In my last post on genre I provided an overview of Longacre’s four basic genre distinctions. He uses the distinctions of agent orientation and successive temporal succession to differentiate one genre from another. For the sake of discussion, I’ll talk about narrative as primarily focused on participants and events. These parameters are not absolute but prototypical of the genre. There are times in narrative where other considerations override the focus on participants and events, hence Longacre’s parameters are principles rather than rules. They provide a simple heuristic for differentiating the genres based on what is most salient characteristics in each.

But wait, there’s more!

Participant-driven versus Event-driven

Writers will not necessarily place equal value on each parameter. Instead these parameters are better understood as forming a continuum, with the focus on participants at one end and on events at the other. I’m not just talking here about within a given narrative, I mean within the narrative  as a whole. In other words, you could have a narrative that is almost completely focused on participants to the exclusion of events, or vice versa. How, you ask? How is it possible to tell a narrative without events, or to tell a story without really focusing on the participants? It happens a lot more than you might think! The basic difference between these two extremes can be crassly summarized as the difference between a “chick flicks” and your standard issue Chuck Norris or Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.

 

 

 

Participant-Driven———————————————————————- Event-Driven

Participant-driven narrative

I read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice over Christmas, taking a fair amount of ribbing for getting in touch with my feminine side. In any case, it was time well spent based on what I learned. It was the most uneventful book I have ever read, literally! I mean there were virtually no events! Almost the entire book was delivered as dialogue between characters, with very little actually reported via narration from Austen. It was not just that she avoided frilly descriptions of scenes; if there was narration to be done, she used the participants to accomplish it. It took me about 2/3 of the way through the book to recognize the pattern that had been subconsciously bugging me. Here’s what I am talking about.

In chapter 49 the Bennets are awaiting word about the whereabouts of Lydia, who had run away with the unscrupulous Mr. Wickham. Instead of narrating the arrival of the expressman from London with a letter bearing news, Austen uses a servant–one of the rare instances in the book where the hired help is anything more than a prop–to convey the arrival of the letter. But even here the servant doesn’t say, “Hey look, the mailman Behold, a rider approacheth! Prithee come hither!” Nope! Instead the housekeeper recounts something that has already happened. The narration is kept to an absolute minimum:

Two days after Mr. Bennet’s return, as Jane and Elizabeth were walking in the shrubbery behind the house,1 they saw the housekeeper coming towards them, and, concluding that she came to call them to their mother,2 went forward to meet her; but instead of the expected summons, when they approached her, she said to Miss Bennet, “I beg your pardon, madam, for interrupting you, but I was in hopes you might have got some good news from town, so I took the liberty of coming to ask.”3

“What do you mean, Hill? We have heard nothing from town.”

“Dear madam,” cried Mrs. Hill, in great astonishment,4 “don’t you know there is an express come for master from Mr. Gardiner?5 He has been here this half-hour, and master has had a letter.”

Away ran the girls, too eager to get in to have time for speech.6

Most narratives have a fair amount of material that is attributed to the narrator, describing a scene or event. Not so in Austen’s Pride and Predjudice. In place of narration, she uses dialogue between the characters to accomplish most of what she needs conveyed. There is narration, but it’s like she avoids it at all costs.

Event-driven Narrative 12772_view

So what about the other end of the spectrum, where there is almost total focus on events instead of participants? You have your average action movie like “Rambo,” “Commando,” or may the remake of “The A-Team.” You get to know the characters mainly through what they do instead of what they say. What they say? Not very much. In most cases there is an attempt a relationship or romantic involvement, there is an effort to provide some kind of meaningful linkage between the events that passes for a plot. However, the real point of interest is the events, watching stuff get blown up or the good guys prevailing over the bad. If there is dialogue in the action movie, it is usually poorly delivered and pretty lame. I’m thinking here of the scene in “Rambo” where the Vietnamese girl is asking Rambo if he’d take her back to America with him. About the time the intimacy begins to develop, the character is killed off. There’s a “touching” moment after she is inevitably killed: Rambo ties on the Jade necklace that she has given him around his neck as he is suiting up for battle. Her death is symbolized by the necklace, becoming another motivation for rescuing the POWs and killing bad guys.

So what’s my point? Genre is not monolithic. There are times in narrative, as in the gospels and Acts, where most all of the content is delivered in dialogue rather than with extensive narration, like Jesus conversation with Nicodemus or the woman at the well in John 3 & 4.  But there are plenty of other times in John’s gospel where he interrupts the story to narrate important details. So although Austen may have a tendency toward dialogue and the action-movie writers toward, well, action, we find a mix of both even within a single author’s work as well.

Okay, quiz time: What makes following picture funny?

 

  1. Perhaps they were looking for the Knights who say “Ni”? [↩]
  2. Note that Austen uses the participants’ inner musings to describe what might happen (irrealis). This material does not advance the plot, but actually delays learning what actually is the reason for her coming out. It’s a great delay technique to add prominence to what follows. [↩]
  3. Note that the housekeeper has assumed the Bennet girls know what she knows: an important letter has arrived from London. On the contrary, her statement causes confusion since the girls had no idea anything had transpired while they frolicked in the shrubbery! [↩]
  4. Note the mid-sentence placement of the quotative frame. It could have been eliminated, or at the very least placed at the beginning of the clause. Note it also includes a characterization of the speech–crying (out) in great astonishment. The mid-clause placement comes between the unnecessary “vocative” of address and the main proposition, another great use of delay tactics to build suspense just before some significant thing. Delay what? Learning why Hill should believe that the Bennets may have received word from London. [↩]
  5. Obviously the don’t know, which is precisely the point of all these delay devices being clustered. [↩]
  6. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (London: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1918), 307. [↩]