Riccardo Fusaroli (2010) – Narrative Schemas, Unnatural – Dictionary of Unnatural Narratology

Unnatural narrative schemas

In structural narratology the depiction of a meaningful action is the basic structure of narration. Representative of these positions is A. J. Greimas (1970). Greimas using Propp (1928) as a starting point puts the Narrative Schema at the core of his model of narratives: “an internal structure which assigns a general form to the action and which distributes a limited number of general roles to be played by the protagonists” (Bundgård 2007). In its most current formulation, a narrative schema is constituted by three phases: manipulation, action,sanction - involving interdefined actantial positions like destinant and destinee, subject, anti-subject and object (Bertrand 2000). These positions endorse valorial stances and thus create the ground to play out a conflict and infer a moral, by comparing the outputs of the actions and the way they are evaluated by the narrator(enunciational sanction). Even if the cultural origin of the schema is sometimes mentioned (“cultural grid of narrative organization sedimented in the collective memory by tradition as a primitive” Bertrand 2000), Greimas seems to consider it as an almost transcendental category of human understanding, an ahistorical formal mechanism and Bundgård (2007) attempts to ground it in basic perceptual phenomenology, thus strongly naturalizing it.

The concept of narrative schema and its linearity are problematized by the presence of multiple perspectives in the narration and their fading into each other in works such as“I Malavoglia” by Verga, and Forestillinger by Fly. However, narrative schemas can be more properly defined unnatural when: i) the human actions represented are tentative and unstable, they present multiple possible rationalities at once or lose them in the course of the action, they are open to re-adjustment, they constitute in time and in situation, far from being linear and pre-determined. (cp. the African tale "So and the cyclops", "La nausée" by Sartre, and edutainment systems like "Life in Ayiti" analysed in Ferri & Fusaroli 2009). ii) the human actions represented are contradictory and revised, through explicit narrator intervention (cp. Reconstruction by Boe) or more implicitly by the actorial and actantial identities of the characters being confused and exchanged(cp. Mulholland Drive, Lost Highways, Inland Empire, by Lynch)

Unnatural narrative schemas caution the reader and the analyst to avoid a posteriori perspectivesre-constructing and impositveclosed, linear and manageable narrative structures. On the contrary they emphasize the importance to pay attention to: i) the conflicts of actions and interpretations in the texts not only as explicitly narrated, but also as implicitly represented, through corrections and variations; ii) an online perspective on the unfolding of the narration.

It has to be noted that the "natural" conception of narrative schemas has in fact its roots i) in an interpretation of Aristotle that attributes the Gestaltic wholeness of the plot (mythos) to human action; ii) St. Augustin's conception of the human action as an actio in the rhetorical sense of the term (cp. Rastier 1999). What happens is that an initially conventional narrative structure from a dramaturgical convention (in Aristotle) or interpretive tendency (St. Augustin) is over-imposed to the human action and through its sedimentation is perceived as natural. This in turn leads to the naturalisation of the original narrative tendency, now appearing as grounded on the nature of human actions. [But for a different story on the perceptual phenomenological origins of the narrative schema, cf Bundgård 2007] Therefore unnatural narrative schemas, while breaking established conventions, are maybe closer to a cognitive [but not phenomenological] description of human action than their natural counterpart (on the heterogeneous distributed and unstable and interpretive nature of human will as leading actions cp. Ross, Spurrett, Kincaid and Stephens (eds) 2007 and Descombes 1996).

Bertrand, D. 2000. Précis De Sémiotique Littéraire. Paris: Nathan Université.

Bundgård, P. 2007. The cognitive import of the narrative schema. Semiotica 247–261.

Descombes, V. 1996. Les institutions du sens. Paris: Editions de minuit.

Ferri, G. & Fusaroli, R. 2009. Which narrations for persuasive technologies?, Acts of the AAAI Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies II, Stanford: Stanford Publications.

Greimas, A. J. 1970. Du Sens. Paris: Seuil. Propp, V. I. [1928] 1968: Morphology of the Folktale (trans. Laurence Scott, 2nd edn.). Austin: University of Texas Press.

Rastier, F. 1999. Action et récit. In Raisons Pratiques, 10, 1999, p. 173-198.

Ross, D., Spurrett, D., Kincaid, H. & Stephens, G. L. (eds) 2007. Distributed Cognition and the Will. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press