrator constantly reevaluates the meaning of the events even as he first tells of them, often engauging in flashforwards during a scene to explain how later he will see it differently than he does now.

Essentially, it is a story narrated from a “post twist” perspective that acknowledge as it proceeds that the twist will come later. This contrasts with typical paradigm shift stories, I think, which don’t want you know a twist is coming, or if they do, provide only cryptic clues to what it might be.

I haven’t read Proust’s opus, but I’m guessing the constant mention that the meaning of current events will change later serves the purpose of building anticipation in the reader. (Gennette defines two basic temporal effects in narrative, where the text diverges from a regular march through time: retrospection (resulting from analepsis) and anticipation (resulting from prolepsis).)

In Proust, he notes, you find a constant movement back and forth in time, so that flashforwards exist withing flashbacks, and vice versa. This serves a number of functions, Gennette says, one being to contrast and compare people, events and ideas that would otherwise are seperated in story time.

For me though, the most interesting part is that of the perspective of the narrator and the choices the narrator makes. In contrast with Proust, for instance, the author of Life of PI (SPOILER ALERT 2) tells his tale of being lost at see as an allegory, but we don’t know it’s an allegory until the very end. The reader gets a sense that the story is fantastical - so much so that it begins to read like a fantasy novel - then at the end get’s slapped with a highly disturbing reinterpretation of the actual events. The reader learns essentially that the narrator he thought was reliable, is in fact completely unreliable.

The most imporant part of Life of Pi is why the narrator is unreliable. He has changes the tale to an allegory, because the real events are too terrible to relate. (And the allegory captures the essential truth of the characters involved; so in terms of essential metaphoric meaning, the narrator isn’t all that unreliable.)

Still the essence is the withholding of information until the end. The narrator knows the full meaning and import of the events, but withholds much of it. Proust’s narrator also knows the full import of his life, but updates the meanings as he goes (again, I’m basing this on Gennette’s description of the novel). The nature of the story is not one of stacking a house of cards then knocking it down at the end, as in Life of Pi, but rather one of constant reevaluation of the meaning of events, always with the understanding that the narrator has all the “strings” in his hands, as Gennette puts it, that lead to the gestault of his life.

The ins and outs

When you read a book you bring something to the table. Unless, of course, you happen to be certain U.S. presidents who shall remain unnamWed and a vice-presidential candiate who will remain anonyPmous.

This means that different people understand books at different levels. If you don’t understand what “caviar” means, the word won’t evoke images of privilege, or poshness, or fishiness - whatever the author hoped to evoke.

So this is a kind of meaning that requires operating on the same wavelength - system of signification, we could call it - as the author. It’s something brought from outside the text to the reading of the text.

Then there are associations that take shape within the book. A black dog comes to represent violence. A broken arm is a reminder of a man’s cowardice in a earlier confrontation.

Some meanings come from the outside (the reader brings them with her to the reading), some from the inside (the reader learns the associations during the course of the reading).

Meanings can be either metonymic or metaphoric.

If they are metonymic, they are simple associations, a nod to a closeness between two objects. A common example: The sails crossed the ocean. The sail is used to refer to the ship. A part is used to refer to the whole.

But the two objects could be completely separate entities that happen to be associated with one another. Pavlov’s dog and the bell are a good example. The bell and the phone share no characteristics; they just exist repeatedly in the same time and place, so the dog develops an association.

"A metonymy neither states nor implies the connections between the objects involved in it. . . . We must already know that the objects are related, if the metonymy is to be devised or understood. Thus, metaphor creates the relation between its objects, while metonymy presupposes that relation."
(Hugh Bredin, "Metonymy," Poetics Today, 1984)

Symbolism is thus a kind of metonymy, where an iconic signifier is used to convey a conventional meaning. The cross comes to represent Christianity. The Jolly Rodger piracy. A coffin death. In all of these cases, many readers would recognize the complex meanings behind these simple symbols.

Metonymy is thus about referring to something.

