The Pragmatics of Narrative: Part I

We’ve discussed at length in this series the ways that our drive towards meaning-creation can optimize how we process and store incoming sensory data. But the true value of this, from an evolutionary standpoint, is that the bank of knowledge this creates can be used to predict what is likely to happen in the future. This is what enables human beings to steer themselves away from potentially dangerous situations, and towards advantageous ones that will help them survive and thrive in the world. Now, audiences, as we know, are always trying to get ahead of the storytellers in the narrative art that they consume, trying to predict what might be coming next. And understanding the process by which our brains predict the future can help us as artists lean into or subvert our audiences’ narratological expectations.?

How exactly do our brains help us predict the future? In Bor’s words, our conscious minds are constantly “tweaking our model of current and future events based on related events from the past.” (1) Again, sounds awfully like our definition of story, doesn’t it? The forging of meaningful connections across time. Essentially, it boils down to this: our understanding of the world is informed by all the relevant data we’ve obtained about the world up to this point. And as we acquire additional data, that understanding changes. We predict the future by making up a story about how we think things are going to turn out, as informed by our understanding of how similar situations have turned out in the past.

There are patterns all throughout nature. Patterns like the Golden ratio, the Fibonacci sequence, and Turing structures, to name just a few. The scientific enterprise itself is essentially dedicated to identifying these patterns through an ongoing series of hypothesis testing. But what is it about finding these patterns in the world that is so evolutionarily valuable? Bor observes:

"If we can successfully turn any group of data into a pattern or rule, then near-magical results ensue. First, we no longer need to remember that mountain of data - we simply need to recall one simple law. But the benefits don't just stretch to memory. We're also, crucially, able to predict all future instances of this data, and to control our environment more efficiently. The rule may even capture something about the mechanism of the data, allowing us to understand it in a more fundamental way." (2)

And, again, it is our ability to build pyramids of knowledge by identifying patterns to bind more and more bits of information together that allows us to build and maintain such a far-reaching internal model of the world around us. With all of that data as a backdrop, our brains can run countless scenarios for how we might approach a real-world situation within the confines of our own mind. Experimentation which would once have required dangerous real-world trial and error can now, for human beings, be conducted wholly within the brain, hopefully giving us the data that we need to react to any given situation as optimally as possible, given the information that we have. Consciousness, Bor says, “is simply a certain kind of processing of information, especially information that is useful, that captures some pattern to the world." (3)

Now, just as our brains contain a mental representation of the real world, we can likewise create a mental simulation of a fictional story world. And, not surprisingly, these simulated story worlds function in a more or less identical fashion to our mental representations of the real one. Within the confines of this specific neuronal filter, with each new piece of information we glean about a given fictional world, we engage in the same kind of predictive statistical analysis that constantly defines and tweaks our understanding of the world at large. Again, this is all just a complicated way of saying that our understanding of a given story world is dependent on all the data we’ve collected about that world up to this point. But, importantly, there are other things at play that contribute to our understanding of a piece of narrative art beyond the story itself.

I began this series by discussing the semantics of narrative, the ways in which effective narrative art facilitates meaning-making in the minds of its audience. I went on to talk about narrative syntax, the process by which artists evaluate which discursive elements to include in their work, and how best to present this material to the most meaningful dramatic effect. Well, that brings us now to the pragmatics of narrative. In linguistics, pragmatics refers to the way that context can affect the meaning of a sentence. One example of pragmatics in action is the use of sarcasm, which can contextually convey that the meaning of a spoken sentence is actually the opposite of what it would appear to be. When it comes to narrative art, there is a lot more at play in regards to our narratological expectations than simply the story itself. In this section, we’re going to explore the pragmatics of narrative, the contextual elements aside from story that shape an audience’s overall narrative experience, and some of the ways that we, as artists, can take those things into account in the art that we create.

It’s pretty plain to see how each new piece of information we glean about the world around us updates our internal model of that world, and how that, in turn, impacts our ability to predict what’s going to happen in all of the moments yet to come. Likewise, it’s easy to see how each successive scene in a piece of narrative artwork updates our understanding of the story world it takes place in, and our narratological expectations of what we believe is coming next. But one key feature of narrative correlationism is the idea that the artwork that we create - the narrative discourse - is only one aspect of the end-user’s overall narrative experience. There is a phrase that comes up in discourse on nordic larp: “Everything is a designable surface.” (4) Larp is short for “Live Action Roleplay,” and we’ll be talking a lot about that particular discursive form later on in this series. But the reason I bring it up now is that, for artists that fancy themselves narrative correlationists, who are therefore concerned first and foremost with their audience’s overall narrative experience, there are potentially so many other aspects of the experience that can be designed beyond the story itself. These aspects are pragmatic concerns - context, in other words - that can play nearly as important a role in a person’s overall narrative experience as the discursive artwork itself.

There are two terms, fundamental to narrative design, which I think it would be prudent to introduce here: “diegetic” and “non-diegetic.” Stemming from the Greek word “diegesis,” these terms are perhaps most commonly used in reference to the music in feature films. A diegetic song is one that happens within the context of the fiction, that characters within the story can hear. If a character in a movie turns on a car radio and starts singing along to the song that’s playing, that song is diegetic. On the other hand, the musical score that accompanies a film is non-diegetic, because the audience can hear it but the characters can’t. All of that being said, in narrative design circles, the terms “diegetic” and “non-diegetic” are also routinely used to differentiate between the discursive aspects of an artwork and all of the other extra-diegetic aspects that provide further context to the overall narrative experience.

