10.13125/2039-6597/1406
Storytelling, as a distinctively human characteristic, is a product of our capacity for language and symbolic communication. Just as language is considered a medium within the field of media ecology, so too can narrative be understood as a medium of communication, as well as a kind of language, and as a fundamentally social phenomenon. As a medium, narrative interacts with and is modified by other media, undergoing significant change as it is expressed through oral tradition, dramatic performance, written documents, and audiovisual media. In particular, major changes in the nature of character and plot accompany the shift from orality to literacy, and writing and especially printing make possible new forms of tragedy as opposed to comedy, prose as opposed to poetry, and fiction as opposed to nonfiction. Storytelling continues to mutate through the introduction of new media, with increasingly greater emphasis on narrative as an environment, especially one associated with social interaction and gaming.
application/pdf
2039-6597
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8
it
Lance Strate
Between
Notes on Narrative as Medium and a Media Ecology Approach to the Study of Storytelling
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
4
Metamorphoses of Narration
2014-11-30
2015-01-22
2014-11-30
2015-02-04
1
Lance Strate
2014/11/30
10.13125/2039-6597/1406
Fordham University, New York City
2039-6597
8
en
Notes on Narrative as Medium and a Media Ecology Approach to the Study of Storytelling
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/1406/1419
4
Notes on Narrative as Medium and a
Media Ecology Approach to the Study
           of Storytelling
                               Lance Strate

     Storytelling appears to be a distinctively human characteristic, so
much so that Walter R. Fisher, a scholar of rhetoric and
communication, suggests that we substitute homo narrans for homo
sapiens, as designation for our species (1987). Although sapience refers
to wisdom, a concept difficult to define, it is generally viewed as a
product of thinking, which is an activity that is not unique to human
beings, given that cognitive processes are clearly observable in other
forms of life. All living things engage in some form of information
processing, animals in particular share with us the process of sense
perception, and many species also have the ability to visualize, both in
regard to memory, and planning and imagination (as well as
dreaming). In sum, it is not the capacity for thought that makes us
human, nor the wisdom we may (or may not) derive from that
capacity. Rather, in following Hannah Arendt's call to think about
thinking (1978), it is arguably the fact that, as human beings, we enjoy
the capacity for a distinctively human form of thought, thinking in
words, in language.
     Linguistic thought, however, presupposes language acquisition, a
process that begins with interaction with significant others, via the
spoken word. First, we learn how to speak out loud to others, and then
we learn to speak to ourselves, silently (albeit not necessarily so),
internalizing speech as thought, and also internalizing the social roles
that accompany speech (Mead 1934), and serve as a form of
metacommunication for interpreting the meaning of our messages
(Bateson 1972, 1979). We go through a similar process when we learn



Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)
Lance Strate, Notes on Narrative



how to read, first learning how to read out loud, and then how to read
silently (although subvocalization is often still involved), and this
mirrors a historical process, as silent reading was rare if not entirely
unknown before the printing revolution that began in 15th century
Europe (McLuhan 1962). It is reasonable to posit that human
development recapitulates human evolution, and that the evolution of
spoken language preceded its internalization as silent thought. The
relationship between language and thought has been discussed by
scholars such as George Herbert Mead (1934), Lev Vygotsky (1986),
and Julian Jaynes (1976), and by Walter Ong (1967, 1971, 1977, 1982,
2002), a literary scholar whose work is central within the field of media
ecology (Strate 2006).
      As another foundational scholar in the field of media ecology,
Lewis Mumford (1952), observes, it is neither thought, intelligence, or
wisdom that distinguishes human beings from other forms of life, nor
the commonly observed fact that human beings have opposable
thumbs that facilitate tool use and technology, for it has long been
recognized that animals are capable of using and even making tools,
and in particular are able to produce such elaborate constructions as
beaver dams, bird nests, and insect hives. Mumford instead suggests
that the most important contribution of the opposable thumb is that it
enabled us to carry objects in our hands, freeing our mouths for
complex forms of vocalization. Or as I like to put it, it is not opposable
thumbs, but opposable tongues, dialogue and conversation, that is the
key to understanding our species. In other words, what makes us
human is our capacity for symbolic communication, and especially
linguistic communication, language taking the physical form of speech,
reflected in our biology both by Broca's and Wernicke's areas in the
cerebral cortex, and the unique structure and placement of the human
larynx. Language and other forms of symbolic communication give us
the ability to engage in what Alfred Korzybski refers to as time-
binding (1993), the ability to preserve information over time,
accumulate knowledge by passing it on from generation to generation,
and evaluate it in order to make progress in our understanding of the
world; time-binding, according to Korzybski, is what separates us from
other classes of life.
      Like time-binding, narrative is unique to our species because it is
a product of our capacity for language and symbolic communication,


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                                   Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



for, as poet Rosemarie Waldrop put it, «animals do not hunt for a
story» (2003: 32). Indeed, narrative is synonymous with story-telling
because it is primarily a linguistic form. It may be possible to tell a
story through a sequence of pictures unaccompanied by words, or by
some form of pantomime, but these are also types of symbolic form, as
Susanne Langer makes clear (1953, 1957). Moreover, a strong case can
be made that such forms of nonverbal narrative could only be possible
after language has given rise to story-telling as a practice, and that
nonverbal narrative requires individuals who are already familiar with
linguistic narrative, and therefore able to fill in what has been left
unsaid. While it is possible for imitation and play-acting to serve as
representations of actual actions, as Gregory Bateson observes (1972,
1979), such significant gestures do not approach the complexity of
narrative structure. Moreover, historically, Denise Schmandt-Besserat
has shown that the practice of arranging images in linear sequence
only appears after the invention of writing, and follows the example of
written characters following one another along a straight line (1996).
And pantomime, as a purely silent form, appears to have originated in
early modern Europe, in conjunction with the printing revolution and
the newfound practice of silent reading.
     A media ecology approach to the study of narrative would
therefore begin with the idea that narrative form is derived from the
medium of language. As the linguistics scholar Edward Sapir explains:

        Languages are more to us than systems of thought transference.
    They are invisible garments that drape themselves about our spirit
    and give a predetermined form to all its symbolic expression.
    When the expression is of unusual significance, we call it
    literature. Art is so personal an expression that we do not like to
    feel that it is bound to predetermined form of any sort. The
    possibilities of individual expression are infinite, language in
    particular is the most fluid of mediums. Yet some limitation there
    must be to this freedom, some resistance of the medium. In great
    art there is the illusion of absolute freedom. The formal restraints
    imposed by the material—paint, black and white, marble, piano
    tones, or whatever it may be—are not perceived; it is as though
    there were a limitless margin of elbow-room between the artist’s



                                                                                3
Lance Strate, Notes on Narrative



      fullest utilization of form and the most that the material is innately
      capable of. The artist has intuitively surrendered to the
      inescapable tyranny of the material, made its brute nature fuse
      easily with his conception. The material "disappears" precisely
      because there is nothing in the artist’s conception to indicate that
      any other material exists. For the time being, he, and we with him,
      move in the artistic medium as a fish moves in the water,
      oblivious of the existence of an alien atmosphere. No sooner,
      however, does the artist transgress the law of his medium than we
      realize with a start that there is a medium to obey.
          Language is the medium of literature as marble or bronze or
      clay are the materials of the sculptor. Since every language has its
      distinctive peculiarities, the innate formal limitations — and
      possibilities — of one literature are never quite the same as those
      of another. The literature fashioned out of the form and substance
      of a language has the color and the texture of its matrix. The
      literary artist may never be conscious of just how he is hindered or
      helped or otherwise guided by the matrix, but when it is a
      question of translating his work into another language, the nature
      of the original matrix manifests itself at once. All his effects have
      been calculated, or intuitively felt, with reference to the formal
      "genius" of his own language; they cannot be carried over without
      loss or modification. Benedetto Croce is therefore perfectly right in
      saying that a work of literary art can never be translated.
      Nevertheless literature does get itself translated, sometimes with
      astonishing adequacy. This brings up the question whether in the
      art of literature there are not intertwined two distinct kinds or
      levels of art — a generalized, non-linguistic art, which can be
      transferred without loss into an alien linguistic medium, and a
      specifically linguistic art that is not transferable. I believe the
      distinction is entirely valid, though we never get the two levels
      pure in practice. Literature moves in language as a medium, but
      that medium comprises two layers, the latent content of language
      — our intuitive record of experience — and the particular
      conformation of a given language — the specific how of our
      record of experience. Literature that draws its sustenance mainly
      — never entirely — from the lower level, say a play of
      Shakespeare’s, is translatable without too great a loss of character.


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                                    Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



     If it moves in the upper rather than in the lower level — a fair
     example is a lyric of Swinburne’s — it is as good as untranslatable.
     Both types of literary expression may be great or mediocre. (Sapir
     1921: 221-223)

      Sapir's discussion of language as medium forms the basis of the
argument put forth by media ecology scholars Edmund Carpenter
(1960) and Marshall McLuhan (1964) that the terms "language" and
"medium" are interchangeable, and therefore that media are languages
in their own right. It follows that each medium has its own particular
grammar, a set of rules and structure for making meaningful messages,
and therefore each medium has its own particular bias towards the
kinds of content that works best with it; for example, the bias of
language makes it conducive to abstract ideas in a way that the bias of
images does not, whereas the bias of images make them conducive to
concrete description in a way that the bias of language does not.
Generalizing from Sapir's linguistic relativism, different media provide
us with different tools for thought, and help us to construct different
views of the world. The biases of media also differ in regard to factors
such as their use of symbolic form (language, images, music, etc.), the
senses they utilize (speech and hearing as opposed to writing and
vision), their ability to communicate over space (e.g., writing on stone
as opposed to writing on paper as opposed to electronic transmission
of information), the speed at which messages are communicated (based
on available transportation systems until the advent of instantaneous
communication via the electronic media), communicate over time (e.g.,
ephemeral speech as opposed to permanent monuments as compared
to the massive but volatile storage capacity of computer databanks),
the volume of information that can be communicated (e.g., ever-
increasing as we move from speech to writing to typography to
electronic media), the accessibility of information (few barriers when it
comes to speech and audiovisual media as opposed to writing, more
barriers for complex writing systems than simple ones like the
alphabet), and conditions of attendance (whether we experience a
narrative as a group gathered together as an audience, as individuals


                                                                                 5
Lance Strate, Notes on Narrative



reading a text in isolation, as individuals attending to a broadcast alone
and yet part of a vast, dispersed mass audience), etc. The idea that
every medium has its own particular bias is fundamental within the
field of media ecology, and summed up by McLuhan's pithy phrase,
«the medium is the message» (1964: 7). Neil Postman introduced the
term media ecology, which he defined as the study of media as
environments (1968, 1970). In this sense, Sapir explains that language,
as a medium, is the environment within which literature emerges and
grows, influencing literature according to its biases, just as the natural
environment influences the organisms that inhabit it. Media ecology
scholars take the position that the same kind of environmental effects
based on media biases influence the way that we think, feel, act,
perceive the world, organize ourselves collectively as a society, and
maintain ourselves as a culture (Strate 2006, 2011, 2014).

