2 Memory – Latency – Eventfulness

2.1 Rethinking the Concept of the Event

2.1.1 The Event at the Core of Narratology: Structuralist Approaches

The ‘event’ as a basic pillar of meaning-making is both essential for memory discourses and the core concepts of narratology. Just as public memory work endows a community with a sense of identity by creating a coherent narrative of past events in relation to the present, narrative plots “stabilize experience by pouring the raw material of life into the mold of events and characters” (Ritivoi 2016: 66). Rethinking literature that deals with memory thus goes hand in hand with rethinking the narratological primary position of the event. In her narratological study Avatars of Story (2006), Marie-Laure Ryan builds on H. Porter Abbott’s definition of a narrative as the combination of story and discourse, whereas “story is an event or sequence of events (the action), and narrative discourse is those events as represented” (qtd. in Ryan 2006: 7). Ryan builds on this definition but adds more complexity to it. She defines narrative in the following way:

Narrative must be about a world populated by individuated existents. This world must be situated in time and space and undergo significant transformations. The transformations must be caused by nonhabitual physical events. Some of the participants in the events must be intelligent agents who have a mental life and react emotionally to the states of the world. Some of the events must be purposeful actions by these agents, motivated by identifiable goals and plans. The sequence of events must form a unified causal chain and lead to closure. The occurrence of at least some of the events must be asserted as fact for the story world. The story must communicate something meaningful to the recipient. (Ryan 2006: 8, my emphasis, Y.L.)

As Ryan’s definition underlines, narrative in the classical, traditional sense, is about meaningful events that trigger change in characters who react emotionally to these events. Events, in her definition, are tied to the goals and purposes of ‘intelligent agents’ who have the capacities to react meaningfully to these events.

As events indicate change and propel the plot forward, they have both a temporal function as change indicates the passage of time and a consequential function in that they make possible the development of the story. The narratologist Peter Hühn similarly connects the concept of the event to a movement in time:

The concept of event has become prominent in recent work on narratology; it is generally used to help define narrativity in terms of the sequentiality inherent to the narrated story. This sequentiality involves changes of state in the represented world and thereby implies the presence of temporality time, which is a constitutive aspect of narration (Hühn 2011: n.pag.)

Linking the nature of the event to its function of establishing temporality in a narrative, it becomes apparent that while “[e]very event is a change of state, […] not every change of state constitutes an event. The event, therefore, has to be defined as a change of state that fulfils certain conditions” (Schmid 2010: 8). According to Hühn, one of these conditions is that events in a literary text create sequentiality, which in turn decides on the ‘presence of temporality’ in that text.

For structuralists, there are some more criteria that need to be taken into account to determine whether ‘something unexpected happening’ counts as an ‘event. The narratologist Wolf Schmid defines facticity and resultativity as necessary conditions for events to count as relevant and worth noticing. In order to count as a real event, the happening that induces changes needs to actually take place (rather than being simply desired, imagined or hinted at) (Schmid 2010: 9) and be resultative, which means that it has to reach a conclusion (rather than having simply begun or being in progress) (9). Although Schmid names these two conditions “necessary conditions of an event in the strict sense” (9), he emphasises that they alone are not sufficient and subsequently names five more categories that decide upon the eventfulness of a text. The changes on the level of the plot are more or less eventful depending on the extent to which these five features are met, while the first two in Schmid’s hierarchical order must be displayed at least to some degree (9). The prerequisites, which are listed hierarchically starting with the most important one, are those of relevance (significance in the storyworld), unpredictability (deviation from what is expected, from the norms of the general order of the world, constituting a surprise for one of the characters, but not necessarily the reader). Similarly, the literary scholar, semiotician and cultural historian Jurij Lotman sees the boundary crossing of a character in a literary text as something that comes by surprise, something that “did occur, though it could also not have occurred” (Lotman 1977: 236). The event, in this sense, cannot be a logical consequence of the plot; it must be unexpected. Next to these two “primary criteria underlying the continuum of eventfulness” (Schmid 2010: 10), Schmid also lists some “additional, less crucial” features: Persistence (the eventfulness is in direct proportion to the affected subject’s long-lasting perception of the event as surprising and unpredictable), irreversibility (irrevocability of the change’s consequences, the original state is unlikely to be restored),1 and non-iterativity (a repeatedly occurring change represents a low level of eventfulness, even if it is each time unpredictable and relevant) (Schmid 2010: 9 – 12).

All of these parameters for eventfulness are context dependent; they can only be measured “with reference to intradiegetic expectations, to a literary or cultural context”, which means that the event has to be “related to [its] surroundings by an entity (character, narrator, or reader) that comprehends and interprets the change of state involved” (Hühn 2011: n.pag). Hühn elaborates that “the extent to which a change in the narrated world qualifies as significant, unpredictable, momentous, or irreversible” depends on “the established system of norms, the conventional ideas about the nature of society and reality, current in any given case […] and can therefore vary historically between different mentalities and cultures” (n.pag.). This established system of norms can either be established within the storyworld or be the norms that the reader is familiar with, as long as either a character, the narrator or the reader can situate and contextualise the “change of state involved” (n.pag.). Adding the concept of a semantic field to the general idea of ‘change of state’, the semiotician, Jurij Lotman claims that

[a]n event in a text is the shifting of a persona across the borders of a semantic field. It follows that the description of some fact or action in their relation to a real denotatum or to the semantic system of a natural language can neither be defined as an event or as a non-event until one has resolved the question of its place in the secondary structural semantic field as determined by the type of culture. But even this does not provide an ultimate resolution: within the same scheme of culture the same episode, when placed on various structural levels, may or may not become an event. (Lotman 1977: 233, my emphasis, Y.L.)

What counts as an event in literature is thus not universal but depends, according to Lotman and Hühn, on the cultural context of the literary work as well as on the semantic field established therein.2 As the structuring within the text also decides on the perception of something as an event, Lotman goes on to argue that “[a] plot thus viewed does not represent something independent, taken directly from life, or something passively received from tradition” (1977: 234). Rather, “a plot is organically related to a world picture which provides the scale for determining what constitutes an event and what constitutes a variant of that event communicating nothing new to us” (234). Events in a literary text, according to Lotman, do not stand isolated but need to be viewed in relation to their context and other events and incidents which they could be related to.

Eventfulness, in the structuralist understanding, therefore depends on perspective and reflects back on a certain cultural situation in which something is either perceived as something radically new and thus constitutes an event or is considered ‘ordinary’ although it might count as an event in a different context.3 Moreover, it reflects on a very specific moment in time, since deviation from the norm, from the ordinary, as Lotman points out, depends on what the norm is at a certain time and place. The tellability of a story is ultimately related to an act which in the context of the story might be unusual or even prohibited. Falling back upon criminal discourse, Lotman expands that “an event is an act of transgression” (1977: 236), it involves “the violation of some prohibition” (236). This...