Eventfulness as a Narratological Category

Wolf Schmid

(Universität Hamburg)

Is eventfulness really a narratological category or is it instead, as some theorists argue, a hermeneutic category indicative of interpretation? I believe it is both. Narratology should do more than simply design clinically pure, aseptic analytical tools whose purpose is to generate objective descriptions that stand alone and have nothing to do with interpretation. In fact, there is little merit in the dichotomy between objective description and subjective interpretation. For example, the narrator authority is, as long as it is semantically dependent on symptoms in the text, heavily dependent on interpretation. And the task of recog­nizing a change of state is, more often than not, heavily dependent on interpretation, either because the explicit prop­erties of the initial and final states are not equivalent and thus require suppositions to be made if they are to be comparable, or because the dif­ference between the states themselves is not clear. It might be suggested that the categories of narratology as such are pure, and that a certain degree of subjective contamination occurs only when they are applied to individual texts, if at all. But what about categories such as the implied author, free indirect discourse, and others, whose status and delimitation have been the theme of scholarly controversies for many years? In so far as it can be assumed that eventfulness is indeed a narratological category in the first place, my aim here is to consider its usefulness and the range of its applications.

Let us begin by clarifying the basic terms:

1. Narrativity: narrativity implies a temporal sequence representing changes of state.

2. Change of state: a change of state that gives rise to narrativity implies at least the following: (1) two states in a chronological sequence, (2) an equivalence of the initial and final state, and (3) identity of the agent or patient affected by the change of state.

3. Event: an event is a special type of change of state that presupposes factivity and resultativity as well as fulfilling five additional requirements.¹ Factivity means that changes of state that are only wished for, imagined, or dreamed of are not events (the real acts of wishing, imagining, or dreaming can, of course, qualify as events). Resultativity is a correlate of an event’s factivity. The change of state that constitutes an event is neither inchoative (begun) nor conative (at­tempted) nor durative (con­fined to an ongoing process). Instead, it must be resultative in that it reaches completion in the narrative world of the text.

The five additional requirements a change of state must meet in order to constitute an event are, in hierarchical order, as follows: (1) relevance, the significance of the change of state in a narrative world, (2) unpredictability, the extent to which the change of state deviates from the doxa of the narrative (that is, what is generally expected in the narrative world), (3) persistence, the consequences for the thought and action of the affected subject in the narrative world, (4) irreversibility, and (5) non-iterativity. We will return to these requirements below. (Ockham might have argued that this is too plentiful a list of features and that some overlap with others; unpredictability, for example, seems to imply non-itera­tivity. But this is not so. The features have been obtained by means of induction rather than by means of deductive reasoning. They are derived from the prose of the Russian post-realist Anton Chekhov, in which they are independent of one other.²)

The 4. basic term is Eventfulness: eventfulness is a scalable property of events. This means that events can have varying levels of eventfulness depending on the prominence of the five features described above. Among them, the first two, namely relevance and unpredictability, are the most important. If a change of state is to be called an event, it must display both these features to some degree at least.

The 5. term is Tellability: this term, introduced by William Labov³, designates something that is worth telling, the raison d’etre, the point of a story (this should be distinguished from the literal meaning of the word, ‘ability to be told’, German Erzahlbarkeit, Dutch vertelbaarheid). In a narrative with a high degree of eventfulness the event­ful­ness will, as a rule, coincide with tellability. In narratives with low eventfulness or no eventfulness at all, tellability can stem from the absence of an event that the reader might have expected. Though the non-expectedness of a change of state is an important prerequisite for an event, the non-fulfilment of an expectation is not, as such, an event. But it can be the point of a narrative. This can be seen from Tales of the Little Quarter, a collection of stories by the nineteenth-century Czech writer Jan Neruda. In one of them⁴, the hero attempts to establish a new grocery somewhere in the Little Quarter of Prague where there has never been a shop before. Jurij Lotman would call this a “movement of a character beyond the limits of a semantic field” or a “crossing of a forbidden border”.⁵ But the grocer’s attempt is doomed to fail because of the reluctance of the established bourgeoisie to accept change in their lives. The boycott of the new shop leads to the border violator’s bankruptcy and eventual suicide. The death of the grocer is therefore not unexpected for reader and narrative world. It is an absolutely foreseeable consequence of what precedes it and is therefore a change with a low degree of eventfulness, in short not an event at all. The “tellable” thing in this story is the failure of an intended border crossing. The whole collection of stories in Tales of the Little Quarter is devoted to the uneventfulness of this microcosm, to the impenetrability of its borders. This is symbolized by the oft-mentioned city walls that surround the Little Quarter.

