Sjuzhet
Encyclopedia
Fabula and syuzhet are terms originating in Russian Formalism
and employed in narratology
that describe narrative
construction. Syuzhet is an employment of narrative and fabula is the chronological order of the retold events. They were first used in this sense by Vladimir Propp
and Shklovsky
.
The fabula is "the raw material of a story, and syuzhet, the way a story is organized." Since Aristotle
(350 BCE, 1450b25) narrative plots are supposed to have a beginning, middle, and end. For example: the film Citizen Kane
starts with the death of the main character, and then tells his life through flashbacks
interspersed with a journalist's present-time investigation of Kane's life. This is often achieved in film and novels via flashbacks or flash-forwards. Therefore, the fabula of the film is the actual story of Kane's life the way it happened in chronological order; while the syuzhet is the way the story is told throughout the movie, including flashbacks.
(1981: 170-172) critique of fabula and syuzhet is that they constitute a so-called double move. The first move is to set syuzhet (narrative) in hierarchical domination over fabula (story). Story becomes relegated in the first move to a mere chronology of event. In the second move, narrative self-deconstructs its initial duality, in order to double back to efface the order of event (Culler, 1981: 171).
Jacques Derrida
(1979) is also critical of the logocentric hierarchic ordering of syuzhet and fabula. He raises the question, "What if there are story ways of telling as well as narrative ways of telling? And if so, how is it that narrative in the American-European tradition has become privileged over story?" One answer is that narrative is both syuzhet (employment) and a subjection of fabula (the stuff of story, represented through narrative). For example, Derrida views narrative as having a terrible secret, in its way of oppressing story:
If story is more than fabula, dominated by narrative, it could have its own manner of discourse, rather than being subordinate to narrative. Derrida plays with just such an idea as follows in setting story in relation to its homonym:
also raises issues about fabula and syuzhet. Bruner summarizes syuzhet as the plot of narrative, and fabula as a timeless underlying theme (Bruner, 1986, pp. 7, 17-21). Bruner wants fabula to be a little more "loose fitting a constraint on story": "I think we would do well with as loose fitting a constraint as we can manage concerning what a story must 'be' to be a story" (p. 17).
The problem for Bruner is to explore the underlying narrative structures (syuzhets) in not only Russian Formalism
, but also French Structuralists
(Barthes
, Todorov
, and others). The European formalists posit narrative grammars (i.e. Todorov's simple transformations of mode, intention, result, manner, aspect & status, as well as complex transformations of appearance, knowledge, supposition, description, subjectification, & attitude). For Bruner, the story (fabula stuff) becomes the "virtual text" (p. 32) to the narrative grammars. "Nevertheless, Shotter suggests that Bruner failed to engage these 'particularities of otherness' in favour of abstractive explanation of meaning-making processes rather than in a description of dialogical performances" (Mos, 2003: 2). In other words, there is a need to consider how narrative pursues grammars and abstract meaning frames, whereas story can be dialogic and in the web of the social.
is also not convinced that fabula and syuzhet is a complete explanation of the relationship of narrative and story. Like Derrida, Bakhtin is suspicious of the hegemonic relation that narrative has over story.
For Bakhtin (1973: 12) “narrative genres are always enclosed in a solid and unshakable monological framework.” Story, for Bakhtin, is decidedly more dialogical, for example in the “polyphonic manner of the story” (Bakhtin, 1973: 60).
Benjamin Whorf
(1956: 256), following up an observation by Franz Boas
, contended that the Hopi
Indians do not experience themselves, or life as narrative grammar, or pattern. Rather than past-present-future, as segregated narrative syuzhet, the Hopi experience is one of "eventing." Shotter (1993: 109) refers to Whorf's "eventing" and to the Hopi's differences with Euro-American space and time. Parr-Davis (see web resources) poses several critiques of Whorf's theory that it was just the linguistic patterns of speech that changed how time and space were being narrated (or emplotted via syuzhet).
(1981) says "White ethnologists reported that the oral tradition among Native American groups has died out" (p. 28). Narrative syuzhet/fabula tends to turn native story into museum artifacts, as archetype narratives devoid of "harsh realities of hunger, poverty and injustice" (p. 280), and that Native story traditions were "erroneously altered by the European intrusion - principally by the practice of taking the children away from the tellers who had in all past generations told the children an entire culture, an entire identity of a people" (p. 6). The idea here is that story competencies are taught in the tribe, and the story memory, passed from generation to generation is disrupted by pulling children out of the home, forbidding their language, etc. Thomas King (2005) in The Truth About Stories, argues that narrative compromises story. The fabula of story, the social fabric of story loses its voice. King argues that story shapes identity differently from narrative. In particular the Indian identity concocted in American-European ethnology, folklore, anthropology, history, and literature --- is being challenged by Native writers. James Cox (2006) looks at narrative (in the tradition of Euro-American enterprise of syuzhet/fabula) as "tools of domination: (p. 24), and a "colonial incursion" (p. 25).
