FICTION, EMOTION AND NARRATION IN SELECTED NOVELS OF CHINUA ACHEBE

FICTION, EMOTION AND NARRATION IN SELECTED NOVELS OF CHINUA ACHEBE

INTRODUCTION

Narration as a concept is the weaving of several strands of events into a story. This means narrative comes out of oral or written account of an event or events such as The Man Died (1972) – the autobiographical narrative on the detention and imprisonment of Wole Soyinka. Narration according Gerard Genette also means “the succession of events, real or fictitious” (25). Narration in this sense may be a novel such as Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. What runs across the two separate definitions of narrative given above is the idea of event without which there can be no narration. Event is the occurrence of action either by man or animal. A student buying a novel at a bookshop is an event and a horse galloping across the field is also an event. The event could be for a very short time and could also be very long such as a civil war. The event or a series of events become a narrative when to use Bridgette Hard et al.’s words they “…are selected and segmented from ongoing information’’ (1221). What Hard et al. mean by “ongoing information’’ are the several existing events from where some have been selected to form the story or narrative.

Selecting from the many episodes has implications on how the narrator

perceives each event in order of importance. This means, as Hard et al put it, analyzing segmentation patterns of events indicate “…the breakpoints of larger units aligned with those of smaller units. This hierarchical alignment effect suggested that the events were perceived as partonic hierarchies” (1221). Narration, therefore, involves making sense of abstract events and the selection of events in order of their importance to the narrator. The event may be about the other person written by someone else. The narration, in such a case, is told about a personality other than that of the writer. This genre of narration is known as biography.

Contrary to what some people believe, storytelling is never a matter of “getting the facts, all the facts, and nothing but the facts” (Jacob, 516). This suggests autobiography or biography no matter the perceived reality is mixed with imagination since some events no matter the vividness cannot be presented the way they occurred. What makes a story interesting is the ability of the story teller to select very important events from among the many, for instance, in autobiographical narrative, the way we consider those facts as they are presented to us by a narrator; this is what makes a story different from a simple retelling of factual happenings, as in the familiar secondary school essay composition that starts each sentence with “And then …”. Stories are part of our lives: they extend into our lives and branch out from there; but also, stories can only be understood if they are localized, fleshed out in terms of our daily reality, and by using the right narrative style. A story that has no relation to our world is probably not going to interest us very much. Some stories written in the past have lost interest among contemporary readers due to their monotonous thematic presentations and narrative styles. On the other hand, we also find stories in older literature such as Jane Austen, Pushkin and Shakespeare, which today seem as fresh as when they first were written down. 

While it is difficult to pinpoint what makes a story succeed, it is perhaps easier to spot at least a few of the causes that make a story fail, or let it fall into oblivion after the story producers’ and the consumers’ generation that supported them have passed away. In his Evgenij Onegin, Pushkin satirizes the ennuiof the Russian genteel country nobility by pointing to the fabulous array of ‘has-been’ authors who constituted the daily spiritual bread of the country manor, and whose fame faded as their pages yellowed (the incomparable Grandison, whose bore is matched by our snore, is only one among many). For Jane Austen, her works have survived and continued to survive the test of time due to her thematic preoccupations and style of character presentation.

In this and similar cases, the interested readership is confined to students of literature or history; the regular readers will find it difficult to relate to the characters and their voices, as these represent an entirely different social and societal environment. The question thus is what makes for a story, and in particular, for a good story. Literary scholars and the common readership have pondered about this question for centuries, both theoretically, in studies of narrative, and practically, in university courses of the ‘Creative Writing’ type. One thing that is pertinent to making a successful piece of fiction is the technique of narration and character presentation adopted by the author. This makes narration an important part of fiction.

Narration is about storytelling. But a story has to be told by someone called the narrator. Already, it may be clear that the narrator is different from the author: in every story, the author creates a world of fiction, the narrative, in which the narrator plays an eminent role, even though not always discernible on the surface. Narrativity thus deals with the techniques and devices that a narrator has at his or her disposal when telling a story; among these, the notion of ‘character’ and the accompanying ‘voice’ are among the most important. To see how character and voice connect and interrelate in narration in, sometimes, rather oblique and inscrutable ways, one may consider the case of the ‘homodiegetic’ novel, or stories told in the first person. Clearly, we cannot assume that the speaking ‘I’ is identical to or is necessarily the author, who likewise cannot be held responsible for the narrator’s claim as being his own.

When the 19th century Russian Mikhail Yu. Lermontov starts his classic

story, A Hero of Our Times (1841) with the famous line “I traveled by stagecoach from Tbilisi …”, every reader will understand that this does not mean that Lermontov himself did the traveling: the words are spoken by the narrator (referring to his conversation while sitting on top of the coach with a returning NCO, the ranking shtabskapitan serving in Chechenya). So, the author is not the narrator, not even if the story is told in the first person singular, as in the Lermontov case. The author creates the narrator as the embodiment of the story’s authoritative competence; it is really not important whether this authority assumes the ‘I’-role or pretends to be an outside ‘voice’: ‘Trust the tale, not the teller’, as the old adage has it. What characterizes the story is its ‘narrativity’, its quality of being narrated andreceived as a story. The latter part is important, but it is often overlooked; Robert Scholes has pointed out that the very idea of narrativity is dependent on the reader actively entering the story world and participating in the narration: “a process by which a perceiver (author or reader) actively constructs a story from the fictional data provided by any narrative medium” (60). Thus, on the part of the reader, there corresponds to the act of narration an act of active collaboration, an “active narrativity” (Jacob, 517).

