Page 295 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| Narrat ve Power and Med a Influence

deFinitions
“Narrative” is used to describe so many different communication acts that its definition can
become slippery. Here are some meanings for the word, each legitimate in other analytical
contexts, but not included in this discussion:
• Narrative as a literary genre distinguished from poems, plays, and essays
• Narrative as a rhetorical mode distinguished from the lyric and dramatic
• Narrative as a compositional technique distinguished from the expository
“Narrative,” used here, is a rhetorical construct that emerges collaboratively between
teller and listener (or writer and reader, producer and viewer).

history, season, day, or clock. To grasp any story, regardless of the technology of
its transmission, depends on seeing the meaningful connections among char-
acter, event, place, and time.
Storytelling, the second element of narrative communication, is comprised
of (1) a narrator, (2) an audience, and (3) the sequencing of information. Sto-
ries do not exist apart from their telling. Some narrators are clearly visible in
their own stories, standing center stage. Others are virtually invisible, hidden
behind the scenes. Likewise, some narrators are reliable, and others prove un-
trustworthy. A teller and an audience cocreate meaning. When they fail in that
effort, a frustrated teller might say, “I guess you just had to be there,” acknowl-
edging both the importance of context to a story and the difficulty of narra-
tive collaboration with an audience. Inasmuch as storytelling occurs in time, a
narrator must sequence events, one before the other, each new word or image
supplanting its predecessor. Temporality makes narrative more akin to dance
or music than to painting or architecture. A story, when it is being told, is never
there all at once. Even when two events occur simultaneously in the story (e.g.,
the gangland execution of rivals at the same moment that the murderer stands
up at a family baptism in The Godfather), the telling of those events cannot be
simultaneous. A narrator must decide how and why to sequence information
for an audience, choosing what details to include or exclude, what characters
to empower or marginalize, what events to promote or demote. In other words,
how a story is told is telling in itself.

an ExamPLE: ThE u.s. PrEsiDEnT as narraTor

Consider the narrative role of a U.S. president. “Commander-in-Chief,” “Chief
Executive,” and “Party Leader” are among the more familiar titles accorded any
president. However, “national narrator,” an unacknowledged role, trumps the
others in potency. Every four years, citizens of voting age have the opportunity
to elect the narrator of their collective story. Who tells the nation’s story makes a
substantial difference to the story itself, as well as to its audiences. Which char-
acters will be cast in major roles? Who will be marginalized as minor characters?
Who will become hero, and who villain? Who might be silenced altogether?