ON NARRATIVITY Stuart Whitling PhD

http://www.medievalart.org.uk/PhD/2_On_narratology.html

Figure 3 - Seymour Chatman’s model for the elements of a narrative

The lower half of Figure 3 is straightforward. Stories deal with ‘existents’ (i.e. things which exist
within the story-world) - primarily made up of ‘characters’ who are typically human (or if not human
then at least anthropomorphised to such an extent that one can ascribe to them some degree of
intentionality) and the spatial and temporal ‘settings’ within which they operate (here I mean spatial
and temporal settings in their simplest physical senses - e.g. the Garden of Eden immediately after
Adam bit into the Apple, Judea in the year zero, Patmos in 65AD, etc). The characters interact with
each other and with the world around them in ‘events’ - either ones they initiate (‘actions’) or ones
which someone or something else initiates (‘happenings’).

Less obvious but altogether more important is the higher-level distinction between ‘story’ and
‘discourse’ - a dualism which lies at the heart of all structuralist approaches to narrative. The
distinction between fabula (story) and sjužet (discourse) was first drawn by the Russian Formalist,
Viktor Šklovskij in his influential 1921 essay on Lawrence Sterne’s classic anti-novel ‘Tristram
Shandy’ .14

[36] The ‘fabula’ is something of an abstract concept but is best conceived as the underlying raw
materials of the story devoid of any act of ‘interpretation’ - i.e. what actually happened, in
chronological sequence. A ‘discourse’ in this specific sense (devoid of any Foucauldian baggage) is a
particular ‘telling’ or version of the story which has been configured from some underlying fabula
through a mediating process of authorship or interpretation. A single fabula may be expressed in any
number of discourses corresponding to different ways of telling the same underlying story. In these
terms, narrativization can be regarded as a kind of mapping process by which the events and existents
of a fabula are selected and configured into a particular discourse.15

Although the concepts underlying the fabula/sjužet (or story/discourse) dichotomy are relatively
simple, they have been problematized by three factors. Firstly there is the question of terminology,
since narratologists (particularly in the English-speaking world) seem unable to agree on the particular
binary pair of terms that should be used. Šklovskij himself paired the Latin word ‘fabula’, (literally
meaning ‘story’ or ‘fable’ but traditionally used in relation to classical theatre) with the Russian word
сюжет (or ‘sjužet’ - though it is also variously transliterated as ‘sjuzet’, ‘suzjet’, ‘sjuzhet’ and
‘syuzhet’) whose literal meanings include ‘subject’, ‘topic’ and (unfortunately) ‘plot’. The problem
here is that the English word ‘plot’ has many common usages, some of which overlap too closely for
comfort with its supposed antonym ‘fabula’. After Tzvetan Todorov, writers in the Francophone
tradition drew an almost identical distinction between ‘histoire’ (or for Gérard Genette, ‘récit’)and
‘discours’, on the basis of which many English authors like Seymour Chatman have chosen to use
‘story/discourse’ as equivalent terms to ‘fabula/sjužet’.16 The problem again is that the English word
‘story’ is simply too imprecise, too broad in its range of possible meanings, to serve as part of a binary
pair with ‘discourse’. As evidence of the confusion this can cause, I would point out that in both the
table of contents and the introduction of an otherwise excellent collection of introductory texts on
narratology, Susana Onega and Jose Angel Landa, chose as their binary pair the words ‘fabula’ and
’story’, thus reversing the normal role of the latter term.17 There is no simple solution to this
terminological hotchpotch. On rather arbitrary grounds I have chosen to use the terms ‘fabula’ and
‘discourse’ to distinguish between the underlying events and their manifestation in some particular
telling.

[37] It is important to stress that the word ‘fabula’, despite its obvious etymological links to ‘fable’
and ‘fabulous’, is devoid of value judgements and makes no assumptions about whether the
underlying story is meant to be construed as historically true or as fictional.

