Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
National Council of Teachers of English is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
College English.
http://www.jstor.org
GEORGEH. THOMSON
DIFFERENTIATE
according
to appropriate
I
MODE
SUBJECTIVE
OBJECTIVE
MODE
(Keallty
rrinciple)
STORYFORM
(Pleasure
DRAMA
Play
Purposeful
Spontaneous self-
Deliberate self-expression
rrlnciple)
Action
expression
FILM
Dream
Voyeuristic
I-centered visual
Other-centered visual
experience
COMIC STRIP
NARRATIVE
Viewing
experience
Action
Day-Dream
Glimpsed
Other viewed as
glimpsed subject
Memory
(of Events)
A recalling (telling)
to oneself
Discourse
(of Events)
A telling (recalling)
to another
COLLEGE ENGLISH
265
1975
266
COLLEGEENGLISH
The first table specifies, under the modes subjective and objective, two categories of experience essential to each story form. In the first instance, if we ask
what subjective and what objective experience in life most resembles drama, the
answer will be play and purposeful action, defined from the point of view of
the participant as, respectively, spontaneous self-expression and deliberate selfexpression. Play and purposeful action are not the explicit subject matter of
drama. Rather they stand for an inherent tension in life which, when translated
into art, determines the unique character of drama. A similar life tension between
the subjective and objective modes, but arising from different categories of experience in each case, dictates the special character of film, comic strip, and narrative.
TABLE II
DEFINING
PREVAILING
ARRANGEMENT
STORY FORM
QUALITY
TIME
OF EVENTS
DRAMA
Intentional
Clock
Plot
FILM
Compulsive
Durational
Scenario
COMICSTRIP
Involuntary
Durational
(in units)
Lay-out
NARRATIVE
Intimate
Psychological
Story
The second table specifies the defining quality, the prevailing time, and the
typical arrangement of events which are characteristic of each form. These three
factors are closely related. In addition, the prevailing time of the story form
applies to the subjective and objective modes of experience as specified in table
one. Thus in respect to drama, clock time dominates both play and purposeful
action; in respect to narrative, psychological time prevails in the personal memory
of events and in public discourse concerning events. One need not be conscious
of this temporal factor for one's experience to be structured by it.
Drama
The subjective mode of experience which informs drama is play; the objective
mode is purposeful action. The two can be seen to have in common an intense
self-involvement in which the existence of spectators is at once necessary and
irrelevant. Out of this emerges one of drama's most salient characteristics, the
impersonality of the relationship between the spectator and the stage. That is
why the spectator does not mind sharing the viewing space. Indeed, the fact that
typically an action is being deliberately carried forward without regard to the
individual observer practically demands an audience to justify the performance
and, what is more important, to guarantee to the observer that the creation proceeding on stage is indifferent to his individuality. The drama is most at home
in the context of the semi-impersonal group or the assembled community.
A cinema audience differs from a theater audience in that it is a practical
rather than an artistic necessity. Nevertheless in the cinema one may share the
268
COLLEGEENGLISH
past and future can be recognized as such only when they have entered the
specious present. Except in hallucinatory experience and sometimes in dream,
we are always aware of past memories and future imaginings as encroaching upon
the durational unit of the specious present. The same law holds for our perception
of the experience represented in stories, but with this proviso. If our attention
is directed from a now event to a past event and does not return quickly to the
now, then in our perception the past will, for the time being, become the present.
All stories of whatever type, whether drama, film, comic strip, or narrative, are
inexorably tied to the specious present. They differ in the ease and flexibility with
which reference to past or future is available and in the capacity to shift the
representational now from one time to another.
The passing of time is indicated by change. Change is recognized when two
perceptions which were not experienced simultaneously are simultaneously present
to the mind. Though the passing of time is not observable in itself, it is fundamental to all four story forms. What distinguishes one from another is the
character of the time passing.
The time of drama is the stage present. Viewed as a whole the action of a play
is a continuum stretching from past to future and subject to the laws of clock
time. Some modification is, of course, the rule; the continuum is usually broken
into pieces, often with distinct time lapses in between, and the pieces are not
necessarily arranged in a chronological progression. Nonetheless, the temporal
order of purposeful action and of more or less causal sequence is fundamental. The
ritual character of drama relates to its presentation by arrangement before a
communal audience; it has little influence on drama's treatment of time. Ritual,
though it must utilize time as a medium, refuses to be dominated by it. But drama
accepts the rule of time and the pervasive sense of temporal and causal sequence.
Knowing this, some contemporary writers have exploited the time-bound character of drama by radically distorting it to create special effects.
