The Four Story Forms: Drama / Film / Comic Strip / NarrativeAuthor(s): George H. ThomsonSource: College English, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Nov., 1975), pp. 265-280Published by: National Council of Teachers of EnglishStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/375657Accessed: 14/12/2009 16:14

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GEORGE H. THOMSON

The Four Story Forms: DRAMA FILM COMIC STRIP NARRATIVE

I DIFFERENTIATE the four story forms psychologically according to appropriate subjective and objective modes of experience. These two modes of experience in their creative tension determine some of the essential characteristics of each story form. Experience which is private and mediated by the pleasure principle comprises the subjective mode. It is the mode of wish fulfillment, though the experience has not in the manner of fantasy cut loose from reality. Experience which is public and mediated by the reality principle comprises the objective mode. These two modes, complementary and contrasting, form the matrix for each imitative story type. They are, in their counterpoise, the psychological forces which underlie each story form. Thus for drama the subjective mode of play with its spontaneous self-expression and the objective mode of purposeful action with its deliberate self-expression are the bases of a dynamic tension which is reflected in the special character of the events on stage. Part of that character is the intentional quality of drama, a quality which in turn is related to the dominance of clock time and the predominance of events arranged in a chrono- logical-causal order, here defined as plot. I set these conclusions out in two tables which the reader may refer to now or at the end of the essay.

TABLE I SUBJECTIVE MODE OBJECTIVE MODE

STORY FORM (Pleasure rrlnciple) (Keallty rrinciple)

DRAMA Play Purposeful Action Spontaneous self- Deliberate self-expression

expression

FILM Dream Voyeuristic Viewing I-centered visual Other-centered visual

experience experience

COMIC STRIP Day-Dream Glimpsed Action Self viewed as omni- Other viewed as

potent subject glimpsed subject

NARRATIVE Memory (of Events) Discourse (of Events) A recalling (telling) A telling (recalling)

to oneself to another

George H. Thomson is Professor of English at the University of Ottawa and author of The Fiction of E. M. Forster (Wayne State Univ. Press, 1967). His special interests are theories of fiction and story making. COLLEGE ENGLISH Vol. 37, No. 3 * November 1975

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The first table specifies, under the modes subjective and objective, two cate- gories of experience essential to each story form. In the first instance, if we ask what subjective and what objective experience in life most resembles drama, the answer will be play and purposeful action, defined from the point of view of the participant as, respectively, spontaneous self-expression and deliberate self- expression. Play and purposeful action are not the explicit subject matter of drama. Rather they stand for an inherent tension in life which, when translated into art, determines the unique character of drama. A similar life tension between the subjective and objective modes, but arising from different categories of experi- ence in each case, dictates the special character of film, comic strip, and narrative.

TABLE II

DEFINING PREVAILING ARRANGEMENT

STORY FORM QUALITY TIME OF EVENTS

DRAMA Intentional Clock Plot

FILM Compulsive Durational Scenario

Durational COMIC STRIP Involuntary (in units) Lay-out

NARRATIVE Intimate Psychological Story

The second table specifies the defining quality, the prevailing time, and the typical arrangement of events which are characteristic of each form. These three factors are closely related. In addition, the prevailing time of the story form applies to the subjective and objective modes of experience as specified in table one. Thus in respect to drama, clock time dominates both play and purposeful action; in respect to narrative, psychological time prevails in the personal memory of events and in public discourse concerning events. One need not be conscious of this temporal factor for one's experience to be structured by it.

Drama

The subjective mode of experience which informs drama is play; the objective mode is purposeful action. The two can be seen to have in common an intense self-involvement in which the existence of spectators is at once necessary and irrelevant. Out of this emerges one of drama's most salient characteristics, the impersonality of the relationship between the spectator and the stage. That is why the spectator does not mind sharing the viewing space. Indeed, the fact that typically an action is being deliberately carried forward without regard to the individual observer practically demands an audience to justify the performance and, what is more important, to guarantee to the observer that the creation pro- ceeding on stage is indifferent to his individuality. The drama is most at home in the context of the semi-impersonal group or the assembled community.

A cinema audience differs from a theater audience in that it is a practical rather than an artistic necessity. Nevertheless in the cinema one may share the

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experience of the film in a way hardly possible in the theater. This is because a kind of personal identification pertains between the viewer and the imaged life on the screen. If at the same time a personal relationship exists between two viewers, they will be able through their private communication to share in some degree the screen experience with which they have identified. In the theater, the imper- sonality of the relationship between spectator and play does not encourage such private communication.