                                   Narrative as Medium

     Narrative is generally recognized as a form, its content being the
specific stories we tell. Recognition of form-content relationships
predates but also parallels that of the medium-content relationships
that McLuhan emphasized (1964), and within the field of media
ecology the term form can be used as a synonym for medium, whether
the reference is to symbolic, aesthetic, or technological form. Moreover,
the fact that narrative form is contained within the medium of
language is in no way problematic, for as McLuhan explains, «the
content of a medium is always another medium» (1964: 7), an idea that
Bolter and Grusin adopt and refer to as remediation (1999). In other
words, media can be nested within other media, as for example the
medium of speech becomes the content of/is remediated by writing,
the medium of writing becomes the content of/is remediated by
printing, and the medium of printing becomes the content of/is
remediated by electronic text. Other kinds of relationships are also
possible, for example between the technique of alphabetic writing as a
medium, and the various writing surfaces and implements that can be



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                                   Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



used in conjunction with the alphabet, constituting the material media
of writing. Narrative can therefore be understood as a particular
technique that emerges out of language, and therefore as a medium
within a medium.
      In Media and Formal Cause by Marshall and Eric McLuhan (2011),
the biases and effects of media are linked to the Aristotelian notion of
formal causality, one of four causes put forth in Aristotle's Metaphysics
(along with material, final, and efficient cause, the latter being the only
form of causality generally recognized today). When writers have the
sense that the story is writing itself, that the demands of the narrative
call for certain events to occur in the storyline, that certain choices must
be avoided because they would violate the needs of the narrative, that
characters take on a life of their own, and the story must be resolved in
a certain way, they are feeling the effects of formal cause. As a
medium, narrative has a bias that imposes certain constraints on the
story's composition, which in turn leads to the tendency for narrative
to follow certain recognizable patterns that distinguish it from other
forms, such as lyric and lists. Form is not confined to the source or the
message, but is environmental in nature (media ecology being the
study of media, aka form, as environments). The storyteller does not
invent narrative form, but rather lives within narrative as an
environment. We are brought up with stories, receive them as part of
our cultural heritage, and are guided by them; the storyteller follows a
narrative tradition, and is very much influenced by the expectations of
the audience or readers (in this sense, the audience or reader, as
context, can be seen as the cause of the particular story, rather than the
storyteller).
      As medium and form, narrative can also be understood as a kind
of language, with a specific grammar of its own, a view consistent with
narratology's emphasis on the structure of storytelling (Propp 1968;
Todorov 1969). As a language within a language, narrative also
performs the same kinds of functions as language. For Korzybski,
language gives us the ability to create mental representations of the
world, inner maps of the actual territory we inhabit (1993). The world
itself is chaotic and overwhelming, with vastly more information than


                                                                                7
Lance Strate, Notes on Narrative



we can possibly absorb, and through what Korzybski referred to as the
process of abstracting, we select out and take in part of the available
information through sensory perception, and continue to select and
order what we perceive through our use of language and symbols.
Korzybski famously stated that the map is not the territory, our
descriptions of the world should not be mistaken for the world itself,
although they often are. Maps, however, may be structurally similar to
their territory, and therefore help us to understand and anticipate what
we will encounter in our environment, and navigate through the
world. In this sense, some maps are better than others. The process of
abstracting can also be equated to a process of mediating between
ourselves and our environment, as the primary function of media
(Strate 2011).
       Narrative represents one approach to abstracting, helping us to
make order out of the chaos of the outer world, to impose a
comprehensible and predictable structure and a sense of continuity on
a series of events. This is what we, as human beings, do as meaning-
makers, in the way that we relate to and relay our experiences. In
journalism, it is not an accident that reports are referred to as stories, as
it is through narrative that we make sense of the information we gather
about our environment; in rhetoric and persuasion, the efficacy of
narrative as a technique is well understood, and in public relations and
strategic communication the goal is often expressed as getting the story
out. Narrative form is by necessity a simplification of the complexity of
reality, a means of making our experiences easy to convey, easy to
share with others, and easy to understand. Narrative also makes our
experiences easy to remember (Ong 1982; Havelock 1963). And just as
we internalize spoken language in the form of silent thought, we
internalize narratives, making ourselves the heroes of our own stories,
modeled after the narrative archetypes of our culture (Becker 1971,
1973; Campbell 1968; Campbell – Moyers 1988; Strate 2008). Narrative
helps us to make sense out of our own lives, to explain our past, and to
provide a sense of what we might be in store for us in the future. The
stories we tell help us to understand, in simplified fashion, what it
means to be living in time, with memory and anticipation, following a


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                                   Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



journey from childhood to adulthood, for youth to old age, and from
life to death. Is it any wonder that all forms of religion and spirituality
are grounded in storytelling, whether we refer to such stories as myth,
or as scripture?
      I have been using the terms narrative and storytelling
interchangeability, and I want to stress the fact that narrative refers to
story-telling. The term narrative is abstract and subject to reification,
and it is important to keep in mind that narrative is not a thing, but
rather a term that refers to a human activity, telling stories. And for a
story to be told, there must be someone to tell it to. Because the study
of narrative so often is based on the reading of texts, it becomes easy to
lose sight of the fact that stories are fundamentally social phenomena. It
is worth nothing in this regard that individuals with autism, who
characteristically have great difficulty with social interaction, also have
difficulty attending to and understanding narrative, and prefer other
forms of expression (Strate 2006). Storytelling is produced by social
interaction, a product of transactions, of relationships between human
beings. Narrative represents a relationship between source and
receiver. Simply put, narrative is a medium of communication,
mediating between sources and receivers. There is no narrative
without a narrator. And narrative also requires a narratee, although it
is possible for the narrator to take on that role as well. It becomes easy
to lose sight of this fact because we tend to focus on texts rather than
contexts, to pay attention to the content and ignore the medium, which
brings us back to "the medium is the message" as a call to pay
attention. For this reason, Postman described the media ecology
approach as context analysis (2006).

