Reconciling a Meaningful Definition of Narrative With Cognitive Constructivism

Ryan (2007, 22) forthrightly describes the relatively recent trend of using the word ‘narrative’ in many more contexts then it has been traditionally applied. Some of these uses genuinely fall within a reasonable definition, while other uses, are catachreses uttered from equivocating users (Ryan, 2007, 22). Succinctly, Ryan (2007, 28-31) provides a list of theoretical criteria for narrative which, as a “toolkit for do-it-yourself definitions” can be used to assemble a pithy denotation, surrounded by “concentric circles” of decreasingly vital connotations. Borrowing from that technique, an attempt to define narrative will proceed here.

One of Ryan’s criteria is that a narrative evolves over a time-span (Ryan, 2007, 29). The importance of time is elaborated by Abbot, who describes narrative as enabling the audience to reconstruct some sense of time from the events described (2008, 4), even if the narrative discourse is not presented in a logically temporal order (2008, 16-17). The second pillar of a denotation of narrative would be Ryan’s (2007, 29) criteria that events are represented as actually taking place in a story-world.

Proximal to this denotation would be Ryan’s (2007, 29) criteria concerning a sense of agency in the characters. Without going into speculation on consciousness, it is agreeable that mentalistic or qualities do strengthen the narrative categorization, but are not required. More distal criteria are the presence of individual characters, and of closure (Ryan, 2007, 29). There can certainly be compelling narratives about social groups without mentioning specific individuals, and some neo-realist films display a deep narrative without an introduction or resolution. An oddball criterion is that of meaningfulness (Ryan, 2007, 29), which can be said to be important because truly meaningless stimuli are likely to be overlooked entirely, yet also unimportant because of the tremendous variation between individuals subjectivity on the matter.

Because narratives can be entirely fictional, it is important to note that even the most physically explicit criteria, even the two central pillars of narrative assembled here, are really just representations of how the information is decoded and constructed in the minds of audience members. Therefore, even the central denotation can be described as a gray area. A sense of time or story could theoretically be conjured from nearly any stimuli; even those not at all intended to be narrative. Just as the same story can be interpreted into different narratives, the same narrative discourse can be interpreted into different narrative representations in the minds of the audience members. How much of these representations can be ascribed to the formal qualities of the discourses, and how much are due individual variation? The inherently constructive nature of cognition corresponds with the concept of the prod-user (Fischer, 2010).

References

Abbot, P. (2008). The Cambridge introduction to narrative. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Fischer, A. (2010). Global media narratives in the digital age (lecture). Binghamton University.

Ryan, M. L. (2007). Toward a definition of narrative. Herman, D. (Eds.), The Cambridge companion to narrative (pp. 22-33). New York: Cambridge University Press.