I turn now to the tension between the spontaneous wish-fulfilling self-expression of play and the deliberate reality-oriented self-expression of purposeful action. This tension is a root element of drama. On the one hand, the players come before us committed to the now of a spontaneous enactment, facing an unknown future which they and we are about to see happen. On the other hand, all the characters in their stage world intentionally create what is for them a finality and for us a revelation. Neither we nor they are there by accident. All are there by appointment, and for the actors it is an appointment with destiny. They deliber- ately present themselves that they may meet that destiny. And we deliberately present ourselves that we may behold it. The total effect is ritualistic.

I specify the defining quality of drama as intentional. The self-expression and repetitiveness of play have a kind of wilful commitment to the spontaneous. This intentional quality is the deeper source of the ritual character of the drama. Moreover, wilful commitment to the spontaneous in combination with deliberate commitment to an action of set purpose (deliberate self-expression) defines in a satisfactory way the dual basis of drama's special quality. This quality is related to the simple fact, insisted upon by Brunetiere, that in a play it is necessary for someone to exercise his will. But I am suggesting that the intentional quality goes deeper than this obvious need, that it is the direct outgrowth of drama's roots in the psychic counterpoise of wish and will.

Each story form, as well as having its distinctive quality, such as intentionality in the case of drama, is marked by a special embodiment of time and a character- istic arrangement of events. There are four categories of time: the future; the present, not yet perceived; the immediate past, perceived as present; and the past. The "past" of immediate awareness has been called many things. E. R. Clay named it the specious present. William James in The Principles of Psychology said that

the practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time. The unit of composition of our perception of time is a duration, with a bow and a stern, as it were-a rearward- and a forward-looking end.'

This unit of composition, which is forever changing as new perceptions enter forward and old ones drop away rearward, does not extend beyond about a dozen seconds. Anything further away in time appears not as fading present but as the past recalled.

From this follows the important rule that in perception and in temporal art,

1New York: Henry Holt, 1927, I, 609.

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past and future can be recognized as such only when they have entered the specious present. Except in hallucinatory experience and sometimes in dream, we are always aware of past memories and future imaginings as encroaching upon the durational unit of the specious present. The same law holds for our perception of the experience represented in stories, but with this proviso. If our attention is directed from a now event to a past event and does not return quickly to the now, then in our perception the past will, for the time being, become the present. All stories of whatever type, whether drama, film, comic strip, or narrative, are inexorably tied to the specious present. They differ in the ease and flexibility with which reference to past or future is available and in the capacity to shift the representational now from one time to another.

The passing of time is indicated by change. Change is recognized when two

perceptions which were not experienced simultaneously are simultaneously present to the mind. Though the passing of time is not observable in itself, it is funda- mental to all four story forms. What distinguishes one from another is the character of the time passing.

The time of drama is the stage present. Viewed as a whole the action of a play is a continuum stretching from past to future and subject to the laws of clock time. Some modification is, of course, the rule; the continuum is usually broken into pieces, often with distinct time lapses in between, and the pieces are not necessarily arranged in a chronological progression. Nonetheless, the temporal order of purposeful action and of more or less causal sequence is fundamental. The ritual character of drama relates to its presentation by arrangement before a communal audience; it has little influence on drama's treatment of time. Ritual, though it must utilize time as a medium, refuses to be dominated by it. But drama accepts the rule of time and the pervasive sense of temporal and causal sequence. Knowing this, some contemporary writers have exploited the time-bound charac- ter of drama by radically distorting it to create special effects.

I have included the future as part of the dramatic continuum because at any point in a play all that is to come has the character of futurity. (There are, of course, technical exceptions to this.) Susanne Langer has suggested that drama is future oriented, whereas narrative points to the past and film to the present. I would rather say simply that in the normal case drama invites us to expect that the immediate future in our experience will coincide with the immediate future of the persons on stage. Film, comic strip, and narrative, in their looser treatment of temporal sequence, do not so strongly encourage such an expectation.

In giving a name to the arrangement of events in each of drama, film, comic strip, and narrative, I have tried to be plain and descriptive: plot, scenario, layout, story. As far as possible I have distinguished between plot as the logical order of events in time and story as the actual order of the events as told or acted. The logical and actual order are rarely identical, whether in a play, a film, or a novel. So both words are needed in describing any specific work. But the fear of adding to the terminological clutter of narrative theory has induced me to use the terms plot and story in a second and somewhat different way. Plot refers generally to the order of events found in drama. Though by no means always the same as the logical order in time, the events of drama are typically much closer to such an

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order than the events of film, comic strip, or narrative. Moreover, drama fre- quently achieves a logical arrangement of a secondary kind. The chronological plot of Oedipus Rex, beginning with the prophecy at the time of the hero's birth, can be reconstructed from Sophocles' text. But the actual play has its own plot, telling how Oedipus searches out the truth about the plague and about his own past. It is a plot moderately logical in development and strictly chronological in order. This secondary kind of arrangement asserts itself not so much because the dramatist intends it as because the theater requires it. Thus, without doing too great violence to the terms, one may regard plot as the best word to designate the characteristic arrangement of events in drama. With similar rough justice, story may serve for narrative.

