Late last night found myself wanting to define the voice of the main character who’s narrating. At the start his voice was more formal and a bit clinical/technical. For a first draft it’s ok, but I needed him to loosen up a lot.  For now the main character’s  the oldest sibling. He’s confident with an edge to his persona, skilled, and nuanced. The writing needed to reflect his informal slangy speech.  I think that personalizes the narrative more.  I was inspired to jot down a few paragraphs in an informal style, and added more scenes.  Worked more on the writing today, which allowed me to get a better feel for the characters.  Also to work on writing an action scene, which is clumsy as hell right now, as it should be messy.

I did try to script out some of the dialogue last night.  I got a half a page, and I love what the characters said, so I’m a use some of that as well. When I tried to print last night, ALL the inks in my printer said “depleted.”  When i get some cash I’ll replace them.  Until then it’s a “keep on writing” event.  So for me multiple drafts will be consolidated sooner or later, but I know I LOVE the voice for the character.  His family will be another matter as I figure them out better.  Still this is going places and I’m loving it.

Just know this first chapter is very unsorted and I need to think about where it begins and ends. Right now it’s too raw but resolving technical issues within the story is what I’m here for.  Might be time to brainstorm a few more plot elements in my notebook.

PRAYER

“Prayer teaches us what to aspire to. So often we do not know what to cling to.  Prayer implants in us the ideals we ought to cherish.
Redemption, purity of mind and tongue, or willingness to help, may hover as  ideas before our mind, but the idea becomes a concern, something to long for, a goal to be reached, when we pray:

“Guard my tongue from evil and my lips from speaking guile; and in the face of those who curse me, let my soul be silent.” “

Abraham Joshua Heschel, Excerpt, MAN;S QUEST FOR GOD

My Dear Ones Out There                                     September 1, 2012
I am re-quoting the original passage from MAN’S QUEST FOR GOD, and then I am picking up the thread of writing Part 2 of the post, at the point I left it at the end of Prayer is an Act of Discovery, Pt.1

A NEW DOOR OPENS – OR OPENED

I had NOT been struck by this passage in numerous previous readings. But Heschel’s quoted words literally ‘jumped at me’ from the page -  asking, pleading  ‘quote me, quote me’  – when I reread them this time around. As I came to Part 2, I was trying to pinpoint  ‘What is this Power of Prayer that we are talking about’ ?

Suddenly, a word linked to a period decades ago came up from my long term memory. A word dating back to my years as an academic scholar, who studied Literature, Semiotics (the Study of How Signs convey meaning), and the then ‘new’ fields of Narratology, Post-Modernism, and Deconstruction. PERFORMATIVITY was the term that began to whistle and echo in my brain. You can find a simplistic explanation of PERFORMATIVE VERBS here.

PERFORMATIVE WORDS CREATE REALITY

Some people may object to this caption, by saying ‘all words create reality.’ But there is a definite distinction between ‘describing reality’; or even ‘evoking reality’ – colorful, dynamic or engaging as the result may be; and the actual creation of reality. If we want to be pedagogic about it, ‘PERFORMATIVE’ applies – in the primary sense – to very specific category, or categories, of ‘PERFORMATIVE UTTERANCE’ or ‘Speech Acts‘. But it may be extended to others. Think of experiences where saying something amounts to actual action(s), with an effect and results in the 3-dimensional world. Because that is, in fact, what Heschel is talking about in his quote, above. Words of Prayer have the power to create reality.

INTENTION IS KEY

I want to supplement the learned discussions of my old teachers and masters, by adding the component called INTENTION, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy defines ‘INTENTON’ as follows: “To have an intention is to be in a state of mind that is favourably directed towards bringing about (or maintaining, or avoiding) some state of affairs.”  But The Oxford Companion to the Mind speaks differently: “Intention — deliberate, purposive behaviour — is one of the most difficult concepts to understand or discuss.”  The manifold difficulty can be easily seen as we observe the erosion of meaning for some of the past ‘pillars’ of Performativ Utterances. For example, ‘promise’ used to be a corner stone of the discussion of Performativity. ‘I Promise’ meant you the recipient could be assured the ACTUAL ITEM(S)  of the promise will follow. Not any longer. People promise, and renege on their promises, with great regularity – more is the pity. The same goes for ‘I Commit.’ Just look at the speed in which people trash their most sacred commitments. And weep.