Metaphor on the other hand is about comparing -- about showing that there are shared characteristics between the sign and the signifier. Using the black dog example again; it could represent violence only because in the story it always shows up just before, say, the Hells Angels arrive (a metonymic association).

But we might also say, the black dog had a face like a viper. Now we've compared it to a deadly creature and evoked a far more sinister feeling in the reader regarding the dog.

We've made a new connection from the dog to the viper, that didn't exist until we wrote it. Until then it could have been a perfectly nice black dog. Linguists would say we've applied meaning from a "source domain" to a "target domain."

One interesting aspect of this, is that the meaning we are drawing from the source domain is essenially metonymic: the association between a viper and deadliness is something we've brought to the book, or if we haven't we one get the authors hidden meaning.

(This makes me think of something said during the recent Nobel Prize announcements by one of the judges - if I recall correctly - that American authors are too caught up in American pop culture. If the judge was correct, that would suggested American authors are perhaps using references and comparisons in their stories that no one but other Americans - or at least consumers of American cultural products - can understand.)

Literary fugue

A while back I embarked on my third or forth attempt to read Godel, Escher, Bach. I failed.

It’s one of those books, maybe the only one of those books, in fact, that I get a hundred page into it and I think, “it’s brilliant, I’m not.”

Still, it’s a rich source of ideas. One is the idea of fugue, which is a major theme in the book. I’m not going to even try to explain the technical definition of fugue from a musical standpoint, but it’s basically a peice of music in which a basic theme is played then repeated and elaborated on as the song continues and new voices chime in.

Fugue is an evolution of canon, a basic musical round, like we all learn in elementary school - remember Row, row, row your boat? But where the canon is characterized by simple repetition, fugue involves repetition with intense manipulation of the original melody.

It occurs to me that literary works often contain examples of fugue. A theme is introduced and repeated later in a different form. The tie between them can thought of as allegory. For instance: a boy learns from a wise old hermit that sometimes you can’t avoid snakes, so you must kill them; the boy later decides the only way to deal with his abusive teachers is to kill him.

Take the Karate Kid: wax on, wax off; he later wins the karate match with the same skills. What is learned early in the story, is conveyed to another situation later in the story.

In Narrative Discourse, Gerard Genette approaches this subject in his chapter on the order of events in a narrative. He discusses how Proust played with the timing of events in his stories to draw a comparison between things that happened at different times but relate closely to one another in meaning.

In some cases Proust does this to contrast the past and present. For instance, a character, look at a row of trees reports, “I recognized that what seemed to me now so delightful was that same row of trees which I had found tedious to both observe and to describe.” This contrast suggests a change in the character - the movement of the narrative.

The repetition could also serve to draw an analogy. The words of a character can repeat thos of another character, thereby making it clear they share some important characteristic. Or, say, a woman recognizes that a man is nice because he picks flowers for children, just the way her much beloved grandfather used to.

In general, the literary fugue, if that’s what we’re to call it, takes meanings established previous in a narrative and repeates them in a new form (as an analogy or allegory, for instance) later in the narrative to suit some purpose.

It occurs to me that the movie Ground Hog day, in which Bill Murray’s character experiences the same day over and over again, is an example of this. The humor comes from his more or less succesful attempts to navigate the same situation again and again. Any story in which the character learns from a situation and uses what he’s learned later on to succeed also uses fugue.

I wonder what the technical literary term for this is? It’s seems so fundamental to story telling that it’s bound to have a name.

Discerning the purpose is the tricky part.

Past and future bubbling through

Stories covey the passage of time. As one of my editors told me, in narrative “something happens then something else happens, and something else happens.”

Of course, written narratives don’t convey every detail of every second. Writers aren’t stenographers, so the “actual” story (in fiction, the totality of an imagined tale; in non-fiction the real life events) and the written narrative (or movie, or comic strip, etc.) only conveys important slices of the totality of what could be conveyed.

Gennete makes this distinction by calling the totality of events the “story” and the expression of those events the “narrative.” Thus “I walked to the car” is the extremely simple abstracted narrative of my trip to the car this morning, during which I gave away an extra peice of plywood, noticed a pair of women dumping junk from their minivan on the ground and received a phone call from someone wanting to rent my condo.