At the same time story must serve for all four forms here discussed. We speak of pictures, facts, actions, and persons "telling" a story. We have no other word that applies in all those contexts where a sequence of events takes place.

Film

The motion picture is outside of nature. It offers a perceptual experience-and I speak now of structure rather than content-which could not be encountered without mechanical contrivance. The uniqueness of the experience centers in the relation of the viewer to the screen images. The question to ask is: What phenomena in life help the film maker to create and the viewer to interpret this unique experience?

On the subjective side is dream; on the objective, voyeuristic viewing. The second half of this proposition may seem bizarre; but it is not improbable in view of the following reflections: first, Peeping Tom, though perverse, is uni- versal in his inclination to glimpse the forbidden; second, film as an artificial art form can be expected to rely on a somewhat unusual mode of experience; and third, since the subjective mode of dream is abnormal by waking standards, a similar quality can be expected in its objective counterpart.

The contrast between dream and voyeuristic viewing is expressed in film as a tension between I-centered and Other-centered visual experience. An outstanding feature of dream is the way the subject, the sleeper in his visual imagination, has at all times a direct relation to the dream material. This relation is not affected by whether or not the subject is himself the principle character in the dream. No matter the content, he is always in a special way central. The voyeur, too, is in a peculiar way central. What he sees would be hidden, forever lost from sight, were it not for his deliberate effort to bring it within his view. Yet the point of his enterprise is the apartness, the inacessibility, the otherness of what is seen.

Film expropriates the I-centered immediacy of dream (which in waking life can only be experienced unconsciously) and the fascination of looking secretly at what one feels to be "other." The tension between these elements is heightened in our experience by the special nature of visual perception. Taste, smell, and touch, we know, take place inside or on the surface of the body; hearing, though the outside source of the sound is important, is recognized as a process within the head; but sight is experienced as complete projection. The object, looked at, seems

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to be apart from the viewer and, in its absolute existence, to compel his attention. All the story forms make the best use they can of this fact; the film wholeheartedly capitalizes on it. The compelling quality of the visual in film brings together in a waking state the unique experiences of dreamer and voyeur.

The dreamer, though he participates in an awareness of the self, feels totally enclosed and absorbed within his illusory world. The voyeur, aware of his own secret presence, is precariously located outside his compelling visual world. Film exploits this tension between dreamlike total absorption and voyeuristic other- ness. Yet it is difficult to give a useful account of the tension since it does not correspond to any one thing in our normal experience.

What the I-centered nature of dream and the Other-centered nature of voyeur- istic viewing have in common is the compelling power of the visual. This power is so intense that the defining quality of film can best be described as compulsive. The word does not exaggerate. It is well known that a person cannot maintain deep concentration for a long period and that even the normal attention span of a well adjusted adult is quite short. The film, with stunning virtuosity, defies this kind of personal weakness and, by fixing the viewer's gaze on perpetually moving images, relentlessly holds it there.

Drama, too, is a visual medium, but one that must accommodate itself to normal human limits. It must not attempt to keep its audience intensely involved through a whole act, for if it does they will turn resentful or collapse in irritation. It must rather let them off, let them down from time to time, allow for casual moments between the peaks. What are the reasons for this difference from film? First, one of the rarest phenomena in the theater is silence. Drama devolves into dialogue, into sound, and aural attention is more difficult to sustain than visual. Second, movement is limited in drama, not only because it interferes with dialogue but because the stage is inherently restrictive. Hence the spectator's attention is prone to fixate and soon tire.

Film as a medium is far more visual. The screen becomes a defined universe of movement by persons, by things, and by the camera itself in all its incompa- rable flexibility and range. The viewer seems one with the camera. "It is the spectator's mind that moves," says Ernest Lindgren in The Art of the Film.2 This is true so long as one stresses the word mind. In dream there is perfect freedom of movement though the actual body of the sleeper is at rest; in film there is unqualified freedom of movement by means of visual perception though the body is at rest in a seat. But in dream, knowledge of the actual body is unconscious or pre-conscious whereas in the cinema it is conscious. The result is a peculiar sensation in which vision tells the spectator he is moving while other organs of perception tell him he is not. I relate this sensation to the unique tension of film and its paradoxical nature for the viewer, who is both master and slave of the screen images, at once observer of them and absorbed in them.