However, when the words carry with them a real, ‘purposive,’  Intention, the words spoken take on an incredible power to shape reality. And when Heschel is speaking of Prayer, he is talking about Prayer with true Intention.

I invite you, for now,  to start looking at your own experience. What activities or types of ‘speaking out words’, provide you, in your life, with this kind of ‘magic’ transformative – and Performative – effect? In what situations – and regarding which of your actions – does your Intention invest you with the power to ‘move mountains’ till you create in actuality the reality described by your words?

PRAYER AS A PERFORMATIVE ACT

My own experience has been that Prayer become an intense experience of discovery when I set out to pray with a full intention to ‘make contact’ with the divine.

To illustrate this point,  take the prayer Heschel quotes within his discussion – which is quoted on top of this Post: “Guard my tongue from evil and my lips from speaking guile; and in the face of those who curse me, let my soul be silent.”. I choose this ‘quote within quote’ as an example of a real Intention to establish a connection with the divine being. There is no self-serving request or need involved – such as a prayer for recovery of health, or for a success in an undertaking. The individual, in appealing to our divine parent, is only asking for God’s support in developing and extending the ability to live, speak and listen in a ‘spiritual’ manner. That is, in a moral manner, honestly and with integrity. It is an aspiration to become a true, living example of  ‘hearing, speaking and seeing only Good and only Truth – not evil or deceit. ‘

And we can clearly see how by the simple vocalizing of this ‘goal’ – “Guard my tongue from evil and my lips from speaking guile; and in the face of those who curse me, let my soul be silent.”- the speaker is actually taking the first steps toward achieving the goal. The prayer is setting the bar UP, and the individual is committing to giving time, energy and attention to raising herself/himself to that desired level of honesty, goodness, and forebearance.

Prayer as An ENCOUNTER with God

In my own praying experiences, I have been astounded and exhilarated time after time, when I came to the prayer site with what I thought was a desire – nothing more -  for an outcome that was not a ‘thing.’  A desire for something of deeper meaning: a clearing up of confusion; a pinpointing of ‘what is my lesson in this situation?’; or a response outlining ‘what steps can I take to break the stasis in XYZ?’

In each case – or 9 times out of 10 – the desired clarity did arrive. Arrived, in fact,  in a special two-pronged experience. On the one hand, the written words of the prayers had been spoken or sang with great concentration and intensity. On the other hand, in a parallel process, the ‘unwritten’ words of the desire,or Intention, led to a realization, or Discovery, at the end of the prayer session; or soon after. An opening arrived that was not there before. A realization that was totally new sprang in me. A state of confusion or bewilderment was replaced by a tangible, palpable clarity that x,y and/or z were the ‘next steps’. Above all, I became infused and suffused with an overarching, visceral gratitude for the tangible experience of the divine presence all around, and in, me.

The words, indeed, were MADE FLESH.

And that transformation of words into reality was the most heart-melting and despair-banishing aspect of the whole Prayer as an Act of Discovery incident. There was nothing abstract or intellectual in feeling an experiential sense of the divine essence. Or In having a 3-dimentional sensation that the divine parent has been – and was still -  right there with me, in me, all around me, emanating an incredible all-encompassing Love. Just the memory of these moments is enough to dispel any sadness or doubt I might feel.

*  *  *

My Dear Ones Out There -
I have written a much longer Prayer is an Act of Discovery, Pt 2 than I have anticipated. I beg for your indulgence. And thank you for your patience.

