The narrative construction of reality - Narrative Intelligence - page 51

erful figure in a culture. He may go beyond the conventional scripts, leading
people to see human happenings in a fresh way, indeed, in a way they had
never before “noticed” or even dreamed. The shift from Hesiod to Homer, the
advent of “inner adventure” in Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy ,theadvent
of Flaubert's perspectivalism, or Joyce's epiphanizing of banalities - these are
all innovations that probably shaped our narrative versions of everyday reality
as well as changing the course of literary history, the two perhaps being not that
different.
It is to William Labov's great credit to have recognized and provided a lin-
guistic account of narrative structure in terms of two components - what hap-
pened and why it is worth telling (Labov 1967, 1981). It was for the first of
these that he proposed his notion of irreducible clausal sequences. The second
captures the element of breach in canonicality, and involves the use of what
he calls evaluation for warranting a story's tellability as evidencing something
unusual. From initial orientation to final coda, the language of evaluation is
made to contrast with the language of clausal sequence - in tense, aspect, or
other marking. It has even been remarked that in sign languages, the signing of
sequence and of evaluation are done in differentplacesinthecourseoftelling
a story, the former at the center of the body, the latter off to the side.
The “breach” component of a narrative can be created by linguistic means
as well as by the use of a putatively delegitimizing precipitating event in the
plot. Let me explain. The Russian Formalists distinguished between the “plot”
of a narrative, its fabula , and its mode of telling, what they called its sjuzet .Just
as there are linearization problems in converting a thought into a sentence,
so there are problems in, so to speak, representing a fabula in its enabling
sjuzet (for a discussion of uses of this distinction by the Russian Formalists,
see (Bruner 1986)). The literary linguist, Tzvetvan Todorov, whose ideas we
shall visit again later, argues that the function of inventive narrative is not so
much to “fabulate” new plots as to render previously familiar ones uncertain
or problematical, challenging a reader into fresh interpretive activity - echoing
Roman Jakobson's famous definition of the writer's task, “to make the ordinary
strange” (Todorov 1977; for a good statement of Roman Jakobson's view, see
(Jakobson 1960)).
6. Referentiality. The acceptability of a narrative obviously cannot depend
upon its correctly referring to reality, else there would be no fiction. Realism
in fiction must then indeed be a literary convention rather than a matter of
correct reference. Narrative “truth” is judged by its verisimilitude rather than
its verifiability. There seems indeed to be some sense in which narrative, rather