(Online edition 2005). Russian Formalism
Russian formalism
Russian formalism was an influential school of literary criticism in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s. It includes the work of a number of highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars such as Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Vladimir Propp, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Grigory Vinokur who...
and employed in narratology
Narratology
Narratology denotes both the theory and the study of narrative and narrative structure and the ways that these affect our perception. While in principle the word may refer to any systematic study of narrative, in practice its usage is rather more restricted. It is an anglicisation of French...
that describe narrative
Narrative
A narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...
construction. Syuzhet is an employment of narrative and fabula is the chronological order of the retold events. They were first used in this sense by Vladimir Propp
Vladimir Propp
Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp was a Russian and Soviet formalist scholar who analyzed the basic plot components of Russian folk tales to identify their simplest irreducible narrative elements.- Biography :...
and Shklovsky
Viktor Shklovsky
Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky was a Russian and Soviet critic, writer, and pamphleteer.-Life:...
.
The fabula is "the raw material of a story, and syuzhet, the way a story is organized." Since Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
(350 BCE, 1450b25) narrative plots are supposed to have a beginning, middle, and end. For example: the film Citizen Kane
Citizen Kane
Citizen Kane is a 1941 American drama film, directed by and starring Orson Welles. Many critics consider it the greatest American film of all time, especially for its innovative cinematography, music and narrative structure. Citizen Kane was Welles' first feature film...
starts with the death of the main character, and then tells his life through flashbacks
Flashback (narrative)
Flashback is an interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point the story has reached. Flashbacks are often used to recount events that happened before the story’s primary sequence of events or to fill in crucial backstory...
interspersed with a journalist's present-time investigation of Kane's life. This is often achieved in film and novels via flashbacks or flash-forwards. Therefore, the fabula of the film is the actual story of Kane's life the way it happened in chronological order; while the syuzhet is the way the story is told throughout the movie, including flashbacks.
Critical reviews of fabula and syuzhet
Critiques of fabula and syuzhet fall under the headings of poststructuralism, symbolic interaction, language studies, and Native story writers.Poststructuralism
Jonathan Culler'sJonathan Culler
Jonathan Culler is a class of 1966 Harvard graduate and Professor of English at Cornell University. He is an important figure of the structuralism movement of literary theory and criticism.- Background and career:...
(1981: 170-172) critique of fabula and syuzhet is that they constitute a so-called double move. The first move is to set syuzhet (narrative) in hierarchical domination over fabula (story). Story becomes relegated in the first move to a mere chronology of event. In the second move, narrative self-deconstructs its initial duality, in order to double back to efface the order of event (Culler, 1981: 171).
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...
(1979) is also critical of the logocentric hierarchic ordering of syuzhet and fabula. He raises the question, "What if there are story ways of telling as well as narrative ways of telling? And if so, how is it that narrative in the American-European tradition has become privileged over story?" One answer is that narrative is both syuzhet (employment) and a subjection of fabula (the stuff of story, represented through narrative). For example, Derrida views narrative as having a terrible secret, in its way of oppressing story:
The question-of-narrative covers with a certain modesty a demand for narrative, a violent putting-to-the-question an instrument of torture working to wring out the narrative as if it were a terrible secret in ways that can go from the most archaic police methods to refinements for making (and even letting) one talk unsurpassed in neutrality and politeness, most respectfully medical, psychiatric, and even psychoanalytic. (Derrida, 1979: 94).
If story is more than fabula, dominated by narrative, it could have its own manner of discourse, rather than being subordinate to narrative. Derrida plays with just such an idea as follows in setting story in relation to its homonym:
Each “story” (and each occurrence of the word “story”, (of itself), each story in the story) is part of the other, makes the other part (of itself), is at once larger and smaller than itself, includes itself without including (or comprehending) itself, identifies itself with itself even as it remains utterly different from its homonym. (Derrida, 1979: 99-100).
Symbolic Interactionism
Jerome BrunerJerome Bruner
Jerome Seymour Bruner is an American psychologist who has contributed to cognitive psychology and cognitive learning theory in educational psychology, as well as to history and to the general philosophy of education. Bruner is currently a senior research fellow at the New York University School...
also raises issues about fabula and syuzhet. Bruner summarizes syuzhet as the plot of narrative, and fabula as a timeless underlying theme (Bruner, 1986, pp. 7, 17-21). Bruner wants fabula to be a little more "loose fitting a constraint on story": "I think we would do well with as loose fitting a constraint as we can manage concerning what a story must 'be' to be a story" (p. 17).
The problem for Bruner is to explore the underlying narrative structures (syuzhets) in not only Russian Formalism
Russian formalism
Russian formalism was an influential school of literary criticism in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s. It includes the work of a number of highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars such as Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Vladimir Propp, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Grigory Vinokur who...
, but also French Structuralists
Structuralism
Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...
(Barthes
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...
, Todorov
Tzvetan Todorov
Tzvetan Todorov is a Franco-Bulgarian philosopher. He has lived in France since 1963 with his wife Nancy Huston and their two children, writing books and essays about literary theory, thought history and culture theory....