* * *

RELATED LINKS

The Dialogue that is A Prayer

Prayer – A Ladder Maker, and Also a Bridge

Prayer – A Ladder AND a Bridge, Too

Prayer is Giving Joyful Thanks for Gifts We Received

* * *

For now, I send all of you the blessings I learned from my diverse teachers, guides and mentors  as I progressed on my ‘Spiritual Trek’

As well as a greeting/blessing from the Muslim praying community:

Assalaamu Alaykum  = Peace be with You   (Muslim )

Walk in Beauty!                                              (Native American Shamans)

Namaste!                                        (Buddhist Devotees)

God Bless You                                ( Christian Masters)

Baruch Hashem !                            (Jewish Rabbis)

May the Journey by Fruitful,
and
May the Return be Joyful                  (my own )

Finally, here is the Tri -Partite Biblical Blessing of the Cohens (Priests)

May the LORD (YHWH) bless you and guard you -

יְבָרֶכְךָ יהוה, וְיִשְׁמְרֶךָ
(“Yivorekhekhaw Adonai v’yishm’rekhaw …)

May the LORD make His face shed light upon you and be gracious unto you -

יָאֵר יהוה פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ, וִיחֻנֶּךָּ
(“Yo’ayr Adonai pawnawv aylekhaw vikhoonekhaw …)

May the LORD lift up His face unto you and give you peace -

יִשָּׂא יהוה פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ, וְיָשֵׂם לְךָ שָׁלוֹם
(“Yisaw Adonai pawnav aylekhaw v’yasaym l’khaw shalom.”)

AMEN!

C2012 Dinnah G. Pladott All Rights Preserved

2012 For Educational Purposes Only

After my first degree at Creighton, I went to post-graduate school at a place called Queens University Belfast, in Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland is a small section of the island of Ireland, completely independent of the Republic of Ireland, but completely dependent on the United Kingdom. Most people know Northern Ireland and Belfast for its sordid recent history, commonly referred to as the troubles. It’s a complicated political subject, but to put it one way, lots of bombs exploded and lots of people died, arguably between the Catholics and the Protestants. Anyways, I received a Masters in Arts in Irish writing while I was there. I miss the place even though it rains about 300 days a year. Here’s a blurry picture of an Englishman friend, named Kyle, tackling me on St. Paddys day in 2009.

Kyle tackling Wes on St Paddys 2009

For the past two years, prior to starting this new degree, I have been working in book publishing at the University of Nebraska Press in Lincoln. I worked in acquisitions, which means I worked directly with authors as they develop a book, edit it, and prepare it for publication. As UNP is a university press (one of the largest in America), most of the books I worked on were scholarly. Content of these books tends to be very dense and geared towards people in very specialized fields. One of my favorite subjects I worked on is known as narratology, which, to put it bluntly, is the study of narrative across media. I found it fascinating that there is a whole field of study dedicated to the affect of new media and technology on storytelling. Here’s a link to the UNP book series that does most of these books. The series editor, David Herman, is great.
I would say this definitely led me to search for ways to bust into this new world of digital media. While most of these books I worked on had a strong theoretical bias, I looked for an opportunity to learn skills to apply them in the real world and make a career out of it. Creighton’s Digital Design and Development major seems to be that conduit, taking in design, computer science, and how they fit together in our new digital world. While working in book publishing, I felt very limited to the uncertainty of the future of that industry and limited by the very few number of companies that still actually publish books. If I ever wanted to return to publishing, I could take that industry into the future with these new skills, while most in the industry stick to what they know and are afraid to let go (which is partially why the book industry suffers…definitely not a lack of good content, I probably read two or three publish-worthy book submissions a week that just didn’t fit our market, which I could write about for a long time, but I’ll spare you now!).

I’ve carried on far too much for my first blog post. Very excited to keep writing!

With that in mind, I am going to work on narratology and marxism this week, as well as Firmat’s living on the hyphen stuff and Cuban literature. We’ll see how it goes.

Now: M.M. Bakhtin: (doesn’t he look a little like General Zod?

