Defining Narrative
John McHugh
I think the first major
distinction I would want to make in defining narrative is that the terms narrative and
story are not, in my view, synonymous. It may have more to do with the baggage that the
word "story" comes with, usually identified with either a read or heard tale,
story is definitely word or language based. Narratives, however, do not need to depend on
words, they can be visual, aural (in any form of sound, be it spoken language or music),
maybe even tactile (could sex be considered a narrative, I’m not sure, but it’s
the only example of a purely tactile narrative I could come up with) (an argument could be
made for a carefully planned meal being a taste (gustative?) narrative, but I think that
might be a stretch). Story also is usually assumed to have character and plot and I want
to suggest that narrative needs neither characters nor plot, but can rely simply on some
kind of motion (generally progressive, but not limited to that (in music, Brian argues the
tonic to root is a narrative moment, but I think we can include almost any tone to tone
movement as narratological, maybe even more so when it’s the tonic and goes to a note
besides the root, thus defeating our expectations and focusing our attention even more
keenly on the progression). I don’t want to narrow the focus to simply progressive
because the majority of modern narratives are an attempt at non-progressivity, or at
least, broken progression.
Another idea I am playing with is the idea of a narrative that has
no movement. My best example is art, frozen moment art, say portraiture, must be
considered narratological if it forces its viewers to construct a narrative surrounding
the captured moment. This, though, is a different kind of narrative, one where the work
only inspires the viewers to construct their own narrative. I think this is also the clue
to studying narrative in music. Maybe rather than discussing the narrative of the piece
(which if the audience must construct for themselves, must necessarily be almost entirely
subjective) we should look at how the piece inspires narrative moments for the audience. I
think the html experiments would fall somewhere between the more traditional view of
narrative and inspiration narrative, since the reader is supposed to be able to
"control" the narrative (whether or not this is the actuality is less important
for now than that it happens to be the goal).
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