Faced with the experience of moving yet not moving, of being one with the images of the screen yet an observer, and faced with the irreversible sweep of pictorial movement, the viewer is kept busy formulating new gestalts to accommo-

2London: Alien and Unwin, 1948, p. 92.

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date the continual changes before him. Since the discovery of visual pattern and significance is usually experienced as a projection, as the apprehending of a form inherent in the things looked at, it would be logical to suppose that the film would leave the impression of being entirely independent of the response or contribution of the viewer. Yet this is not so. Indeed Eisenstein thought the film unique in that "the spectator is drawn into a creative act."3 What made Eisenstein think viewing a creative act? What saves the spectator from the sensation of drowning in an unending sea of images? First, the absorption, the sense of being taken up into the film and sustained, so that the viewer is one with his projections. Second, the dislocation in his sensations of movement which establishes a quite unique awareness of the self. And third, the unrelenting need for new gestalts, a need which stimulates attention.

From this discussion has emerged the answer to the question of how the film holds our attention decisively for long periods of time. In contrast to drama, film institutes rapid change in the visual point of fixation; the spectator's own mind moves, and the angle of vision changes frequently. The effect of one gestalt following fast upon another and of the eye moving quickly from one focus to another sustains attention vividly for a longer time than is usual in life or art. Though this attention is made possible by the continuous relief of change, the quality of the attention, far from being changeable, is compulsive.

What is equally striking, the persons on the screen share this imperative quality. Because the viewer is so ruthlessly gripped by the now of film time, the characters who participate in that now appear to act not out of the past, as they would do in drama, but out of the urgent needs of the present. Their responses, though compatible with their already established patterns of behavior, give the impression of being dictated by the immediate situation and hence of being compulsive in nature. I may add that this is a general statement. A specific film may make a point of showing that a character acts out of his past. In that case there will be a sustained and possibly a creative tension between the subject matter and the inherent tendency of the medium.

In the arranging of episodes and of the shots which make up an episode, film has much of the flexibility of narrative, though it cannot move about in time with comparable ease. I have called this cinematic arrangement of events a scenario. When a film is set down in print, it seems bare and abstract. When it is translated to the screen by a creative director, it takes on that incomparable fluidity characteristic of motion picture order and sequence. As a result of this fluidity, film is wholeheartedly committed to the specious present. Persons and objects move; the camera (the eye of the beholder) moves; and the combination of the two is intensified by the fact that the body is at rest. The viewer, occupied in making sense of a continuous stream of images, has scarcely a moment to reflect on past or future except in so far as they are directly brought to his attention by the immediate events on the screen. And because he has no choice but to shift in time as the stream carries him, even a flashback loses its pastness and becomes the present.

3The Filmn Sense (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942), p. 33.

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Our normal perception of duration is extremely vague, and in moments of excitement or deep attention it may entirely disappear. We have a lively aware- ness of duration only when we urgently wish our present state to change or self-consciously wish it not to change. The film resembles life in the way it gives rise to durational perceptions ranging all the way from non-awareness to the intense consciousness of agonized suspense. But the typical quality of the viewer's awareness of film time is influenced by two special considerations. The first is the fact that the eye and mind of the spectator move while his body remains at rest which, though it has nothing directly to do with time, contributes a peculiar motor-sensory quality to the experience as it takes place in time. The second factor is the compelling, attention-fixing movement of the screen images, move- ment which narrows and heightens the normal time span of the specious present. The viewer is impelled to give all his attention to the flying wedge of the present. The past falls rapidly away. We may say, then, that the film is dominated by the continuous durational flow of the specious present, that this perceived present is more sharply and narrowly focused than in life, and that it is colored by a unique motor-sensory quality.

The compulsive quality of film action and of our response to its narrowed and intensified present time makes it especially appropriate for representing irresistible irrational states and hypnotic dreamlike behavior. When compulsive action is attempted by other story forms its irresistible quality runs the risk of appearing frenzied on stage and exhausting in narrative. (Faulkner takes this risk and usually wins.) When the hypnotic is essayed by drama the danger is trancelike boredom as the spectator's fixated point of view makes contact with a fixated subject. (The dreamlike, being thoroughly subjective, is admirably suited to narrative.) Film has an inherent defense against all these dangers-it is the motion picture. By its irresistible onward flow, it spares us alike from frenzy and sleep. And if the director stops the flow in an attempt to hold our attention unwaveringly before some horrendous or some hypnotic action, the process will be effective for a short time only. Then we will grow indifferent. Having experienced the continuous variety and heightened awareness of the specious present, we will not for long settle for anything less exhilarating.

