The Syntactics of Narrative

Have you ever been accused of having selective memory? When this happens in everyday life, it tends to be looked on as a bad thing; Usually, it implies that you’re focusing on certain memories to the exclusion of others. But the truth is, we all have selective memory, in the same way that we all have selective attention, and ultimately, for the same reason. Just as our brains don’t have sufficient resources to process all of the incoming sensory data from our surroundings, they likewise don’t have the storage capacity to remember all of it. As Daniel Bor puts it, “The person who forgets an optimal amount of old material can have a more accurate, organized view of what's relevant in the world right now." (1) Our brains, then, in an ongoing capacity, both evaluate what is most important for us to focus on in the moment, and which of our past experiences are most important for us to remember in the aggregate. We’ve talked at length about the first part, the way our conscious faculty of attention creates embryonic stories out of each moment of our lives, by meaningfully connecting our present to something important from our past. But now let’s talk about how our brain decides which of those experiences are worth remembering in the long-run, and how it weaves all of those meaningful memories into the larger story of our life.

I’ve touched briefly on philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, who more than a century ago had some keen observations about the human conscious experience that are very much in keeping with the tenets of narrative correlationism. Dilthey’s original aim was to analyze ancient texts, religious and historical. In his studies, Dilthey came to understand - as we have - that human beings can only access their history via memory, and that a memory is not a true record of the past; It is merely our impression of some past experience, the aspects of the event that our brain saw fit to attend to and to retain, and the meaning we ascribed to it in incorporating it into our broader understanding of the world. When it comes to our own personal histories, in other words, history and memory are one and the same. This means that “reporters of events are partisan in nature,” in that the histories they record will always have been processed first through their own subjective conscious awareness. (2) To Dilthey, this meant that if he wished truly to understand the reality to which ancient historical texts referred, he would have to endeavor first to understand the conscious process by which the authors compiled those histories in the first place. How had the authors of these texts decided what was worthy of inclusion? And what did the contents of the texts - and the process by which they were compiled - mean to the people that authored them? These were the types of questions Dilthey set out to answer. And, in due course, Dilthey came to believe that the only meaning there was to be found in history was what it meant to the people who lived it, and what it means in retrospect to the people who remember it.

When I first started down the path that would lead me to narrative correlationism, my intent was only to talk about art. I had no idea that in order to get to the core of humanity’s artistic expression I would need first to cultivate in myself an entirely new understanding of the fundaments of the human condition. Likewise, I do not believe when Wilhelm Dilthey set upon his journey to study historical works from humanity’s ancient past that he had anything quite so profoundly existential in mind, either. And yet both of our journeys appear to have led us to the same place. At first blush, it may seem odd that two very different pursuits led Dilthey and I to the same conclusions about what it means to be a human being, but as Dilthey himself put it, there is a kinship between artists and historians. And the reason for this is that the compiling of histories and the creation of fiction are both narrative acts. History, by its very etymology, is simply a kind of story, and by extension it is subject to the same rules for story construction that characterize our conscious experience of the world. Dilthey eventually went so far as to say that human beings are possessed of a “historical consciousness” (3); And since histories are just stories, that’s really just another way of saying that the human conscious experience is a narrative one.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the saying “History is written by the victors.” Well, the true power that the victors wield in this axiom is the ability to choose which events are recorded for posterity and which aren’t. Any historian worth their salt will endeavor to be as objective as possible in recording the events of the past for posterity, but, as stated above, histories are simply stories, and stories are subjective by our definition. Every historian is at least tacitly providing commentary on the events they’re recording, simply by deciding which events to include and which to leave out. No matter how ‘objective’ a historian sets out to be in recording the past, there are simply far too many things that occur in our world to make an accounting of all of them. At some point, the historian has to choose which details are worthy of inclusion and which aren’t. Sound familiar? Deciding which details, out of a nigh infinite number of options, to include in a historical record and which to leave out is not at all dissimilar to the process by which our brain evaluates which of our past experiences are worth remembering and which aren’t; A process which, as we’ve already established, is constitutive of story-creation.

