The complexity and ambiguity of narrative
The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity.
—Scott Turow, novelist
I was reminded of a funny phrase from a comic—”What is another word for Thesaurus”? I think it was Steven Wright.
Last night, amidst the packing for another work trip — let’s be honest, I haven’t fully unpacked from the last one, the clean but unfolded laundry sitting on a bedroom chair, a disorganized office, and a host of other things whistling for attention, I turned off my office light, made myself an omelette and watched Three Thousand Years of Longing.
Your mileage may vary. I am definitely not an Arabian Nights sort of genre person but holy moly if this story didn’t pull me in. By the time things bordered on disturbing I was already hooked. Afterwords I read that when it debuted at Cannes it received 6 standing ovations!
First of all, the charms of Idris Elba not withstanding, but like Dr Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) I am also a solitary person. I am lucky that my 30 year marriage and children never stifle my traveling nature but simply provide a North Star and sense of purpose to it all. I have learned in the last decade or so that introverted extroverts are an actual thing.
Second, she is a Narratologist. New word for me and a prompt for my chuckle at Steven Wright. Brilliant distinctions abound between simply telling stories and narratology.
The French term narratologie was coined by Tzvetan Todorov, a Bulgarian-French historian, philosopher, and literary critic, in his 1969 book Grammaire du Décaméron. In that book, Todorov encouraged literary critics to shift their focus to the most general structural properties of a narrative, properties which would apply no matter what kind of narrative you looked at: things like sequencing of events, character, narrator, audience, perspective. Todorov’s call for a new way of thinking about narrative became the academic discipline of narratology. — Arkady Martine, The Mysterious Discipline of Narratologists: Why We Need Stories to Make Sense
How did I miss this movie? I think I vaguely recall a trailer but my habit since Covid is to just wait for it to show up on a streaming service. Alithea even travels to a conference about Narratology so hello—where do I sign up?
Narratology is, broadly, the study of narrative structures and the way in which humans perceive, create, and are influenced by them. It’s a type of literary theory, and like most literary theory, it is full of terms that can seem overtly and deliberately obscure. (Why, for example, do we need the term focalization when we’ve already got the perfectly good and fairly explicable concept of point of view? There are some reasons, but most of the time I’ve found that point of view works just fine, especially when I’m speaking as a practitioner—a writer—rather than a literary analyst or critic.) But what narratology does—especially in its newer forms, like ‘cognitive narratology’—is give us tools to think about not only the patterns in a narrative but how narratives are part of how human beings understand and interpret events which happen to them in their everyday lives.Arkady Martine, The Mysterious Discipline of Narratologists: Why We Need Stories to Make Sense
The real beauty of the film is how a movie about narratology teaches the very thing it features as an occupation of the central figure. That is a jumbled way of saying, you learn about storytelling and narratology by listening and watching stories — some untold, a few assumed, and the ones that are revealed.
The last part of the preceding quote is what I am aligning with the work I do telling stories with geospatial data:
But what narratology does—especially in its newer forms, like ‘cognitive narratology’—is give us tools to think about not only the patterns in a narrative but how narratives are part of how human beings understand and interpret events which happen to them in their everyday lives
Have you seen it? Let me know what you thought!
Film based on a story The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye: Five Fairy Stories