In sum, film is used to most advantage in dramas of psychological disorder, tragedies of fate, and historical spectacles implying irresistible destiny. It is also good for fast-paced action, either serious or slap-stick, and especially for comedy exploiting the mechanical and compulsive. It is not so well suited to humor, which requires generosity in the matter of time.

Comic Strip

Of all the story forms, the comic strip seems the most visual because it is so nearly pictorial in presentation. The subjective mode of experience on which it relies is day-dream, the objective mode glimpsed action in which the Other is viewed as glimpsed subject. The result is a sequence of glimpses with stereotyped projections. When a person catches momentary sight of an action he involuntarily completes the action in his mind, filling out what must have come before and after.

The Four Story Forms 273

And when he sees an object very briefly, if it arouses any interest at all because of its incipient attractiveness or repulsiveness, he then projects onto it an additional glamor or horror according to the needs and wishes of his own mind. A glimpse is inherently tantalizing and invites completion. Something glimpsed always appears dynamic-even though it may be a static object-because the action of completion in the viewer's mind is transferred to the thing perceived. That is why with respect to the comic strip the objective mode of experience is glimpsed action. The viewer's mind creates action.

The mind also involuntarily transforms things glimpsed into images of desire or horror. It therefore relies on what is most readily at hand, the familiar and typical. For this reason glimpsed action proceeds by means of stereotypes. Even when such images are subject to unconscious influence and are on that account charged with an unusual intensity and significance, they will still maintain their surface appearance as stereotypes.

The daydream portrays the self or those who are intimate projections of the self as omnipotent subject. It is a narrative of fulfilled desires, with minimal accommodation to the reality principle. It is not concerned with details, unless they are gratifying. It cannot afford to insist on careful development such as is found in the action of drama. Instead it is a sequence of highlights with stereo- typed characters.

All the same, the daydream does not give the impression of being casually organized. It conveys a strong impression of sequence and a peculiar feeling that the sequence is both arbitrary and inevitable. One does not seem to determine the course of events or choose one action in preference to another; yet the events of the daydream, far from being haphazard, move towards a destined fulfillment in accordance with one's subjective inclinations. The word to describe this course of events is involuntary. Daydream is involuntary because it is determined but not consciously willed. It exploits the familiar and the accessible, only requiring that these conform to the images of desire. The characters and events are stereo- types, even including the omnipotent self who is at the center of the action. Such stereotypes are socially conditioned patterns by means of which we simplify, comprehend, and master the complexities of experience. The stereotypes of day- dream are more personally mediated and subjective than the reality-tied projections of glimpsed action.

The comic strip itself takes over the sequence of highlights typical of day- dream structure and proceeds to represent them as a sequence of glimpsed actions. A typical comic strip panel resembles a glimpsed action in that it is not static. It presents its characters at one or more stages of a process which is not otherwise represented. Often it will show a first character in an early phase and a second in a later phase of a complex process of interaction. Or again, such a process may be represented through a single character by showing his facial expression at one stage and his bodily expression at another.

The comic strip divides action into a series of arbitrary units and each panel aims to represent not just the most important moment in that unit of action but as much as possible of the process of action making up the unit. In other words, the comic strip artist gives pictorial representation to the involuntary projections

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which characterize the mind's response to glimpsed action. The representation is acceptable because the process is familiar to the reader and because the reader is invited to continue the process, to carry out his own involuntary projections which will complete the glimpsed action. In the nature of things, the reader is not usually aware of the involuntary character of his responses.

Because the comic strip works principally with highlights it has no satisfactory means of handling intricate actions, and lacks the resources to develop complex characters. The comic strip must depend on clearly articulated plot lines and

strongly marked character types. This makes it suitable for stories of suspense and adventure and for the sustained variables of domestic trauma (soap opera). On account of its well defined unchanging characters, it is also suited to comic art, but that is a topic I cannot enter into here.

Comic strip action of the serious kind has a peculiar quality very like that of daydream. The characters are stereotypes, relatively simple and rigidly unchang- ing. Their behavior, which is essentially involuntary, appears both decisive and

spontaneous, deliberate and casual. It seems spontaneous because the actions are immediate and unpremeditated; it seems deliberate because it expresses fixity of character and leads-without the characters being themselves aware of it-to an inevitable conclusion.

This may seem to put the case too strongly. After all, the comic strip thrives on the unexpected, the sensational, the exaggerated. But these things, it seems to me, are no more than the exuberant flourishes made possible by the unqualified certitudes of the well conducted strip with its discernible plot lines and with its unalterable heroes and heroines (subject only to temporary changes such as amnesia) who carry, through all their vicissitudes, that magic counter-good luck, good looks, good will, good something-which saves them, no matter how devas- tating the dangers, from permanent grief.

