CHAPTER ONE
1.1 INTRODUCTION
1.2 Fiction and Emotion
Narration as a concept is the weaving of several strands of events into a story. This means narrative comes out of oral or written account of an event or events such as The Man Died (1972) – the autobiographical narrative on the detention and imprisonment of Wole Soyinka. Narration according Gerard Genette also means “the succession of events, real or fictitious” (25). Narration in this sense may be a novel such as Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. What runs across the two separate definitions of narrative given above is the idea of event without which there can be no narration. Event is the occurrence of action either by man or animal. A student buying a novel at a bookshop is an event and a horse galloping across the field is also an event. The event could be for a very short time and could also be very long such as a civil war. The event or a series of events become a narrative when to use Bridgette Hard et al.’s words they “…are selected and segmented from ongoing information’’ (1221). What Hard et al. mean by “ongoing information’’ are the several existing events from where some have been selected to form the story or narrative.
Selecting from the many episodes has implications on how the narrator
perceives each event in order of importance. This means, as Hard et al put it, analyzing segmentation patterns of events indicate “…the breakpoints of larger units aligned with those of smaller units. This hierarchical alignment effect suggested that the events were perceived as partonic hierarchies” (1221). Narration, therefore, involves making sense of abstract events and the selection of events in order of their importance to the narrator. The event may be about the other person written by someone else. The narration, in such a case, is told about a personality other than that of the writer. This genre of narration is known as biography.
Contrary to what some people believe, storytelling is never a matter of “getting the facts, all the facts, and nothing but the facts” (Jacob, 516). This suggests autobiography or biography no matter the perceived reality is mixed with imagination since some events no matter the vividness cannot be presented the way they occurred. What makes a story interesting is the ability of the story teller to select very important events from among the many, for instance, in autobiographical narrative, the way we consider those facts as they are presented to us by a narrator; this is what makes a story different from a simple retelling of factual happenings, as in the familiar secondary school essay composition that starts each sentence with “And then …”. Stories are part of our lives: they extend into our lives and branch out from there; but also, stories can only be understood if they are localized, fleshed out in terms of our daily reality, and by using the right narrative style. A story that has no relation to our world is probably not going to interest us very much. Some stories written in the past have lost interest among contemporary readers due to their monotonous thematic presentations and narrative styles. On the other hand, we also find stories in older literature such as Jane Austen, Pushkin and Shakespeare, which today seem as fresh as when they first were written down.
While it is difficult to pinpoint what makes a story succeed, it is perhaps easier to spot at least a few of the causes that make a story fail, or let it fall into oblivion after the story producers’ and the consumers’ generation that supported them have passed away. In his Evgenij Onegin, Pushkin satirizes the ennuiof the Russian genteel country nobility by pointing to the fabulous array of ‘has-been’ authors who constituted the daily spiritual bread of the country manor, and whose fame faded as their pages yellowed (the incomparable Grandison, whose bore is matched by our snore, is only one among many). For Jane Austen, her works have survived and continued to survive the test of time due to her thematic preoccupations and style of character presentation.
In this and similar cases, the interested readership is confined to students of literature or history; the regular readers will find it difficult to relate to the characters and their voices, as these represent an entirely different social and societal environment. The question thus is what makes for a story, and in particular, for a good story. Literary scholars and the common readership have pondered about this question for centuries, both theoretically, in studies of narrative, and practically, in university courses of the ‘Creative Writing’ type. One thing that is pertinent to making a successful piece of fiction is the technique of narration and character presentation adopted by the author. This makes narration an important part of fiction.
Narration is about storytelling. But a story has to be told by someone called the narrator. Already, it may be clear that the narrator is different from the author: in every story, the author creates a world of fiction, the narrative, in which the narrator plays an eminent role, even though not always discernible on the surface. Narrativity thus deals with the techniques and devices that a narrator has at his or her disposal when telling a story; among these, the notion of ‘character’ and the accompanying ‘voice’ are among the most important. To see how character and voice connect and interrelate in narration in, sometimes, rather oblique and inscrutable ways, one may consider the case of the ‘homodiegetic’ novel, or stories told in the first person. Clearly, we cannot assume that the speaking ‘I’ is identical to or is necessarily the author, who likewise cannot be held responsible for the narrator’s claim as being his own.