In The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin explores the “new genre” called the novel, a new form “that is as yet uncompleted” (3). Other genres, established traditional ones, are complete and have a fixed, pre-existing form that an artistic uses. These established genres (such as the epic and tragedy) live a completed life and present a history that happened. Furthermore, the older genres retain their oral tradition beginnings; where as, the novel “is younger than writing and the book” (ibid.). The novel, however, does have a canon, but a canon that is mutable, growing and changing—older genres have established canons, and Bahktin compares studying older genres with studying dead language as opposed to the novel, which is living and contemporary.

Since the novel is a new genre, it requires a new theory of reading. The novel fails to get along with other genres (although I believe Bahktin’s idea here is outdated: the 21st. century novel adapts to all other genres—it steals from poetry, from epic, from tragedy, from comedy). Bahktin claims that the older genres delimit each other and are interconnected and compliment each other, but the novel goes against them. The older genres have hegemony on poetics: “Their aim is not a living and organic fullness but rather an abstract and encyclopedic comprehensiveness” (5). The completed, older genres can be studied together, but the incomplete novel fails to fit in anywhere. The animosity of the novel arises out of the manner in which the novel parodies other genres. The stuffy language here makes the older genres sound like they have no sense of humor, and the novel comes along and makes fun of them. Bahktin says “Those genres that stubbornly preserve their old canonic nature begin to appear stylized” to the point that they begin to sound like parodies of themselves—an essential, central point for the novel. The novel parodies dominant forms.

The novel incorporates humor, laughter, irony and renews itself with heteroglossia . Since the novel keeps developing, it reflects current reality, reflecting a new world in the making. Additonally, by becoming the dominant genre, the novel infects the other genres because the novel embraces inclusiveness (7). This inclusiveness, along with the newness, reflecting contemporary reality and time creates a problem for theory, which can explore set genres easier because established genres have a set canon and rules to follow. The novel defies any easy classification.

Some common novel characteristics: 1) the novel should not be poetic; 2) employs anti-hero—he should be both high and low; 3) Hero should be a round character; 4) “the novel should become for the contemporary world what the epic was for the ancient world” (10). Through these characteristics, the novel criticizes other genres (critique of hero, for instance), while also attempting to establish itself as a dominant genre. Bahktin makes sure to inform his reader that these definitions/characteristics he explores should not be taken rigidly because the novel is the most fluid of all genres. He goes on to outline characteristics that distinguish the novel from other genres: style, time, and contemporary, all three of which resulted from globalization and Europe’s encounter of other cultures and languages, resulting in a polyglossia unique to the novel. The world mixes knowledge, language, and culture, which makes language distinctions fall apart, and all these factors create a new “polyglot world” where “completely new relationships are established between language and its object (that is the real world)” that creates problems with old genres.

Bahktin then compares the epic: national epic which reflects a nation’s past; national tradition—not personal history—serves as material; distance between epic world and contemporary world. The epic reflects on a past that can never be directly experienced and tells the story of a nation’s history—a history closed, ended, that is reflected upon and is distinct from the present. The epic passes down, already defined to new generations. It also valorizes temporality by reflecting on a romantic (better) past—it privledges the “original” while also relying on memory instead of knowledge. The novel, on the contrary, relies on personal experience and knowledge about contemporary time. Where epic time is sacrosanct, isolated, and finished, the novel’s time is open, ambiguous, and future directed. All completed genres have three charcteristics: 1-same time; 2-role of tradition; 3-hierarchical distance (past on top, present on bottom of hierarchy) (18). The established genres have valorized the past and has established this valorization as official, but the novel lives now, taking everything now and using it, living, growing, changing, including language.

The novel, furthermore, uses humor to familiarize itself with the world and brings the high low. A new attitude emerges. From here, Bahktin explores older forms of “comedic” genres as the precursors to the novel, emphasizing laughter because it breaks down distance and brings subject closer, which makes the object familiar, taking fear away and makes scientific knowledge possible (23). He uses the example of Socrates, a hero who parodies himself (his greatness comes from knowing that he knows nothing), uses irony, multiple styles, etc, and he brings the world closer in order to analyze the world fearlessly. The novel intrudes on the present.

