Narrative Theories – Aristotle
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Narrative Theories
Aristotle
(384 BC – 322 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great.
Every story has a beginning, a middle and an end
The “well-made” story demands a sense of closure (following human nature)
The Greek philosopher Aristotle described in his Poetics a set of rules to describe an ideal narrative. These broadly consist of the following:
A story needs a plot which is constituted as a beginning, followed by a middle and closed off with an ending. These points of entry, middle and exit should be clearly defined, and should not be meddled with.
The highest level of tension in the narrative should coincide with the actual middle of the narrative.
The story should be about a hero/protagonist, who should be a representation of someone important in the polis, because these characters are crucial for the existence of the entire polis.
The tension in the narative comes from a conflict, which is condensed in the character of the antagonist. The plot should be aimed at working through this conflict.
The narrative should arouse feelings of pity and fear in the spectator, who will identify with the hero and who will, from working together with the hero through the conflict, eventually get a feeling of katharsis (a mental/psychic kind of cleansing or an obtaining of a new understanding). The whole narratives aim is the bringing about of katharsis in the spectator.
To be worthy of the name tragedy or epic, the narrative should be of a definite magnitude.
Tzvetan Todorov
(born 1939, Bulgarian philosopher) suggested that conventional narratives are structured in five stages:
a state of equilibrium at the outset;
a disruption of the equilibrium by some action;
a recognition that there has been a disruption;
an attempt to repair the disruption;
a reinstatement of the equilibrium
This type of narrative structure is very familiar to us. In the James Bond movies, for example, a megalomaniac usually creates the disruption by attempting to take over the world. Once this is recognised Bond is despatched by M and most of the film is taken up with stage four before finishing at stage five.
Claude Lйvi-Strauss
born November 28, 1908, is a French anthropologist who developed structuralism as a method of understanding human society and culture.
Constant creation of conflict/opposition propels narrative. Narrative can only end on a resolution of conflict. Opposition can be visual (light/darkness, movement/stillness) or conceptual (love/hate, control/panic), and to do with soundtrack. Binary oppositions.
Binary opposites: Protagonist/antagonist
Good looking/ugly
Witty/humourless
Binary Oppositions from James Bond
Bond
Bond
Villain
Villain
Woman
Woman
Bond
Free World
Soviet Union
Great Britain
Non-Anglo Saxon Countries
Duty
Sacrifice
Cupidity
Ideals
Love
Death
Chance
Planning
Luxury
Discomfort
Roland Barthes
Semiotics professor in the 1950s and 1960s
Roland Barthes describes a text as being like a tangled ball of threads which needs unravelling so we can separate out the colours. Once we start to unravel a text, we encounter an absolute plurality of potential meanings. We can start by looking at a narrative in one way, from one viewpoint, bringing to bear one set of previous experience, and create one meaning for that text. You can continue by unravelling the narrative from a different angle, by pulling a different thread if you like, and create an entirely different meaning. And so on. An infinite number of times. If you wanted to.
All you need to know, again, very basically, is that texts may be open (ie unravelled in a lot of different ways) or closed (there is only one obvious thread to pull on).
Barthes also decided that the threads that you pull on to try and unravel meaning are called narrative codes and that they could be categorised in the following five ways:
Enigma Code (sets up a question to be answered later)
Semic Code (How characters, actions,events, settings etc. take on meaning within a culture.
Symbolic Code – Binary Oppositions or Psychological symbols
Action Code – understood