Affective Narratology. The Emotional Structure of Stories

Abstract

Drobot reviews Affective Narratology. The Emotional Structure of Stories by Patrick Colm Hogan.

Patrick Colm HOGAN. Affective Narratology. The Emotional Structure of Stories, University of Nebraska, US, 2011, 293 p.

In the Introduction of the book, Hogan states the purpose of this study: "to explore the relation between emotion and recurring story structures and components" (p. 18), that is, "the ways in which emotions make stories" (p. 1). The author notices that narratology could benefit from more research done in relation to emotion. He examines existing research on emotion and narrative and finds it limited judging from the aspects he wishes to focus on and develop in his book.

Chapter 1, Before Stories. Emotional Time and Anna Karenina , is about "incidents and the way these are built up through causal attribution into events and episodes" (p. 18). Hogan argues for his choice to discuss the novel Anna Karenina due to its analysis by Keith Oatley and Vladimir Alexandrov. Alexandrov claims that "understanding is intertwined with love in Anna Karenina" (235) - one very striking way in which social cognition and emotion are inseparable in this novel" (p. 21). Hogan believes that "spatiality, the 'existential' experience of location, is fundamentally an emotional experience" (p. 29) in relation to the character Stiva, who "understands his location by contrast with where he should be, where he would like to be, where he would be if everything were right" (p. 29). Leaving home is a matter of emotional risk. Readers expect normalcy, and when such anticipations are contradicted, the "attentional focus is triggered" (p. 30) and an arousal that prepares readers for certain emotions occurs. The letter Stiva notices in Dolly's hands causes readers to experience a shift of attentional focus, because "Almost immediately upon experiencing an emotion, we begin to attribute a cause" (p. 34). Dolly has been unfaithful to her husband, readers find out together with Stiva from the letter. The "emotion-provoking incident" is represented by "Dolly, motionless, looking at Stiva with horror, despair, and fury"; the causal attribution is represented by the letter; all these are depicted as an event, and the readers experience it as an event (p. 40). Hogan presents appraisal theory, which claims that "we do not respond emotionally to simple perceptual facts. Rather, we respond emotionally to facts with a certain meaning of significance, facts interpreted in a certain way" (p. 43). Appraisal theory applies to Stiva in terms of the way he is affected by a situation which affects the pursuit of some goals. Dolly's affair affects his pursuit of the goal of avoiding conflict, for instance. Hogan states that "our experience of time is not uniform. We encode experience into hierarchized units, organizing temporality first of all by reference to emotional response" (p. 66).

Chapter 2, Stories and Works. From Ancient Egypt to Postmodernism, deals with "what constitutes a story" (p. 19). Several stories from different epochs are examined: one from Middle Kingdom Egypt, where general story structure is analysed; King Lear is analysed to show how a work is different from a collection; a postmodern story, from India, Meenaxi, a film by M.F. Husain, where the analysis focuses on the general organization of a story's structure. According to Hogan, "stories [...] are demarcated most significantly by emotion systems. Specifically, sequences of episodes are increasingly storylike to the degree that they satisfy a growing number of preference rules." (p. 121) According to the first set of preference rules, a small number of protagonists seek the achievement of a goal. The goal consists of "expectations of happiness" (p. 121). According to the second set of preference rules, "The pursuit of the goal should be resolved either by the achievement of the goal or by making that achievement impossible" (p. 122).

Chapter 3, Universal Narrative Prototypes: Sacrifice, Heroism, and Romantic Love , examines "the main cross-cultural types of stories" (p. 19), thus moving towards particular story patterns. Hogan analyses sacrificial narratives (Dou E yuan by Guan Hanqing), heroic tragicomedy (the West African oral narrative Epic of Son-Jara), the heroic plot (the African oral narrative The Mwundo Epic), and the romantic plot (a work of Sanskrit dramatic literature, Abhijnanasakuntalam). According to Hogan, "The major cross-cultural genres" are "derived from the need of storytellers to produce narratives of general interest." (p. 181) The goals of the characters in the stories "must be instances of eliciting conditions for happiness." (p. 181) Happiness prototypes are physical, personal, and social. In order for these goals "to be effective across people and contexts", they "must be widely accepted as important and nonsubstitutable" (p. 181). The sacrificial narrative has to do with drought or famine coming before abundance, which is the goal. In the romantic narrative, the lovers are separated, the ir goal being romantic union. For the heroic narrative, the goal is the achievement of a high position in the group.

Chapter 4, Cross-Cultural Minor Genres: Attachment, Lust, Revenge, and Criminal Justice, analyses what Hogan calls "minor genres": "stories of attachment, sexuality, and crime" (p. 10). The attachment stories Hogan analyses are stories from the Bible, stories from the Mahabharata, the Japanese dramas Kagekiyo and Yoroboshi, the Chinese drama The Story of the Circle Chalk, King Lear, The Odyssey, Dans le Labyrinthe by Alain Robbe-Grillet, etc. The sexual narrative includes discussions of stories from the Mahabharata and the Kalevala, the ancient Sumerian story of Enlil and Ninlil, The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki, Mother-in-Law by Terence, Tirso's version of Don Juan, Faust by Goethe, etc. The revenge plot and the criminal plot are included in the same category, and here Hogan discusses The Drum of the Waves of Horikawa by Chikamatsu, The Spanish Tragedy, Oedipus the King, The Trial by Kafka, Hamlet, the Oresteia, etc. Hogan identifies two ways in which genres appear: first, "through happiness goals" (p. 233), and second, "from our spontaneous, unself-conscious categorization of works and our implicit averaging of properties of those works" (p. 233).

While the four chapters focus on "ways in which our emotion systems affect and explain our stories" (p. 23), the afterword deals with the question of whether stories can affect emotion processes "ways in which our stories affect and explain our emotions" (p. 237).

To conclude, Hogan's study is important since he draws attention to the affective dimension of narratology, analyzing the way the emotional experience works in relation to how stories are composed.