Bahktin then moves on to explore the artistic features related to the novel’s conception of time. – which I will get to later… (31).

Me, photographed by some installation at the Activist Demo Day at Eyebeam last spring.

The first time I remember hearing about Cowbird was during an Occupy-related event at Eyebeam – I was telling a colleague of mine about my interest in these ideological, mythological forms of information embedded in media, what Barthes would have explained as the “third order signification.” This reminded him of Storify, and Cowbird. Storify was popular at the time because of the way that citizen journalists had used it to help craft the narrative of OccupyWallStreet, but I hadn’t heard of Cowbird. Over the past year I checked into the site occasionally, reading stories and enjoying some of the things that had been shared.

I’ve always enjoyed reading the stories of others. Over the past ten years there have been fantastic sites dedicated to cataloging the experience and narratives of people, in ways that shattered the illusion of an everyman/everywoman. There was The Lowbrow Project (and it’s 2.0 version) – a thing largely lost to the internet, so I’m convinced I’m one of the few people who remember. Lowbrow took anonymous stories and let the world read about the things others had been through. The second version was to incorporate a phone line where people could call in, leave a message, and then listen to it later when they were assembled into a podcast.

There are other anonymous confessionals – GroupHug and PostSecret having spawned books and being two of the more famous. But there was also RandomAccessMemory.org, which was a “an experiment in collective recollection.” And if one knows where to look, you can find great stories still being shared and thriving – Pathetic Geek Stories used to be a favorite of mine, Overheard in New York was birthed from the now-defunct InPassing, and everyone loves  FML, just to name a few. Even B3TA’s Question of the Week goes back to 2003 and has thousands of answers.

The format of social media may be to create a digital footprint of the stories we are creating right now, but to actually trace and draw out the journey is something that is done through different frame of mind. Andrew Burstien and Nancy Isenberg recently pointed out how journalists make poor historians. Writing history (as opposed to events) is a different mode. But we are keenly aware of how the metanarrative, the grand story, is a seductive and powerful voice. Its uses range from branding national myths and symbols (BNMS), propaganda, creating rhetoric for bigoted world views.

We’re quite used to hearing about a huge story that explains everything, whether its a political myth based in religion, or religious myth based in politics. How we define such phenomenon is troublesome because it also reveals our own ideological orientation and discursive preferences. One could say how anti-interracial marriage practices in apartheid South Africa and modern Israel have their roots, not in Afrikaner Calvinism or Jewish Orthodoxy, but the simple political implications for mixed-race offspring.

The universality of these metanarratives is shattered when we make the effort to pay attention to the experiences of others. New media has many potentials and dangers, as Matthew Hindman and Evgeny Morozov point out.

In a recent InMediaRes piece,  Justin Owen Rawlins and Zenia Kish write about Kony2012 and point out an earlier speech that Jason Russell gave at Liberty University. They note how,

For the organization, storytelling is the most powerful social unifier, the moral mission exemplified by Jesus. Moreover, it is the only way to get people to do anything, individually or collectively, to positively change the world. It is precisely by reaching the “hearts and minds” of the uninitiated through storytelling that Russell argues one can avoid polarizing audiences. “Kony 2012” thus imagines itself as the spark igniting a new, universal revolution to end human suffering.

If you haven’t seen the TED talk by Chimamanda Adichie I posted above, please watch it. It’s well worth the time. It further drives home the point Rawlins and Kish make about how totalizing ideology, even in the name of social justice, can serve to create the polarizations and conflicts we see fade away when we account for a multiplicity of perspectives.

Even on the internet, where millions of stories are available, many of us still believe in the one story, something totalizing and inflexible. We lend our experiences to it, advocating it, even as we are unaware how our own outlook and experience flavors it a bit differently. We wash over those flaws because we believe in the power of unity. But as more micronarratives, counterpublics and alternative perspectives come closer within our own circles and networks, can the one story survive? Moreover, should it survive?

