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Article Excerpt
I tell you he got more arguments out of stories than he did out of law
books, and the queer part was you couldn't answer 'em--they just made you see it and you couldn't get around it. I'm a Democrat, but I'll be blamed if I didn't have to vote for Mr. Lincoln as President, couldn't help it, and it was all on account of that snake story of his on illuminatin' the taking of slaves into Nebraska and Kansas. Remember it? (Tarbell 1907, 9)
I
How do stories convince? How do stories and "law books" appeal differently? How do narratives argue?
This essay addresses these questions. They are important questions, not just for the literary scholar but also for every person. For the "story of our lives" is a central part of our self-talk and of the conversations about us. We live our lives as stories--or as "narratives," as the literary scholars prefer to say. Whatever the term, the fact is that a deeper understanding of the subtle dynamics of storytelling and "narratology" can shed valuable light both on literature and on our lives.
The fictional stories that become part of our cultural fabric and social mythology both reflect and shape our lives: the plots of novels and the "storied lives" of fictional characters influence our lives (and resemble them too). We have much to learn from closer study of literary narratives. Art not only "entertains," as Horace observes in The Art of Poetry, it also "edifies." My reflections here aim to illuminate how stories edify us, whereby I also explore the implications of their instruction (or "persuasion").
The three questions in my opening paragraph serve as a broad framework for our inquiry, which I explore from the perspective of rhetorical studies, a field generally devoted to matters of persuasion and argumentation. I advance a conceptual outline for what might be termed "a rhetoric of narrative," i.e., if we consider rhetoric in the classical tradition as "argumentative speech." For these are rhetorical questions--not in that they do not solicit answers, but in that they demand rhetorical approaches toward answers. Among my concerns will be to distinguish narratio from narrative theory, persuasion from conviction, and narration's epistemic function from its ontological status.
In attempting to construct a rhetoric of narrative, we must take up not only the what of narrative but also the how. We must venture beyond the grammatical to the other two arts of the medieval trivium: logic and rhetoric.
The pioneering scholarly work in literary theory and narrative aesthetics during the last three decades--which has been conducted by Seymour Chatman, Gerard Genette, Tzevetan Todorov, Roland Barthes, Gerald Prince, Paul Ricoeur, Mieke Bal, and numerous others--has focused chiefly on the how of narrative, posing questions about storytelling and story construction within the grammatical orbit. (1) This scholarship in narrative theory is vast and complex, and I will only allude briefly to it here. Fundamentally, it constitutes a "grammar" of narrative that has the part of speech as narrative's defining unit (Fisher 1984, 1-22). (2) For example, in Genette's view of narrative, the key unit is the verb (and its categories: tense, mood, voice); other grammatically based theories distinguish discourse types according to nominal/verbal distinctions. Such overarching noun/verb distinctions oppose narrative stasis to succession, being to action, and description (or exposition, classification) to narration.
Thus a grammatical approach to narrative identifies which kinds of discourses are narratives, typically classifying them apart from categories such as exposition and classification. Such a grammar of narrative has been invaluable for building a taxonomy of storytelling features and distinctions that can be separated and categorized, serving as markers differentiating "narratives" from other forms of discourse. Grammar is understood here to concern itself with the linguistic level of syntax, "getting words in the right order" (Frye 1957, 244). "Right" means "correct": grammarians are chiefly concerned with "correctness," rather than meaning or persuasiveness. Grammar does not address the levels of semantics [meaning] and pragmatics [purpose], which are the domains of logic and rhetoric.
II
A grammatically based narrative theory can identify narrative from non-narrative, yet it does little to illuminate what and how a story means and argues. In considering questions other than marking narrative and categorizing its modes of operation (e.g., pause, scene, summary, ellipsis), we enter the spheres of logic and rhetoric. We are still concerned here with grammatical issues insofar as syntax (or "correctness") affects meaning and logic. But functional issues such as identification and syntactic markers now give way to "higher-order" questions of meaning, for the part of speech is no longer the defining unit for narrative in these next two arts of the trivium.
What then becomes the defining unit for logic? If grammar is "right order," logic is "right order with significance." Grammar is pattern; logic is meaningful pattern. So a "logic of narrative" would have the proposition as its defining unit, with axioms and postulates comprising its constituents. This is the dominant narrative type in scientific and philosophical treatises.
Whereas a grammar of narrative is often discussed (e.g., in the work of Gerald Prince) as the representation of a succession of "events" in a temporal sequence, the orientation in a logic of narrative would be a tightly and rationally connected chain of "concepts," rather than "events." Whereas the aim of grammar is correctness, the aim of logic is proof. One "proves" in logic and mathematics by demonstrating results from premises, beginning with axioms and ending with theorems.
