The social and psychological dimensions of 'narrative'

In this essay I examine Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather, Memento, and Run Lola Run to determine how their original take on narrative relates to psychological and social experience. My discussion identifies space, time and causation as the key elements to each text’s originality, and explores the way in which these dimensions relate back to contemporary experience. Drawing on the thought of T.S. Eliot, H. Grosz, and B.H. Smith I also try to explain a way in which social experience has become an influence for most contemporary narrative.

In discussing how these texts make judgements upon contemporary social and psychological experience, we need to understand what ‘contemporary’ really means, because to speak about the nature of contemporary experience seems a contradiction of terms. Nature is something immutable, organic, and inescapable, whereas ‘contemporary’ implies something was different before and will be after. Can there really be such a thing as contemporary experience to make judgements upon?

If we consider psychological experience first, then to say people think differently in the contemporary world to how they did before appears incorrect. The emotional condition is more acceptable today than in the past, and expressing our psychological state is not seen as something personal, but actively encouraged as healthy and appropriate (e.g. stress in the workplace), however surely cultured humans have always felt happiness, sadness, stress and so on. For the three texts to make any judgement upon contemporary psychological experience it cannot be about the psychological phenomenon itself, only the way in which is it presented to us within the text (i.e. its narrative form). Psychological experience is consistent, and perhaps so because it is a narrative itself. We experience the world through the ordering and sense-making of otherwise random events into a narrative that is better understood. If we examine our psychological experiences, we might question whether events occurring in the world (or story) are genuinely ordered, or whether we, as meaning making individuals, make connections that do not exist, to thus create a story, or narrative (Smith, 1980, p.229). Immanuel Kant (1781) thought this was an innate restriction to our epistemological limits, and that we can only ever know things (and their relations) within the confines of space and time.

Relevantly, the organisations of narrative in our three texts are all manipulations of space, time, and causation (hereafter; STaC). The texts make other judgements it is true, but even these themes relate to STaC. For example, the personal identity theme in Memento might be understood in terms of a definition; recognition of a unified self persisting over time (Locke, 1975). We are only able to recognise ourselves if we can place our bodies in space and time, acting out, or being acted upon by certain events. What Mementodoes is break that recognition of the self persisting over time. Pieces of time are removed from the protagonist’s sense of recognition and personal identity becomes fragmented. Similarly in Run Lola Run, we are treated to a wonderful exploration of ‘what ifs’ by manipulation of STaC. The speed at which Lola starts her quest affects a series of causal events that vary with her position and timing in various places; being somewhere earlier or later results in different encounters, and subjection to different information. The manipulation is facilitated through a technique of multiple frequency (Mansfield, 2009, Lecture 3: Questions of Time), which essentially shows the same events from different perspectives. The interesting aspect in this text is that the multiple perspectives are all observed by the same character - the changes are to space, time, and subsequent chain of causation.

Buying a fishing rod for my father (Xingjian, 2004, pp80-158) (hereafter; BAFRFMF) is yet another example of STaC manipulation. When the protagonist of the title story hears the fishing rod he bought for his grandfather falling, we are taken on a journey to where the main character grew up and shared time with his grandfather. The reading process takes minutes, as the events occurring are numerous, however at the end we are brought to back the main character exactly where he was when we left him upon hearing the fishing rod fall and we realise that the exploration was just a daydream, occurring in a moment, triggered by the association of the fishing rod with memories of his grandfather and things associated with him. The duration of time (Mansfield, 2009, Lecture 3: Questions of Time) is manipulated as we stretch seconds into hours, we are all thrust into a place and time from his memory, and brought back suddenly to reality and now. You realise that you have been unwittingly taken along for the daydream, and lost all sense of space and time like the protagonist. Nothing seems causally related until you are returned to your starting point and realise you lost your orientation for a while. It is a fantastic example of another element common to the three texts; their ability to take the audience with them on the journey. I’m not sure there are many viewers of Memento who suffer with anterograde amnesia, but the film is effective in allowing the audience share Leonard’s memory disability (Bragues, 2008, p.65). Any sense of cause and effect is lost, as you are nearly always denied events immediately prior to, or after the present scene. A similar effect occurs in Run Lola Run, where in being denied a happy outcome (twice), the audience shares Lola’s feeling of frustration that events developed badly, and the determination they should be replayed until right - back in time we go with Lola until things go according to plan.

So for the writing form STaC becomes its plaything. The (potentially) innate and inescapable way in which we view STaC is not so inescapable for the writer, who can manipulate STaC in ways we never could. Events can be presented as existing outside of space (e.g. the BAFRFMF daydream), moving backwards in time (e.g. Lola being able to restart events from the beginning), and without cause or effect (e.g. in Memento the protagonist loses all sense of causal relations).  The writer can create a vantage point for events that no human could really assume; such as seeing events from multiple perspectives, or being in two places at one point in time. In some places the texts follow tradition or convention, like the narrative techniques of revenge and detective themes in Memento (Gillard, 2005, p.116), but in other areas they attempt to break even these boundaries. For example the clichéd happy ending, considered ‘good’ and ‘correct’ in the modern writing form, is deviated from by each of these texts. In Run Lola Run we are subjected to two unhappy endings run before we gain the happy ending that contemporary narrative craves. In Memento, we are dealt an ending of perverted justice where Leonard is only saved from misery by an ignorance that he knows will soon befall him when his memory fades (plus the discourse 'ending’ is in fact only the middle of the ‘story’)(Mansfield, 2009, Lecture 3: Narrative). Then BAFRFMF has the strange concept of there being no real endings. There is no culmination of events in the stories to provide for that happy ending, only a series of events coming to a close.

