(Arab) Notebooks on Narrative!

The destiny of the world is determined less by the battles that are lost and won than by the stories it loves and believes in.

—Harold Goddard

If you keep telling the same sad small story, you will keep living the same sad small life.

—Jean Houston

The What and the Why:

Narrative is one of those extremely common words that everybody uses, but is nonetheless still very difficult to in down and define. In the simplest terms possible ‘narrative’ is the telling of a story. The structure of the story, how events follow each other, is the plot. Narration is telling a story, and the person – if there is one – who tells the story is the storyteller. (Duh!) Narrative is not something to be trifled with, though. As Ana Menendez (American Studies Fulbright Scholar) clarified in a lecture at the AUC, narrative has always existed as long as man has existed, and it has withstood all the revolutions in artistic mediums – the invention of writing, the print press revolution, the internet age. And we could add, that it has withstood the transference of stories from the oral and written tradition to cinema. She uses a story by Umberto Eco to illustrate this. In the story they dump nuclear waste in a certain place and want to leave a warning for future generations, thousands of years from now, when no doubt language and warning signs will have changed. So what they do is invent a religious cult tat tells a story over and over again, sure that this will carry on into the future because storytelling never goes out of fashion!

People like to be told stories and presenting material to them is much easier if it structured as a narrative. But the question is why and what pitfalls are implied in this. What you get with narrative is a simplification of reality, where characters are used as mouthpieces and embodiments for the complexities that go into social life. That’s why its so appealing and stood the test of time. It communicates to people at the level of common sense, concrete objects and events – people and the things they do – instead of dealing with generalisations and abstractions (social forces, processes, categories) we can’t see. Old fashioned storytelling, of the fairytale variety, is particularly appealing because the storyteller does all the mental work for you. The narrator gives you all the background knowledge you need...

... structuring of events still tends to follow the format found in literary storytelling. There’s the nature of the narrator, first person or third person, with mixtures of the two. The Third person is the most common technique, supposedly giving you an ‘objective’ perspective where the narrator has all the information and a ‘God’s eye’ view of events. The first person perspective is ‘subjective’ and puts you in the emotional frame of mind of the narrator, who’s actuallyin the story. But you can also have a third person talking about the first person, or a radical subjective technique know as...

... to make sense of the foreground, the character and events.

While movies have their own narrative techniques – pictures, music –the...

... the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique!

This is a

British

literary

innovation,

actually,

like

women’s

lib!

The Hollywood model is grounded in the action of ‘individuals’, looking at those actions as driven by the characters ‘desires’. This is a very ideological model, grounded in liberal ontology; individuals pursuing their self-interests, in search of happiness (understood in utilitarian terms). That’s one reason why such movies tend to have the hero recounting the story, if only at the opening and closing of the movie.

Who gives a r&*( a#@!

Communist cinema did the opposite, emphasising the group instead!

The more confident you are of

yourself, the more you shine up

against equals

I will say one thing in favour of the American model, which is the emphasis on success stories. With Egyptians its failure stories. We love talking about tragic ends to people, especially young people, who think they can get ahead by themselves, without the support of their families. When we do have success stories, it’s never the success story of an individual, but a family, because we don’t believe in the individual but wasta and genes and tarbiya and disorganised group efforts!

Remember how something bad always happens after something good for this guy. Law of Compensation?!!

You also have multi-perspective novels with several narrators. Not necessary in the first person, but the third person focusing on one person at a time. However, since novels are longer...

... each chapter is has a narrative structure, something that’s harder to do in film. Each chapter can begin at the end, with the narrator telling you that this is the end, ...

... then go to the beginning and fill in the background piece by piece. This can happen in cinema, especially with adaptations, but the chapter format is applied to the whole movie. That is, some dramatic event to catch the interest of the viewer, followed by everything before that leading up to it, then getting to that opening scene where everything falls into place and makes sense, then what follows after that, which is the finishing off and dramatic climax, leaving you with a sense of wisdom gained, and entertainment. But that’s not the end of the story, pardon the expression.

An old soap opera technique!

Then there’s ‘pacing’ – the alternating speed of the unfolding events, where things are fast to grab your attention, then things slow down to help you relax and keep track of what’s going on and get engrossed in the details. There’s often ‘flashbacks’ or ‘background’ information to help fill you in on more and more important...

... knowledge about what exactly is going on. There’s also constant scenes where your excited, shocked or freaked out, for entertainment purposes to remind you of the weird world you’ve entered.

Again, stuff to freak you out, but also slow sequences where you’re shown the world where they live in, positive side included (LA at night). Parallelism here, the badguy meeting the same fate as the hero’s wife. Not that this is a straightforward movie, at all.

Nonetheless, it does follow the most common film narrative model, which is the Hollywood narrative model.

This is actually a very naive and typically American set-up (formulaic and so predictable). There’s such a thing as a tragic ending where no resolution takes place, or an ending where the bad guys win, and the personal growth doesn’t have to be of the hero, at times, but the villain who repents before dying. (Personally, when I watched this scene in Blade Runner I said drop him!!!!)

(Another example of inverse growth). Not to mention that the oldest technique in the book is, when you’ve got a character that’s too interesting and you don’t know what to do with him or her, kill them off, especially if they’re more interesting than and better than the hapless hero. And plot twists are there to hide lack of a plot, having endless ‘realisations’ that don’t amount to anything worthwhile in the end!

friend

ally

love

A better word than hero is protagonist since the centre of the story can often be a bad guy, or a good guy forced to bad things!

In other words, ‘elements’ of literature my foot!