The second problem with the fabula/discourse distinction concerns whether the concept of the
fabula has any validity or utility in relation to fictional works. Indeed it has been questioned whether
the concept of an underlying, receiver-independent fabula has any validity in non-fictional or
historiographic narratives either. How, such an argument goes, can we talk about the underlying facts
of a story when that story-world itself may be the invention of an author or is otherwise unknowable
to us? The structuralist response to this challenge is to assert that given any specific telling of a story
(which may contain flash-backs, prophecies and other deviations from natural chronological
sequence, changing points of view, free indirect discourse and all manner of other narratorial
trickery), it must always be possible to postulate some abstract and hypothetical sequence of events,
conditions and happenings such that the given discourse is a particular telling of it.18 The existence
of such an underlying fabula is foregrounded in various art-forms. The ‘multiple-tellings’ story model
is an established structural topos in both literature and the cinema, such as in Akira Kurosawa’s film
Rashomon, in which the details of a particular event (in this case a rape) are retold by each of the
protagonists in turn. One could also point to the common publishing phenomenon of new authors
extending fictional story-worlds created by now-dead ones (with or without the approval of the
latter’s heirs) as an indication of how natural such an exercise is.19 More practically, Emma
Kafelenos has deflected some of the objections about the fabula by redefining it simply as ‘a construct
that readers make from a sjuzhet’, thereby ‘...shifting debate from problematic concepts including the
intent and identity of the author to epistemological issues that can fruitfully be pursued’.20

Ultimately however the best response to this challenge is not to ask whether the distinction is
‘right’ but whether it is useful. This brings me to the third objection that has been raised in the
fabula/discourse debate, namely the question of whether it matters - does the concept of an underlying
fabula distinct from its specific manifestations as discourses add anything to our understanding of
narratives - or is it just theoria pro gratia theoriae? This question (which always belongs at the front
of the art historian’s vade-mecum when venturing into the bosky groves of ‘Theory’) is perhaps more
easily answered in relation to medieval Christian narrative art than for any other period or genre, since
the definitive texts of Christianity demonstrate the [38] fabula/discourse distinction perfectly. The four
Gospels each tell the same story but in different ways as the four Evangelists emphasise and elaborate
different parts of the underlying fabula. They include or omit particular events or characters,
presenting them as more or less important or disagreeing about where things happened and in what
order. However, even when the evangelists differ on a substantive point, it is still assumed that they
are describing the same underlying events and the apologetics could usually be relied upon to explain
the apparent disparity. The importance of this or visual narratology is that while images may illustrate
one specific Gospel text or another, more often than not they contain elements of two or more.
Likewise artists and their advisers were able to interpolate details which were not mentioned by any
of the evangelists but which were concordant with the assumed fabula (the ‘Miracle of the cornfield’
incident mentioned in the preceding section is a typical example). Moreover the existence of four
‘discourses’ created the possibility of generating a fifth, combining them into what was, in effect, an
interpolated alternative window onto the shared underlying fabula. Such ‘harmonised’ Gospel texts
appeared as early as the 2nd century AD (Tatian’s Diatesseron being the first and best-known) and
remained a popular genre throughout the middle ages.21

The model of narrative discussed in this section has been concerned with what has been
characterised as ‘surface structure’ - fabulae and discourses are both concerned with the telling of
specific or particular stories, populated by individual characters. An alternative approach to narrative,
one more attuned to the linguistic model of Saussure, is the generalisation of stories and characters at
the ‘deep structural’ level, such as we find in the analyses of Propp and Greimas - but this will be
addressed shortly (chapter 2.d).

2.d) background to a structural model of narrative

Any discussion of narratology must at some point turn to Vladimir Propp and his pioneering 1928
book on The Morphology of the Russian Folk Tale, which may justly be considered the first
‘structuralist’ model of narrative (even if it predated ‘Structuralism’ by some decades). Although at
that stage he was largely working on his own, Propp was heavily influenced by the emerging
methodologies of the Russian Formalists, particularly the strand known as ‘organic formalism’, which
recognised that just as each individual organism shares certain characteristics with other individuals of
that species and (more distantly) genus, so individual texts share certain elements with other texts
within a given hierarchy of literary form or genre.44

Propp took as his research material one hundred out of the 600+ traditional folk/fairy tales
collected by the Russian folklorist Alexander Nikolayevich Afanasyev, which he analysed line by line
to identify those elements which the stories had in common. These story elements he called
‘functions’, each function being ‘... an act of a character, defined from the point of view of its
significance for the course of the action’.45 His conclusions regarding the nature of these functions
merit quoting in full:46
Functions serve as stable, constant elements in a tale, independent of how and by whom they are
fulfilled. They constitute the fundamental components of a tale.
The number of functions known to the fairy tale is limited.
The sequence of functions is always identical.
All fairy tales are of one type in regard to their structure.

