The Two Principals Of Narrative - Formal Music Part I
Thoughts On: Structuralist Narrative Theory via Propp & Todorov
An exploration of approaches to literature via their component parts.
The Two Principals of Narrative is often held as a central, foundational text of narrative theory. It is an essay by Tzvetan Todorov, whose book, The Fantastic, we have explored before. In this essay, Todorov uses a structuralist approach to narrative; he seeks to understand story and narrative, its general body, through its formal being and its component parts. The essence of this narrative is hinged upon Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale - which we have also explored.
Propp sought to identify, what we might call today, the major beats of the Russian folktale's plot. He calls the central happenings and events that appear in (as is implied) all Russian folktales, functions. Alas, we shall think of 'function' as 'beat' for now as the more modern term leads us down some interesting paths.
'Beat' comes from the world of music. Unlike any other art form, music has deeply--profoundly--unifying structural qualities that are inherent to its formulation. Music is built with notes and tempo/rhythm. Notes are a fascinating phenomena as they are the 12 wavelengths that all music is built upon (this is especially true in traditional Western music). The 12 notes are: A, A#/, B, C, C#/, D, D#/, E, F, F#/, G, G#/. What we see here are 7 notes (A, B, C, D, E, F, G) and 5 sharps(#) or flats(/) (A#/, C#/, D#/, F#/, G#/). (The difference between sharps and flats is almost null; you call a medial tone 'flat' or 'sharp' depending on ascent or descent; thus, if you go up a scale, you will hit A, A#, B, but, if you descend, you hit B, A/, A; there is no difference in sound, only in language). If you listen to a whole band pay, the drums, guitar, singers, bassist--everyone--will be using these 12 notes together, and this is how music is made. Music is formalised further, however, with scales. Scales must be thought of as patterns built out of jumps between notes. Thus, they are made of tones and semitones. A tone is a jump over one note, a semitone is a jump to the next. A scale is completed when you can jump across the 12 notes cyclically. Alas, this can only be demonstrated visually. Here is our 12 notes in order.
A scale is made when you can start on one note and move across all of the rest to get back to it, leaving whatever gaps you decide. Let us then put two sets of notes next to one another and then move across them with a pre-decided pattern.
Here we have two octaves, two sets of the 12 notes available to us. We will jump across them with this order: Tone, Tone, Semitone, Tone, Tone, Tone, Semitone. This means that we will start on one note, jump up a tone (meaning skip the next note) or jump up a tone (go to the next note) as the pattern dictates. We will start on A and follow this TTSTTTS order:
If you study this briefly, you will see that we have followed the predetermined order of jumps (of semitones and tones) to create a pattern that can be repeated cyclically. The predetermined order (TTSTTTS) is a scale. This particular pattern, this particular combination of tones and semitones, is the Major Scale. Because we started the pattern on A, what we see represented in red is the A Major Scale:
We can start the Major Scale pattern at any point. Let us start this time at C so that we have the notes of a C Major Scale:
If a band is playing in C Major, the only notes that will be played throughout the entire song (or as long as they play in this scale) will be A B C D E F and G. The keyboardist will then only hit the white keys, never the black flat or sharp keys:
The guitarist has a slightly more complex job. They have to know where all the notes on a guitar are and must only ever play A B C D E F and G. They learn how to do this with specific patterns that I will not delve into.
I open this talk on narrative with a somewhat unnecessary explanation of notates and musical theory to provide incite on how formalised music is. To play a song, you will decide on a scale, for example, the C Major Scale, and you decide a tempo, for example 120 beats per minute. This means you will only ever play A B C D E F and G in time with a back beat or click that sounds, uniformly, twice every second. Here is an example of a song in C Major played at 120 bpm:
With the same scale, but a different pace, a slower bpm, we have this song:
And here is yet another song, still in C Major, but with a faster bpm:
What we can begin to understand in greater depth now is the great diversity that emerges from a rather strict, inescapable system or form in the world of music. And it is understanding this that we can now look to other arts and begin to understand the application of structuralism in, for example, cinema and literature.
