Joep Leerssen

Amsterdam University
So what is a narrative?
Key note speech
Summary4

I
Contemporary memory culture, which includes museums, among which the House of
European History, tend to emphasise the notion of ‘narratives’. Is this just a buzzword? What
do people mean by it? Current usage suggests that the concept is meant to signify the fact
that items from the past are not presented singulatim, anecdotally in their own right, but
as part of a logical concatenation through time that gives them a historical meaning. These
concatenations are then called ‘narratives’.

That usage seems sensible and justified

enough. But from my own specialism,
literary history, I want to offer a slightly
more sharply-focused notion of the idea of
‘narrative’ and why it appeals to us. Indeed
the very fact that narrative appeals to us
is part of my topic. What makes narratives
appealing, and how do memory curators
draw on that appeal?

In the full presentation of this lecture I proceeded to tell a story, almost as an experiment in
order to demonstrate how telling a story can engross an audience, capture their attention. It
was the story of how the 19th-century philologist Hoffmann von Fallersleben hunted down
a lost medieval manuscript by travelling from Vienna to Ghent, by train (then a futuristically
modern conveyance; this was in 1837). With the help of the Flemish man of letters Jan Frans
Willems he managed to locate the elusive text, which had been kept in a monastic library but
lost from sight when that monastery was dissolved in the French Revolution. It was retrieved
in nearby Valenciennes. The story finishes on a note of irony: Hoffmann and Willems were
not just dry-as-dust-librarians, but also adventurous explorers, and, in addition, important
leaders in the Romantic national movements of Flanders and Germany. By contrast, the 9th-
century manuscript they retrieved was bilingual; its nameless scribe had copied, on the same
page, both the old German Ludwigslied and the old French hymn to Saint Eulalie. These two
primeval vernacular texts feature side by side, in the same scribal hand, in what amounts
almost to a 9th-century prefiguration of European cultural unity-in-diversity. But the place
where the manuscript was written, lost and found would be torn up by the trenches of the
First World War a thousand years after its completion.

The story serves to illustrate some points about narrative. Narrative is not just a concatenation
of incidents, but it makes a point; it has relevance, ‘the moral of the story’. It has a specific
structure (already hinted at by terms like ‘hunting down’ and ‘adventurous explorers’), and it
has a specific effect on the audience. Structure and audience-effect have been scrutinised

32 4
Informal summary of a lecture, without specific references to theoreticians on this topic.
by great literary scholars from Aristotle to the twentieth-century ‘narratologists’ (Greimas,
Genette, Bal, Fludernik, Rigney), and their insights seem relevant for the present occasion.

A preliminary clarification is in order: a narrative need not be fictional. Most fictions, from the
Iliad to Jane Eyre, are narratives. Indeed one would be hard put to think of fictions that are
non-narrative in structure; some of Borges’s Ficciones, essays on counterfactual topics, are
a rare example. So: most fictions are narratives. But not all narratives are fictional. History-
writing and autobiography are examples of non-fictional narrative.

The fact that autobiographical or historical narratives may not always be factually reliable is
completely beside the point. The opposition between non-fiction and fiction is not the same
as the opposition between truth and lies. Plato confused fictions and lies when he exiled poets
from his ideal Republic; but ever since Aristotle we have been trying to dispel Plato’s error.

We can use narratives to tell the truth, to lie, or to trigger people’s imaginations. And narrative
is supremely powerful, particularly in that third function. Why?

II
A narrative as a text is structured differently than other discursive genres such as prayers,
computer manuals, lyrical poems or political manifestos. The structure often involves a
quest of sorts. In a story, a protagonist is on a trajectory towards some goal or conclusion.
Three elements mutually define each other: the protagonist, the trajectory, the conclusion.
Narratives typically have a ‘sense of an ending’, some closure (which may be happy or tragic),
which provides a point of convergence for the events leading up to it, and which suggests
the tale’s ‘meaning’ or ‘moral’. The protagonist is defined in terms of the trajectory s/he is on:
Odysseus on his way home to Ithaca, Frodo Baggins on his way to Mordor, Elizabeth Bennett
on her way to adult womanhood and a relationship based on sensible understanding, or Alice
in her progress across the bewildering wonderland through the looking-glass.

