13. Rhetoric and Narrative
Narratives have many different components that make them rhetorically relevant. They are reflections of an audience’s values: a story is never just a story. They are about the people telling them, about ways of envisioning the future, or about the contemporary problems that those tellers are confronted with.
Narratives are ways of shaping public memory or retelling events that have happened in the past. They allow us to remember what has happened or to retell these moments as alternate futures.
Narratives also reflect a dominant ideology because they reflect the values not just of the people who create them but of the people who read and watch them, making them a part of their lives.
Inside and Outside
Narratives have an inside and an outside, and some specialized terms capture those ideas. The inside is the diegesis, and the outside is the extra-diegesis.
In a written narrative, the elements that occur in the timeline of the story form the diegesis. Things that happen in the story but fall outside the scope of the story’s events are extra-diegetic. For instance, a story may be about characters whose lives were changed by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The things that happen to these characters would be part of the diegesis. But if September 11, 2001 were not explicitly part of the story, they would be extra-diegetic if those events occurred before the story ever began.
In films, diegetic and non-diegetic sound define what is available "inside" and "outside" of the story. For instance, if a character turns on a radio in a film and the sounds are audible to both the characters and the audience, then that sound is diegetic. If ominous music plays and is only audible to the audience but not to the characters on screen, then that sound is extra-diegetic.
Narrative Time, Fabula, Syuzhet
Narrative Time describes the way that stories are ordered for a reader, listener, or viewer. Sometimes, a story isn't told linearly. Narratives may begin in medias res, where events are already happening or have already happened. Stories both happen step-by-step and as an overall "arc" that connects the beginning to the end. They can happen as brief moments of surprise and as the unfolding of deeply plotted events.
Fabula describes the chronological sequence of the events in a narrative. The fabula is the timeline that we would construct if we were to untangle all of the events in the narrative, creating a timeline that puts them back in their linear order from beginning to end, though the narrative may not have presented them in that order.
Syuzhet (pronounced, roughly, "siuu-ZHJET") is the way a story is organized, or its structure. In other words, if the events in the narrative occur in first, second, third order, then that is the syuzhet. If the narrative begins in the middle, returns us to the past, and takes us to the end, then that is the syuzhet. If the narrative is a collection of different stories that start and end at overlapping times, then that is the syuzhet. It is time in the narrative voice of the story as it is told.
Forms
Narratives are also categorized and reshaped by genre or conventions that allow stories to be widely recognizable and appreciated by wide audiences. Genres create a pattern of expectation, such that some of the best stories make us question our expectations of what the characters will do or make us jump with a twist ending. Both “form” and “genre” refer to ways of organizing narrative. So, what is the difference?
Form and genre are two important ways of describing the recognizable organization of narratives.
Forms are the particular logical elements that may occur within a given narrative, while genres are arrangements of those elements as recognizable kinds of narrative.
Forms are akin to the building blocks of narrative. They are durable, repeatable elements that may appear as features within many different narratives. Form arrange symbols and organize language in ways that give it a recognizable and repeatable order, like a figure of speech.
Forms can be picked up and then used in a variety of different contexts, creating the same meaning using different messages. For example, the “distracted boyfriend meme” may be understood as a form when we witness the same elements in a similar arrangement within a different image or text. This meme has a precursor from The Killers, a film from 1946:
That form can morph recognizably to blend in other contexts, as we see here:
When we recognize the similarities between these images, we can see how a similar meaning occurs in very different messages whose creation is separated by several decades.
But forms also can create different meanings with the same message. Memes work this way. The image below is of Brittany Broski, the star of the “Kombucha Girl” meme. On the left, Broski’s signature facial expressions carry the captions “We need to have a talk” and “We need to have a taco.” But this form, the very same image, can carry a different meaning as well. The image on the right, now putting the meme onto a protest sign, shows Broski’s face both disgusted at climate change and optimistic at the prospect of doing something about it. In this case, “Kombucha Girl” produces a form that creates different meanings in different contexts.
By themselves, forms are ambivalent concerning the ethical or political goals that they serve. Studying form alone cannot tell us which forms are correct or better or worse. They serve a number of different purposes. When analyzing forms, we have to pay attention to where and how those forms are being used. Forms may be picked up, repeated, and recur in many different texts.
Genres
Genres are names for categories of narratives (and other discourses). Genres emerge when some number of forms appear together as a consistent feature among different narratives. They may also change over time, as different genres sometimes merge to form new categories of common storytelling.
For example, “horror-comedy” and “dramedy” are recent examples of how distinct genres of narrative have come together.
Genres are constellations of formal elements. They are not identical to forms because they assemble forms and materialize when several different forms cluster together.
When we watch ⏯️ the trailer for The Shining, for example, many formal features come together to create a widely recognizable contribution to the genre of horror films. The music, images of large unoccupied spaces, characters running or limping across the screen with weapons, the voice-over about people in isolation experiencing a mental breakdown, and Jack Nicholson’s changing demeanor all indicate that watching the film will be a frightening experience.
Genres also set audience expectations about coherence and resolution. When we watch a movie that belongs to a certain genre, we have expectations associated with it. When those expectations are violated, different things can happen: we might not enjoy ourselves because the movie isn’t the one we hoped to see. It might create a new genre by blending existing formal elements.
Genres also structure the interpretation and reception of public events according to the interests of a dominant culture and ideology. If form describes the interchangeable, repeatable organization of narrative elements, then genres describe a constellation of forms that cluster together to tell stories in recognizable ways.
Narrative Frames
Narrative frames are ways that public events are constructed through a narrative. Two critical communication theorists use “frame” to describe narratives: Kenneth Burke and Shanto Iyengar.
Comic and Tragic Frames
Burke's frames are borrowed from Aristotle. They are the comic frame and the tragic frame. For Burke, the same story can be told as a comedy or a tragedy. The difference lies in how we see the motives of the characters.
The comic frame is a viewpoint that would have you see others as mistaken rather than evil, bumbling instead of calculating.
In ⏯️ this promo for Veep, Selena Meyer and her aides are incapable of doing their jobs, which is the main reason that you are invited to see them as mistaken rather than as terrible people.
By contrast, the tragic frame would have you see others as evil rather than mistaken, calculating instead of bumbling.
In ⏯️ this clip from House of Cards, the two main characters plot and scheme to use a declaration of war to distract from their various scandals.
Episodic and Thematic Frames
Shanto Iyengar’s media frames account for how news stories are repeated and told in a political context. The frames are traditionally understood in terms of the way that news stories are organized.
The episodic frame depicts public issues in concrete instances or public events; the episodic “makes for good pictures.” Its key characteristic is the snapshot or the close-up. It is about isolated events disconnected from a greater context. They are “human interest stories” that are reducible to the motives of individual actors. Something surprising has happened or is happening, but for no particular reason other than the psychology of the people involved.
The thematic frame places public issues in some general context. They establish a history and structure that has allowed the events to occur the way they have. Often, thematically framed narratives take the form of a “takeout” or “background” report directed at the general outcomes of policy or event. The thematic frame would, for example, draw attention to conditions of gentrification as the reason for greater homelessness or stock buybacks as the explanation for mass layoffs. This mode of telling suggests some greater reason that would explain why things are as they are.
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