The details of points 2 and 3 are particularly surprising. Propp concluded that in fact there are only
thirty-one distinct functions to be found in all of the Russian folk tales he examined - and [49] that
although not all of those are present in every tale, the ones that do appear will always appear in the
same order. Some of these sequences are logically necessary, while others are necessary only because
of the ‘rules’ of the genre. So for example function 2-An interdiction is addressed to the hero, must
logically come before function 3-The interdiction is violated. In the folk-tale genre however, these
two functions will always happen before 11-The hero leaves home, which itself will always come
before 18-The villain is defeated (even though there is no logical reason why this sequence should not
be reversed). In spite of what may appear from some of the subsequent commentary on his work,
Propp never claimed that these thirty-one functions and their sequence were applicable to all or any
other genres - simply that they were sufficient to represent the structure of all conventional Russian
folk tales. In listing his thirty-one functions, Propp also identified seven distinct ‘roles’ responsible for
enacting the various actions associated with those functions; the hero, the villain, the princess (or
more generally, the sought-for person), the dispatcher, the donor, the helper and the false hero. Note
that these roles are not equivalent to characters - an individual character within the story’s dramatis
personae might act as donor in relation to one function and as villain in another.
 Compared with the earlier discussion about the fabula/discourse distinction, Propp’s functions and
roles are operating at an altogether deeper, more abstract level. Essentially what he was attempting to
do was to identify the full set of atomic building blocks (functions) from which any fabula within a
particular genre could be constructed - and then to show that the particular genre could be expressed
in terms of a single generalised structure based on the sequence of those building blocks. Expressed in
terms of some hypothetical narrative syntax, these deep-structural functions are purely syntagmatic
categories - they are in effect place-holders which may or may not be filled but which, if present,
always join together in a particular ordered sequence. The paradigmatic axis exists only in the surface
structure of fabula and discourse - in terms of, for example, who the villain is or how and when they
are defeated.

The Morphology of the Folk Tale remained relatively unknown in the west until its 1968
translation into English. It thus emerged into an academic world enthusiastically embracing
Structuralism, a context in which Propp’s unabashed Formalism seemed distinctly old hat. Criticism
of Propp (of which there has been a great deal) has come from two main directions. On one hand are
those who rejected the Formalist method outright in favour of approaches that showed more respect
for the ‘textuality’ and individuality of narratives - or else who looked for more deeper, more
universal structures.47 On the other hand are those who broadly accepted Propp’s methodology but
disagreed about the required number or scope of the functions. Of the latter, perhaps the most
important critic was the Lithuanian semiotician Algirdas Greimas, who [50] sought to make the model
universally applicable to all narrative forms. Whereas the set of general ‘roles’ identified by Propp
were specific to the genre he was interested in (i.e. Russian folk tales), Greimas abstracted the model
one stage further and identified a base set of six ‘actants’ (Subject, Object, Sender, Receiver, Helper,
Opponent) which, he believed could account for all of the roles found in all different narrative
genres.48

One of the problems with the approaches of both Propp and Greimas is that they seek to describe
narrative solely in terms of agents and agency-effects (i.e. the causers of actions and the actions thus
caused). The major difference between their approaches is that Propp starts with the agency-effect (the
‘function’) and derives from this the necessary agent (the ‘role’) whilst Greimas works the other way
round, privileging the actant (or ‘type of agent’) as the basis of his genre theory. Whilst both
approaches have their uses and have been fundamental to the development of Structuralist approaches
to narratology, these ‘universal’ roles/actants are generally too deeply abstracted to be directly useful
to the understanding of medieval narrative art. Moreover both of them exclude the role of the
reader/viewer. In these models, the significance of a function for the course of the action is regarded
as an innate property of the genre, not the product of a receiver’s interpretation.49 This is not to say
however that deep-structural models don’t have their uses. One can for example postulate a more
directly relevant set of roles, specific to the needs of biblical and hagiographic narratives, as I have
attempted to do in Table 3.