The audience usually sees the event through the eyes of the protagonists. This is called,
technically, ‘focalisation’. It would be counter-intuitive, a bit of a thought experiment, to
re-imagine the Odyssey from the point of view of Penelope or Circe, or the Harry Potter books
from the point of view of Draco Malfoy. Authors can, of course, play with different or even
conflicting focalisations. Famously, Kurosawa’s film Rashomon tells the same story three times,
from the points of view of the three different protagonists. But even in such recent experiments
with traditional conventions, it is precisely this choice of focalisation that establishes which of
the characters is the ‘main character’, at the centre of the action.

This is worth pondering. The centre of the action is the character through whose eyes we
witness the events and other characters. That means in effect that our perspective on the story
is that of the protagonists in the story. In the very root sense of the word, we identify with the
main character. When we read the Diary of Anne Frank (and although it was not written as a
narrative, we read it as such), we see the Nazi occupation of Holland through her eyes, from
her experiential point of view. We experience the events from the inside, as if we were part of
them, through the proxy of the focalising protagonist.

33
This explains the powerful capacity of narrative to suspend our self-awareness and
to ‘lose ourselves’ into someone else’s world and fate – even in the case of fictional
narratives we react as if the events were real. Like children shouting ‘watch out!
behind you!’ when a monster sneaks up on a movie hero, our real, physical emotions
are triggered by events that we merely imagine. We weep, feel tension, experience
sentimental endearment by processing words about non-existent or long-dead persons.

Narrative is, in short, an empathy machine. It allows us to live and experience the lives of
others, more directly and emotionally involved than if we were reading a mere description.
It can also manipulate our sympathies. Depending on their relationship with the protagonist
and his/her agenda, other persons can be reduced to ‘good guys’ or ‘bad guys’ or expendable
extras, aiding or opposing the hero or inconsequentially marginal. Indeed narrative reduces
the contradictions and complexities of real humanity to a finite repertoire of actantial
functions, such as (besides the hero) the mentor, the sidekick, the foe, or the victim. Out of
these structural elements, and a judicious dosage of circumstances, incidents, choices and
coincidences, do we weave stories; much as we create music from a limited gamut of musical
notes.

III
Experiencing stories is something we learn very early on in our lives, when we listen to the
tales of Little Red Riding Hood or Hansel and Gretel, often in the closest intimacy of familial
domesticity at bedtime. This ideal-typical setting of narrative not only makes the audience
identify with the tale’s protagonists (will Gretel liberate Hansel and herself from the witch? will
Little Red Riding Hood survive her encounter with the Big Bad Wolf?) but also creates a close
bond between the audience and the narrator. Telling a story is a very companionable thing:
narrator and listener share an intense co-presence in the here-and-now of the storytelling act.
Later in life, that can develop into exchanging jokes, or reminiscences, or gossip.

In the second instance, stories can also be mediated, in writing or print, or by audio-visual
means, or both. But even then, in this disembodied form, they can become a bonding agent:
I read The Hobbit to my children at bedtime when they were beyond the age of Hansel and
Gretel, and we all went to the movie spin-offs together when those came out. Our shared
experience of the story was manifested in discussions afterwards, about what we liked and
didn’t like. And here is, then, a third axis where narratives can be a binding agent: the audience
sharing their experience of a story. People show a remarkably pronounced tendency to
communicate the experience of their involvement in a story, either in face-to-face encounters
(people discussing a movie afterwards; reading clubs) or through reviews, websites, notice
boards and blogs. In extreme cases, they will form associations (‘Trekkies’ for fans of the TV
series Star Trek; ‘Janeites’ for dedicated fans of the novels of Jane Austen).

