An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative
An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative*
Roland Barthes
T
HERE ARE COUNTLESS FORMS of narrative in the world. First of all, there is a prodigious variety of genres, each of which branches out into a variety of media, as if all substances could be relied upon to accommodate man's stories. Among the vehicles of narrative are articulated language, whether oral or written, pictures, still or moving, gestures, and an ordered mixture of all those substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fables, tales, short stories, epics, history, tragedy, (frame [suspense drama], comedy, pantomime, paintings (in Santa Ursula by Carpaccio, for instance), stained-glass windows, movies, local news, conversation. Moreover, in this infinite variety of forms, it is present at all times, in all places, in all societies; indeed narrative starts with the very history of mankind; there is not, there has never been anywhere, any people without narrative; all classes, all human groups, have their stories, and very often those stories are enjoyed by men of different and even opposite cultural backgrounds: I narrative remains largely unconcerned with goad or bad literature. Like life itself, it is there, international, transhistorical, transcultural.
Are we to infer from such universality that narrative is insignificant? Is it so common that we can say nothing about it, except for a modest description of a few highly particularized species, as literary history sometimes does? Indeed how are we to control such variety, how are we to justify our right to distinguish or recognize them? How can we tell the novel from the short story, the tale from the myth, suspense drama from tragedy (it has been done a thousand times) without reference to a common model? Any critical attempt to describe even the most specific, the most historically oriented narrative form implies such a model. It is, therefore, understandable that thinkers as early as Aristotle should have concerned
Roland Barthes
T
HERE ARE COUNTLESS FORMS of narrative in the world. First of all, there is a prodigious variety of genres, each of which branches out into a variety of media, as if all substances could be relied upon to accommodate man's stories. Among the vehicles of narrative are articulated language, whether oral or written, pictures, still or moving, gestures, and an ordered mixture of all those substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fables, tales, short stories, epics, history, tragedy, (frame [suspense drama], comedy, pantomime, paintings (in Santa Ursula by Carpaccio, for instance), stained-glass windows, movies, local news, conversation. Moreover, in this infinite variety of forms, it is present at all times, in all places, in all societies; indeed narrative starts with the very history of mankind; there is not, there has never been anywhere, any people without narrative; all classes, all human groups, have their stories, and very often those stories are enjoyed by men of different and even opposite cultural backgrounds: I narrative remains largely unconcerned with goad or bad literature. Like life itself, it is there, international, transhistorical, transcultural.
Are we to infer from such universality that narrative is insignificant? Is it so common that we can say nothing about it, except for a modest description of a few highly particularized species, as literary history sometimes does? Indeed how are we to control such variety, how are we to justify our right to distinguish or recognize them? How can we tell the novel from the short story, the tale from the myth, suspense drama from tragedy (it has been done a thousand times) without reference to a common model? Any critical attempt to describe even the most specific, the most historically oriented narrative form implies such a model. It is, therefore, understandable that thinkers as early as Aristotle should have concerned