I have included the future as part of the dramatic continuum because at any
point in a play all that is to come has the character of futurity. (There are, of
course, technical exceptions to this.) Susanne Langer has suggested that drama
is future oriented, whereas narrative points to the past and film to the present. I
would rather say simply that in the normal case drama invites us to expect that
the immediate future in our experience will coincide with the immediate future
of the persons on stage. Film, comic strip, and narrative, in their looser treatment of
temporal sequence, do not so strongly encourage such an expectation.
In giving a name to the arrangement of events in each of drama, film, comic
strip, and narrative, I have tried to be plain and descriptive: plot, scenario, layout,
story. As far as possible I have distinguished between plot as the logical order
of events in time and story as the actual order of the events as told or acted. The
logical and actual order are rarely identical, whether in a play, a film, or a novel.
So both words are needed in describing any specific work. But the fear of adding
to the terminological clutter of narrative theory has induced me to use the terms
plot and story in a second and somewhat different way. Plot refers generally to
the order of events found in drama. Though by no means always the same as the
logical order in time, the events of drama are typically much closer to such an
Film
The motion picture is outside of nature. It offers a perceptual experience-and
I speak now of structure rather than content-which could not be encountered
without mechanical contrivance. The uniqueness of the experience centers in the
relation of the viewer to the screen images. The question to ask is: What
phenomena in life help the film maker to create and the viewer to interpret this
unique experience?
270
COLLEGEENGLISH
to be apart from the viewer and, in its absolute existence, to compel his attention.
All the story forms make the best use they can of this fact; the film wholeheartedly
capitalizes on it. The compelling quality of the visual in film brings together in
a waking state the unique experiences of dreamer and voyeur.
The dreamer, though he participates in an awareness of the self, feels totally
enclosed and absorbed within his illusory world. The voyeur, aware of his own
secret presence, is precariously located outside his compelling visual world. Film
exploits this tension between dreamlike total absorption and voyeuristic otherness. Yet it is difficult to give a useful account of the tension since it does not
correspond to any one thing in our normal experience.
What the I-centered nature of dream and the Other-centered nature of voyeuristic viewing have in common is the compelling power of the visual. This power
is so intense that the defining quality of film can best be described as compulsive.
The word does not exaggerate. It is well known that a person cannot maintain
deep concentration for a long period and that even the normal attention span of
a well adjusted adult is quite short. The film, with stunning virtuosity, defies
this kind of personal weakness and, by fixing the viewer's gaze on perpetually
moving images, relentlessly holds it there.
Drama, too, is a visual medium, but one that must accommodate itself to normal
human limits. It must not attempt to keep its audience intensely involved through
a whole act, for if it does they will turn resentful or collapse in irritation. It must
rather let them off, let them down from time to time, allow for casual moments
between the peaks. What are the reasons for this difference from film? First, one
of the rarest phenomena in the theater is silence. Drama devolves into dialogue,
into sound, and aural attention is more difficult to sustain than visual. Second,
movement is limited in drama, not only because it interferes with dialogue but
because the stage is inherently restrictive. Hence the spectator's attention is prone
to fixate and soon tire.
Film as a medium is far more visual. The screen becomes a defined universe
of movement by persons, by things, and by the camera itself in all its incomparable flexibility and range. The viewer seems one with the camera. "It is the
spectator's mind that moves," says Ernest Lindgren in The Art of the Film.2
This is true so long as one stresses the word mind. In dream there is perfect
freedom of movement though the actual body of the sleeper is at rest; in film
there is unqualified freedom of movement by means of visual perception though
the body is at rest in a seat. But in dream, knowledge of the actual body is
unconscious or pre-conscious whereas in the cinema it is conscious. The result
is a peculiar sensation in which vision tells the spectator he is moving while other
organs of perception tell him he is not. I relate this sensation to the unique tension
of film and its paradoxical nature for the viewer, who is both master and slave of
the screen images, at once observer of them and absorbed in them.
Faced with the experience of moving yet not moving, of being one with the
images of the screen yet an observer, and faced with the irreversible sweep of
pictorial movement, the viewer is kept busy formulating new gestalts to accommo2London: Alien and Unwin, 1948, p. 92.
272
COLLEGEENGLISH
Of all the story forms, the comic strip seems the most visual because it is so
nearly pictorial in presentation. The subjective mode of experience on which it
relies is day-dream, the objective mode glimpsed action in which the Other is
viewed as glimpsed subject. The result is a sequence of glimpses with stereotyped
projections. When a person catches momentary sight of an action he involuntarily
completes the action in his mind, filling out what must have come before and after.