The narrative is not always linear. Flashbacks and flashforwards diverge from the natural order of events in the story, so that a narrative that begins in media res jumps around in time. Genette calls all temporal divergences anacronies, using the term prolepsis for jumps forward in time from the predominate temporal flow of the narrative and analepsis for jumps back.

One thing I’ve struggled with is how to bring important information from the past, into a story without having to resort to a full-fledged flashback. In most cases, and in the narrative I’m working on now, I’ve devoted large structural chunks to move back in the story and provide the necessary background for the reader to understand the full nature of a character’s struggles.

But their are more subtle ways to do this. Ernest Hemingway’s story Hills Like White Elephants comes to mind. I need to reread it, but I remeber the story being narrated as a single scene, with no majore temporal fluctuations. But the story is about a conflict which finds its roots in the past (an unwanted pregnancy and the word play which results.) It also seems that flashes of the past might help remind a reader of something important that happens later in a narrative, to related within the main real-time flow (there’s bound to be a better word for this) of the narrative something that brings to the forefront a key idea or emotion.

In Genette’s introduction to order of events in narrative in Narrative Discourse, he uses a number of examples from Proust of small scale annacronies. He’s using them to illustrate the point that they exist. But they are also examples of the sentence structures one might use to let the past (or the future) bubble through into a present narrative.

Things

Some things I’ve been thinking about but haven’t had time to write about:

1) Three=many, something that came up in the introduction of Number, a book I’ve been dabbling in. This is a very practical thing for a writer to know, it seems, as exemplifying ideas is key. How many times have I heard “Three makes a trend.”

2) Gerard Genette’s concept of a narrative - even one that’s extensive and complex - as the “expansion of a verb.” He describes the Homer’s Odyssey and Proust’s Recherche du temps perdu, for instance, as the amplification of statements such as “Ulysses comes home to Ithaca” or “Marcel becomes a writer.” This is very similar to the core meaning of stories that Jon Franklin discusses in Writing for Story. In developing a conceptual framework for understanding and writing stories, this concept strikes me as fundamental.

The next question then: How does one settle on such a core meaning to serve as the bones upon which to hang the flesh of a narrative? Why, for instance, is a Tom Clancy novel considered less weighty (less “important”) than, say, Michael Chabon or Norman Mailer? Franklin has a chapter in his book that addresses this issue and offers advice on hunting for stories.

Beginning theory

Just finished the second edition of Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, by Peter Barry. It was a great read.

It covers a broad swath of theory, from liberal humanism to ecocriticism. Somehow, I managed to never take a course in literature that intruduced the ideas of structuralism, post-structuralism, post-modernism and so on.

Lot’s of the terms were familiar, like sub-text and deconstruction, for instance, but the seemingly common sense meanings one assumes for such things doesn’t capture the full flavor of where they came from and their complexity. So it was good to actually learn - though I still can’t explain with much clarity the exact difference between structuralism and post-structuralism.

Anyway, I recommend it.

Death to the refrigerator

I went looking for a book on writing short stories today. A nice stack of paper to hold in my and which in turn would hold my hand. I “went to the refridgerator” as one of my favorite journalism professor used to put it.

He was refering to the lengths writers will got to to avoid writing. In the throes of writing, he would suddenly find himself at the refridgerator, for the tenth time in a single hour, not writing at all. He acknowledged gaining a bit of weight in this manner. In my case, I found myself searching for my tenth book on writing short stories.

I don’t need another one. My book shelves are bloated. Instead, I need to work out the practical side of writing on my own. I find a system that works for me. So here I am. I didn’t buy the book.

Where to start? Meaning.

The story has to covey a meaning. It has to say something about how the world works and what its like to be here. Maybe its a logical epiphany. Oh my God, Jack avoid intimacy with women because his mother neglected him. Or maybe is an emotion, a feeling that can’t be expressed explicity, but is coveyed through the details of the story accumulating to put the reader on the top of Mt. Everest, in the horror of a battle field, the embrace of a long lost love.

