narrative, what is that?

NARRATIVE

All media 'packages' reality for us. Conventions shape representation in every culture, language, and media. Imagine that you are asked to represent for others the story of your own life. If you chose to write an autobiography, you would need to think in chapters, establishing major events, themes or characters, arranging them so as to impart the desired message. Think of trying to represent your life photographically: which photos would be included, which left out? Would sequence matter? Would it be important to present them in an appealing manner, or would a chaotic pile be more appropriate? And if you were to compress your life into a feature length film, how would you begin to represent its changes and complexities? What would you use for the soundtrack?

Of course, this is not really how life happens to us. To 'narrate' reality is to give it shape and meaning within known, and therefore 'readable', conventions of shape and meaning! Roland Barthes, the 20th century French structuralist and cultural commentator, is convinced that narrative lies at the very heart of human experience:

Narrative is first and foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed amongst different substances - as though any material were fit to receive man's stories. Able to be carried by articulated language, spoken and written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting...,cinema, comics, news items, conversation. Moreover, under the almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative.... it is simply there, like life itself. (Barthes, 1968, p.251)

Barthes is also anxious to point out that, precisely because of its 'pre-formed' character, narrative is never an 'innocent' player in the depiction of reality. It brings to each of its forms an often unacknowledged bundle of assumptions, distortions and predispositions.