The Story and narrative module in the labyrinth theatre course/workshop for educators working in and with museums - an output of Labyrintheme, a LLP/Grundtvig Multilateral Project (2011-2012).
Labyrintheme
curriculum
Story
and narrative theory-focused session
Lucian
Branea
1. Introduction
1.1.
Background
The
rationale of the inclusion of such a module is to introduce trainees to the importance
of story and narrative, as well as to some structural elements common to fairy
tales and myths around the world deemed essential to effective narratives.
1.2.
Objectives
The
module’s objective is to offer a brief theoretical background to developing a
narrative. By the end of this module, trainees should have a grasp regarding the
importance of storytelling and basic knowledge regarding some technical aspects
of storytelling and narrative.
2. Pre-requisites
2.1.
Required competences of trainer/s
The trainer
should be knowledgeable of narrative / storytelling theory and practice,
derived either from a literature studies or a performing arts studies
background. Background in creative writing practice helps :)
2.2.
Required competences of
trainees
Trainees
need no specific competence, skill or background, except curiosity and openness
towards the subject matter of the module.
2.3.
Required logistics
No specific
logistics is required, the module is delivered within the training course
space.
2.4.
Duration and timing
The
duration of the session is 2-3 hours, with appropriate breaks, provisionally
positioned in the morning of Day 4.
3. Module program and content
3.1. Actual content
a. Lecture (max. 30 minutes)
In Terry Pratchett’s Witches Abroad, witches Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and Magrat Garlick have to travel from their native mountainous Ramtop to the distant lowlands of Genua to fulfil an apparently easy task. You have to admit: how hard can it be to ensure that a particular servant girl does not marry a prince? However, since this happens on Discworld (which travels through space on the back of four elephants who in turn stand on the shell of the Great A’Tuin, the sky turtle), things are not so simple as they appear. And this is because Discworld runs on magic, and magic is indissolubly linked to Narrative Causality, the power of story. On Discworld servant girls have to marry the prince; wolves have to eat grandmothers; and it is impossible for the third and youngest son of any king, upon embarking on a particular quest, not to succeed.
In Terry
Pratchett’s words,
[…] stories are
important.
People think that stories
are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around.
Stories exist independent
of their players. If you know that, knowledge is power.
Stories, great flapping
ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the
universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have
died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling…
stories, twisting and blowing through the darkness.
And their very existence
overlays a faint but insistent pattern on the chaos that is history. Stories
etch grooves deep enough for people to follow in the same way that water
follows certain paths down a mountainside. And every time fresh actors tread
the path of the story, the groove runs deeper.
This is called the theory
of narrative causality and it means that a story, once started, takes a shape.
It picks up all the vibrations of all the other workings of that story that
have ever been.
This is why history keeps
on repeating all the time. […]
Stories don't care who
takes part in them. All that matters is that the story gets told, that the
story repeats. Or, if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a
parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself.
Even more,
on Discworld, the narrative imperative is reified into narrativium.
Narrativium
is not an element in the accepted sense. It is an attribute of every other
element, thus turning them into, in an occult sense, molecules. Iron contains
not just iron, but also the story of iron, the history of iron, the part of
iron that ensures that it will continue to be iron, and has an iron-like job to
do and is not, for example, cheese. Without narrativium, the cosmos has no
story, no purpose, no destination.
If the
descriptions above remind you of memes,
the cultural analogues to genes first described by Richard Dawkins, you are
indeed on the right track. And you’d better be, because on Roundworld (that is,
obviously, Earth) the story is at least as important as it is on Discworld. In
all human cultures, from very early infancy, each and every bit of socializing
and of learning is achieved through stories. Children hear stories even before
they are able to recognize any words at all, and by the age of three most of
them are already set to make up their own stories about their immediate
environment. And things continue like this, year after year, story after story,
until they grow older and some of them get ashamed of referring to ‘stories’
anymore, preferring to call their made-up stories ‘alternative scenarios.’ However,
they’re still using stories, narratives, to shape and communicate their
experiences, no matter how they call them.
Now, even
if most of us were able to make-up our own stories by the age of three, only a
fraction of us are really successful when telling jokes at parties. A much
smaller fraction is able to make careers as stand-up comedians, novelists or
movie-makers. And an even much smaller fraction is eventually so successful
with storytelling so as to get rich and internationally famous (this arithmetic
does not apply to politicians, a distinct category of storytellers!). As a
consequence, in order to alter such statistics, some of us become teachers of
literature, or even (if we’re really over-structured) narratologists, while
some hold creative writing or screenwriting workshops, training others to
unlock their potential in a) writing stories (movie scripts included), that b)
grab their readers or audience from the first moment and don’t let them go back
to their mundane world until the story is over. This second outcome is a tricky
business indeed, because stories passed on to other people have to interest
them, to make them care, and consequently to make them learn something about
the world and, in the process, about themselves.
