Jasmine’s Reviews > Narrative > Status Update

Narrative has been crucial for human existence because it has been the pre-eminent form of representation, allowing the world to be apprehended in a specific form by humans, recording the details of a culture, but also legitimating own arrangement or re-presentation of that culture. (p.168)

Generally, narrative is not so much absent in modernism but is put to different or more detailed purposes: 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' initially seeks to reproduce the thought-patterns of infancy; Marcel Proust's narrative are concerned with the evocation of memories and sensations; Kafka's novels depict a nightmare world with a heightened sense of domination by the alien structures of society. (p.152)

First, the narrative of imperialism professes a civilizing tendency but is haunted by the desire to exploit; second, this is consonant with a general psychology in the West which seeks to repress troublesome aspects of existence such as sexuality and the bodies of others; third, the narrative of 'Heart of Darkness' dramatizes the increasing early 20th-century concern that human identity is not unified and coherent.

Chandler stated his contention that the reader is not interested in the fact that a man got killed in a story, but that at the moment of his death he was trying unsuccessfully to pick up a paper-clip. Simple narration of events, then is subordinate here to detailed description. If Chandler is correct, it suggests that there is something about digression in narrative that is potentially pleasurable for readers. (p104)

The precondition for the growth of a novel-reading public, then, was a growth in literacy in Western culture. The general growth of the population in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries encompassed the significant growth of a new, non servant, bourgeois, middle class. (p. 71)

The Greek culture that produced the Homeric narratives was not 'purely' Hellenic, as Matthew Arnold and others would have it. As Havelock argues, it was heavily influenced by Mycenaean culture, which itself bore strong affinities with the Near Eastern cultures: Sumerian, Assyrian, Hittite and Palestinian. As such, the Homeric narratives are not the product of one culture, either 'literate' or 'Hellenic'. (p.50)

"There is a consensus that the oldest written narrative, the epic of 'Gilgamesh', is a mere 5,000 years old and that human verbal communication dates from between 50,000 to 250,000 years ago, so there is a long period of foraging society in which narrative might have developed." (p.24)