This last bonding function is the most socially potent of the three. It binds individual readers/
listeners into a collective called an audience or public. Thus, seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century theatre criticism lies at the root of what Jürgen Habermas analysed as the ‘public
sphere’; and the rise of widespread reading material (above all, the novel) played an important
part in the rise of what Benedict Anderson termed ‘imagined communities’. As narratives make

34
the individual reader/listeners empathise with the story and its protagonists, so too those
readers/listeners collectively will merge into an empathetic community, bonded by a shared
interest in narratives.

IV
Where is this community situated? Who and where are those people who share the emotional
space of narrative involvement?

I can identify, tentatively, three spheres of imaginative co-presence.

One is communitarian: immediate, face to face, and embodied: family members and bedtime
stories; alumni at a reunion reminiscing about their past exploits.

Then there is the virtual or ‘imagined’ community. This can be a national one, as analysed by
Anderson, sharing (across great distances, by means of mass media) the collective experiences
and memories of the nation’s triumphs and tragedies, heroes and villains, crises and scandals.
Alternatively, the imagined community can be an ethical one: a religious group sharing
devotion to the events or personalities in their holy books, or, more trivially, subscribing
members of a Charles Dickens Appreciation Society Newsletter.

A third one, perhaps most suggestive for the present context, is what I call ‘location sharing’:
people from different places, transient, engaging with a given place by means of a story.
Among such location sharers are, above all, travellers and tourists, who, when they see a
medieval castle or salient landmark, will be informed of some characteristic event, anecdote
or adventure that took place there. This practice is very ancient. Many sagas are stories
about places: like that mountain called the Lorelei, overlooking the Rhine, called after the
legendary nymph who dwelt there. Many sagas explain why a place carries the name it has.
The aboriginal Australian practice of the Walkabout links the landscape and its features, like
so many landmarks in a narrative, to the origin-tales of a community: the wanderer traverses,
not a country but a collective memory (‘songline’) given geographical expression. Much more
trivially, modern tourist guides will link buildings to their historical background and erstwhile
function, and to the events that occurred around them. And museum visitors will be subjected
to a combined experience of spectacle (arranging displays spatially across rooms and exhibits)
and narrative (informing the audience that these exhibits have a tale to tell).

V
This juxtaposition of narrative and spectacle is intriguing and suggestive. One is, as Lessing
called it, a Nacheinander, an arrangement of events in time; the other is a Nebeneinander, an
arrangement of objects in space. Narrative works in a very special way when it is, precisely,
spatialised, dovetails with spectacle: as in the Australian songlines and walkabouts, or in a
museum display, or in large-scale panoramic movies with stunning landscape shots. The ‘here-
and-there’ of location meets the ‘then and now’ of story. In this dovetailing, what emerges is,
quite literally, a lieu de mémoire, a memory-site.

35
I assume that this conflation of space and time was, perhaps subconsciously, at work in the
concept of a Haus der Geschichte or ‘House of History’, something that is not merely a museum
where the past is displayed as objects but a location where the past is domiciled, at home.
What could be more natural than to arrange this house along narrative lines? The intent,
clearly, is to trigger the visitor’s sense of empathy, across space and time, with others who, like
they, are implicated in the stories we hear.

The narratives and the sites that have set the tone tend to be, by default, national. That default
was established by the great national storytellers of the Romantic period (Walter Scott, Tolstoy,
Mickiewicz, Victor Hugo), and by the great national museums that emerged in the nineteenth
century. If this brief sketch has any moral, it could be this: that narratives have more locations
than only the national ‘imagined community’. Narratives can take shape, and bond their
participants, at the familial, the communitarian, the ethical, and the transient/transnational
level. That aspect of narratives offers perspectives for a House of European History.

36
“Europe
exposed”
25-27 JUNE 2018
Report

House of European History

Brussels