274
COLLEGEENGLISH
276
COLLEGEENGLISH
Narrative
made out of all the hills and rivers and dales he has even seen.4
The personal way a hearer pictures each element of a story according to his
own experience and imagination and fantasy life may explain the great freedom
of narrative and its capacity to treat an extraordinary range of material in a rich
variety of styles.
We may look at this freedom from another angle too. Drama is a transaction
between the stage and the audience in which the actors are both the principal
subject matter (the characters) and the principal instrument of the transaction.
Hence, if the subject is improbable, the instrument must be improbable. The role
of the story-teller is very different. In the transaction between him and his listeners, he is the instrument whereby the narrative reaches them, but he is not
himself the subject of his own discourse. (The reader will be aware of certain
complications which are here left aside. He will notice also that from a linguistic
point of view the narrator is indeed the subject of his discourse.) Hence the
events recounted may be unlikely or even fantastic without detracting from the
convincing presence of the story-teller or from the reality of his relations with
the listener. This is most obvious in oral narrative where the social presence of
the singer is real and constant, however much the value of his performance may
fluctuate according to the worth assigned to his individual songs. But in written
fiction too, the author-narrator-though he may be hidden from view-is always
a felt presence.
It is undeniably true that the author-narrator may strike the reader as inconsistent, unreliable, trivial, or any number of other unappealing things, and
that recent fiction has exploited this possibility for a great variety of effects. But
the essential point remains, that the reader can make such judgments because
he has a sense of the narrator as distinct from his story and as existing in his own
right. This awareness is often unconscious and that may explain why recognition
is followed by an impression of the story-teller either as strangely all-pervading
4Tree and Leaf (London: Alien and Unwin, 1964), p. 67.
278
COLLEGEENGLISH
of narrative.
Drama, film, and comic strip purport to open a door onto the act of happening,
but narrative undertakes to tell about events by arranging them in an effective
way. That way may be in accordance with causal and temporal logic in which
case the order will be primarily like that of drama, or it may be in accordance
with emotional logic in which case the order will be lyric and the prevailing time
psychological, or it may be-and most often is-a combination of these two. In
any event, the narrative, unlike the other story forms, does not reach us objectively
through the visual medium of characters in action, but is entirely verbal and
directly mediated by the voice of the story-teller. The story, the narrator's
arrangement of events, is personal and stands in intimate relationship to the
reader. The subject matter, too, participates in this spirit of intimacy. Yet the
personal and lyric quality of story-telling is counter-balanced by the fact that the
narrating of a story is a publicly mediated act. It is this which saves narrative
from emotional and psychological self-indulgence, for the honest story-teller is
licensed in accordance with an implied contract by which he is responsible at
all times to his audience.
Drama permits far less intimacy than narrative. Characters on the public stage
who among themselves indulge in close emotional contact and innermost confidentialness soon appear silly or sentimental. As for the relationship between the
stage and the audience, its impersonality makes any attempt at familiarity disastrous, unless the interplay is exploited for deliberate and usually ironic effect.
The same impersonality is typical of the comic strip where the visual nature of
the medium gives the story a public character and the pictorial conversations establish a barrier between layout and reader.
Film, as the voyeuristic nature of its substructure would imply, is excellent in
portraying close and delicate relations between characters. It has in this respect
an almost unlimited capacity so long as the subject can be represented visually.
Though dialogue may further expand the scope, speech is in its effect more public
than physical gesture or expression. There are things that film characters can
not say without appearing indiscrete or foolish, though the same words may
without embarrassment be attributed to the non-visual persons of narrative. But
film characters have at their disposal incalculable intricacies of physical expression which the narrative artist can no more than touch upon.
Film can establish relations of intimacy within its pictorial world but not
between this image world and the viewer. The screen with its motion pictures
is a kind of mechanical device and as such is mercilessly exclusive. That is why
film stars are so spectacular. They are larger than life because they exist outside
the audience's normal experiences of relationship. This does not go counter to the
prevailing theory that the darkness of the cinema and the compulsive immediacy
of the screen induce the viewer to identify strongly with the hero. There is an
important difference between identification and intimacy. The first is an act of
280
COLLEGEENGLISH
introjection characteristicof film; the second is a recognition of proximaterelationship. Such a recognition of closenessis not characteristicof our experience
of the visual story forms, drama,film, comic strip. Intimacy is characteristicof
our relationshipto narrative and to no other form because only narrative is
entirely subject to the personalmediation of the story-teller and only narrative
has an inherentbarrieragainstthe self-indulgenceof intimacyin the responsibility
of the narratorfor his public act of story-telling.
(f