Varied yet unchanging, full of surprise yet inevitable, spontaneous yet deter- mined, casual yet deliberate: such are the paradoxes of the comic strip created in the mode of daydream and characterized by involuntariness. Not only are the actions of the characters involuntary and the end towards which they move involuntarily achieved but the reader in looking at the individual panels involun- tarily fills in the action on either side of the glimpsed moment and, where neces- sary, between the time units represented by the panels.

The comic strip resembles painting in that the individual panel, like the individual picture, is not a snapshot capturing a single moment but a subtle representation of several phases in a time unit. We react to these phases within the panel as though they were glimpsed actions which we imaginatively complete. The act of projection is dependent for its content on our previous perceptual experi- ence, but the projection is not itself subject to the usual law of perception, namely that motion is a sequence of differing states. The projection, freed from the limitations of the eye, assumes the quality of passage. It creates the illusion of movement and the flow of time.

In this respect the comic strip resembles the film and for the same essential reason. "It is the spectator's mind that moves." But in the comic strip only a few moments of a time unit are objectified and from these the mind creates the move-

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ment and flow which comprise the complete duration of the time unit. The mind, by means of a projection which is the more powerful for being involuntary, attributes motion to the images on the page. The prevailing time in the comic strip as in the film is the specious present with the sense of duration heightened and narrowed.

So far, however, only the effect of the individual panel has been considered. No reader of the comics can have failed to notice how the transition from one panel to the next is often drastic. Characters are regrouped, the angle of vision is reversed, or a completely new scene is sprung on the reader. In other words, the comic strip does not attempt continuous passage. Taking its cue from day- dreams, the strip creates a series of highlights. It is the spectator's own mind that moves or at least projects motion within the individual panel, but between panels the reader is as immobile as a spectator in the theater. The scene is changed before his eyes; the angle from which he sees is determined for him. Here the comic strip with its sequence of fixed points of view offers a parallel with the drama. This factor is greatly outweighed, however, by the illusions of motion and duration within the individual panel,which show the comic strip to be far more significantly related to the film.

When the specious present of comic strip and film are compared, one difference is apparent. In film we are compulsively drawn into each present moment by the changing nature of the screen images. Their visual impermanence is the source of their power. In comic strip we are involuntarily gripped by each panel or by each phase of action within a panel. On top of that, nonetheless, we have the satisfaction in "reading" the comic strip of seeing before our eyes its sequential layout, we have the pleasure of beholding slabs of the present. The pictorial nature of the strip, its visual permanence, reinforces the sense of presentness.

One conclusion to be drawn from these facts is that neither comic strip nor film is as suspense-oriented as has commonly been supposed. Though they both utilize suspense, they typically involve us more in the question of what is coming now than in the question of what will be coming next.

A similar point may be made about narrative, but for precisely the opposite reason. Narration concerns what has happened. It is mediated by the human voice of a narrator, by psychological time, and by implicit analogies with memory. It is more concerned to explore, to show, to interest, than to arouse suspense. No one would deny that narrative may be excruciatingly suspenseful. But that is not its forte. After all, it's possible to read the last chapter, and just as possible to realize that one is being deliberately manipulated by the narrator who all the while he is stirring up intense curiosity has the future instantly within his grasp.

That leaves drama as the only inherently suspenseful story form, an appropriate conclusion since it is the one form dominated by clock time. The quality of sus- pense is balanced in the theater by the ritual sense of events being deliberately acted out. Drama has in its incentional nature a force to counterbalance the cheap exploitation of suspense. Because the other story forms lack this inherent safeguard, they may more easily abuse their medium and their readers or viewers by culti- vating an anxious regard for what will happen next.

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Narrative

By virtue of its non-visual character, narrative belongs to a much larger category which extends from lyric to rhetoric. The subjective mode of experience inform- ing this large verbal grouping is memory of all kinds, including the useful; and the objective mode is discourse, which by definition is intentional. But in this place we are concerned with a specific verbal form, narrative. It has for its subjective mode a personal memory of events or a recalling to oneself, and for its objective mode a discourse concerning events or a telling to others.

The two modes of telling involve a contrast between personally mediated re- calling of events and publicly mediated recalling of events. The schemata of memory are conditioned through language, custom, and institution. In personal memory the social stereotypes concerning the self and others are subject to individualizing personal mediation, especially as time more and more removes the recalled event from the actualities of its origin. In public discourse concerning events, the stereotypes are submitted to the view of others. Such public medlia- tion encourages conformity to social expectation. Narrative as a literary type, whether oral or written, is sustained by this tension between private and public telling, between the personally mediated wish-oriented memory and the publicly mediated socially oriented memory.