Princeton held a science writing seminar this week, and on the poster for the event was a graphic depicting a bunch of scientific formulas (chemistry, mathematics, physics) falling into a funnel of the sort used to put oil in a car engine. Out the small end of the funnel came a single sentence written in clear English. A core meaning, distilled down from many things.

Writing a fiction story is just the opposite. The idea is grown into many details and thus the story gains life. The reader’s experience works the other way around. She absorbs all the details as she reads and from them comes to understand, logically or emotionally or both, the core meaning of the story.

Settling on that core meaning takes time, and, if it wasn’t nailed down exactly to begin with, lots of rewrites. So it seems like that’s a pretty good place to start thinking about how one writes stories. How to decide what to write about. How to distill it down so it can be blown back into life. What are the steps taken to build the story from that core meaning.

(On a side note: My friend Gadi has pointed out, or at least implied, that this blog might be an electronic version of buying too many books on writing or compulsive visits the refridgerator. I only would point out that this blog costs next to nothing to run and contains no calories.)

Signs, meaning and the nature of abstraction

The basis of communication is abstraction. This equals that.

Obama=change. McCain=experience. Sarah Palin=pig. A well groomed pig, to be specific and to interpret recent political rhetoric from the stance that nothing a presidential candidate says is truly offhand.

Contemporary discussions of communication (at least in semiotics which is the field that seems to take the broadest approach) use the term “sign” as the basic unit of discourse (a term for “communication” used by semioticians).

The discussion of course is about abstraction, the human ability to use one thing as a proxy for another thing. Two fingers held up to a fellow hunter, for instance, can represent a pair of birds in a tree. The word “dog” represents a four-legged mammal with fur and a long tail. A tap on the arm represents a call to pay attention.

We share some of these abilities with animals. The bower bird, for instance, constructs pimpin’ cribs to attracted fluttering females. The message: I’m healthy, love me. Good bower=good genes. But, really, we humans kick animal butt when it comes to abstraction.

Cognitive neuroscience investigates how our brains store information from the sensory world and store it in electrical circuits made up of neurons. The brain then draw generalizations (abstractions) from that information, noting trends among objects and using common characterists to generate create abstract categories. This bird and that bird make bowers, thus they go in the same category, one designated by the verbal abstraction “bower bird.”

The English word abstraction derives from the Latin abstractus, past participle of abstahere, to drag away. The root prefix is abs - or, “to pull” or “draw.”

Relevant definitions from Webster’s include: “disassociated from any specific instance”; “expressing a quality apart from an object”; “having only intrinsic form with little or no attempt at pictorial representation or narrative content.”

That last one is puzzling, but I’m going to ignore it for now.

Much debate has revolved around how concrete the relationship is between symbols, sounds and images (signs) and the objects (concepts, physical objects, etc.) with which they are associated (signified).

In fact, many of the differences between the various approaches in literary and cultural theory seem to hinge on the nature of link between sign and signified.

One of the biggest schism, for instance, was that of liberal humanism, the traditional approaches the English studies, and structuralism. One simple difference among the many between them was that liberal humanist critics saw the meanings of words as immutable, while structuralists saw meaning as a fluid thing that changed over time. (Warning: I might be over reaching here.)

Structuralism began with the work of the French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who wrote that “The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.”

Thus, in the structuralist view, words are decoupled from the things they represent. (Onomatopoetic words might be seen as having a closer connection, because there is a sensory link between sign and signified.)

Tall please!

So not too long ago, I walked into a coffee shop in Balitmore called Red Emma’s.

Named after Emma Goldman, an anarchist and political activist, who died in 1940, the basement shop doubles as a bookstore for feminist, African American, anti-establishment and queer literature. Food and drink offerings include fair trade coffee and vegan and vegetarian food.

The dreadlocked clerk asked me what I’d like.

“Tall, please.”

Silence. An eyebrow lifted. A dreadlocked twitched.

