Movement Within Movement:
The Physiognomy of Story and Narrative
When we talk about story and narrative, we're talking about the difference between, say, a song and music. The later is the raw material of the medium, the former is a genre. A genre distinguishes itself purley by how the raw material is constrained. All art depends on material constrained. A word is a sound constrained by a beginning and an end, an open vowel (the primitive yowl of existential dread or the mother's sigh over her baby) is held in my the terminus supplied by constenants.
A story has a temporal condition that is unique to forms like music. Music, of course, doesn't exist outside of time, though narrative or story may. Think for example of a representational painting that displays figures frozen in action, the narrative is the sum reslut of the meaning of the various attitudes of the characters and their props, and the idea, the implication of time: something happened before the event depicted and something will happen as a result. Even the most dull, static still life, the trompe l'oiel, suggests that that jug of wine has just been poured and lets the viewer imagine the consequences of such a delight, it's taste and refreshment.
Time's arrow is malleable in a story. I tell my students that far from being a mundane, mechanical gesture it's a truly magical and auspicious maneuver, radical in its possibilities, albeit the closest thing to actually being able to control time that we have. One might concede that the ability of limitless imaging making might trump this exercise, but I would strongly advice the reader to actually begin writing a story with an attention to the flexibility of time and see how unique this astonishing technique really is.
The containment of a story, its frame, we long ago think of as linear, as having a beginning, a middle and an end, a form that has at its base a truth that is indisputable. Though like every truth it's very easy to fall into the trap of reductive cliche; hence there's a strong aversion among even the dilettante to ignore such rules or rules of thumb. But a story seems to ache under the strain of not having these simple features, these dictates of formalism. The story needs somehow if it exists in time to relate to time in some way, to advance forward in a relative dance with the reader. I am primarily talking about the written form of narrative here, though many of these conditions and constraints are applicable to motion pictures and visual narrative forms as well.
The motion forward in a written story depends on the reader's ability to do some heavy lifting, to read. And reading in this case isn't the shallow practice we learned in elementary school, the dreaded method of "phonics" which reduces the art to a pasteboard masquerade of sounding out sounds to make sounds, rather than assuming the challenge of exploring meaning. In order to read well, one has to work a bit at it, and a text should both make demands on a reader's skill, but also excite and encourage them to take on the non-passive role that will require them to, say, dig into Moby Dick and remain with Ishmael through several hundred pages.
The requirement is that the author produce this thing called "narrative drive" that mechanism that catches the reader by the collar and helps them up hill. The reader is doing the work, but the text is what gives her traction, and nourishes her while it's happening. A queer symbiosis is at work here. Part of what keeps the reader reading is that idea that is peculiar to narrative, but also shared by other mediums and art formas, that question of what will happen next is worth answering. The narrative drive is how this question is formed in the reader and gives her that desire to look at the sentences that follows the first, then the next paragraph, and encourages her to lick her finger before turning the next page over. Narrative drive is the fuel, accomplished in many different ways that brings the reader through. It can work in an overt way, keeping the stakes high, (The Painted Bird, Crime and Punishment) or even in a more quiet fashion, (Housekeeping, Herzog). In each case there are two parallel mechanisms that create narrative drive, both opperating in harmony to keep the reader interested and their attention on the page.
The autotelic and exotelic refer to the process of moving towards a target as a straight line, or imagining the target as the action itself. The root of both words, "telos" refers to target and if one imagines a bull's-eye, such an image will suffice. The exotelic narrative drive is what keeps us in the big picture. It's the thing that propels the reader to push towards the ending, even if it's a very long book. These are overt block and pulley systems that keep us in the big picture, the long journey ahead. Will we find out who the murderer is? Will Sam and Frodo deliver the ring to the mountain and survive? Will the child survive his bildungsroman through the horrors of central Europe during the Second World War, will the anti-hero succeed in murdering his landlady? Our noses are pointed toward that final destination, the end result, even the "take away" that we expect when we read the last page.
The autotelic is more delicate a mechanism, the thing that, when mismanaged, causes us to be impatient readers that jump to the last page to spoil ourselves of the outcome. We might do this because the actual flow of the narrative as it happens lacks the procedural development we require to remain interested. Perhaps the skill of the writer isn't up to making interesting scenes, or developing characters? Or maybe it's that there language is dull, or ponderous, or their insights shallow and cliched. Getting there should be more than half the fun.
Imagine a canoe trip across a lake. One could set their direction to a distant shore lined with giant hemlock, dip the paddle into the water and begin sliding their canoe in a simple forward direction, sans diversion, a straight line with only the scale of trees in your eyeline growing, the horizon ever stretching away, but your destination an eventual terminus. You arrive. And there you are.
The other way to canoe might be to simply go in circles, observing at close proximity the transparent depths of the lake, the flora and fauna