                          Narrative and Media

     The emphasis on narrative as text and the fact that we tend to
equate it with literature is a reflection of a literate bias. The term
storytelling as a synonym for narrative serves as a reminder stories
were first and foremost tales that were told, which is to say that they



                                                                                9
Lance Strate, Notes on Narrative



existed within the medium of speech, of the spoken word, for tens of
thousands of years before the writing was invented. Even after the
introduction of writing, most narrative was communicated via oral
performance, the products of oral composition, as part of an oral
tradition. And for most of the history of writing, especially prior to the
invention of the printing press with moveable type in 15th century
Europe, writing mostly was used in the service of rhetoric, oratory,
recitation, and dramatic performance; even solitary reading was
reading out loud, with silent reading all but unknown in scribal
cultures (McLuhan 1962). We might further consider how well the sum
of all written narratives composed throughout human history would
compare with the total number of unrecorded stories that are shared
through interpersonal exchange each day.
      As a form and medium unto itself, narrative has structural
elements that are independent of the other languages and media that it
is expressed through, e.g., character, plot, and setting, that is, agents
performing actions in some kind of sequence, constituting a distinct
whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. While what is universal
to narrative is of interest to media ecology scholars, the greater
emphasis in the field lies with the ways in which narrative changes and
evolves in response to changes in media and technology. This forms
the basis of much of the literary criticism of McLuhan (McLuhan 1969;
M. McLuhan – E. McLuhan 2011; McLuhan – Watson 1970), Ong (1967,
1971, 1977, 2002), and others who follow their lead, such as Elena
Lamberti (2012), B.W. Powe (2014), Jerry Harp (2010), and Thomas
Zlatic (2012), N. Katherine Hayles (1999, 2002), and in her own unique
way, Camille Paglia (1990). The ways in which media and technology
affect narrative form can include the material conditions of authorship
and composition, including the technologies, languages, and varieties
of symbolic form used to construct narratives; the experiences of
authors working in different media, for example novelists who also
wrote for newspapers, magazines, or worked on screenplays; the self-
conscious incorporation of our response to the media environment, for
example authors response to printing, or to the technologies of
modernity; and the unconscious effects of the media environment, as


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                                  Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



changes in the mode of communication lead to changes in culture and
consciousness. And perhaps the most significant example of this last
factor is the shift from orality to literacy.
      In oral cultures, where there is no means of preserving knowledge
outside of collective memory, narrative serves first and foremost a
mnemonic function, fixing knowledge in the concrete and memorable
form of agents performing actions, and functioning as a kind of tribal
encyclopedia (Havelock 1963, 1982, 1986). For example, instructions on
how to accomplish a given task are encoded in story format, while
abstract phenomena, forces of nature for example, are given
anthropomorphic form. The catalogue of ships in the Iliad is often cited
as an example of how dry information such as a census is transformed
into oral narrative by necessity, in that lists, as a form and medium,
only appear after the invention of writing (Goody 1977). The centrality
of narrative to culture was diminished by the introduction of the
written word, and arguably further reduced by more recent
innovations involving the mechanical reproduction of images and the
electronic transmission of information.
      In oral cultures, narrative can only be performed, and there is no
clear distinction between oral performance and oral composition, since
there can be no pre-existing text, no verbatim memorization, only
repeated retellings in which no two performances can be alike. Oral
narrative is therefore characterized by multiformity, each performance
differing according to occasion, audience, and mood of the performer,
and all the more so from one performer to the next, and from one
generation to the next. This allows for a great deal of fluidity and
flexibility within oral cultures, but also requires the adoption of a
conservative approach because knowledge can so easily be
irretrievably lost, resulting in an emphasis on tradition, on traditional
narratives, and the use of formulas and clichés (Ong 1967, 1982); an
emphasis on novelty and variety in narrative are therefore very much a
product of the written word. Understanding that narrative has a
history that begins long before the invention of writing is essential in
understanding the nature of narrative as well as its history (Scholes –
Kellogg 1967).


                                                                              11
Lance Strate, Notes on Narrative



     Literary studies reflects a literate bias towards the text (Ong 1982),
so much so that the term text is used as a metaphor for all sorts of
cultural artifacts and events that have nothing to do with pages and
documents, whereas the exact opposite should be the case, that the text
is understood as a process and form of symbolic action. It is perhaps
understandable, then, that in the field of communication, with its long
connection to speech and rhetoric, it is drama, derived from
performance rather than text, that is the most powerful metaphor, and
applied as dramatism and its variants to rhetoric (Burke 1945, 1950), as
well as psychotherapy (Berne 1961), and in the theory of symbolic
interaction in social psychology (Goffman 1959, 1963, 1967; Mead,
1934). Media ecology scholars also favor this metaphor, as opposed to
scholars associated with cultural studies and its media studies offshoot,
in part because the spoken word is primary (writing being a visual
representation of the sounds of language).
     Oral performance is dramatic performance, so that we cannot
fully understand oral narrative by just studying written texts, even if
they are records of oral performance, as is the case of the Iliad and the
Odyssey. Significantly, Milman Parry arrived at his breakthrough
understanding of oral composition in the early 20th century by
comparing the Homeric texts to contemporary singers of tales
practicing in Serbo-Croatia (Lord 1960; Parry 1971). Even after the
establishment of a literate culture in ancient Greece, we cannot fully
understand the Attic playwrights for example, without taking into
account the evolution of oral performance from a single singer of tales
into one divided among three singers still utilizing Homeric diction,
the addition of the chorus, and the staging of the play (Havelock 1982).
Similarly, textual analysis of Shakespeare's plays that ignores the
requirements of the spoken word, the constraints of stagecraft, and the
need to appeal to a live audience can easily result in mistaken
conclusions about the meaning and motivation of the narratives. The
same is true for modern audiovisual narratives, as dramatic
considerations cannot help but come into play, albeit in different ways
than in live theater, for example, in film and television's emphasis on
the close-up of the human face, and the use of editing to create a


