Some speculations on Narrative and Story in Token 2000

What's the difference between narrative and a story?

Is a mere chronological list of events a narrative? Must there also be some causal links?

Intuition: a story is a narrative about a problem. Craig says this is well known in screen-writing, it's the so-called Central Conflict Theory.

For token 2000, can we use stories? If so, we need to know kinds of problems even make sense in this domain

1. Problems that the artists had (artistic, technical, economic). e.g. How can I paint a group of 20 people in a way that will lead the eye to the main figures? How can I earn enough to survive? How can I manage the work of my school?
2. Problems of the people the artists portrayed (human interest). I have seen museum texts written from this standpoint, particularly those intended for children.
3. Problems of art historians: Who created this, and when? How do we know? Who influenced this painter? There are some works in the Rijksmuseum for which the name of the artist is unknown. In some cases scholars believe they have several works by the same unknown person, and in this case they invent an "anonymous" person and give him (or her!) the name "Master of the X" where X is the title (again, one supposes, invented by scholars) of some particular piece (again, how this piece is chosen is unknown to me). So somehow, art historians solve a puzzle of deciding that two pieces are by the same person. How do they do it?
4. Problems for the audience: How can you understand this work? Why does it matter? How does it make me feel?

Only some stories are good stories. What makes a story good? First, we need to care about the characters and their problems. Second, the development of the situation must be interesting and rich (e.g. the protagonist's initial understanding of the problem is inaccurate or partial, or the first attempted solution only makes things worse.) I don't think we can hope for this in Token 2000.

So the question is, if we can only make weak stories, is that better than no story at all? I don't know. It might still be entertaining, or at least more memorable than no story. What's the relation between rhetoric and a narrative? I claim that if Rhetoric is about convincing or explaning, then rhetoric forms a part of the structure of the narrative. The narrator has to provide the reader with sufficient information (evidence) that the reader can reconstruct the problem, the characters's understanding of the situation, and the actions taken. We have to assume that characters have motivations we can understand, that they are about as rational as we are, and can take actions for intended effect. The writer's task is to provide us with evidence so we can make inferences about these characters, and this inference-making is no different, in principle, than the logical inferences we make in following other arguments.

Perhaps the sole difference that in plain rhetoric, it's possible and perhaps even desirable to state one's main goal explicitly, and perhaps even to repeat it, but this is rarely if ever done in a novel (though I can recall novels, particularly those written in a diaristic style where the protagonist or narrator "speaks" in first person to the reader (or to the diary), stating, more or less plainly, the conclusions that you are to come to, e.g. "At the time these events took place, dear reader, I had no idea of the horror that was soon to engrip my life. As you will see, I was still living in a dream of a sheltered life. But all that came abrubtly to an end".)

Another point I want to note, though it's not original to me, is that story can be a social performance, done for its own sake. We never repeat rhetoric (for both Mann and Thomspon and Searle, one of the preconditions for making an assertion is that the speaker believe that the hearer does not already know the material asserted.), but we read stories to children over and over again, though there's no new information in them. Indeed, anyone who has read a story to a child knows that if you try to perform the text in any way differently, the child objects. 

Comment from Craig about the relationship between narrative and rhetoric (Fri March 31, 14:00):

An interesting book on scriptwriting is "Alternative Scriptwriting: writing beyond the rules" by Ken Dancyger and Jeff Rush (1995).
Dancyger and Rush characterise the Hollywood dominant 3-act restorative structure in terms of a central conflict established in act 1. In this model, there's generally a single protagonist, and the conflict is a moral one. Act two begins with the protagonist making the wrong choice about how to resolve this conflict, and the rest of the act concerns the negative implications of the wrong choice. In act 3 the protagonist recognises the wrongness of her/his choice and corrects it somehow, leading to the ever-so-tiresome happy ending. This is a very conscious and well established model that is learnt and followed by mainstream commercial screenwriters. The structure is referred to as "restorative", since the moral conflict involves a transgression of normative morality, and the resolution involves the restoration of that morality.

Dancyger and Rush go into a lot of detail about the conventions involved in this system, and then systematically explore various violations of those conventions as strategies for alternative (and FRESH) screenwriting.

The model for the restorative 3-Act structure is interesting from a rhetorical viewpoint, since it suggests that the primary function of this kind of narrative structure is the reaffirmation of a specific system of morality. Hence the structure has the rhetorical function of supporting a moral position via a story. Alternative screenwriting straegies of the kind explored by Dancyger and Rush represent alternative rhetorics implicitly arguing for other moralities, ideologies and world views from that expressed by the 3-act restorative model.

End of comment ...