Does literature have the equivalent of musical notes? One could easily argue, yes: it is the alphabet of any given language, this is what unifies all literature. Alas, letters are difficult to equate to notes for the fact that they are so much more dexterous. A song can easily be built with 3 notes, or 3 chords. I'm sure it would be pretty much impossible to write a full-length novel with only 24 letters. Furthermore, when letters come together to form words, they gain rather strict, lucid meanings. The meaning of a chord, or a string of notes, is not at all as apparent. After all, how many dictionaries for chords and notes have you come across? Because music has a far simpler semiotic (meaning-based) foundation than literature, its complexity and beauty often comes from layering; using three notes to create a chord, a new note, or 50 different instruments playing slightly different sets of notes as to form an orchestra. Literature on the other hand works successively; it just keeps using more words to build a greater whole. It is not likely that you will find success by printing two books on top of one another. It is possible to juxtapose two different stories to create something approaching a literary orchestration, but it is all too clear that strings of words cannot operate like strings of notes for the simple fact that we can only read one word at a time whereas we can hear multiple notes at once.
Let us now ask if cinema has the equivalent to musical notes. Some may argue that cinema does: the different shot types that build cinematic language - close-up, long-shot, dolly, establishing shot, etc. Alas, cinema is not just a camera moving in space. Cinema is made up of acting, choreography, music, literature, sculpture and more. These separate arts conglomerate to make cinema. Each has its formal quanta - if it can be found. Music then has its notes, literature its letters, acting, in terms of speech, has its phonemes, choreography has... sculpture has... here we run into trouble. Is there a true equivalent to musical notes in all art, in cinema? I can't find a way to say yes.
What I have just mapped out is the reason why structural approaches to narrative mediums such as literature and, more so, cinema can be so fruitless. In the world of music, structuralism is relatively easy; you can speak of a song's note structure, its beats per minute, its tone, pitch and more, and understand the whole from these component parts. When one tries to find the component parts of narrative, they can speak of the alphabet and grammatical rules, but the semiotic complexity and massive successive accumulation of words makes this seem like a rather inane task. Maybe there is value in mapping out all the grammatical techniques a book uses in order and comparing them to others on mass. I doubt this, however. Furthermore, I am not inclined to find out.
Because it is not practical to use the obvious quanta of literature to analyse a book, structuralists operate in a more abstract realm of 'narrative' and have to identify or invent new quanta. This brings us all the way back to beats. Beats, whilst they do not describe something such as notes in music, do describe something such as rhythm.
The foundation of rhythm in music is bpm; it is the division of a period of time, a minute, into equal parts. By dividing 60 seconds by a number, you have a consistent pace. If you were to play at 120 beats per second, you then play 2 beats a second. Alas, songs are not made out of continuous thumping. Rhythm is complexified by skipped beats, or breaks, and emphasis. It is not unnecessary to delve into time signatures and more here, however, as we have already made the point that music is far more strictly formalised than other arts with our exploration of notes and scales. Suffice to say then that, whilst music has very strict rhythmic techniques, narratives can be perceived as having somewhat loose rhythmic rules.
We now come to Propp again. Propp approaches folktale narratives as if they are whole sequences existent in the imagination. Where music deals with time, narrative deals with an imagined space in which communication occurs. So, where music divides units of time, such as a minute, Propp divides units of communication, of story. He establishes 4 major phases or spheres of narrative. They are as follows:
Within these four phases are 31 functions or beats. Propp's parameters of narrative are the start of the introduction and the completion of the return; this is his second 0 and second 60. The 31 functions are the bpm by which this journey is divided. It is slightly misleading to refer to these as bpm as the functions do not divide a narrative equally and uniformly, but, nonetheless, they do divide the narrative. These 31 functions then become accents of a time signature in music. As a song plays, we can count out its rhythm with "one-and-two-and". This is how you count quarter notes, "one" and "two" being emphasised. You can likewise count out triplets as such: "one-and-a-two-and-a". The "one" and "two" are what Propp identifies with his functions - again, what we in the modern day often call beats. These are the constant subdivisions that are found in all narrative. What fills the spaces between these beats, the "and" or "and-a", is how narratives find spaces in which they can differentiate; between the functions are then character, setting, theme and more. This is Propp's attempt, and it is a rather valiant one, at structurally breaking down narrative as it appears in the Russian folktale. Alas, it is not perfect.
Through Propp, it seems that there is no way to fully formalise narrative, to speak of its structure like we may speak of music's. It is in the next post that we then ask if Todorov's revision and attempt at structuralising narrative brings narrative any closer to music.
Previous post:
The Young Girls Of Rochefort - The Art-Musical
Next post:
The Two Principals Of Narrative - Formal Music Part II
More from me:
amazon.com/author/danielslack
An exploration of approaches to literature via their component parts.
