Velleman's “Narrative Explanation” (2003) begins from the claim that “A story does more than recount events; it recounts events in a way that renders them intelligible, thus conveying not just information but also understanding” (1). The fact that phrases like “an unintelligible story” and “an incoherent story” are not nonsense, that we can be told a story yet fail to understand it (while still identifying it as a story), would seem to immediately falsify Velleman's starting point. His claim, more charitably interpreted, cannot be that it is a necessary condition of a discourse that it must convey understanding in order to be a story. Rather, as he goes on to gloss his point: “the question how
storytelling conveys understanding is inseparable from the question what makes for a good story” (1, emphasis added). Bad stories are still stories, but what interests Velleman are good stories and their nature. Compared to Carroll's, Velleman's frame is thus in one sense narrower, in another wider. It is narrower in that, by seeking to characterize the narrative connection, Carroll seeks the crucial component of all narratives; Velleman is interested in explanatory narratives only. It is wider in that Carroll seeks to characterize only the narrative connection, saying little about works as wholes; Velleman, by contrast, targets narratives in their full scope: “what makes a story good specifically as a story—
what makes it a good example of storytelling, or narrative—is its excellence at a particular way of organizing events into an intelligible whole” (1).18
18 Notice, right away, that this would seem to suggest that Kafka's novels, or H. P. Lovecraft's stories, or any works of literature that leave us with a feeling of confusion and disorientation, that present the world as unintelligible, are, at least as stories, bad. Velleman's claim that “a bad story can make for a great novel” begs the question (10). Why assume that understanding is the sole purpose of stories?
As we saw, Carroll includes scientific explanations as a species of narrative, insofar as they fit his general definition: earlier events serve as at least causally necessary conditions of later events. Velleman begins from the hypothesis that narrative, properly speaking, explains in a way different than science. “Can we account for the explanatory force of narrative with the models of explanation available in the philosophy of
science?,” he asks. “Or does narrative convey a different kind of understanding?” (1).
Velleman concedes that “the idea of a plot without causality is absurd” (4). But he suggests that the mere itemization of causal connections doesn't yet amount to narrative.19 Whereas Carroll seeks the “tightness” proper to the narrative connection, Velleman asks what makes various events and connections add up to a unified plot. To reject Carroll's analysis, he seeks “to show that something other than causality or probability serves the function of differentiating narrative from other genres and endowing it with its peculiar explanatory force” (4).
Recall one of Carroll's examples: “Aristarchus hypothesized the heliocentric system and then centuries later Copernicus discovered it again.” Velleman points out that Carroll must hold not only that this isn't a story, because the events are causally
unconnected, “but that there is no true story to be told about them, given their mutual isolation in the web of causality” (5). His “skepticism […] aroused,” Velleman recounts Aristotle's example from the Poetics of “a disjointed story”: Mitys is murdered, and then his murderer is killed when a statue of Mitys falls on him (5). Such an incident, Aristotle says, “we think to be not without a meaning” (quoted on 5). Is this a story? One
possibility, consistent with Carroll's analysis, is that it is, but only because we infer a causal connection between the events. We might, for example, “imagine an avenging
19 His “null hypothesis,” taken from Carroll, is “that the explanatory force of narrative is due to
information that would be equally explanatory if recast in non-narrative form” (3). This suggests that, if Carroll's analysis is right, the discursive conventions of narrative don't matter—they can be pared away, leaving the itemization of causal connections, without lessening the explanatory effect. This perhaps ignores Carroll's second condition, which is specifically discursive.
spirit, or some other force of cosmic justice, behind the falling statue” (6). Velleman writes, however, that “the story holds up even under an absurdist reading, which takes the murderer's death for an accident” (6). In that case, we have two examples of causally unrelated events: Aristarchus and Copernicus, Mitys' killing and the death of his murderer.20 Yet the latter looks more like a narrative than the former. Why?
