Rick Altman,
A Theory of Narrative.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-231-14429-2
US$27.50 (pb)
392pp
(Review copy supplied by Columbia University Press)

It’s nothing new to say that telling stories is a way of imagining the world differently and possibly changing it. One of the things that Rick Altman does in A Theory of Narrative is to point out that a narrative may be as much an act of stasis as it is of change. He proposes a new way of understanding narrative and, as he is doing this, he provides thoughtful ways of looking at some old and not-so-old texts.

Altman sees traditional notions of narrative as being too restrictive in their scope. The very definitions of narrative have been delimited by discarding those texts (pastorals, romances) that don’t conform to some pure Aristotelian model. The question of “What counts as a narrative?” has traditionally been folded too much into “What kind of narratives should be composed?”. This prescriptive and plot-based definition of narrative persisted into twentieth-century theorising about the issue. Narrative became synonymous with plot, for which the novel became the ideal embodiment. After Tzvetan Todorov, Edward Branigan provides a definition (not an analysis, Altman notes) of narrative comprised of the “equilibrium disrupted then reinstated” model. Altman’s way of understanding narrative is one that “depends on the simultaneous and coordinated presence of action and character” (p. 15). There are two basic processes that are needed to establish a narrative: following (a particular character is distinguished from the background of others, and attention is paid to them by some narrative sensibility) and framing (the categorisation of a text as being made up of “characters, action, and following”) (p. 17).

Altman demonstrates the benefits of this analysis by exploring The Song of Roland. Instead of seeing the individual Roland as being at the centre of the action, Altman more disinterestedly traces the location of the narrative itself, which reveals a fairly even series of sequences that fix on both the sides in the battle equally and thus turn out to be more similar than might be supposed initially. What might at first seem like a story about an individual can be seen as a story about the preservation of a community and an empire. Altman calls this kind of narrative “dual-focus” (p. 55). Existing in a closed system, after an imbalance or conflict from the two sides the restoration of unity tends to come from the re-assertion of tradition (p. 90). There is a conservative tendency at work here; the resolution of the narrative tends to return things to the state they were always in.

In contrast, “single-focus” narratives turn more towards individual protagonists who make their more self-assertive way through the narrative. The drive here is ultimately more towards change rather than stasis, disruption of the community in favour of equilibrium for the individual. Altman posits The Scarlet Letter as an archetypal example of the single-focus narrative. Hester Prynne is at the centre, not just as a protagonist to whom the following-pattern returns, but also as the consistent location of the point-of-view that the novel depicts. There is no ultimate resolution where the prior, “natural” order of things is restored. On the contrary, Hester is a disruptive force in the wider context of things. If there is an order restored, it is to Hester’s own identity and equilibrium and not to the community that she has scandalized with her adultery. What Altman is charting here is nothing less than a shift in world views, from narratives depicting relative stability to those in which ideas of change, individualism and progression are more commonplace.

From here it’s easy to see that narratives can also employ multiple-focus following patterns. What these do is engage the reader in a conceptualisation that goes beyond the confines of the narrative itself to broader themes and ideas. The reader is drawn not simply to identify with and follow individual characters but to ask questions about the ways in which the larger conceptual scheme of the narrative is contracted. The frequent discontinuity of many multiple-focus narratives encourages this kind of participation too. Altman uses Bruegel’s paintings to demonstrate this. The lines that Bruegel projects into and out of some of his paintings, and the layers that various characters make in a space (not unlike the deep-focus spaces found in cinema), serve to make the narrative of the painting allegorical in a richly visual way. The individual characters and their activities in the engraving Summer, “taken together and understood not in their specificity but in their collective generality, make up the season known as ‘Summer’” (p. 238). It is the idea of summer that Bruegel evokes, rather than a specific story around individual actors. The multiple-focus strategy does not necessarily exclude a focus on individual characters, but it does demand that the reader negotiate between them and the wider broader issues. This broad view exceeds the point-of-view of any individual characters and provides an event that “in all its volume takes on a meaning and an existence of its own, one to which only the reader can claim full access” (p. 251).

While Altman’s main analyses are of literary texts and paintings, thinking about other narratives this way (disparate as they are) retains a consistency of approach that is enabled by the simple idea of “following” that he establishes. (George W. Bush’s dual-focus “axis of evil” narratives, for example, invoke a coherent national identity in his war on terror but aren’t up to the task of a nuanced understanding of a complex world.) Altman, a cinema scholar, does not focus very much on cinema in this book and, by demonstrating the wide application of his theory, he makes a strong point for its effectiveness. If one of the main flaws with traditional narrative theory is the limited corpus on which it is based, then this study addresses that problem quite effectively. Using the “following” strategy and attending to the specific characteristics of each text allows less-well-regarded traditions of “serial novels, comic strips, and genre films”, similar in their dual-focus approach to stories of “Greek pastoral” and “Christian matyrs’ lives” (p. 188), to exist on their own terms despite being less-dominant forms. What Altman has given us in this study is a consistent and coherent way of understanding narrative in its many forms. It’s not such a big step to imagine a single-focus approach being revealed in the computer game Assassin’s Creed, or a multiple-focus view of the TV series The Wire. With A Theory of Narrative, Altman enlivens both narrative theory and narratives themselves.

Mike Lim,
Flinders University, Australia.

Created on: Sunday, 18 April 2010