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                                   Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



narrative montage (Eisenstein 1942, 1949). In this way, film, radio,
television, and other media of the last century and a half introduce new
kinds of narrative, and this is not limited to dramatic formats, as Scott
McCloud demonstrates in his work on comics as a graphic medium
(1993).
      Even when it comes to written narrative, Ong (1967, 1971, 1977,
1982) emphasizes the presence of oral residue, texts being composed in
large part to be read out loud, and writers often having been educated
with an emphasis on rhetoric and oratory. It is not until we achieve the
high literacy of full immersion within print culture that we get such
purely visual writing as that of Henry James or Jane Austen, and with
it the move away from an external narration of events and towards an
inner thought world, ultimately leading to the stream of consciousness
narration in the early 20th century. And there is indeed a certain irony
in the use of the term voice as a metaphor for literary style, in that voice
is exactly what is absent when language is coded as visual marks on a
writing surface. Handwriting might retain some sense of connection
with the author, some of what Walter Benjamin calls aura (1968), but it
hardly has the same deep connection to identity as an individual's
voice, and in any event that too disappears through typography.
Writing renders presence problematic (Ong 1967, 2002), although we
find ways to compensate through communication. But as
communication, writing introduces the odd situation in which the
narrator is separated from the narratee, and must be separated in order
to compose the narrative. As Ong points out, «the writer's audience is
always a fiction» (1977: 53) and the same is true of the author from the
point of view of the reader, the paradox being that we find that we
need to be alone in order to communicate effectively through the
written word. The electronic media bring about what Ong terms
«secondary orality» (1982), a mediated orality, which restores voice to
audiovisual narrative to a large extent, but in an unprecedented,
disembodied manner.




                                                                               13
Lance Strate, Notes on Narrative




                          Mediating Character and Plot

     Characters in oral narrative serve a mnemonic function, as figures
that vital knowledge is attached to, and for this reason they tend to be
characters that facilitate audience attention and message retention, i.e.,
characters that are larger than life, figures that are divine, semidivine,
or royalty, heroes and villains that are extraordinary if not
supernatural, monsters that are bizarre and otherworldly (e.g., a
cyclops, a gorgon, a minotaur). In other words, they are the characters
of myth and legend, or what Northrop Frye refers to as mythic and
romantic heroes (1957). In keeping with the formulaic quality of oral
narrative, oral heroes are flat characters, stereotypical, stock characters,
associated with formulaic epithets (heroes are brave, noble, clever, etc.)
that function in large part to fill the metric needs of poetry and song
(Lord 1960; Parry 1971). Written narrative opens up the possibility of
creating well-rounded characters, as can be seen in biblical narrative
and ancient Greek and Roman biography (Auerbach 1974; Strate 2008).
In Frye's terms, mimetic characters are introduced, first high mimetic,
followed by low mimetic characters. As writing provides a means of
preserving knowledge outside of human memory, narratives no longer
need to serve the same mnemonic function that they once did, so that
the mythic and legendary figures of oral culture are no longer
necessary, and the mechanism by which they were created, oral
tradition, no longer available. Oral narrative requires an economy of
expression that is no longer necessary with writing as a medium, and
the increased volume of information that writing affords allows for
more information to be communicated about narrative characters,
making them more individual and idiosyncratic, as well as more
historically accurate, but above all easier to relate to and identify with,
more like ourselves. The greater the volume of information being
communicated, the more narrative characters are humanized, and
lowered in relation to ourselves, until we reach the age of celebrity,
which emphasizes character types that are just like us, completely
ordinary, and even ironic in Frye's terminology, inferior to us or



14
                                   Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



otherwise just the same as us. Changing media environments have
resulted in shifts from oral to literate heroes, and from print to
electronic heroes (Strate 2008), and this is reflected as well in the way
that mythic and romantic heroes are portrayed in film and television
narratives.
      Oral narratives are characterized as episodic in regards to plot
(Ong 1982; Scholes – Kellogg 1967), and this is due in part to the
improvisational nature of oral composition, which takes place
simultaneously with oral performance (Lord 1960; Parry 1971),
working along lines similar to jazz in its variations on a theme. Singers
of tales are described as stitching together their narratives by drawing
on formulas, formulaic expressions, and formulaic episodes, and there
is no set sequence by which the parts of the story are told. As the tales
are traditional in nature, audiences already are familiar with the story,
so there are no surprises other than the ordering of the episodes, and it
does not matter if the singer begins at the beginning or end, or mostly
like somewhere in the middle, in medias res, thrusting us into the midst
of things, where the action is, in order to capture the audience's
attention. Events that occur earlier can be related later in the
performance, in some ways similar to the use of flashbacks in
audiovisual media, but the better analogy would be to storytelling in
interpersonal interaction, when the storyteller forgets to add a part of
the story, then later interrupts the forward flow of the narrative to fill
in the missing details. The oral composition can also be shortened or
drawn out by the addition of more episodes, depending on the
situation. But the main point is that it is not until the introduction of
writing that we could step back from a sequence of episodes, examine
them objectively, and edit them to create a linear narrative or story line
(Ong 1982; Scholes – Kellogg 1967). Again, linear narrative takes the
form of drama in ancient Greece, and is reflected in the discussion of
plot in Aristotle's Poetics. Of course, written narrative does not require
linear plotting, it only opens the door to the possibility, but the idea of
narrative progressing from beginning to middle to end originates with
Aristotle, and informs narrative composition from antiquity onward,
with further elaboration such as the concept of the climax, perhaps best