UPDATE: Following those thoughts, check out this TED-Ed video from Jessica Wise, on “how seminal novels have shaped the minds of thought leaders across history and help all of us broaden our spectrum of empathy by assuming different perspectives.” ↬

_{Morozov, Evgeny. The Net Delusion: the Dark Side of Internet Freedom. New York: PublicAffairs, 2011.}

_{Hindman, Matthew Scott. The Myth of Digital Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.}

The TDF is closely tied to the patrimoine of France. It is less of a bike race and more a display of a long running cultural showcase deeply embedded in the hearts of the French. The tour de France IS France. It is traditional, maybe even tradition itself. As INRNG has pointed out, this year’s Tour isn’t like those of the 90’s which produced expected outcomes, but I don’t think that it makes the race boring.

I’m going to go ahead and throw out this quote from The Rider by Tim Krabbé, though I’d like to not be so cliché, but it’s incredibly fitting and exactly upon what my thesis is based:

“’You guys need to suffer more, get dirtier; you should arrive at the top in a casket, that’s what we pay you for,’ I say. ‘No,’ Knetemann says, ‘you guys need to describe it more compellingly.’”

In the first 7 days, we saw 3 flat sprint finishes, two uphill classics-style arrivés, an ultra long time trial, [and of course the prologue], the rest day drama and the first classified mountain stage. What stands out here? the two stages that end with a kick…. of which the winner was expected. But as for individual events themselves? no one is talking about that. Crashes? Predictable, though their magnitude and who they affect is not so much. What about “surprise performances”? if you tried to anticipate who would perform them, then it wouldn’t be a surprise. The inherited yellow jersey wearer shined where expected, increasing his lead exactly as much as expected over some. I’ve even read that certain people think they should just let him take the jersey home right now.

If you think the Tour is boring, stop trying to decide who is going to win what stage. The critics have been right so far as to who would win what. Of course the prologue specialist won, wore and kept the Maillot Jaune until the stage on which everyone expected him to. Of course the young prodigy has been flourishing in his first tour, over shadowing his predecessor. Of course the former teammates of the fastest man on two wheels have been incredibly successful in their roles as leader on new teams. All of these things are par for the course based on speculation and betting-odds.

But the articles? They’re not at all the same. And there have been some very entertaining narratives written so far. From a narratological and literary standpoint, or at least how I see it, the race is merely a playground of events about which narratives can be written. It’s the influence and inspiration for stories. Therefore, yes the Tour is boring because every parcours provides more or less the same equipment. It’s up to those who watch and write to make it what it entertaining, to make it worth watching, to make the events worth reliving in the journals. I’ve been able to see the “sport reporting” style versus the more “literary” articles, and how these two distinct story telling approaches produce narratives for a varying audience.  You can probably assume which I find more entertaining.

Diegetic point of view and diegetic focalization

“A hill. Not so big. My legs feel great. But I don’t know.”

Diegetic point of view and extra-diegetic focalization

“Looking ahead, the hill didn’t seem too tough as I considered the awesome feeling in my legs. I didn’t have any idea how wrong I was.”

Extra-diegetic point of view and diegetic focalization

“I remember seeing the hill that I died on. I miscalculated my fatigue. But in the moment I didn’t know my legs were shot.”

Extra-diegetic point of view and extra-diegetic focalization

“I must have thought there was more left in my tank at that hill. That was where I messed up.”

Order

The relation between the time of the story (the event itself, for us will be stages of the TDF) and the time narration (when the story comes out) is called order. These two things never sync up; the presentation never aligns with the unfolding of the events recounted. In classic literature, the order is typically clear cut, but not every narrative can be reformulated into a chronological order. The out-of-orderedness is actually the rule and not the exception with stylistic elements such as foreshadowing. The flexibility of the chronology comes back to the amount of information known to and provided by the narrator (a matter to be addressed later).