Those who support the idea that eventfulness is not a narratological category might point to the hermeneutic or context-sensitive character of at least two of the five features listed above, namely relevance and unpredictability.

Relevance is a heavily subject-dependent and context-sensitive category. Not only the characters of a narrative world, but also the narrator and implied semantic entities such as the abstract author and the abstract reader, can evaluate the relevance of a narrated change of state in different ways. Moreover we need to take account of the fact that real readers can have individual concepts of relevance that do not conform with those of the fictitious and implied entities—not to speak of the different assessments of relevance by real authors and readers, or by abstract entities and fictitious characters on the one hand and real readers of later times on the other.

A similar subject-dependency and context-sensitivity applies to unpredictability. A highly eventful change is para­doxical in the Aristotelian sense of the word: it is not what we expect (in his Rhetoric, Aristotle defines paradox as that which contradicts general expectation, the “Doxa”⁶). Doxa involves the narrative world and its protagonists and is not equivalent to the reader’s script (that is to say, what the reader expects in the action on the basis of certain patterns in literature or the real world). A change of state that comes as a surprise to the protagonists in a narrative world can be perfectly predictable for an expert reader if it is a generic feature. It follows that the reader’s script for the course of a work and the pro­tago­nists’ expectations for the course of their lives must be treated as distinct and separate notions.

Such references to context-sensitivity and the suggestion that eventfulness is dependent on context provoke the question: what is context anyway? What does it mean to be context-sensitive? At least three meanings of context can be distinguished.

1. First, “context” means the system of social norms and values of the author’s time or of the time depicted in a work. The force of social perspectives on literature in the 1970s, however, led to a tremendous overestimation of the relevance of reconstructing the social context of the author’s epoch or of the epoch depicted in a work. But to understand the eventfulness of Madame Bovary, there is no need to study the curriculum of French convent schools or the state of medical science in France at those times. It is clear that Emma’s expectations regarding her future have been spoilt by reading too many bad love novels and that Bovary is a poor surgeon. It is a happy truth that literary works provide, more or less overtly, information about the norms and values in terms of which their eventfulness should be understood.

2. More important is the reconstruction of another context, that is to say the concept of the event in different genres and literary movements in a given period. Genres and movements are characterized by certain concepts of what is eventful. In Russian literature of the 1830s, for example, epic poetry developed event concepts quite different from those of contemporary narrative prose, and late romanticism allowed for forms of border crossing different from those of contemporary early realism. To understand eventfulness, it is necessary to know the event code of the genre and movement in question.

3. Considerably important but often underestimated is the intertextual context. I have already pointed out that a change of state that comes as a surprise to a character may be not surprising at all to well-read readers because they are prepared by pretexts. Following Viktor Sklovsky⁷, it can in general be said that literature is perceived against the background of preceding literature rather than against the background of real life.

Where, then, lies the usefulness of the category of eventfulness? Eventfulness is a culture-specific and historically changing phenomenon of narrative repre­sentation. The category is therefore particularly important when it comes to dealing with prob­lems of cul­tural typology and the history of literature and thought. Let me give some examples of changes in eventfulness in Russian literature.

