The narrative construction of reality - Narrative Intelligence - page 54

Calvino for converting post-modern anti-foundationalism into classic mythic
forms, and so on.
Narrative genre, in this dispensation, can be thought of not only as a way of
constructing human plights, but as providing a guide for using mind, insofar
as the use of mind is guided by the use of an enabling language.
8. Normativeness. Because its “tellability” as a form of discourse rests upon
a breach of conventional expectation, narrative is necessarily normative. A
breach presupposes a norm. It is this founding condition of narrative that has
led students of the subject, from Hayden White and Victor Turner to Paul Ri-
coeur, to propose that narrative is centrally concerned with cultural legitimacy
(see especially (White 1978; Turner 1982)). A new generation of legal scholars,
not surprisingly, has even begun to explore the implicit norms inherent in le-
gal testimony, which, of course, is principally narrative in form ( Michigan Law
Review 1989 ,seealso Amsterdam and Bruner 2000) .
While everybody from Aristotle to the so-called narrative grammarians, all
agree that a story pivots on a breach in legitimacy, the differences in how the
notion of breach is conceived are themselves revealing of differing cultural em-
phases. Take Kenneth Burke's celebrated account of the dramatic “pentad.” The
pentad consists of an Agent, an Action, a Scene, a Goal, and an Instrument, the
appropriate balance between these elements being defined as a “ratio” deter-
mined by cultural convention. When this “ratio” becomes unbalanced, when
conventional expectation is breached, Trouble ensues. And it is Trouble that
provides the engine of drama, Trouble as an imbalance between any and all of
the five elements of the pentad: Nora in A Doll's House , for example, is a rebel-
lious Agent in an inappropriately bourgeois Scene, etc. Precipitating events are,
as it were, emblems of the imbalance. Burke's principal emphasis is on plight,
fabula . It is, as it were, concerned ontologically with the cultural world and its
arrangements, with norms as they “exist.”
In the second half of our century, as the apparatus of skepticism comes to
be applied not only to doubting the legitimacy of received social realities but
also to questioning the very ways in which we come to know or construct re-
ality, the normative program of narrative (both literary and popular) changes
with it. “Trouble” becomes epistemic: Julian Barnes writes a stunning narrative
on the episteme of Flaubert's perspectivalism, Flaubert's Parrot ;orItaloCalvino
produces a novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler ,inwhichtheissueiswhat
is text and what context; and theories of poetics change accordingly. They too
take an “epistemic turn.” And so the linguist Tzvetvan Todorov sees the poetics
of narrative as inhering in its very language, in a reliance on the use of linguistic