When talking about TDF journalism, you think it obviously has to be in chronological order: kilometer 1 to the red kite; neutral zone, breakaway formed, crash, feed zone, crash, attack, re-grouping, attack, winner. We’ll see that this isn’t always true, and sometimes contradictory. Especially when the headline gives it away.

Duration

Genette calls the duration both vitesse and durée which is moderately inconsequential because the terms are equal and used interchangeably. Duration defines itself as the relationship between the duration and the length: a relation between the temporal and the spatial. It answers the question “how much time passes in the story in how much time it took to read?”

We can sum it up more specifically in the ratio of kilometers to word count, or hours on the bike to minutes it took you to speed-read the article between conference calls. This relation establishes the narrative tempo. There are four ways in which this tempo can be modified; the most common in journalism is the summary which represents a “null” in the story: it lacks both details and actions. There are certainly other tactics to modify the narrative tempo, but we will examine the specifics in practice.

Mood

Mood is going to be a bit more complicated, because not all of its elements apply to this study. Together, the mood is the regulation of information given by the narrator. It is composed of two parts, the distance and the perspective. In the realm of distance, it specifically deals with how involved the narrator is in the story itself. We see that the narrator is never present in cycling journalism. There is no “I” that is equivalent to “rider.” In short, distance concerns types of discourse, with quotes and he-said-she-said stuff. There are several degrees of distance but for now, it is important to only note that the distance is usually “farther” than it is “closer” in TDF journalism.

For perspective, there will probably be a whole entire blog devoted to it. But, in a nutshell, it is closely related to “point-of-view” of the narrator and how much information he knows. This is what we call focalization. It’s a confusing topic, because this doesn’t have anything to do with how much information he tells. This is also distinct from narrative voice (I have yet to encounter a need for discussing narrative voice specifically. Obligatory defining link so you don’t end up at Wikipedia.)

For my first endevour into narratology, I used this website. I made little cards out of the chart and I still tote them around in my copy ofDiscours du Recit for practicallity sake.

Here we have to blur the lines between fact and fiction. Putting it in the most basic clear cut terms, nothing is either totally fact (loyal, true, etc.) or totally fiction (false, lies, make-believe). We have to evaluate the degrees of pretending. As it turns out, Genette prefers to us the terms “fictional” and “factual” in order to avoid the negativity associated with “non-fiction.” Here it implies that fiction is false, where as non-fiction refers to “not false.”  John Searle would say that the fictional narrative is just the simulation of factual narrative: where the novelist “pretends” the story is true but never asks his reader to believe it.

It’s from these thoughts we find Jean-Francois Lyotard who was the first to apply Genette’s theory to newspaper articles to demonstrate journalisms ability to conquer the borders of fiction.

When we read an article, how can we decide how much is authentic and how much is make-believe? If you watched the race, you might disagree with the quantity of information given in the article. That’s to say maybe they didn’t mention a failed attack at kilometer 74 or the second natural break.

Some of the articles we will examine through the course of the TDF take the form of the historical narrative. This type of story unfolds chronologically, focused on the actual events rather than their causality. So, we would expect the historical race to happen as such: the race started, some things happened, someone won. But when evaluating articles we will find 200km colored with metaphors, a span of time and distance ignored and details missing. Does the omission of events make the narrative less authentic?

I dare to say, no. It’s all a work of fiction. That doesn’t mean that the events didn’t take place, but rather that the events can never be represented 100% purely. This is true even not taking into account subjectivity, which is a topic to be considered in some other blog. In this respect, applying narratology to any and every form of communication seems totally valid to me. I won’t really be looking to evaluate what is and what isn’t true about each story; to me it’s irrelevant. I think that it’s less important to distinguish fictional narratives from factual narratives because no narrative resides in only one of those categories.