The Two Principals of Narrative is often held as a central, foundational text of narrative theory. It is an essay by Tzvetan Todorov, whose book, The Fantastic, we have explored before. In this essay, Todorov uses a structuralist approach to narrative; he seeks to understand story and narrative, its general body, through its formal being and its component parts. The essence of this narrative is hinged upon Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale - which we have also explored.
Propp sought to identify, what we might call today, the major beats of the Russian folktale's plot. He calls the central happenings and events that appear in (as is implied) all Russian folktales, functions. Alas, we shall think of 'function' as 'beat' for now as the more modern term leads us down some interesting paths.
'Beat' comes from the world of music. Unlike any other art form, music has deeply--profoundly--unifying structural qualities that are inherent to its formulation. Music is built with notes and tempo/rhythm. Notes are a fascinating phenomena as they are the 12 wavelengths that all music is built upon (this is especially true in traditional Western music). The 12 notes are: A, A#/, B, C, C#/, D, D#/, E, F, F#/, G, G#/. What we see here are 7 notes (A, B, C, D, E, F, G) and 5 sharps(#) or flats(/) (A#/, C#/, D#/, F#/, G#/). (The difference between sharps and flats is almost null; you call a medial tone 'flat' or 'sharp' depending on ascent or descent; thus, if you go up a scale, you will hit A, A#, B, but, if you descend, you hit B, A/, A; there is no difference in sound, only in language). If you listen to a whole band pay, the drums, guitar, singers, bassist--everyone--will be using these 12 notes together, and this is how music is made. Music is formalised further, however, with scales. Scales must be thought of as patterns built out of jumps between notes. Thus, they are made of tones and semitones. A tone is a jump over one note, a semitone is a jump to the next. A scale is completed when you can jump across the 12 notes cyclically. Alas, this can only be demonstrated visually. Here is our 12 notes in order.
A A#/ B C C#/ D D#/ E F F#/ G G#/
A scale is made when you can start on one note and move across all of the rest to get back to it, leaving whatever gaps you decide. Let us then put two sets of notes next to one another and then move across them with a pre-decided pattern.
A A#/ B C C#/ D D#/ E F F#/ G G#/ A A#/ B C C#/ D D#/ E F F#/ G G#/
A A#/ B C C#/ D D#/ E F F#/ G G#/ A A#/ B C C#/ D D#/ E F F#/ G G#/
If you study this briefly, you will see that we have followed the predetermined order of jumps (of semitones and tones) to create a pattern that can be repeated cyclically. The predetermined order (TTSTTTS) is a scale. This particular pattern, this particular combination of tones and semitones, is the Major Scale. Because we started the pattern on A, what we see represented in red is the A Major Scale:
A B C#/ D E F#/ G#/
We can start the Major Scale pattern at any point. Let us start this time at C so that we have the notes of a C Major Scale:
C C#/ D D#/ E F F#/ G G#/ A A#/ B C C#/ D D#/ E F F#/ G G#/ A A#/ B
It just so happens that if you start the TTSTTTS pattern at C, you will only hit non-sharp, or non-flat, notes. Thus, this is the C Major Scale:
A B C D E F G
If a band is playing in C Major, the only notes that will be played throughout the entire song (or as long as they play in this scale) will be A B C D E F and G. The keyboardist will then only hit the white keys, never the black flat or sharp keys:
The guitarist has a slightly more complex job. They have to know where all the notes on a guitar are and must only ever play A B C D E F and G. They learn how to do this with specific patterns that I will not delve into.
I open this talk on narrative with a somewhat unnecessary explanation of notates and musical theory to provide incite on how formalised music is. To play a song, you will decide on a scale, for example, the C Major Scale, and you decide a tempo, for example 120 beats per minute. This means you will only ever play A B C D E F and G in time with a back beat or click that sounds, uniformly, twice every second. Here is an example of a song in C Major played at 120 bpm:
With the same scale, but a different pace, a slower bpm, we have this song:
And here is yet another song, still in C Major, but with a faster bpm:
What we can begin to understand in greater depth now is the great diversity that emerges from a rather strict, inescapable system or form in the world of music. And it is understanding this that we can now look to other arts and begin to understand the application of structuralism in, for example, cinema and literature.