Due to a
variety of cultural and economic factors and stakes, the most energy to develop
such advice for the novice storyteller emerged from within the movie-making sector.
Aspiring storytellers might have occasionally heard about Syd Field and Robert
McKee, or Catherine Ann Jones, or John Truby, or Linda Aronson, or Blake Snyder
for that matter, because such screenwriters and story consultants in the
movie-making industry put their advice on paper claiming that the things they
recount about making a story ‘work’ are relevant and applicable to writers of
all kinds, including short story writers, novelists, but also journalists,
memoirists, and other non-fiction writers.
This module
chose to present to you a model developed on some structural elements than can
be found in myths, fairy tales, and even dreams across the world: Joseph
Campbell’s The Hero's Journey refers
to a basic pattern found in a substantial number of narratives in Eastern and
Western cultures alike. This identifiable pattern was first fully described in
his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces
(1949). Slightly more than four decades later, Christopher Vogler, a Walt
Disney Company development executive, compiled a 7-page company memo based on
Campbell's work, A Practical Guide to The Hero With a Thousand Faces, that circulated extensively around Hollywood.
Vogler's memo was later developed into TheWriter's Journey. Mythic Structure For Writers, with a first edition in
1997 (and a third printed in 2007 as the latest edition at the moment of writing
this).
Please mind
(again!) that this is only a model of a variety of models, which you might find
useful or not, within or outside the Labyrintheme training course’s scope, and
as such it is the personal option of the author of the present module. Such an
option is primarily based on the fact that each story worth its existence
recounts a protagonist’s journey, be it outward or inward, in the end of which the
hero is changed forever. Or until a next journey, of course…:>
Christopher Vogler’s The Hero’s
Journey
[the names of the stages of the Hero’s Journey as dubbed by Vogler are in
Bold;
only some of them correspond to Campbell’s terminology]
1. The heroes are shown (more
or less extensively) in their ‘home environment’, the Ordinary World, where they mind their own daily businesses, until
2. one day the Ordinary
World is shaken in one way or another and the heroes are presented with a Call to Adventure, a way out of their
familiar environments and their routine;
3. at first, the heroes are
reluctant, from a variety of reasons, to respond to the challenge, and a Refusal of the Call is tabled;
4. however, a Meeting with the Mentor helps heroes to
rise to the challenge and embark on their quest.
5. Leaving the Ordinary World
and effectively entering a non-ordinary, unfamiliar world, the heroes are Crossing the First Threshold,
6. entering a stage during
which they encounter Tests, as well
as sort out Allies and Enemies.
7. The heroes and their
allies are furthermore preparing for the major challenge of their journey, that
is for the Approach to the Inmost Cave,
8. a stage in which they are
subjected to an Ordeal, confronting
their most terrible fear or death,
9. which they survive and consequently
get their Reward.
10.
The Road Back now
begins, as the heroes must (or choose to) return to the Ordinary World, to
bring back the Reward and implement lessons learned during the journey;
11.
however,
perils along the journey are far from over: the heroes have one more dangerous
meeting with death and undergo a final purging and purification, a Resurrection, before re-entering the
Ordinary World.
12.
Finally,
heroes Return with the Elixir, in
the form of an artefact and/or specific wisdom; they are forever changed by the
experience, and the Ordinary World is expected to change too, in some minor or
major form.
Archetypes
Mentors, Allies, the
Heroes themselves and many others are character types. Myths and fairy tales
throughout the world tend to share a series of recurring character types,
symbols and relationships. Carl Gustav Jung first suggested that a collective
unconscious may exist, to the same extent as there is an individual
unconscious. And since a series of such character types consistently occur at
both levels, across vast cultural spaces, Jung used the term archetype to account for such patterns
of personality as a shared heritage of humanity.
Christopher Vogler
describes, in his The Writer’s Journey,
eight archetypes as “the most common and useful” for the storyteller,
acknowledging there are many more, but introducing just “the most basic
patterns, from which all others are shaped to fit the needs of specific stories
and genres.” As Vogler’s Journey, the
following list of archetypes is just a proposal; you are obviously welcome to
find others that do not seem to be particular variations of the ones below.
However, before examining
a list of possible patterns, please note two more important things about
archetypes. First, while they look like character types, they may very well be
roles or functions performed temporarily, in various stages of the story, by
various characters, including the hero her/himself. Second, if you think that all humans are complex (like I do!), you might as well look at all archetypes as
facets of the hero’s personality, acquired or gaining prominence in various
stages of her/his journey.
Hero.
The term
comes from the Greek ἥρως (heros) and literally
means protector, defender. As such, the hero is a central protagonist that, in the
face of danger and adversity or from a position of weakness, display courage
and the will for self-sacrifice for the common/greater good. Its psychological
function is to represent what Freud called the ego, the part of personality that considers itself distinct. Its
dramatic functions (because the Hero has several) are: to facilitate audience
identification; to display learning/growth; to act, in control of own fate; to
confront literal or symbolic death; to sacrifice herself/himself. In any story,
the hero is the one who learns/grows the most.