                                                                               15
Lance Strate, Notes on Narrative



known today in conjunction with Freytag's pyramid. Edgar Allen Poe's
19th century invention of the detective story is particularly noteworthy
in its use of a linear narrative and closure of plot (Ong 1982), and of the
secondary narrative that the detective pieces together, usually
beginning with the end of the narrative (e.g., the dead body), and then
through the discovery of clues, piecing together different parts of the
narrative until the whole story is revealed. While the secondary
narrative is about piecing together a sequence of events, the emphasis
in the primary narrative shifts from external action to the interior
landscape of the mind, as the detective tries to get inside the head of
the perpetrator, to understand the way that the other person thinks
and sees the world. This is the first step towards stream of
consciousness narrative, and reflects a shift from writing as a
representation of the spoken word to writing as an externalization of
inner thought (Nystrom 1987).
      In the 20th century, we encounter the breakdown of linear
narrative in literature as well as in audiovisual media, reflecting the
new secondary orality and electronic culture. This is apparent not only
in modernist and postmodernist literature and independent and avant-
garde filmmaking, but in the episodic structure of many radio and
television programs, as well as the never-ending storylines of soap
operas and many other serials that involve multiple, overlapping plot
threads. The departure from linear narrative is manifested in new
media through the introduction of hypertext narratives modeled on
branching storylines (Bolter 1991; Landow 1992; Strate 1996), through
the evolution of computer games as interactive fiction (Montfort 2005),
and through transmedia narratives (Jenkins 2008) that need to be
pieced together via entirely different media (e.g., film, books, video,
computer games, websites, etc.). New media theorist Lev Manovich
goes so far as to suggest that digital technology has replaced narrative
with a new form (or medium), the database (2001), an interesting
argument, but one that does not take into account that narrative is itself
a medium and technology, and one that has been central to human life
for tens of thousands of years.



16
                                   Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



      Closely related to the distinction between episodic and linear
narrative is the contrast that Joseph Meeker paints between comedy
and tragedy (1997). Comedy, he argues, is a narrative form universal to
all cultures, and involves a form of picaresque play in which heroes are
concerned with living in harmony with their environments, with just
getting by, what Meeker refers to as the comedy of survival. Tragedy,
on the other hand, is peculiar to western cultures, and features heroes
who try to possess and master their surroundings, and in their hubris
in thinking they can control their environment, bring about their own
doom. Although he does not make the connection between these two
forms and orality-literacy comparisons, Meeker's literary ecology fits
well with a media ecology approach, as comedy originates with oral
narrative, works with episodic plot structure, and then evolves as a
genre within written and audiovisual narrative, while tragedy can be
understood as the unique product of a literate culture. McLuhan notes
that oral culture is associated with acoustic space (1962, 1964), which
places us inside our environment, surrounded by and at the center of
our environment. This is the way that we experience the world
through our sense of hearing, and it is an inherently subjective
position, as well as one that is conducive with living in harmony with
our environment. Literacy, he argues, moves us into a visual space, as
exemplified by Euclid's geometry, the development of perspective in
art, and Newtonian physics. In visual space, we stand outside of the
world, as outsiders looking in, voyeurs and spectators. That is how we
experience the world when we rely on vision alone, especially utilizing
the fixed point of view associated with reading, the literate gaze or
stare, and it is an inherently objective stance, giving rise to the ideal of
objectivity, but also to the idea that our environment consists of objects
that we can manipulate, possess, and control. This alien and alienating
vision is associated with the idea that we are not a part of nature, that
nature is an other that we are in conflict with, an idea born out of the
literate cultures of the ancient world. Literacy, then, is the basis of
tragedy as Meeker understands it, and not surprisingly, McLuhan
relates Shakespearean tragedy to the fact that he was grappling with
the novelty of the literate culture emerging in Elizabethan England,


                                                                               17
Lance Strate, Notes on Narrative



that Hamlet's indecisiveness, for example, is a direct effect of his
bookishness. As tragedy is so intimately bound up with literacy, it may
well be that a contemporary lack of understanding of true tragedy as a
narrative form is a byproduct of the postliterate culture emerging from
our electronic media environment.
      In oral cultures, collective memory requires the use of memorable
techniques, form, or media, and this includes narrative, and also the
forms we associate with poetry and song. When oral narrative is
remediated by the written word, poetic diction is remediated as well,
as can be seen in the texts of Homer, Hesiod, and the Attic playwrights.
And while poetic technique evolves and expands through writing, epic
poetry and verse drama constitute the first and primary form of
written narrative, with prose emerging gradually as an entirely new
form unique to writing as a medium (Godzich – Kittay 1987). As we
become more fully immersed in literate and typographic culture, prose
narrative becomes the norm, and narrative poetry the exception, for
poetry and storytelling alike. Prose opens the door to the new narrative
form that appears in the wake of the printing revolution, the novel,
along with the short story, and which quickly become the main
manifestation of narrative in print culture. Along with this typographic
innovation comes the concept of fiction itself, which is to say the
distinction between fiction and nonfiction, a distinction not made in
oral or scribal culture (Scholes – Kellogg 1966). Fiction follows
typography's bias towards specialization in representing writing for
writing's sake, a narrative form that makes no claim whatsoever to
representing real events. Ironically, while completely divorcing itself
from reality, fiction came to be evaluated almost entirely by the
criterion of realism, along with a sense of originality and novelty that
did not and could not exist before the printing revolution. The strict
separation of fictional and nonfictional narrative characteristic of print
culture has broken down in the electronic media environment, through
forms such as the docudrama, as has the absolute association between
fiction and narrative, through non-narrative fictional products such as
study guides for Klingon, the language of an alien race from the Star
Trek series.