In demonstrating the role of the readers in progressing the narrative and distinguishing between narrative level or styles, Jacob distinguishes between a primary level, where the action unfolds, and a secondary (and possibly further) level(s), where the actors come in and their voices are heard. On the primary level, we have the narrator’s text; on the secondary (“embedded”) level, we are confronted with the actors’ text. The latter text does not necessarily contain only what the actors say or think in the context of the primary level; they may start a story of their own, and this embedded narrative may then again have several levels of its own, where the secondary story is related to the primary one in various ways. A good example is provided by the classic novella by the German author, Theodor Storm, Der Schimmelreiter (‘The man on the white steed’, 1888; Engl. transl. ‘The Dyke Master’, 1996), where the narrator on the primary level is the authoritative retired school teacher, who ‘frames’ the story by telling it to his friends in the local pub (in German, this kind of narrative is called a Rahmenerzahlung (Jacob, 515), literarily ‘a story within a narrative frame’). But the narrative is not about the teacher and his audience; rather, it concerns the legendary local official in charge of dams and levees (in German: der Deichgraf, ‘the dyke master’), whose expertise and innovative efforts form the secondary narrative, which in fact is the story that we, the readers, co-construct and remember. The teacher’s primary voice, as perceived in his narration and buttressed by his memory, lends credence and local colouring to the embedded story and its secondary voices.

Similarly, in one of the most famous collections of stories ever told, the 1001Nights, the main character, Sheherazade, invents and ‘orchestrates’ the stories, which she then attributes to secondary narrators on the embedded level. These secondary narrators remain implicit, that is, they are heard, but not seen; in contrast, another famous collection of stories, Boccaccio’s Decameron, has the actors on the primary level narrate their own stories as narrators of secondary level-stories.

In what have been said so far, it has been implicitly assumed that actors ‘speak’ in narratives; in other words, they have been attributed with a voice. But how does this happen? More precisely: How do we know whose voices we are hearing in a narrative? How do we decide if what we are ‘hearing’ (and this includes of course ‘reading’) is spoken by the narrator, by an actor (primary or secondary), or by some other (‘third’) party in a story? To better understand, and answer this question, the mode of narration and character presentation adopted by the author is pertinent. The author gets into the consciousness of the readers by the way the story is presented to attract emotions (catharsis) from the readers.

Studies in narration show that the concept always has to do with emotion even though it is not expressly stated. Since emotion is a psychological concept, any attempt to relate narration and emotion in a literary analysis would also be approached from a psycho-analytic viewpoint. Collingwood argued that “art is the expression of emotions in languages such as prose, poetry, music, painting, and so on” (5). In a psychological experiment carried out to determine the relationship between narration and emotion, and which also shows that different narrative modes will draw different emotional experiences from the readers, Oatley (2003) in his Communications to Self and Others proposed that “when emotions are important but their experience is unclear, writers of fictional literature explore them by expressing them, and readers can benefit from this exploration and thereby improve their understanding of them” (211). Oatley goes further to argue that fiction is a kind of simulation: one that runs not on computers but on minds. “We could also call it imagination: of characters, their plans as they interact, and the emotions that occur when their plans meet vicissitudes” (211).He notes that there are two aspects of literary simulation. One is the simulation of the minds of other individuals (characters). This is imaginative mind-reading based on empathetic theory of mind. The other is understanding the complexities of social interaction. He exemplifies this by stating that if one learns to fly, one might spend time in a flight simulator, where one can learn more things, and learn them better, than in actual flying when much time is spent aloft with little happening. The skills one learns in the simulator then transfer to flying an actual airplane. Based on this analogy, Oatley et al. argued that people who read a lot of fiction would be better at theory-of-mind and other social abilities than those who read mainly non-fiction.

Fiction allows entry to simulated social worlds, and the insertion of characters’ goals and plans into our own planning processors. As in ordinary life, the process is empathetic (identifying with characters). As in ordinary life, it has two parts. In one part, we impute emotions to another (a character). In this part, fiction is designed to enable us to imagine a character’s emotions and their causes. In the other part, having given up our own plans and concerns and, instead, taken on the goals and plans of the character, we experience our own emotions in response to the events that befall the character. Oatley et al.’s (2009) experiment with Anton Chekhov’s “The lady with the little dog,” which is widely regarded as one of the world’s greatest short stories, was used to determine the level of emotions that goes with narrative modes (fiction and non-fiction). It starts with a man who, while staying at a seaside resort, meets a woman he has seen walking with her dog. They begin an affair and at the end of their holiday they part and return to their spouses. But their feelings for each other become stronger and more important than anything else in their lives. The version in non-fictional format was written by Djikic as a report from a divorce court, with the same characters and events as Chekhov’s story. It was the same length and the same level of reading difficulty. Readers rated it just as interesting, though not as artistic, as Chekhov’s story.

It was found that the personality traits of people who read Chekhov’s story changed significantly more than those of readers of the courtroom account. Changes were in different directions for different readers, and they were mediated by the emotions people experienced while reading. One may ask why readers find emotion or narrative empathy with the fictional version of the story but find little or no emotion with the same story in a court case divorce situation. An answer to such a question would probably lie in the writers’ method of narrative style of characterization or the diction employed in telling the same story. The researchers’ explanation is that, in their engagement with Chekhov’s story, readers experienced emotions (catharsis) with the protagonists: identified with them, felt emotions on their behalf, or perhaps felt disapproval, so that each in his or her own way was affected by them. Readers thus came to understand their emotions and themselves a bit better.                                                                   

When we read fiction, our own emotions become important, far more so than the emotions of the characters. It is our own emotions that we seek to experience and understand: we would not read short stories and novels, or watch films and plays, which did not move us. Fiction offers simulated social worlds

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