On Growth and Form of Narrative Structures

Narrative is firstly a formal organization, but it is a form that interprets the events giving them meaning. Starting from a reinterpretation of the classical Morphology of the Folktale by Vladimir Propp, we can now note how narrative form and cultural meanings interact with each other. Thus, we remove the “formal” dimension from its traditional segregation to a universe of insubstantial non-things, returning it to the arena of human strategic action and social practices. We may conceive a story as a route performed by a subject on a social and categorical map: so, a narrative configuration is essentially a set of dynamic relations, lying between a procedural and a systemic dimension. We find the basis of everything in the fundamental Saussurean view that interrupts the ordinary separation between “things” and “relations”: identity, meaning, and structure are the effects of systemic relations. In this light, Claude Lévi-Strauss offers us the most elaborate picture of narrative systems, where textual objects are seen as secondary outcomes of transformational tensions: every text is by nature a remake; it exists only through other texts. The most radical feature of this original perspective is indisputably the adoption of the theoretical model expounded by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson in his famous book on the morphogenesis of zoological species, On Growth and Form. Textual theory emerges greatly innovated, linked to a view of cultures as systemic networks of connected texts. And this applies also to products of our culture, as the concluding examples (the Alien film saga and Puccini’s Bohème) should positively illustrate. 7.1 The Meaning of the Form For some time, the idea that the narrative system has a central or even primary role among other semiotic systems is widespread, not only in semiotics but also in psychology and other areas of the humanities. Take, for example, the opening G. Ferraro (&) Università degli Studi di Torino, Torino, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 A. Sarti et al. (eds.), Morphogenesis and Individuation, Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-05101-7_7 141 words of Hayden White’s famous book The Content of the Form, which is undoubtedly relevant to our discussion: “To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself” (White 1987: 1). This primary and dominant position —that could for the first time free language from the role of “primary modeling system”—seems attributable to the fact that the narrative system offers us an image of special abstraction, or of particular purity, where the form dominates what represents the filling, i.e. the concrete elements of the story. The distinction in the field of historiography between real history and simple chronicles is revealing. “Form” is the manner, imbued with narrative, in which historians organize the data provided by the material in the chronicles. This form gives meaning to events that, by themselves, do not appear to have a narrative configuration. As White writes (1987: 44), “any given set of real events can be emplotted in a number of ways, can bear the weight of being told as any number of different kinds of stories”. So, “it is the choice of the story type and its imposition upon the events that endow them with meaning”. The narrative, in short, adds nothing to the content of the events that it tells, but superimposes a formal organization, and since this form interprets the events, it is crucial to their meaning. Let’s start from the idea that the form is anything but a neutral instrument of meaning, and let’s discard from the very beginning the hypothesis that sees the form that organizes a story as a mere reproduction of the “form of the events” to which it alludes. Multiple hypotheses are still available, which are very different from each other. The book to which we refer most often, as the starting point of narrative theory, holds the significant title of Morphology of the Folktale (Propp 1928). This work primarily presents an “unitary composition scheme”, intended to describe the general form of folktales from the Russian tradition. The scheme, despite being constructed in a partially inductive manner (from one hundred textual samples), can neither be described as a simple generalization nor as a real prototype. Since no folktale presents the entire range of functions that make up the whole schema— some, in fact, present very few, or select a conspicuously partial subset—you could say on one hand that the composition scheme is, as such, missing direct textual implementation, and on the other that each story is seen as an imperfect trace of the model, as an incomplete and basically inessential occurrence. What matters are not the projections of the model onto textual objects, but the semio-cultural configuration as such: an higher-level entity, not directly observable, understandable only in its whole finished design, and as such the primary carrier of semantic values. This hypothesis is perhaps questionable, but intriguing. The cultural value of this configuration was subsequently clarified by an analysis of its historical roots (Propp 1946), which is founded in the fundamental ritual practice of initiation ceremonies. This historical and cultural grounding, badly lost in subsequent generalizations, should make us aware of the fact that the schema matches one of the different existing narrative architectures. In any case, this inaugural essay, permeated by the spirit of the formalist movement, has bequeathed us with the idea that it is to some extent possible to isolate a purely formal level, provided with relative autonomy. 142 G. Ferraro