On Growth and Form of Narrative Structures

Abstract

Narrative is firstly a formal organization, but it is a form that interprets the events giving them meaning. Starting from a reinterpretation of the classical Morphology of the Folktale by Vladimir Propp, we can now note how narrative form and cultural meanings interact with each other. Thus, we remove the “formal” dimension from its traditional segregation to a universe of insubstantial non-things, returning it to the arena of human strategic action and social practices. We may conceive a story as a route performed by a subject on a social and categorical map: so, a narrative configuration is essentially a set of dynamic relations, lying between a procedural and a systemic dimension. We find the basis of everything in the fundamental Saussurean view that interrupts the ordinary separation between “things” and “relations”: identity, meaning, and structure are the effects of systemic relations. In this light, Claude Lévi-Strauss offers us the most elaborate picture of narrative systems, where textual objects are seen as secondary outcomes of transformational tensions: every text is by nature a remake; it exists only through other texts. The most radical feature of this original perspective is indisputably the adoption of the theoretical model expounded by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson in his famous book on the morphogenesis of zoological species, On Growth and Form. Textual theory emerges greatly innovated, linked to a view of cultures as systemic networks of connected texts. And this applies also to products of our culture, as the concluding examples (the Alien film saga and Puccini’s Bohème) should positively illustrate.