All of which is to say that, if we’re in agreement that the processing and storage limitations of our brains necessitate that every story must be a subset of a larger whole, then determining which details of a story to include and which to leave out becomes one of the most important functions of our artists and our historians alike. A tactical or accidental omission of facts from history renders those facts invisible to future generations, and omissions of important details from a piece of narrative discourse can render those details invisible to the audience. And some vital information - if absent - can threaten an artwork’s entire narrative cohesion, or at the very least threaten to dramatically alter an audience’s narrative interpretation of the work as a whole.

Now, because of our brain’s finite processing and storage capacity, it requires what Bor refers to as a gatekeeper. Attention, he says, is the gatekeeper of our awareness. (4) To put it another way, we only become consciously aware of the things we pay attention to. Well, if attention is the gatekeeper of our conscious awareness of the real world, then storytellers are the gatekeepers of our awareness of the fictional worlds that they create. In the real world, our brain carries out the attentional decision-making that dictates which details about the world we notice and focus on. In a fictional discourse, the storyteller is making those decisions for us, by deciding what scenes to include, what details to highlight. In making those decisions, the author is shaping our narrative experience of their work in much the same way that our faculty of attention shapes our experience of the world around us. So, the effort of a storyteller to convey story through art is fundamentally an effort to re-create the conditions that facilitate narrative experiencing in the real world.

Earlier in this series, I posited the idea that we may be able to glean valuable insights into the nature of narrative by mapping onto it the different aspects of semiotics. We’ve already covered the semantics of narrative, how our brain’s tendency for neurons that fire together to wire together enables humans to create meaning in an otherwise meaningless world. But now let’s take a look at what you might call the syntactics of narrative. Syntax, in linguistics, represents the rules for arranging words in such a way that they convey a new order of meaning. Dilthey, for his part, believed that "There are syntactical moments of life and history that are like particles or conjugations, and they have a meaning, which is sought by every kind of human being." (5) As Dilthey here suggests, there is a syntax to stories, a selection- and organizational-process that gives otherwise unconnected data a new order of meaning. Historians, like artists, are creative, both in the process by which they select the elements to include in their work, and the ways in which they ascribe those elements cohesive meaning. Dilthey goes so far as to say that “it is in this creative [...] world rising sovereignly from us - and only in it - that life has its [...] meaning." (6)

Of course, as already discussed, no piece of narrative art is inherently meaningful on its own; It’s just a collection of sensory data waiting to be processed into a story by a conscious human brain. It is the role of a storyteller, then, not to create meaning in their work, but to fashion a work that creates the context necessary for their audience to be able to do it themselves. And, ultimately, it is the syntactical decisions that the storyteller makes - the elements they choose to include in the discourse, and the way they choose to present them - that will determine whether or not the audience is able to interpret the artwork as a coherent narrative. Now, to achieve maximum narrative cohesion, each successive element of the artwork is meant, in some way, to be meaningfully connected to one that came before it or one that will come after it. Including extraneous details can distract from the story you’re trying to tell, and leaving out key details can disrupt the narrative cohesion of the work. After all, the story the artwork inspires, in the final analysis, is intended to represent a meaningful sequence of events; Meaningful connections across time. And, to that end, it makes sense to only include events that can be seen by your audience to be meaningfully connected.

Now, let’s take a look at an example of how a single discursive omission can profoundly alter an audience’s experience of a piece of artwork as a whole. When game designer Neil Young famously commented on the way that each scene in a film can tweak our overall understanding of that film’s story world, he called the phenomenon “additive comprehension.” (7) To explain the concept, Young most often invokes a scene that we’ve already talked about at length in earlier posts: the infamous unicorn dream sequence from Ridley Scott’s director’s cut of “Blade Runner.” That single scene, when placed within the context of the rest of the film, suggested an interpretation that might largely have been lost on viewers who had only seen the original theatrical cut.

