Page 140 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

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Narrative

Jolyon Mitchell

Repetition of narratives
Amplifications of narratives
Elaborations of narratives
Reverberations of narratives

In Manila, at 7:03 am on December 30, 1896, a Filipino writer, poet,
sculptor, and eye doctor by the name of Jose Rizal was shot dead by Filipino
soldiers. A line of Spanish troops stood behind them to ensure that they
carried out the execution. As he was shot, Rizal is said to have twisted
around so that he fell on his back, staring up to the sky. The band played
on. As soon as he had fallen, some Spanish bystanders clapped, others even
cheered: “Viva Espana.” The story of Jose Rizal’s death at Bagumbayan
Field soon transformed into an act of martyrdom, becoming a foundational
narrative for the emerging nation of the Philippines. With the help of a range
of different media, Rizal became a national hero, a unifying point for the
evolving “imagined community” of the Philippines (Anderson 1991).
I am using the example of Rizal to consider the place of narrative in
relation to the study of media and religion. Over the last thirty years,
narrative has become a hotly debated topic, with scholars from a wide
range of disciplines speaking of a “narrative turn.” The nature of this turn
has been mapped in detail elsewhere (Herman 2007: 4). It is useful in the
context of my discussion, however, to note how several scholars have drawn
on the work of Vladimir Propp, who identified common plot functions
(narratemes) in Russian folk tales, emphasizing the significance of “disruptive
events” (Propp 1928) in driving a narrative forward. Hearing news of Rizal’s
execution undoubtedly upset the equilibrium for many of his followers, but
his story, far from terminating with his death, was soon transformed into
a pivotal moment in the evolving national narrative. And as we shall see,
this disruptive event became the subject of novels, dramas, and films. There
are already extensive discussions of how best to analyze a narrative’s plot,
characters, dialogue, language, genre, or structure (Herman 2007: 39–123).
For example, scholars such as Roger Silverstone identified what he described