Does literature have the equivalent of musical notes? One could easily argue, yes: it is the alphabet of any given language, this is what unifies all literature. Alas, letters are difficult to equate to notes for the fact that they are so much more dexterous. A song can easily be built with 3 notes, or 3 chords. I'm sure it would be pretty much impossible to write a full-length novel with only 24 letters. Furthermore, when letters come together to form words, they gain rather strict, lucid meanings. The meaning of a chord, or a string of notes, is not at all as apparent. After all, how many dictionaries for chords and notes have you come across? Because music has a far simpler semiotic (meaning-based) foundation than literature, its complexity and beauty often comes from layering; using three notes to create a chord, a new note, or 50 different instruments playing slightly different sets of notes as to form an orchestra. Literature on the other hand works successively; it just keeps using more words to build a greater whole. It is not likely that you will find success by printing two books on top of one another. It is possible to juxtapose two different stories to create something approaching a literary orchestration, but it is all too clear that strings of words cannot operate like strings of notes for the simple fact that we can only read one word at a time whereas we can hear multiple notes at once.
Let us now ask if cinema has the equivalent to musical notes. Some may argue that cinema does: the different shot types that build cinematic language - close-up, long-shot, dolly, establishing shot, etc. Alas, cinema is not just a camera moving in space. Cinema is made up of acting, choreography, music, literature, sculpture and more. These separate arts conglomerate to make cinema. Each has its formal quanta - if it can be found. Music then has its notes, literature its letters, acting, in terms of speech, has its phonemes, choreography has... sculpture has... here we run into trouble. Is there a true equivalent to musical notes in all art, in cinema? I can't find a way to say yes.
What I have just mapped out is the reason why structural approaches to narrative mediums such as literature and, more so, cinema can be so fruitless. In the world of music, structuralism is relatively easy; you can speak of a song's note structure, its beats per minute, its tone, pitch and more, and understand the whole from these component parts. When one tries to find the component parts of narrative, they can speak of the alphabet and grammatical rules, but the semiotic complexity and massive successive accumulation of words makes this seem like a rather inane task. Maybe there is value in mapping out all the grammatical techniques a book uses in order and comparing them to others on mass. I doubt this, however. Furthermore, I am not inclined to find out.
Because it is not practical to use the obvious quanta of literature to analyse a book, structuralists operate in a more abstract realm of 'narrative' and have to identify or invent new quanta. This brings us all the way back to beats. Beats, whilst they do not describe something such as notes in music, do describe something such as rhythm.
The foundation of rhythm in music is bpm; it is the division of a period of time, a minute, into equal parts. By dividing 60 seconds by a number, you have a consistent pace. If you were to play at 120 beats per second, you then play 2 beats a second. Alas, songs are not made out of continuous thumping. Rhythm is complexified by skipped beats, or breaks, and emphasis. It is not unnecessary to delve into time signatures and more here, however, as we have already made the point that music is far more strictly formalised than other arts with our exploration of notes and scales. Suffice to say then that, whilst music has very strict rhythmic techniques, narratives can be perceived as having somewhat loose rhythmic rules.
We now come to Propp again. Propp approaches folktale narratives as if they are whole sequences existent in the imagination. Where music deals with time, narrative deals with an imagined space in which communication occurs. So, where music divides units of time, such as a minute, Propp divides units of communication, of story. He establishes 4 major phases or spheres of narrative. They are as follows:
Introduction
Body of Story
Donor Sequence
Hero's Return
Within these four phases are 31 functions or beats. Propp's parameters of narrative are the start of the introduction and the completion of the return; this is his second 0 and second 60. The 31 functions are the bpm by which this journey is divided. It is slightly misleading to refer to these as bpm as the functions do not divide a narrative equally and uniformly, but, nonetheless, they do divide the narrative. These 31 functions then become accents of a time signature in music. As a song plays, we can count out its rhythm with "one-and-two-and". This is how you count quarter notes, "one" and "two" being emphasised. You can likewise count out triplets as such: "one-and-a-two-and-a". The "one" and "two" are what Propp identifies with his functions - again, what we in the modern day often call beats. These are the constant subdivisions that are found in all narrative. What fills the spaces between these beats, the "and" or "and-a", is how narratives find spaces in which they can differentiate; between the functions are then character, setting, theme and more. This is Propp's attempt, and it is a rather valiant one, at structurally breaking down narrative as it appears in the Russian folktale. Alas, it is not perfect.
Through Propp, it seems that there is no way to fully formalise narrative, to speak of its structure like we may speak of music's. It is in the next post that we then ask if Todorov's revision and attempt at structuralising narrative brings narrative any closer to music.
Previous post:
The Young Girls Of Rochefort - The Art-Musical
Next post:
The Two Principals Of Narrative - Formal Music Part II
More from me:
amazon.com/author/danielslack
