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Storytelling and Self-Knowledge
THE FILM A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT1 (1992) is about many things-parental nurture, sibling friendship, growing up and leaving home, and the way nature is woven into the weft of character development. But hovering above and embedded within the apparently conventional story is a second-order subject, the subject of narrative itself. It hovers above the story by virtue of the movie's form and cinematic technique. It is embedded within the story in the numerous references to and examples of storytelling. The significance of narrative, then, at once shapes the film and is imminent within it.
Although obviously a conventional story about a pair of brothers growing up in Montana, A River Runs Through It is also about the art and process of Storytelling itself. The metanarrative dimension runs through the straightforward story of the Maclean family, just as the rivers of Montana run through the family's life. We are reminded in a variety of ways that we are being told a story by a self-conscious narrator (the voice-over is director Robert Redford's). The self-consciously told story, moreover, is meant to give instruction, to be an edifying narrative.
Of course, stones can be and are instructive about many things. Among the more well-worn subjects, we find love and loss, authenticity and self-deception, care and responsibility. And the first-order, traditional story that unfolds in A River Runs Through It certainly gives food for thought about enduring features of the human condition, such as the nature of parental nurture and sibling friendship.2 As a metanarrative, though, the film is about stories and the telling of stories.
All metanarrative works of art aim to illuminate the nature of narrative-that is what makes them metanarratives. Some films, such as Last Year at Marienbad (1961), call into question the linear form and presuppositions ofverisimilitude of traditional storytelling. Other films, such as Rashomon (1950), raise questions about the narrative conventions of cinematic truthfulness that undergird our grasp of the events in the film's story.
The metanarrative thrust of A River Runs Through It does not deal with questions of narrative structure, assumptions, or logic. Neither does it problematize or deconstruct conventional storytelling. Rather, its metanarrative themes are modestly housed within a conventional story. And this is itself remarkable since...