In the original “Blade Runner,” Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard was tasked with hunting down and eliminating rogue replicants, bioengineered beings that had been built by humanity as an artificial workforce. But replicants are in many ways indistinguishable from humans, and so for the past 40-odd years, the fans and creators of “Blade Runner” have debated whether or not Rick Deckard, the first film’s protagonist, might be a replicant himself. Even though we discussed the scene at length in my last article, I think it’s important to speed-run an explanation here, for the purposes of making this entry stand on its own. Why does the fact that the character has recurring dreams of unicorns potentially serve as evidence of the Deckard as replicant theory? Well, to make replicants appear more human, they were programmed with false childhood memories of young lives that never actually happened. And this meant, ultimately, that some replicants had no idea that they were replicants.?

In the cyberpunk future of “Blade Runner,” there is an entire division of the LAPD dedicated to policing errant replicants. Deckard, in the first film, has a few run-ins with a detective from that unit called Gaff. Gaff, we learn, has a fondness for creating origami, and at one point in the film he hands Deckard an origami unicorn. Why is this significant? Well, we know that for each replicant, there exists a file in which their pre-fabricated memories can be seen by anyone who has access to them. And one imagines that Gaff, as a member of the LAPD unit specifically tasked with finding replicants, might potentially have access to replicant files.?

In the theatrical cut of “Blade Runner,” the origami unicorn likely had little significance to the audience. But after the unicorn dream sequence was added back in, that little paper unicorn took on an entirely new order of meaning for certain fans. Many believe it is entirely too much of a coincidence that Gaff would gift an origami unicorn to Deckard without knowing about his unicorn dreams. And the supposition is that Gaff would have no way of knowing about Deckard’s dreams unless he had read about them in Deckard’s replicant file.

You can see then how the creators of “Blade Runner” were acting as the gatekeepers of our narrative experience of the film, determining which parts of the story we attended to by deciding which scenes to include and which to leave on the cutting room floor. In the real world, our brain is the arbiter of our conscious experience, directing our attention to only the things that it deems relevant to us. In movie-making, the filmmaker stands in for the brain as the arbiter of our narrative experience of their story world, by similarly directing our attention to what they believe is relevant to the story that they’re telling. And our “Blade Runner” example reveals just how important this aspect of a storyteller’s role really is. In the words of “Blade Runner 2049” director Denis Villaneuve, “[The theatrical cut of “Blade Runner”] is the story of a human falling in love with an artificial being, and the story of [the director’s cut] is a replicant who doesn’t know he’s a replicant and slowly discovers his own identity.” (8) Those are two entirely different stories, and it is wild that the inclusion or omission of one specific scene could alter the reading of the film that much. Narrative correlationism, therefore, holds that truly great artists will evaluate every scene in their work as if its inclusion or omission could have the same impact as “Blade Runner’s” unicorn dream sequence. Be merciless when cutting extraneous scenes that distract from what your story is meant to be about, and be vigilant not to omit key scenes that threaten the overall narrative cohesion of your work.

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SOURCES

(1) Bor, D. (2012). Ravenous Brain (p 53). Basic Books.

(2) Dilthey, W. (2002). The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences. In R. Makkreel, F. Rodi (Eds.), Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected Works, Volume III: The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences (pp. 118-119). Princeton University Press.

(3) Dilthey, W. (2002). Drafts for a Critique of Historical Reason. In R. Makkreel, F. Rodi (Eds.), Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected Works, Volume III: Different Modes of Formation in the Natural Sciences and in the Human Sciences (p. 127). Princeton University Press.

(4) Bor, D. (2012). Ravenous Brain (p 146). Basic Books.

(5) Dilthey, W. (2002). Drafts for a Critique of Historical Reason. In R. Makkreel, F. Rodi (Eds.), Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected Works, Volume III: Plan for the Continuation of the Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences (p. 311). Princeton University Press.

(6) Dilthey, W. (2002). The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences. In R. Makkreel, F. Rodi (Eds.), Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected Works, Volume III: The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences (p. 104). Princeton University Press.

(7) Jenkins, P. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (p. 127). New York University Press.

(8) Cecchini, M. (2017, August 25). Which Cut Is Blade Runner 2049 a Sequel To? denofgeek.comhttps://www.denofgeek.com/movies/which-cut-is-blade-runner-2049-a-sequel-to/Retrieved January 24, 2024.