Abstract
Our experience of narrative has an internal and an external aspect--the content of the narrative’s representations, and its intentional, communicative aetiology. The interaction of these two things is crucial to understanding how narrative works. I begin by laying out what I think we can reasonably expect from a narrative by way of causal information, and how causality interacts with other attributes we think of as central to narrative. At a certain point this discussion will strike a problem: our judgements about what is a relevant possibility within the narrative’s story depend on our judgements of probability; but these latter judgements depend, in turn, on factors external to the world of the story, and cannot be explained in terms of causal relations available within the story. We need the external, author-centred perspective at this point. These different perspectives, the internal and the external, correspond to different types of explanations we may give of events in a story; I call these internal and external explanations. I show how these different explanations are made use of in two contrasting arthistorical projects. I use these examples as the basis for a generalisation about the structure of the two explanatory forms. Finally, I suggest some ways in which explanations of these two kinds relate to one another, and to our thinking when we are engaged by a narrative.
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Notes
See Wollheim (1980). We do find exactly the two-foldness of painting in visual narratives: in film, and in painting itself. But I am putting that aside here to examine something not identical to but merely like the two-foldness of painting: something which we find in all narratives, of whatever media.
See his (1996), especially Chapters 2 and 8.
See Carroll (2001).
See Lewis (1986).
Sometimes a distinction is made between paratactic and hypotactic plots: a distinction between those which make their causal connections clear (or relatively so) and those that do not; the distinction allows for more or less (see e.g. Rabkin (1977). But a plot rated as highly paratactic, such as The Sound and the Fury tells us a good deal about causal history in Lewis’ sense. And this paratactic/hypotactic distinction as regard to plot needs to be distinguished from a grammatical distinction often expressed using the same terms: the distinction between texts which conjoin or subordinate phrases, and those which don’t. A grammatically paratactic text may enable the reader to be quite clear about the causal connections it implicitly represents.
See Auerbach’s discussion (1953, Chapter 4) of Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks, for a subtle exploration of the interplay between causality and specificity, and the relation of both to the presentation of a vivid and concrete narrative. Hayden White discusses a kind of writing he calls the annal, which, he says, falls short of being a narrative in various ways (White 1981). His example is from the Eighth Century Annals of Saint Gall: a disconcertingly unconnected list of years with at most a brief comment against each (some years have no entries against them at all). The entry for the year 712 is “Flood everywhere.” This minimal account is certainly thick with causality; we already know what kind of event is in question here, roughly what its cause is, and can guess at some of its effects. But this is causality without much specificity. (Note the spuriously high degree of specificity in the entry for year 732: “Charles fought against the Saracens at Poitiers on Saturday”.)
Noel Carroll discusses a case where the discourse announces at the end that all these events have happened in a world with “no causes, just coincidences”. He says that this is in fact no narrative. I take it that Carroll has in mind an addition more like my (4) than my (3). I agree that with the addition of (3) there is no narrative. But if the case Carroll offers is supposed to be genuinely is like my (4) then he and I disagree about it, for I say that intuition is on the side of it being a narrative, and I am not prepared to quarrel with intuition in this case. See Carroll (2001), p.35.
David Velleman has argued, on other grounds, that causal relations are not essential to narrative; see his (2003). He claims that our sense of narrative may be given by our emotional reaction to the events of the story told, and need not depend on our perception that causal relations are represented. I consider his argument in some detail in my (2006). I conclude there that the examples which he presents as favouring his case show something different: that our sense of narrative may depend on our being subject to a persistent illusion that the events of the story are causally connected—or connected, at least, by a relation of determination—even when we are told that they are not so connected. It may be that what is said here about causal relations needs to be generalised to accommodate a wider class of determination relations, but I do not think that this would be difficult. For the sake of simplicity, I confine myself to causal relations.
Though nothing depends, in my argument, on whether it is true.
See Beardsley (1981).
See e.g. Walton (1990).
For this last view see Predelli (2005), Chapter 2, Sect. 6. Predelli argues that we have reason to believe in the shiftability of context even for utterances such as “Miss Bates was upset because Emma Woodhouse was rude to her”, where there are no indexicals. One possibility is that Predelli’s context-shifting account turns out to be an account of what it takes (as Walton puts it) to engage in the make-believe of asserting that Miss Bates was upset because Emma Woodhouse was rude to her. In that case there would be two, and not three, rival accounts before us. It is also possible to combine these views, arguing that each of the accounts is correct for different kinds, or occasions, of utterance. Thanks to Predelli for discussion of this point.
The same point applies, by the way, to the idea of context shifting; we can’t say “Because the order to charge was given in 1815, the cavalry is attacking now”, and expect “now” to refer to the time of the battle.
See Walton (1973).
Or we might instead think that the proper criterion of correctness was the availability of those purposes as rationally justified motivation. We need not settle that issue here.
Or why the door to Walter Neff’s (Fred MacMurray) apartment opens outwards (Double Indemnity, Wilder, 1944). Wilder needed to place it that way so that Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) could not be seen in the corridor by Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson). It is not part of the story that Neff lives in an eccentrically designed building.
Though radical revision of belief could open up a space for an internal explanation. We just might discover that in Biblical times people often lined up on the same side of the table, or that it was widely believed in Leonardo’s time that they did.
See Walton (1990), p. 175.
See Walton (1970).
It is characteristic of naturalistic fiction to avoid the abandonment of representational correspondence.
See also George Wilson’s treatment (2003) of certain narrative tropes in von Sternberg.
See Kinkead-Weekes (1962).
See Sperber and Wilson (1995), Chapter 3.
See my (1993).
Collapse, in my sense, occurs when external facts become part of the content of the narrative itself, and hence internal. I don’t count it as collapse when, as often happens, both domains are represented within the same vehicle. Thus literary authors sometimes explicitly comments on their capacity to shape the fates of their characters, schlockmeister William Castle appears on screen in Mr. Sardonicus (1961) to ask the audience for a judgement on the villain, and Ingmar Bergman interviews his actors in A Passion (1969). Such activities do not automatically insert themselves into the world of the fiction itself, and do not in fact do so in Mr. Sardonicus or in A Passion.
A great many narratives bring about contact between the two perspectives in subtle ways—ways that deserves a label less dramatic than “collapse”. Jonathan Culler (1980) notes how Oedipus becomes convinced of his own guilt as much through a sense of “narrative coherence” as through attending to the evidence. Such cases have been used, rather too freely, to illustrate the thesis that character and motivation mean little in comparison with the forces of “language” (see the balanced commentary by Roslyn Jolly (1997).) But these cases are real enough, and deserve separate treatment.
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Currie, G. Both sides of the story: explaining events in a narrative. Philos Stud 135, 49–63 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9092-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9092-1