Memory is the way we accommodate our experience to our self-image. This is true not only for private life but for historical and cultural life as well. Without memory, there can be no history and no group consciousness. Memory filters our private or our group experience and gives it the human shape of a self telling or a public telling. Language, which could not exist without memory, is one of the principal ways we conceptualize and communicate this human shape. And lan- guage, as an instrument of shaping, is so powerful that it exerts a pervasive formal influence in its own right. This filtering and shaping character which memory and language together give to story-telling is one of my reasons for proposing as the distinguishing feature of narrative its intimate quality. My other reason for designating it as intimate is even more compelling. As a wholly verbal medium, it is the only form of story-making that communicates to us exclusively with a human voice.

This does not imply that narrative is chummy or underdistanced. Rather it is intimate because in its non-visualness it is open to our imagining, because the laws of psychological time are built into it just as they are built into our subjective experience, and because its story structures often parallel the structures of per- sonal memory. These factors, in conjunction with a human voice, shape our response.

Even more important, the characters and events by reason of the medium of their presentation are in their very natures distinctly intimate-more intimate than they would be for instance if we could imagine them translated to the stage. In all four of the story forms the mode of presentation has a direct influence on the characters and events portrayed. The intentional quality of drama describes not just the theater medium but the nature of the characters and their actions. The compulsive quality of film and the involuntary quality of comic strip are in

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each case similarly correlated with the nature of character and action. The in- timacy of narrative, inherent in a form which speaks exclusively with a human voice and which takes its patterns from personal and public memory, is likewise expressed in the persons of the story and the manner of their actions.

Narrative is marked by its ability to encompass an amazing range of subject matter. Why, we ask, is it so much more effective than drama in representing on the one hand the multifarious and intricate details of visible reality and on the other hand the improbable, the bizarre, and the utterly fantastic? J. R. R. Tolkien, in his essay on the fairy story, answers the question by contrasting drama with pure story-making. At the same time he points to the way the scope of narrative is directly related to its intimacy.

The radical distinction between all art (including drama) that offers a visible presentation and true literature is that it imposes one visible form. Literature works from mind to mind.... It is at once more universal and more poignantly particular. ... If a story says "he climbed a hill and saw a river in the valley below" . . . every hearer of the words will have his own picture, and it will be made out of all the hills and rivers and dales he has even seen.4

The personal way a hearer pictures each element of a story according to his own experience and imagination and fantasy life may explain the great freedom of narrative and its capacity to treat an extraordinary range of material in a rich variety of styles.

We may look at this freedom from another angle too. Drama is a transaction between the stage and the audience in which the actors are both the principal subject matter (the characters) and the principal instrument of the transaction. Hence, if the subject is improbable, the instrument must be improbable. The role of the story-teller is very different. In the transaction between him and his lis- teners, he is the instrument whereby the narrative reaches them, but he is not himself the subject of his own discourse. (The reader will be aware of certain complications which are here left aside. He will notice also that from a linguistic point of view the narrator is indeed the subject of his discourse.) Hence the events recounted may be unlikely or even fantastic without detracting from the convincing presence of the story-teller or from the reality of his relations with the listener. This is most obvious in oral narrative where the social presence of the singer is real and constant, however much the value of his performance may fluctuate according to the worth assigned to his individual songs. But in written fiction too, the author-narrator-though he may be hidden from view-is always a felt presence.

It is undeniably true that the author-narrator may strike the reader as in- consistent, unreliable, trivial, or any number of other unappealing things, and that recent fiction has exploited this possibility for a great variety of effects. But the essential point remains, that the reader can make such judgments because he has a sense of the narrator as distinct from his story and as existing in his own right. This awareness is often unconscious and that may explain why recognition is followed by an impression of the story-teller either as strangely all-pervading

4Tree and Leaf (London: Alien and Unwin, 1964), p. 67.

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in the narrative or as mysteriously both present and absent. To be more precise than this about the effect created by the story-teller's existence would require one to pass from the psychology of the author-reader relationship to a linguistic analysis.

The consequence for the reader of recognizing the story-teller as a pervasive presence is readily illustrated by a comparison with the theater. The universe of drama exists only through the action and the action exists only through the characters. The universe of narrative exists only through the narrator, whether he is the omniscient author, the less than omniscient observer, or his mask, one or a series of characters within the narrative. The action of drama determines our point of view. We see for ourselves what is. The narrator of fiction determines our point of view. We see for the narrator what is. The dramatist may place a commentator on the stage, he may obviously designate one of the participants in the action as his spokesman, but he cannot alter the basic convention of the theater. The narrator may strive for supreme objectivity, he may use dialogue to the exclusion of almost everything else, but he cannot alter the basic convention of the narrative. The one displays an action; the other tells a story. The dramatist has no alternative but to project a universe through action. The story-teller has no alternative but to project a universe which embraces action, a universe of which his own inclusive perspectives are the defining edges.

