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142 Consuming Media

The separation between the two times of narrative mostly demands some kind of
coupling or bridge to be trustworthy. The narrator can be positioned either within or
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outside the story: homo-diegetic or hetero-diegetic. And the narrator need not even
be a person, as in films and visual narratives where the camera without any narrating
words defines the point of view of the narrator for the audience. Where there is no
explicit narrator at all, or the originators of the narrative are unknown or non-
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identifiable, there might still be an implied author. This is often the case in adver-
tising, docusoaps and reality TV.
Mikhail Bakhtin used the concept of chronotope – ‘time-space’ – to refer to a
system of time and space coordination in novelistic writing. 41 Chronotopes exist in
any narrative media genre, confirming or reworking the time of corporeal reality and
its location in historical time. Chronotopes work by unifying specific characteristics
of historical time and space into condensed figurations or articulations of the past,
the present and the future. They are at the heart of many media genres like news,
historical melodrama and science fiction, and approach what Benjamin discussed as
images of history. Even historically periodizing terms like ‘modernity’ function as
chronotopes – or tropes – of political, theoretical and historical narratives. The
advent of postmodernist dismissal of utopian thought in Western culture indicated a
crisis for these grand narratives in recent history. In the late 1970s, Lyotard
proclaimed that the autonomous multiple language games of postmodernity had
displaced the grand narratives of modernity. 42 In fact, master narratives have broken
down or eroded earlier in history, disrupting its unity and direction in the minds of
people, as for example happened to the grand narratives of religious absolutism and
feudal monarchy in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe.
Grand narratives offer basic answers to questions of continuity and discontinuity
in history, and thus of the unity of historical time itself, serving as comprehensive
frameworks to which people can relate and make sense of their own particular narra-
tives of themselves. Although there is hardly any universally accepted master narra-
tive in the contemporary world, the mutual interplay between grand, smaller and
personal narratives still persist within political, religious and social movements. This
is especially true of sectarian radical or conservative movements, where media narra-
tives that do not confirm the self-apprehension of the members and their worldview
are rejected. Converting into a new worldview goes hand in hand with recasting one’s
life in a new narrative and changing one’s view of other mediated narratives, whether
fictitious or historical. In a similar way, common-sense worldviews are also based on
more or less conscious and consistent narratives that connect the self to a greater
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scheme of things. It is impossible to make sense of life without some kind of narra-
tive framework for individual stories and media plots. Grand narratives work as
frames for more petty narratives, in the media as well as in the stories people tell in
everyday life. Some of these grand stories have even been told and developed since
ancient times, as shown by Michael Walzer’s exploration of the story of the Exodus
and Northrop Frye’s analysis of the empowering stories generated from the Bible
throughout Western history. 44