Sometimes when I ride my bike in races, I like to write down a narrative of what happened in a first hand perspective. As true as I can. But, the criterium laps take their toll, I lose count, I forget, I exaggerate. While these narratives are about my experiences in the first person, they’re merely autobiographical and not an autobiography. They give the appearance of being what happened to me but it’s probably not at all what happened according to the casual observer.

First and foremost, what is narratology? Basically, it’s a study or theory of narratives. It’s necessary to say “a” theory and not “the” theory, because there are quite a few, and they are not at all contradictory. It is a formalistic and structuralist approach that revolves around separating the story (the events and actions) from the discourse (the recounting, the story being told) and the variety of relations these two things have with eachother. It is an examination of how things are told. Think about Raymond Queneau’s Exercises du style or that movie where the comedians all tell the same joke.

It also follows that narratology can be applied to not only print literature in the most classic forms (novels, etc), but to almost anything: advertisements, songs, conversations, thoughts. Pretty much everything is the act or product of narration. It’s important to point out also that narratology is not a linguistic study, which while we sometimes look at word choice and verb tense, this is merely to evaluate that there is an effect given by whatever stylistic choice. We are also not evaluating implicated nor metaphorical meanings. We look at the text and what is there, that is all. When we look at les compte rendu sportifs we’ll see lots of metaphors, but not evaluate their meaning. The author will never be taken into account, only the narrator and his role or degree of presence.

Throughout my studies, I will primarily be using Gerard Genette’s “Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method” in both French and English. Not all of the theory applies directly to my study so it will focus mostly on order, duration, and certain aspects of mood (in French: ordre, durée/vitesse, mode).  For his study, Genette uses Proust’s La recherche de temps perdu as an example. Proust provides the most complex sorts of narratological conundrums, but in my brief study of Du cote de Chez Swann, it obviously lacks examples of the most basic literary practices.

In order to outline my study, I’ll be using the 2012 Tour de France, l’Équipe, Vélo101, and Eurosport. I think that these few journals are simultaneously popular and quite different in the kinds of narratives they give about races. Not every analysis will be exhaustive, but will likely focus on an element that is strikingly different. I have the intentions of keeping my analysis of the race out of it.

What is this blog about? In laymans terms, I’m interested in the way that cycling races are portrayed in journalism. No, I’m not a journalist, nor does journalism interest me. But, I started reading French cycling news to help me learn French, and it worked, and I like to ride my bike, and I like to watch bike races. Combined with my love of literature, which now days manifests itself in mostly narratological studies, I decided to write about the literature of cycling. Thus, The story of cycling.

I see on the internet blogs such as Cosmo Catalano’s “how the race was won” and the Inner Rings “The Moment the Race was Won” and I notice distinct story telling differences, even when speaking about the same race. I wonder how if we all saw the same race, how did we make different narratives about it?

So, during the 2012 Tour de France I will be comparing and analyzing race re-caps from a literary perspective, focused on not only what they say, but how they say it. This is including, but not limited to, time of narration (verb tense), length of the article, and presence of the narrator.

Let’s face it: bike racing is boring. How do they make it the most dramatic and enthralling sport? It’s all story telling.

* * *

Mythology: A Love Story.

They say stories are just myths retold
And characters recycled
But try as I might,
But search as I have,
I can’t find us in The Odyssey.

No Penelope I
Nor Circe,
No Odysseus you
Nor Poseidon.

They say everything is pastiche these days,
That everything’s been done
But humble though I am,
But search as I have,
I can’t find our love story in the books of old.

No Orpheus you
Nor Romeo nor Darcy,
No Eurydice I
Nor Juliet nor Eliza.

So where, my love, is our story?
It must exist somewhere.
In the pages of a crumbling tome,
Or a faded still frame of an old silent film.
So say the scholars.

But maybe, just maybe, our tale is ours alone-
And that thought brings me comfort.
Maybe everyone has a personal epic,
And the only stories set in stone
Are the ones that came before them.

* * *

P.S. I wrote this in a very short space of time, and am aware that it’s not the greatest thing I’ve ever written. But I had my fun, and that’s all that matters.