We may ask what judgements these manipulations make, but if we understand judgements as things involving decisions of value (i.e. whether something is good, bad, correct, or incorrect) then we might understand the texts as assessments of the way texts could or should be. When something is good it brings happiness and satisfaction, when something is bad it is incongruent to our concept of good and is disliked. Barthes makes the point that an author (or scriptor as he describes them) is merely someone who performs the act of drawing from “a tissue of quotations” (1977, p.146) across various cultural sources. From this perspective we may understand the author as making judgements upon various sources of influence, including or excluding ideas based on the authors’ intention for the final work.

Looking at this from the perspective of social experience, one view might be that what the authors of these three texts are doing is making observations about the way people behave at their time of writing and putting these themes into a narrative form. Matching T.S. Eliot’s (1922) view of the creative writer as someone who retains observations from the world until inspired to present them in a novel and insightful way, if we look at the various stories within BAFRFMF, we definitely see an attempt to narrate the unspectacular events in life constituting its most significant and memorable moments (in effect; the content of our existence). For example, the melancholy encounter with a child’s relative in The Temple is hardly a major life event for the protagonists, yet it’s the kind of social encounter that would stick with someone for a long time after it occurred. Another view might be to consider whether different discourses are all just varying manifestations of common human endeavours (Smith, 1980, p.218). Could it be that the seemingly unique narrative presented in Run Lola Run is merely a tautology of the crazy things people do for love? It’s considered somewhat acceptable in contemporary western society that people will behave irrationally for love, taking supererogatory actions to maintain and preserve a love bond. Lola’s actions throughout are an extreme example of the lengths people will go to for a partner’s affection and safety. Then there is Grosz’s (1994, p.142) view of acceptable and unacceptable types for each cultural setting. In Memento we are treated to an example of an unacceptable type; a person with mental illness. Here, it is not so much the difference of the main character’s mental state that makes him unacceptable to the viewer, but the placement of him within an incongruent cultural setting (i.e. sane society), and the way this plays out in the narrative. While all three perspectives are useful however, only BAFRFMF can really be said to make judgements on contemporary social experience. You can go back as far as Homer (1990) to find themes of acceptable/unacceptable types (heroes, slaves) and crazy actions taken in the name of love (the Trojan War). But Xingjian (2004), in marking insignificant events as actually quite significant, captures the zeitgeist incisively. In contemporary society we are fascinated with reality TV and instant updates of insignificant events across social networking media. Contemporary social experience is full of the inane thoughts drawn from our friends and celebrity’s minds alike, and, if you believe the media, we are more sensitive than ever to the small things in life.

What Run Lola Run and Memento determine to do is draw upon the world as we experience it, and recreate it in a way we do not. Conversely, what Buying a fishing rod for my father determines to do is draw on the world as we experience it, and recreate it in the way it truly is. Experience comes in many forms, but is always restricted to modes of space, time, and causation. Illustrating the world as it truly appears, makes judgements upon the way in which we experience society. Illustrating the world in ways it does not normally appear makes judgements upon the psychology of humans. Whether either of these notions is confined to the contemporary world, I leave for the reader to decide.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

·          Barthes R (1977), ‘The Death of the Author’, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath, London, Fontana, pp. 142-148.

·          Bragues G (2008), ‘Memory and Morals in Memento: Hume at the Movies’, Film-Philosophy, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 62-82. <http://www.film-philosophy.com/2008v12n2/bragues.pdf>.

·          Cheuse A (2005), Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather, Gao Xingjian, Reviewed in Off the Air, Book Reviews from National Public Radio,
World Literature Today, pp. 14-16. SEPTEMBER–DECEMBER 2005 

·          Foucault M (1984), ‘What is an author?’ in Foucault Reader, Rabinow P, pp.101-120.

·          Eliot TS (1922), ‘Tradition and the individual talent’ in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism.

·          Gillard G (2005), '"Close your eyes and you can start all over again": Memento' in Screen Education, 40, pp.115-117.

·          Grosz EA (1994), "The body as inscriptive surface" in Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, pp138-159.

·          Homer (1990), ‘The Iliad’, trans. Robert Fagles, Penguin Group, New York.

·          Kant I (2007), ‘Critique of Pure Reason’, trans. Marcus Weigelt, Penguin Group, London.

·          Locke, John (1975). "Of identity and diversity - extract" in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding , Locke, John; Nidditch, Peter H. pp.328-347

·          Mansfield N (2009), ‘Lecture 3’, CLT230: The Cultural Studies of Writing – From the Great Poet to Viral Aesthetics,Macquarie University, Sydney.

·          Smith BH (1980), ‘Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories’ in Critical Enquiry, Vol. 7, No.1, On Narrative, pp213-236.

·          Wood C (2006), ‘Sometimes you need the help of the universe: 'Run Lola Run'’, in Australian Screen Education, pp.107-109.

·          Yacowar M (2010), "Run Lola run: Renn for your life." in Queen's Quarterly 106.4 (1999), pp.556-65. Expanded Academic ASAP. Web. 29 Apr. 2010. Document URL <http://find.galegroup.com.simsrad.net.ocs.mq.edu.au/gtx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC-Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=EAIM&docId=A30069469&source=gale&srcprod=EAIM&userGroupName=macquarie&version=1.0>