In Old Russian literature, that is, Russian literature up to the seventeenth century, which was strongly influenced by religious thought, eventfulness does not present itself as a positive quality. There is no unpredictability in hagiography, the leading genre of the time. Of course, hagiographical texts as a rule represent changes of state, and they often culminate in miracles. Miracles are not really surprising and unforeseeable in this textual world, though, for they follow holy models and affirm the Christian world order. Essentially, the hagiographical world does not admit fundamental surprises.

Eventfulness in our modern sense appears in Russia only in some “secular tales” of the seventeenth century that were influenced by western European novellas of the Renaissance. These secular tales tell of morally dubious heroes and their border crossings that are no longer punished at the end as was the case in religious tales. The hero Frol Skobeev, for example, is able to rise in society and then marry the daughter of a dignitary whom he has cunningly seduced earlier, all without prospect of worldly retribution.

This phase of secular narrative, of course, was never more than an episode; it was not returned to in the subsequent development of Russian literature before the eighteenth century. In the eighteenth century, the classical concept of literature pushed eventful narration aside. The classical episteme is defined by the idea of order and seeks to classify all phenomena. This leads to the predominance of description over narration. Varying predications are not the basis of changes but characterize things in terms of their nature and possibilities, both of which serve to predetermine development as something essentially non-contingent. This means that eventfulness in the modern sense is impossible, since the unpredictability and border crossing that are its constituent features have no positive place in eighteenth century’s shape of the world.⁸

Eventfulness gained the upper hand only with the prose of sentimentalism and romanticism around 1800. The event was increasingly modelled as a change in the internal, mental state of a character. This development culminated in the realist novels, in which, of course a variety of event concepts are deployed. In Ivan Turgenev’s novels, people are basically portrayed as unchangeable; Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, on the other hand, give form to mental processes that have been described as cases of insight, illumination, and sudden understanding. The realist event concept culminates in Rodion Raskol’nikov’s “resurrection” in Crime and Punishment, the sudden understanding of the meaning of life gained by Konstantin Levin in Anna Karenina and Pierre Bezuchov in War and Peace, and in the Karamazov brothers’ final acknowledge of guilt. It should of course be remembered that in both authors, the internal change is linked with transcendental forces. Clear enough in Tolstoy, this is clearer still in Dostoevsky, who uses the saint’s life as a model when crafting the chain reaction of conversions in The Brothers Karamazov. Not by chance is the story of the first conversion told in the language of hagiographical style throughout. This reflects Dostoevsky’s attempt to reconcile hagiography and realism, to write a realistic vita, and thus move realism to “a higher level”.⁹

While the novels of the two realists show people who have the capacity to undergo fundamen­tal transformations and transcend the boundaries of morality and the logic of personality, Chekhov’s post-realist narratives place a major question mark over the eventfulness of the world and the ability of people to change. Checkhov’s narration is centered on interrogating the idea of a mental event, an existential or social insight, an emotional switch, or an ethical/practical reorientation. If an event does not occur, the tellability of the stories lies in how they represent its prevention, in how they illustrate the reasons that lead to the intention of change and prevent it from being realized. Chekhov’s post-realist poetics thrives on the fact that tellability and eventfulness are no longer congruent. Consider, for example, the famous play The Three Sisters. The heroines, who lead an unfulfilled life in rural Russia, seek a fundamental change, as expressed in the repeated phrase “to Moscow”. The tellability of the play lies in the impossibility of crossing the topographical, occupational, and existential borders involved.

Socialist realism appears at first glance to have been a development in which event­ful­ness thrived. The conversion of the doubter or miscreant into a liberator of the people who supports the right side in the struggle was one of the most popular scripts in this kind of literature. On closer examination, however, this way of thinking, with its similarities to salvation history, turned out, to limit the possibility of border crossings just as much as the Church literature of the Middle Ages.

The picture in the literature of post-communist Russia is extremely varied. In the neo-realist, neo-mythic, and postmodern movements, the eventful stories of “high” realism are continued, are transposed into mythic iteration, or have their illusory nature exposed. In all cases, though, event and eventfulness are useful narratological categories that can help us describe even the thought that defines the most modern literature.

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