“The crucial difference between these examples, I think, is that in Aristotle's the sequence of events completes an emotional cadence in the audience,” Velleman writes (6). Concerns of causality are thus reduced to a background condition. What gives a narrative explanatory power, and thus what makes a story good as a story (according to Velleman's framing), is its enactment of a typical emotional cadence or arc. Causal chains don't have beginnings and endings, and neither does nature. But, filtered by our emotions, our understanding of events (in which causality will play a part, just not the crucial one) will find unified narrative shape (14). “Emotions like hope, fear, and anger are by nature unstable, because they motivate behavior, or are elicited by circumstances, that ultimately lead to their extinction,” Velleman writes. They will naturally serve as beginnings to emotional/narrative arcs. “By contrast, grief and gratification are stable,”
so, for example, “grief can resolve an emotional sequence but it rarely initiates one” (15).
Thus “human affect follows a cycle of provocation, complication, and resolution” (12).21 Velleman develops and defends his account in further ways that need not concern us here. As a rejection of Carroll's definition of narrative and an analysis of one way that stories can acquire unity and larger explanatory coherence, Velleman's thesis is an
20 Perhaps another rebuttal is available to Carroll. Mitys' murder is a causally necessary condition of Mitys' murderer being killed by the falling statue. Not because the statue is in any way causally connected, but because only given the first event is the person who dies in the second “Mitys'
murderer.” Reading “causally necessary condition” this weakly would seem to entail that any chain of events with a unified subject will, if only in passing, state causally necessary conditions, making them useless as a further identifying characteristic.
21 Velleman claims these patterns are “biologically programmed,” but can “be modified by cultural influences” (13), and that some but not all emotions “are subject to cultural elaboration” (24-25n35).
See Le Guin (ON, 190) and Bordwell 1985, 35 for skepticism.
appealing one. But he would seem to be making a much grander claim: that the
enactment of typical emotional arcs is what makes stories what they are, or at least what makes good stories good. Some questions: that a statue of Mitys falls on and kills Mitys' murderer completes a typical emotional cadence, unifying the story in the absence of causal connections. If the statue of Mitys were to fall, but narrowly miss Mitys'
murderer, would an emotional cadence still be completed? One of disappointment rather than just desserts? But what if a roofing tile were to fall and kill the murderer? What if he accidentally (and anachronistically) stepped in front of a bus? Velleman maintains that the example, even on the absurdist reading that there is no force of justice at work,
remains a story. These last examples strain even an absurdist reading, it seems to me, and in a revealing way. If the death of Mitys' murderer completes an emotional cadence, even on the absurdist reading, then it seems like it shouldn't matter how he dies—if it does matter, then some remnant of the assumption of another background cause, like a force of justice, seems to linger. Yet “Mitys is murdered, then his murderer dies by accident” isn't much of a story. It doesn't mean anything, even absurdly, because not only has causal connection between its events been lost, but any larger thematic connection has as well.
Aristotle's observation that disjointed stories are “not without meaning” seems right. That the only way they come to have meaning is through the emotions is
implausible. Notice that Velleman has subtly changed the standard of definition used to analyze narrative. Carroll proceeds by way of philosophical definition, in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions (though perhaps somewhat informally, in allowing that the result is only a characterization, as noted above). Velleman proceeds by way of normative definition. He seeks to characterize narrative by defining what it aspires to, what makes for a good narrative. There remain such things as bad narratives, but only in light of what they fail to accomplish. Let me make the workings of this kind of definition in Velleman's essay explicit, then suggest that it too is a misguided approach.
Velleman provides “an apparent counterexample” to his analysis, from the Histories of Herodotus, via Walter Benjamin's “The Storyteller”:
When the Egyptian king Psammenitus had been beaten and captured by the Persian king Cambyses, Cambyses was bent on humbling his prisoner. He gave orders to place Psammenitus on the road along which the Persian triumphal procession was to pass. And he further arranged that the prisoner should see his daughter pass by as a maid going to the well with her pitcher.