18
                                   Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)




                                Conclusion

      Understanding narrative as a medium in conjunction with media
ecology as the study of media as environments suggests a need to
study narrative as an environment. The tendency to think of narrative
as a text serves as an impediment to this alternate approach. The shift
from oral to literate media environments amounts in a shift in
experience and understanding of narrative, from an event and a
transaction between storyteller and audience in oral cultures, to a thing
and object in literate cultures, whether in the concrete material sense of
a particular copy of a book, or in the more abstract notion of the
specific content that appears within multiple copies of the same work.
Inklings of narrative as environment can be gleamed, however, in the
literate sense of getting lost in a story, being transported to another
place and time through reading. More generally, the seemingly
universal phenomena of using personal narrative to make sense of our
world, the ways in which we turn ourselves into the heroes of our own
stories, the extent to which the internal monologue or dialogue of
consciousness amounts to an inner self playing the role of narrator or
storyteller, all point to the idea of narrative as a process of abstracting
and mediating, mapping the territory, creating a view of the world,
and constructing our perceived environment.
      In literary criticism, the tendency to focus on character and plot
also works against an understanding of narrative as environment. It is
in the nature of environments to be in effect invisible, that is, to serve
as background in a figure-ground relationship (Sapir 1921; McLuhan
1962, 1964). Media are environmental because they mediate between
ourselves and our outer environment, and in coming between us and
the outer world become the environment we actually experience, but
also because they quickly become routine and therefore ignored in
favor of the content they convey or the way in which they are used.
Unless the technology or form is entirely new, or ceases to function
properly, we generally do not pay attention to the medium itself,



                                                                               19
Lance Strate, Notes on Narrative



which is why one of the main tasks for media ecology scholars is to
bring media back into conscious awareness and make them the object
of study, because media, rather than content, have the more significant
effects on us, individually and collectively. The problematic nature of
figure-ground relationships that media ecologists seek to correct is
mirrored in literary criticism's traditional focus and value placed on
realism as a criterion. Realism highlights the elements of character and
plot, and deemphasizes the narrative element concerned with
environment, the setting. For this reason, science fiction and fantasy
narratives in particular, along with offshoots such as alternate history
and magic realism, have until recently been denigrated because they
concentrate on the development of highly original settings rather than
character and plot (Strate 1993, 2011, 2015).
      The creation of fictional environments within narratives has
become increasingly more prominent over the past century, however.
J.R.R. Tolkien's extraordinary achievement in building a fantasy world
began with the medium of language, through the creation of Elvish
tongues, out of which he created not just a history, but a territory
called Middle Earth. Together with James Joyce and George Orwell,
Tolkien's heightened awareness of language can be linked to the
introduction of secondary orality via radio and sound recordings. In a
very different way, the comic book industry gave birth to a kind of
collaborative world-making, beginning with a character from one
series appearing in another character's story as pioneered by DC
Comics, leading to the launch of the Marvel Universe in the early
1960s, an approach that Marvel has now successfully replicated in the
motion picture industry. Broadcasting, in introducing programming
consisting of episodic series, necessitated the creation of a kind of
guidebook, manual, or ‘bible’ for each series to make sure that different
writers and directors working on the program maintained a level of
consistency from one episode to another. In doing so, they also created
worlds or universes, that is, settings and environments for their
characters, out of which individual plots could be constructed. It is no
accident that what may well be the most successful narrative format on
television has been the situation comedy, situation being synonymous


20
                                  Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



with environment in this respect. The sense that episodes are windows
into a larger universe was not lost on fans of the programs, as fan
fiction, pioneered by Star Trek enthusiasts, served as further
explorations of the fictional universe, giving rise to new kinds of
transmedia narratives (Jenkins 2008), further expanded upon in more
deliberate fashion following the success of George Lucas' first Star
Wars film in 1977. The creation of fictional environments gave rise to
the trend towards multipart narratives in publishing, film, and
television, e.g., the Harry Potter, Hunger Games, and Game of Thrones
series, among others. The use of the term game in titles also reflects the
fact that gaming has moved increasingly towards the creation of
narrative environments, from the original Dungeons and Dragons game
inspired by Tolkien that utilized computer-generated statistical tables,
to the interactive fiction genre that included author Douglas Adams
writing the text for the 1984 adaptation of his Hitchhikers Guide to the
Galaxy, as well as an original game entitled Bureaucracy released in
1987, to the turn towards cinematic narrative associated with Myst in
1993, which remains the dominant mode in gaming narrative today.
Hypertext narrative also brings the concept of the environment to the
fore, the narrative serving as a kind of architecture or garden that the
reader navigates through (Bolter 1991; Landow 1992; Strate 1996). The
web being a hypertext writ large, the online environment offers new
possibilities for narratives based on nonlinear navigation.
      Social interaction also functions as an environment, as we enter
into conversations and relationships, and it is worth recalling that
narrative in oral cultures was not characterized by the strict separation
between narrator and narratee, storyteller and audience, that took hold
in literate cultures with the separation in time and space between
author and reader; the breakdown of that separation is often cited as a
characteristic of new media narratives such as hypertext. Moreover, in
oral cultures, audiences participate, by singing along, through call and
response, and by reminding the storyteller of elements of the narrative
that had been left out or otherwise requesting the addition of certain
elements (or that they be passed over). While older forms of
audiovisual media that follow the mass media model are consistent