One extra-diegetic concern that we’ve spoken about at length is the personal history that each audience member brings to bear on their narrative experiences, those aspects of their past that become inextricably correlated with the art they’re engaged with in the present, thanks to the nature of conscious experiencing. It is, of course, impossible to account for each audience member’s unique past experience. But there are plenty of extra-diegetic aspects of an audience’s experience of narrative art that we can more actively design for.

As I suggested in an earlier post, chunking like-ideas together is a fully conscious human being’s default mode. More than that, it’s key to our survival as a species. And it is our ceaseless search for patterns, also, that leads us to group together narrative artwork into categories like genres. Let’s take the romantic comedy genre as an example. Our idea of a romantic comedy is based on a specific schema stored in our brains, a set of discursive elements that romantic comedies generally have in common, which we’ve assembled based on all of the romantic comedies we have ever seen. As a film unfolds, and we see that it contains multiple elements that we associate with romantic comedies, our brains lump the film into that broad genre category. This then results in what narratologists refer to as ‘narratological expectations,’ which are akin to the predictive calculations that our brains perform to constantly fine-tune our understanding of the world. Once we’ve come to the conclusion that the film we’re watching falls within a familiar genre, we naturally assume that it will adhere, more or less, to our personal master schema for the genre in question, until we see something to the contrary.

One interesting thing about classifying narrative art into genres is that our narratological expectations of how a particular story is going to end may have very little to do with the diegetic story world in which the characters in the story live. Ritivoli observes: “Narrative expectations about what constitutes a coherent sequence of events do not come only from earlier events mentioned in the story; they also stem from ‘our knowledge’ of the world (our knowledge of what is causally possible in everyday life), our knowledge of what is causally possible within the conventions of a certain narrative genre, and our knowledge of what is thought possible given the beliefs of the culture in which the narrative is composed.” (5) A certain story turn that might seem absurd in the real world may not feel at all out of place within a romantic comedy, if - in our experience - this kind of thing is an established staple of that narrative genre.

In most romantic comedies, for example, the protagonists are thwarted at nearly every turn. Nothing about the story as told throughout most of the film should lead us to believe that these stories are going to have happy endings for our protagonists. Yet, once our brain has lumped a film in with similar films we have seen previously, all of which ended happily, we expect that the film we’re watching now will have a happy ending, too. And, crucially, we can’t not think that; It is the nature of our conscious experience that our brain builds and maintains connections between like things, regardless of whether or not those connections turn out to be spurious.

What’s interesting here is this: If you, as an artist, are familiar with the standard tropes of the genre you’re working in, you can be reasonably assured that you know what the audience is expecting from the story you’re telling. This opens up a non-diegetic design space for you as a storyteller: When do you lean into your audience’s expectations and when do you subvert them? Now, knowing the answer to this question is an art unto itself. Sometimes, giving the audience what they think they want is the absolute right thing to do. Some amount of fan service can be a good thing, and not all fan service is inherently pandering. But, at the same time, skewing too close to a genre’s accepted schema can lead to your artwork being evaluated as cliche and derivative. So, oftentimes, how closely a story adheres to our narratological expectations can be inversely proportional to how much we enjoy the work. If a romantic comedy exhibits almost no deviations from the schema in our head, that is generally considered to be poor storytelling, whereas a story that subverts our narratological expectations in an interesting way tends to garner high critical praise. If, for example, a story that resembles a romantic comedy ends in tragedy, the author has not only subverted our narratological expectations, they may actually force us to retroactively lump the story into a different genre category altogether.

Perhaps the most famous observation on the phenomenon of narratological expectations came from Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, who noted, “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off.” (6) Savvy audiences recognize that, in a story well-told, every discursive element is included for a reason. They then work backwards from the end and figure that each individual discursive element is going to have some meaningful connection to something else later on in the narrative. They are, in other words, using their current understanding of the story world to try and predict what’s going to happen later in the narrative, with the assumption, of course, that the creator is being a good steward of their responsibility as arbiter of their narrative experience, by only including elements that will ultimately matter. What Chekhov is getting at with his famous quote is this: If you include a gun in your story, audiences are going to assume that you included it for a reason; And the most likely reason to include a gun in a story is because that gun is going to eventually be fired.

In the real world, we do not necessarily expect that situations will unfold according to genre conventions, but in fictional worlds, we do. And knowing that your audience has certain expectations in mind enables you as an artist to thrill them by subverting those expectations, or sometimes by giving them exactly what they think they want. And this is all just another extension of an idea that permeates this entire series: Since we know that our audiences experience our work through the prism of their conscious mind, being aware of what is going on in their mind can help us craft more resonant narrative experiences.

Move on to Entry #10

Go back to Entry #1

SOURCES

(1) Bor, D. (2012). Ravenous Brain (p. 76). Basic Books.

(2) Bor, D. (2012). Ravenous Brain (p. 149). Basic Books.

(3) Bor, D. (2012). Ravenous Brain (p. 36). Basic Books.

(4) Koljonen, J. (2019). An Introduction to Bespoke Larp Design. In J. Koljonen, J. Stenros, A.S. Grove, A.D. Skjonsfiell, E. Nilsen (Eds.), Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences (p. 28). Landsforeningen Bifrost. https://trepo.tuni.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/136330/978-952-03-2260-1.pdf (5) Ritivoi, A.D. (2009). Explaining People: Narrative and the Study of Identity. Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, 1, 25-41. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25663006

(6) Mar, R.A. and Oatley, K. (2008). The Function of Fiction is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(3), 173-192. doi: 10.1111/j.1745-6924.2008.00073.x. PMID: 26158934.