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.