, and others). The European formalists posit narrative grammars (i.e. Todorov's simple transformations of mode, intention, result, manner, aspect & status, as well as complex transformations of appearance, knowledge, supposition, description, subjectification, & attitude). For Bruner, the story (fabula stuff) becomes the "virtual text" (p. 32) to the narrative grammars. "Nevertheless, Shotter suggests that Bruner failed to engage these 'particularities of otherness' in favour of abstractive explanation of meaning-making processes rather than in a description of dialogical performances" (Mos, 2003: 2). In other words, there is a need to consider how narrative pursues grammars and abstract meaning frames, whereas story can be dialogic and in the web of the social.
Language studies
Mikhail BakhtinMikhail Bakhtin
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language...
is also not convinced that fabula and syuzhet is a complete explanation of the relationship of narrative and story. Like Derrida, Bakhtin is suspicious of the hegemonic relation that narrative has over story.
For Bakhtin (1973: 12) “narrative genres are always enclosed in a solid and unshakable monological framework.” Story, for Bakhtin, is decidedly more dialogical, for example in the “polyphonic manner of the story” (Bakhtin, 1973: 60).
Benjamin Whorf
Benjamin Whorf
In studying the cause of a fire which had started under the conditions just described, Whorf concluded that it was thinking of the "empty" gasoline drums as "empty" in the meaning described in the first definition above, that is as "inert," which led to a fire he investigated...
(1956: 256), following up an observation by Franz Boas
Franz Boas
Franz Boas was a German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology" and "the Father of Modern Anthropology." Like many such pioneers, he trained in other disciplines; he received his doctorate in physics, and did...
, contended that the Hopi
Hopi
The Hopi are a federally recognized tribe of indigenous Native American people, who primarily live on the Hopi Reservation in northeastern Arizona. The Hopi area according to the 2000 census has a population of 6,946 people. Their Hopi language is one of the 30 of the Uto-Aztecan language...
Indians do not experience themselves, or life as narrative grammar, or pattern. Rather than past-present-future, as segregated narrative syuzhet, the Hopi experience is one of "eventing." Shotter (1993: 109) refers to Whorf's "eventing" and to the Hopi's differences with Euro-American space and time. Parr-Davis (see web resources) poses several critiques of Whorf's theory that it was just the linguistic patterns of speech that changed how time and space were being narrated (or emplotted via syuzhet).
Native American writers on story
An increasing number of Native American authors are positing a more vibrant role of story, beyond fabula, and in resistance to Euro-American formalist and structuralist narrative. For example Leslie Marmon SilkoLeslie Marmon Silko
Leslie Marmon Silko is a Native American writer of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, and one of the key figures in the second wave of what Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance...
(1981) says "White ethnologists reported that the oral tradition among Native American groups has died out" (p. 28). Narrative syuzhet/fabula tends to turn native story into museum artifacts, as archetype narratives devoid of "harsh realities of hunger, poverty and injustice" (p. 280), and that Native story traditions were "erroneously altered by the European intrusion - principally by the practice of taking the children away from the tellers who had in all past generations told the children an entire culture, an entire identity of a people" (p. 6). The idea here is that story competencies are taught in the tribe, and the story memory, passed from generation to generation is disrupted by pulling children out of the home, forbidding their language, etc. Thomas King (2005) in The Truth About Stories, argues that narrative compromises story. The fabula of story, the social fabric of story loses its voice. King argues that story shapes identity differently from narrative. In particular the Indian identity concocted in American-European ethnology, folklore, anthropology, history, and literature --- is being challenged by Native writers. James Cox (2006) looks at narrative (in the tradition of Euro-American enterprise of syuzhet/fabula) as "tools of domination: (p. 24), and a "colonial incursion" (p. 25).
See also
- Nonlinear narrative
- Organizational storytellingOrganizational storytellingOrganizational storytelling is an emerging discipline in the study of management, strategy and organization studies. As an emerging discipline it is contested ground, with some academics describing it is a purposeful tool to be used by business people, and others describing it is a way of...
- Story arcStory arcA story arc is an extended or continuing storyline in episodic storytelling media such as television, comic books, comic strips, boardgames, video games, and in some cases, films. On a television program, for example, the story would unfold over many episodes. In television, the use of the story...
- StorytellingStorytellingStorytelling is the conveying of events in words, images and sounds, often by improvisation or embellishment. Stories or narratives have been shared in every culture as a means of entertainment, education, cultural preservation and in order to instill moral values...
Further reading
- Garcia-Landa, Jose Angel. 1990. Narrative Theory (University of Zaragoza); On line edition 2005.
(Online edition 2005). Russian Formalism
- Parr-Davies, Neil. The Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis: A Critique
- Pateman, Trevor. 1991. English Formalism and Russian Formalism: Clive Bell and Viktor Shklovsky English Formalism
- Walsh, Richard, 2001. Fabula and Fictionality in Narrative Theory. Style. Narrative Theory