“Tall?” the clerk finally repeated, then paused to offer me a chance to redeem myself in the eyes of Red Emma, who if she were watching from beyond the grave (not likely since she was an atheist, but we’ll gloss over that here), was no doubt deeply dissappointed.

“We have small, medium and large,” the clerk said.

Point taken. I’m Starbucks’ whore.

My shameful suceptability to brianwashing aside, the more I think about the acceptance of “tall,” “grande,” and “venti” into common parlance, the more it seems a rich vein of semantic slippage.

There’s a lot going on here; the use of “tall” to describe the smallest unit a company offers; the power of distribution - that Starbucks is so widespread that it can change how we use language; a term that once was hip, known only to the in crowd, is now passé, distained by the vanguard as establishment rhetoric.

The irony, for me, is that I don’t even like Starbuck’s. I like coffee, Starbuck’s are everywhere, 7-Eleven coffee sucks, so I end up ordering “talls.” (I’ve asked for a “small” at a Starbucks before, and gotten the same reaction I elicited at Red Emma’s.)

Viewed from Starbucks perspective, its easy to see why they call a small a “tall.” I feel good about buying a tall - even though a small cup at 7-11 costs less. Tall is big; I get my money’s worth. A grande, well, that must be huge! What value! Venti’s must come with a Hummer.

It was cool for a while. Starbucks cherrypicked hip urban locations to open stores, lending their product a chic, hard-to-get feel. (Hip Baltimorean’s long bemoaned the company’s reluctance to grace Charm City with an outlet.)

Then Starbucks grew from 1,000 to 13,000 stores in 10 years. Millions of us learned to say “tall” for small just as the Seattle coffee juggernaut left the temple of cool to set up shop next to Applebee’s and McDonalds.

In my case, the oddest aspect of my encounter at Red Emma’s wasn’t that I’d come to associate the word “tall” with a small coffee. It was that I actually wanted a large coffee. I retained the original meaning of the word: tall=big.

I wonder what the clerk thought I meant. Despite his distaste for my discourse, I’m sure he knew what a Starbucks tall looks like. Did he think I wanted the smallest size Emma’s offers, which would have been the meaning in the context of a Starbucks store? Or did I want a coffee of the same volume as a Starbucks tall? Or did I want the largest coffee cup he offered, the connotation if I was using the original meaning of the word “tall”…big.

If he had an inkling, he didn’t show it. He rejected my “signifier,” the term for words and other signs in semiotics parlance, as inadaquate for him to place the “signified,” the entity to which I was attempting to refer. Either he was truely confused, or my odiously out-dated lingo offended his hipster sensibilites, or both.

(A related note: the term passé, in addition to meaning out-dated, is also used in fencing to describe an attack that passes the target without hitting. A nice metaphor for my original order.)

This exchange wasn’t just about the meaning of words. It also involved another type of discourse: personal identity. The clerk and I were negotiating how we define ourselves in the context of our culture.

I emerged as the yuppy professional, short haired and necktie bound, too caught up in job, family and career to get ahead of the cultural zeitgiest. He was leading the charge into the new and vital. He cared about poor South American coffee farmers, and so worked for a cafe that sells only fair trade coffee. I stole food from those farmers’ hungry children by supporting corporate America.

“Oh, yeah,” I said, with an embarrassed chuckle. “Large please.”

He silently went to the pot and poured me a tall…I mean…big, cup of coffee.

It was hot and I thought about asking for one of those sleeves that slip around the cup to insulate it. Images of bulldozers pushing down Amazonian rainforest trees flashed in my mind. So I let it go.

Speaking of tropes

I found this definition of trope on Wikipedia:

In linguistics, trope is a rhetorical figure of speech that consists of a play on words, i.e., using a word in a way other than what is considered its literal or normal form. The other major category of figures of speech is the scheme, which involves changing the pattern of words in a sentence.

Trope comes from the Greek τροπή (tropē), “a turn, a change” and that from τρέπω (trepō), “to turn, to direct, to alter, to change”. We can imagine a trope as a way of turning a word away from its normal meaning, or turning it into something else.