Mentor.
Most
often a positive figure, the Mentors teach, inspire and protect heroes. Its
psychological function is to represent the Self, the aspect of one’s
personality connected with the world, therefore the wiser and nobler part of
it. Its dramatic function is supporting the heroes through teaching/training,
but also offering them gifts that will be of help at some point through the
journey.
Threshold
Guardian. A
guard at each gateway to a new world encountered along the journey, the Threshold
Guardian is there to keep the unworthy from entering. Its psychological
function is to represent the ordinary obstacles in the everyday world, but
ultimately our internal demons: fears, self-limitations, dependencies. Its
dramatic function is to test the hero at various checkpoints along the journey.
Herald.
The
Herald issues challenges, announcing imminent change. Therefore, its
psychological function is signalling the need for change. By issuing
challenges, the Herald’s dramatic function is to motivate the Hero.
Shapeshifter. Shapeshifters are
characters continuously change appearance or mood, with their loyalty and sincerity
always questionable. Their psychological function is to express the energy of animus and anima in Carl Gustav Jung’s terminology: the male element in the
female unconscious, and the female element in the male unconscious,
respectively. Consequently, their dramatic function is to bring suspense into a
story.
Shadow.
The Shadow
archetype represents the energy of one’s dark side. Its psychological function
is therefore to represent the power of repressed feelings, not so much neuroses
(as in the case of the Threshold Guardian), but psychoses threatening to
destroy oneself. Its dramatic function is to challenge the hero, posturing as a
worthy opponent.
Ally.
A
companion, conscience or even comic relief, the Ally is an archetype whose psychological
function is to represent positive unexpressed or unused parts of one’s
personality that should be brought occasionally to action. Its dramatic
function is to support, and occasionally challenge, the hero.
Trickster.
A
catalyst character, it embodies de desire for change. Its psychological
functions are to cut egos down to size, bringing everybody taking themselves
too seriously down to earth, as well as facilitating change or transformation.
Its dramatic function is therefore that of comic relief.
Summing
up
Defining story or, for
the purpose of this brief, storytelling can consume whole libraries. There’s no easy way out of this, so I’ll just refer
you to a TED Talk in February 2012: Andrew Stanton - The clues to a great story. Says Stanton:
Storytelling
-- is joke telling. It's knowing your punchline, your ending, knowing that
everything you're saying, from the first sentence to the last, is leading to a
singular goal, and ideally confirming some truth that deepens our
understandings of who we are as human beings.
For the other
19 minutes of Stanton’s TED Talk, check http://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_stanton_the_clues_to_a_great_story.html.
Then read or watch stories whenever you can to make up your own definition for
‘story’ :)
b. Practical
activities:
*
reconfigure your choice of a story [with yourself as the protagonist in a
museum setting] as a ‘hero’s journey’
* design a brief
‘hero’s journey’ whose hero is a
museum artefact of your choice
3.2. Resources used
Material
resources needed: flipchart, paper, pens/pencils, personal objects of participants.
Bibliography
Christopher
Vogler’s A Practical Guide to The Hero With a Thousand Faces
Cristopher
Vogler, The Writer’s Journey: MythicStructure for Writers - Michael Wiese Productions, 2007 (3rd
edition)
Terry
Pratchett, Witches Abroad – Corgi
Books, 1992
Terry
Pratchett, Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen, TheScience of Discworld II: The Globe – Ebury Press, 2003
Terry
Pratchett, Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen, TheScience of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch – Ebury Press, 2005
Only indirectly referred to in this brief, but essential for aspiring storytellers:
Robert
McKee, Story: Substance, structure,style, and the principles of screenwriting – Methuen, 1999
If you feel over-analytical :) and wish to
update your knowledge of narrative to an academic level, go to
David
Herman, Basic Elements of Narrative –
Wiley-Blackwell, 2009
3.3. Glossary
Archetype. an inherited idea or
mode of thought in the psychology of Carl Gustav Jung that is derived from the
experience of the race and is present in the unconscious of the individual (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/archetype). The term derives from the Latin noun archetypum, the latinisation of the
Greek noun ἀρχέτυπον (archetupon) and
adjective ἀρχέτυπος (archetupos) – a
compound of ἀρχή (arche = origin) and τύπος (tupos = pattern, model, type).
Meme. An idea, behavior, style
or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/meme).
Alteration of mimeme, from Greek μίμησις (mimesis = imitation). First
coined by Richard Dawkins in The SelfishGene (1976).
4. Concluding session
The
concluding session should discuss trainees’ opinions on what makes a good story and what makes a well told story.
No comments :
Post a Comment