As a result, a narrative theory combining these emphases of grammar and logic would probably include some distinction between "connection" and "interruption." For instance, a break in the strict logical chain--an attempted connection that "does not follow" (the familiar non-sequitur) would not simply be narration versus non-narration (exposition, classification), as in a grammar of narrative. Rather, it would be considered a narrative break. Thus the overarching distinction would be narration versus non-sense (literally, for we would have maintained the "pattern" yet lost the patterned meaning).
Strictly on the level of a logic of narrative, therefore, non-sense becomes equivalent to non-narrative, i.e., a "meaningless" or incomprehensible phrase (or clause or sentence) amounts to "non-narrative." It stops readers up short; our comprehension cannot proceed. It is "disordered." Such an interruption in the chain of propositions, so closely interconnected that each depends upon the previous one for its validity, will here be said to constitute "non-narrative."
I have sketched here a few postulates for a "logic" of narrative. My purpose is not only to distinguish it from our grammatical approaches. Logic also serves as a sort of "building block" for a rhetoric of narrative, in the same way that grammar (as mere pattern) is the "ground" for logic as meaningful order. For whereas logic is meaningful pattern, rhetoric (as rationally based argument, per the classical canon) is convincing pattern.
III
As with logic, the defining unit in rhetoric is the proposition. Whereas the syllogism is the instrument in logic, however, the enthymeme (the rhetorical syllogism that deals in probabilities rather than proofs) is the instrument of rhetoric. The aim of rhetoric is not proof but assent.
We can now glimpse here a third level in our "building block" approach toward a rhetoric of narrative. Whereas the "unfiltered stream" of history--the "undigested" flow of events--is a pure model of a grammar of narrative, the carefully numbered propositions of a geometry text exemplify a logic of narrative. By contrast, "literature" in a very broad sense corresponds to a rhetoric of narrative.
We should consider such distinctions based in the trivium as matters of emphasis rather than as a matter of pure types. Thus, all personal or human history is filtered in some way by individual minds or cultures; no mathematical or philosophical treatise, as Northrop Frye notes, can speak entirely with "the voice of Reason Itself." Philosophers' attempts to reduce grammar to logic (or vice versa) have not been successful. "The only road from grammar to logic, then, runs through the intermediate territory of rhetoric," says Frye. Pure history as grammatical narrative, or mathematics as logical narrative, illustrates the hypothetical union of logic with grammar. Frye describes literature as "the rhetorical organization of grammar and logic.... Persuasive rhetoric is applied literature, or the use of literary art to reinforce the power of argument" (1957, 245) (3).
Like a logic of narrative, a rhetoric of narrative moves by concepts. Yet they are not concerned chiefly with logical abstractions, valid proofs, and taut propositional linkages. A rhetoric of narrative does still include a substantial rational component, but its concepts are less dry or mechanical or head-centered, and instead more full-bodied and even impassioned. They are rational but also emotive and ethical.
Rhetoric in the classical view (as developed by Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian) must first and foremost establish "reasonableness" and persuasiveness, not conceptual rigor or precision. Emotional appeals and ethical proofs (e.g., referring to character and personal histories) are acknowledged as powerful means of persuasion, but they are presumed to function within an orderly framework of facts and ideas. Because rhetoric, concerned primarily with audience assent rather than formal proof, possesses a much looser propositional chain than logic (i.e., rhetoric is linked by the probabilities of enthymemes rather than the airtight rigor of syllogisms), it will also distinguish non-narrative differently than does logic.
Such a rhetoric of narrative would continue to build upon and incorporate our narrative theory distinctions on the levels of grammar and logic; it would be based on a distinction between sequences of "events" and sequences of "concepts." The overarching distinction would be narration versus argument. Narration in this sense would be primarily expository or informative. (Nevertheless, as I will demonstrate later, narrative categories such as description, classification, and especially explanation can also operate argumentatively.)
Since its units of identification have neither the taut precision of parts of speech nor of geometric, logical chains, the twin tasks of formulating a rhetoric of narrative and distinguishing narrative (as "mere" information) from argument are more nuanced and interpretive than at the lower levels. We may say that a "break" in the rational/emotional chain of propositions, each of which must somehow advance the argument, constitutes "mere narration," or aimless storytelling (i.e., as in a tangent or digression). If the break is extreme or continues, we may have a "pure" short...
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