While all the Egyptians were lamenting and bewailing this spectacle, Psammenitus stood alone, mute and motionless, his eyes fixed on the ground; and when presently he saw his son, who was being taken along in the procession to be executed, he likewise remained unmoved. But when afterwards he recognized one of his servants, an old, impoverished man, in the ranks of the prisoners, he beat his fists against his head and gave all the signs of deepest mourning.22
The story doesn't explain why it is only upon seeing his servant that Psammenitus breaks down.23 Indeed, for Benjamin, this is what makes it a great story: “A story,” he writes,
“does not expend itself” (90). Whereas Velleman claims that a story explains the events it recounts, Benjamin contrasts the art of storytelling from explanation: he takes it as emblematic of the decline in storytelling that “no event any longer comes to us without already being shot through with explanation” (89). Stories, unlike mere information, live on, because in them an interpretation “is not forced on the reader” (89). Velleman
suggests that the story of Psammenitus might appear to be a counterexample to his account, since it “fails to guide us toward any emotional resolution” (17).
It is not a counterexample, however, because Velleman's account isn't “meant to be strictly applied”: “many genres are based on narrative without employing it
straightforwardly” (17). This “story” is, according to Velleman, a marginal case, not part of “the core extension of the term” narrative (17). “Herodotus has left part of the
storytelling to us,” thus it is “a protean story only” (17-18). Velleman's analysis of this example reveals his account of narrative to be even more implausible than one might have so far supposed. If, as seemed to be the case, his claim was that a narrative should enact a typical emotional arc, then the story of Psammenitus wouldn't seem to loom as a
22 Velleman, 16; Benjamin, 89-90. The story makes it into Sartre's Nausea as well (149).
23 Benjamin claims “Herodotus offers no explanations” (90). Allen Speight pointed out to me that this is actually false. Herodotus reports Psammenitus' explanation: “my own suffering was too great for tears, but I could not but weep for the trouble of a friend, who has fallen from great wealth and good fortune and been reduced to beggary on the threshold of old age” (Book 3, Chapter 14).
counterexample. Velleman writes that the story “doesn't arrive at any emotional conclusion” (17). But it does do this: Psammenitus is captured, various complications ensue, then Psammenitus grieves (Velleman even named grief as a typical resolving emotion). Velleman is only threatened by this example because, even more strongly, narrative must explain why exactly Psammenitus grieves, and thus what we should feel about his reaction, and why we should feel it: the story “closes with what must be Psammenitus' conclusory emotion about his defeat, which clearly calls for a conclusory emotion on our part” (18). We've now, it seems to me, strayed quite far from any plausible standard of even good narrative. According to Velleman's standard here, narrative in the paradigmatic case, good narrative, would descend into didacticism.
Surely part of the appeal of narrative is that it “understands” its objects in a manner other than theoretical discourse does. It shows us something to which we react, rather than telling us how to react. I would suggest that Velleman has things the wrong way around.
A pedantically spelled out story, which includes its own interpretation, is dependent on the paradigm of narrative as “inexhaustible,” as in Benjamin's account. Good stories encode understanding in a way other than literary criticism and philosophy. They can be translated endlessly into those discourses because those discourses will always leave something behind.24
Velleman's analysis successfully demonstrates that Carroll's fixation on causal connections in narratives is too limited. Charitably interpreted, Velleman offers an account of explanatory narratives or, actually even more narrowly, narratives that explain specifically through means of emotional cadences. He seems to suggest, however, that his account is one of narrative generally, because all narratives aspire to explain. This is misguided. Explanatory narratives are but a subset of narrative generally. Indeed, any normative definition of narrative seems misguided, as it will depend on identifying the
24 I'll say more about this at the end of chapter five.
purpose—universal—of narrative. Narrative is a cultural practice with a long history and diverse, even contradictory, uses. Any attempt to single out what makes narrative “good”
is likely to do little more than reveal one's own extremely contingent tastes.
We should follow Velleman in his broadening of narrative beyond causal
connections, noting that connections of meaning, even absent causes, are characteristic of narrative. We should resist his emphasis on emotional cadences, except inasmuch as these are one way, among many, that meaningful connections between events can be established. What's important is that a series of events doesn't rise to narrative unless it possesses human meaning. It can do this via human emotion, but also by presenting the internal perspective of human agents, or through thematic resonances.