Types

* metonymy — a trope through proximity or correspondence, for example referring to actions of the U.S. President as “actions of the White House.”
* irony — creating a trope through implying the opposite of the standard meaning, such as describing poverty as “good times.”
* metaphor — an explanation of an object or idea through juxtaposition of disparate things with a similar characteristic, such as describing a courageous person as having a “heart of a lion.”
* synecdoche — related to metonymy and metaphor, creates a play on words by referring to something with a related concept: for example, referring to the whole with the name of a part, such as “hired hands” for workers; a part with the name of the whole, such as “the law” for police officers; the general with the specific, such as “bread” for food; the specific with the general, such as “cat” for a lion; or an object with the material it is made from, such as “bricks and mortar” for a building.
* antanaclasis — is the stylistic trope of repeating a single word, but with a different meaning each time. Antanaclasis is a common type of pun, and like other kinds of pun, it is often found in slogans. Example: “Latin America has import. (it counts, has significance). And when it imports (brings foreign goods in), it imports (it brings in the goods) with LatinAmericaImporta.com”(part of an Internet company’s name).
* allegory - A sustained metaphor continued through whole sentences or even through a whole discourse. For example “The ship of state has sailed through rougher storms than the tempest of these lobbyists.”

First post

It’s pretty simple - in a big-picture, oversimplifying sort of way. Meaning. That is the subject of inquiry. The construction and deconstruction of signs. In fact, runner-up for the name of this blog was tructionist.com (available by the way, in case anyone’s in the market.)

In a nod to transparency, and to provide fair warning to approach this all with a grain of salt, I offer this disclaimer: I ooze with enthusiasm about literary and cultural theory, but claim no more than a bush league knowledge or experience in either of these fields. Moreover, I realize that semiotics - the study of signs, for other novices - encompasses far more than literature and culture, but at this juncture I would be hard pressed to articulate the breadth of the field.

So, I will first appeal to authority by quoting Johns Hopkins University’s definition of semiotics (they appear to be a bastion of erudition in this area of study), then explain who I am and the crooked path I’ve followed to get here.

Here’s what that esteemed Baltimore bastion of learning has to say of semiotics:

“Semiotics can be defined broadly as a domain of investigation that explores the nature and function of signs as well as the systems and processes underlying signification, expression, representation, and communication. As can be demonstrated from numerous cultural traces (verbal, pictorial, plastic, spatial artifacts, etc.), the constitution of signs, the laws that govern them, and their role in human life have been ongoing concerns over the ages.”

Dry, I know. But the definition hides the vitality of the subject matter. Semiotics is the umbrella term used for the study of how humans make and communicated meaning through novels, poetry, film, political speeches, sign language and Viagra advertisements. We spend our lives in a jungle of messages. Semiotics seeks to understanding the surface of those messages and the subtexts that so often evades our conscious awareness yet still influence us at some deeper level.

My specific interest derives from my profession. I make my living writing, previously as a newspaper reporter, now as a university science writer, and in trying to hone my craft I continue to search out the best conceptual framework for producing powerful writing. After several years of toying with how to best answer that question, I’ve concluded that I’m essentially asking a question about meaning.

Words are units of meaning - signs, in semiotics speak - that elicit a reaction in the mind of the reader. Framed this way, the question become very scientific sounding: How are these units of meaning put together to elicit a desired response from the reader. Again, dry, I know. But posing the question in this way provides entry into fields of theory - literary theory, cultural theory, linquistics, anthropology, computer science, neuroscience etc. - in which the mechanisms and nature of meaning have been well studied.

My intention here is to blend my interest in writing - particularly in the writing of stories, fiction and non-fiction - with these academic fields of study. As I read more on semiotic theory, continue to write and develop my craft, and generally attempt to deconstruct the bombardment of signs I encounter in everyday life, this blog provides a place to ruminate.

Rumination meaning of course to chew slowly, like a cow, with no sense of urgency or direction.