Drama catches up its audience in the inexorable sweep of clock time; film (and comic strip too) confines its viewers to an intensely focused durational present; but narrative invites its readers to enter a private world in which time is entirely flexible. The story-teller may intervene whenever it pleases him. The future, so far as our experience goes, is what he chooses to say next. As a con- sequence his narrative is an expression of psychological time. A chapter may be consumed in representing a minute or two of experience; years may sift by in a few pages; descriptions may be essentially timeless. As for the reader, he may spend an hour with a story and have no notion of the passing seconds. Narrative is significantly free of the world's time. For this reason concentration is not, as it is in drama, first a question of two or three hours in the theater, and next of compactness and intensity of action. The quality of concentration in narrative is much more subjective. If a story can hold the reader's attention, its length, elaborateness, or looseness of structure need not detract from the illusion it creates of significance and emotional power and climax. (As for the oral singer, his performance is before a much more casual and social audience than that assembled for drama; and he adjusts the length and detail of his story to the situation and mood of his listeners.)

Narrative freedom from time is related to a deeper freedom. A reader can attend to a story whenever he likes and for however long he likes. But when he is part of an audience in the theater, his response is not entirely within his own will. He cannot ignore what others are paying excited attention to, he cannot absent himself even in thought because the play will not stop at those points where he would like to reflect. His will is not his own. For that reason he is more insistent that his attention should at every moment be commanded and rewarded. As the member of an audience which has given up its freedom, he feels a stronger right

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and a more compelling urge to be exacting than does a solitary reader. It is the relation of the individual will to the story presentation rather than the superior comforts of the closet or any other such marginal consideration that dictates the greater intensity and concentration of drama and the more spacious and leisurely progression of narrative.

Drama, film, and comic strip purport to open a door onto the act of happening, but narrative undertakes to tell about events by arranging them in an effective way. That way may be in accordance with causal and temporal logic in which case the order will be primarily like that of drama, or it may be in accordance with emotional logic in which case the order will be lyric and the prevailing time psychological, or it may be-and most often is-a combination of these two. In any event, the narrative, unlike the other story forms, does not reach us objectively through the visual medium of characters in action, but is entirely verbal and directly mediated by the voice of the story-teller. The story, the narrator's arrangement of events, is personal and stands in intimate relationship to the reader. The subject matter, too, participates in this spirit of intimacy. Yet the personal and lyric quality of story-telling is counter-balanced by the fact that the narrating of a story is a publicly mediated act. It is this which saves narrative from emotional and psychological self-indulgence, for the honest story-teller is licensed in accordance with an implied contract by which he is responsible at all times to his audience.

Drama permits far less intimacy than narrative. Characters on the public stage who among themselves indulge in close emotional contact and innermost con- fidentialness soon appear silly or sentimental. As for the relationship between the stage and the audience, its impersonality makes any attempt at familiarity disas- trous, unless the interplay is exploited for deliberate and usually ironic effect. The same impersonality is typical of the comic strip where the visual nature of the medium gives the story a public character and the pictorial conversations estab- lish a barrier between layout and reader.

Film, as the voyeuristic nature of its substructure would imply, is excellent in portraying close and delicate relations between characters. It has in this respect an almost unlimited capacity so long as the subject can be represented visually. Though dialogue may further expand the scope, speech is in its effect more public than physical gesture or expression. There are things that film characters can not say without appearing indiscrete or foolish, though the same words may without embarrassment be attributed to the non-visual persons of narrative. But film characters have at their disposal incalculable intricacies of physical expres- sion which the narrative artist can no more than touch upon.

Film can establish relations of intimacy within its pictorial world but not between this image world and the viewer. The screen with its motion pictures is a kind of mechanical device and as such is mercilessly exclusive. That is why film stars are so spectacular. They are larger than life because they exist outside the audience's normal experiences of relationship. This does not go counter to the prevailing theory that the darkness of the cinema and the compulsive immediacy of the screen induce the viewer to identify strongly with the hero. There is an important difference between identification and intimacy. The first is an act of

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introjection characteristic of film; the second is a recognition of proximate rela- tionship. Such a recognition of closeness is not characteristic of our experience of the visual story forms, drama, film, comic strip. Intimacy is characteristic of our relationship to narrative and to no other form because only narrative is entirely subject to the personal mediation of the story-teller and only narrative has an inherent barrier against the self-indulgence of intimacy in the responsibility of the narrator for his public act of story-telling.

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