                                                                              21
Lance Strate, Notes on Narrative



with the literate tradition of active sender and passive receiver of
messages, new media are participatory in nature, whether by way of
direct and immediate feedback mechanisms and opportunities for
interaction and collaboration, or through programmed interactivity
with the medium itself, or through the users' ability to upload and
disseminate material in the form of blogs, podcasts, video sites like
YouTube, etc. Indeed, we might well speculate on the multitude of
personal narratives expressed through blogs, podcasts, and webcam
videos. Looking towards the future of narrative in an evolving media
environment, I would point to such innovative experiments as Bob
Stein's            social          book            platform            (<a
href=”http://www.livemargin.com</a>), Douglas Rushkoff's Exit
Strategy (2002) involving an experiment in open source annotation,
Michelle Rae Anderson's Venice is for Lovers (2011) based on her
innovative online digital Miracle in July novel, and Robert Blechman's
award-winning humorous mystery novel Executive Severance (2011)
composed entirely on Twitter.
     Tablets and smart phones have been remediating works produced
by and for chirographic and typographic media, while adding
hypertextual functionality to narrative and non-narrative alike; they
have also played a role in renewing interest in interactive fiction.
Features such as the touch screen and the ability to change the position
of the screen, turning it from vertical to horizontal and back again,
have allowed for new narrative applications take advantage of the bias
of mobile media, notably Strange Rain first released in 2011, DEVICE 6
in 2013, and Sailor's Dream in 2014. While highly creative, these apps
do not take full advantage of the mobile aspect of tablets and smart
phones, as compared for example to Walking Cinema's location-based
apps that go beyond the gaming concept of mobile-based scavenger
hunts to the creation of a series of documentaries in which the
storytelling is linked to actual exploration of a city, e.g., The Legend of
Casteo for Venice released in 2005, Murder on Beacon Hill for Boston
released in 2009, Posts from Gloucester for the Massachusetts fishing
town in 2012, and Museum of the Hidden City for San Francisco to be
released in 2015. Embedding narrative in real spaces and places utilizes


22
                                  Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



location-based software based on GPS tracking, and will no doubt
increasingly incorporate augmented reality software to create an
audiovisual and textual overlay on the physical world, making use of
the devices' cameras and displays, and eventually of wearable
technology such as Google Glass. On a much more limited scale,
Disney has been extraordinarily innovative in the creation of specially
built narrative environments through the media of theme parks and
rides, with Universal's contributions in this area also worthy of note.
Still, locations have their limitations, and stories have always offered a
means of travel independent of physical transportation and the
necessity of being there. In this respect, virtual reality technology
represents the ultimate potential for full immersion in a simulated
narrative environment, with Oculus Rift, purchased by Facebook in
2014, poised to lead the way.
       The future of storytelling lies in the continued shift away from
narrative as text, and towards the fuller development of narrative as
environment. In conjunction with the electronic media and especially
the new media, narrative will increasingly involve interaction and
collaboration in its creation, and its reception, social narrative as a
form, and social storytelling as an activity. And in keeping with the
bias of new media, narrative will increasingly involve programmed
interactivity, and gaming. These and other mutations are aspects of the
continuing evolution of narrative, as it interacts with other media, at
each turn releasing bursts of creativity, what McLuhan referred to as
hybrid energy (1964). Despite the appearance of a many new non-
narrative forms, the medium of narrative remains as intrinsic to human
life as language itself, and storytelling survives as a distinctively
human, and humanizing activity.




                                                                              23
Lance Strate, Notes on Narrative




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    Soukup, Cresskill, NJ, Hampton Press, 2012: 241-280.



                             The author
Lance Strate

      Lance Strate is Professor of Communication and Media Studies
at Fordham University in New York City. A founder and past
president of the Media Ecology Association, past president of the New
York State Communication Association, and trustee and former
executive director of the Institute of General Semantics, his research
interests include media ecology, new media, and popular culture. He is
the author of Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman's Brave New
World Revisited (2014), On the Binding Biases of Time and Other Essays on
General Semantics and Media Ecology (2011), and Echoes and Reflections:
On Media Ecology as a Field of Study (2006), and a forthcoming book of
poetry, Thunder at Darwin Station, and co-editor of The Medium is the
Muse: Channeling Marshall McLuhan (2014), Korzybski And… (2012), The
Legacy of McLuhan (2005), and two editions of Communication and
Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment (2003, 1996).

      Email: strate@fordham.edu



                             The paper
Data invio: 30/08/2014
Data accettazione: 30/10/2014
Data pubblicazione: 30/11/2014




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Lance Strate, Notes on Narrative




                           How to quote this paper
Strate, Lance, “Notes on Narrative as Medium and a Media Ecology
Approach to the Study of Storytelling”, Tecnologia, immaginazione e
forme del narrare, Ed. L. Esposito, E. Piga, A. Ruggiero, Between, IV.8
(2014), http://www.betweenjournal.it/




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