Role
Characters often expressing this role
Visual characteristics

Hero
Christ, Saints, Disciples
Nimbus

Helper
Disciples, Three Magi
Various ‘positive’ features

Witness50
Prophets, Apostles, Longinus
 Book or scroll, eye-gesture

Enemy
Satan, Herod, assorted guards, executioners, heretics, etc
Various negative features, including Semitic facial types, partial undress, inelegant posture etc.51

Table 3 - Deep-structural 'roles' in Biblical and hagiographic narratives

These roles become particularly relevant to the present thesis when one considers them in terms of
the semiotic clues employed to identify and distinguish them in visual narratives (third [51] column of
the table). Such clues index the role, rather than signifying a specific character at the fabula level.
Instead the latter generally relies on additional visual clues, such as a textual titulus, a personal
attribute (e.g. St Laurence’s griddle, Stephaton’s sponge, Baalam’s ass), an action (Pilate’s hand-
washing) or on other contextual information. Note also that characters can and do perform multiple
roles within any given narrative - for example John the Baptist takes the roles of Witness (as a
prophet), Helper (when baptising Christ) and Hero (in the story of his own martyrdom), while Christ,
who would normally be associated with the Hero role also appears in various saintly narratives as
Helper (arranging Thomas’ trip to India, bringing St Denis his last communion, etc.)

As well as considering role/actant-based models, deep-structural models based around the idea of
the narrative function also have their practical uses. The obvious similarities in the lives of various
martyr saints is an open invitation to some kind of Proppian analysis, employing such functions as
Nativity, Conversion, Trial (test of faith), Imprisonment, Miracle (proof of sanctity), Martyrdom, etc. I
will return to these matters later when discussing hagiographic topoi (chapter 2.i). Apart from any
utility they have as analytical tools, the real attraction of these deep-structural models of the
characters and actions that feature in Christian narratives is the fact that medieval exegetes, in their
obsessive quest for precursors and ‘types’, also tended to discuss their narratives and characters in
generalised terms. Thus all saints were seen as Alter Christus, persecutors were all ‘types’ of Satan
and so on.

While Propp may have pioneered the structural analysis of narratives, it was Roland Barthes who
developed it into a potentially useful methodology. His Introduction to the Structural Analysis of
Narrative , which proposed the adopting of a linguistic model as the basis of narrative theory, might
justly be considered one of the foundational charters of structuralism in general and structuralist
narratology in particular.52 The Introduction... was always seen by Barthes as a ‘work in progress’
and in the years that followed, his attitude to narrative, together with the associated analytical method,
developed and shifted quite radically. These shifts culminated in the publication in 1970 of S/Z (his
close textual analysis of Balzac’s Sarazine) - an event that signalled his turning away from the
supposedly ‘closed’ analytical approach of structuralism towards the poststructuralist ideal of textual
plurality (something he felt was being ignored or denied by the emerging field of narratology). In
1969, while still on his journey from Introduction... to S/Z, Barthes also wrote a far less well-known
paper (not published until 1971) [52] entitled The Structural Analysis of Narrative: A Propos Acts 10-
11, which marked a further development of his original method.53

The following section will attempt to set out a hybrid approach to structural analysis, drawing
upon elements of all three of Barthes’ contributions to the topic, as well as on some of the
developments of Barthes’ scheme proposed by James Rushing in his study of Ywain imagery.54 By
proposing yet another slight variant on the existing models for the analysis of narratives, I am not
suggesting that the existing ones are wrong or deficient in any way - simply that they do not suit my
requirements. One of the most frequent criticisms aimed at structuralist narratology is its supposed
desire to define a single all-encompassing ‘Grand Unified Theory’ of narrative, applicable to all
genres, periods and media. Roland Barthes, somewhat belatedly recognising the monster he had
created, wrote about this in the opening paragraph of S/Z:
 There are said to be certain Buddhists whose ascetic practices enable them to see a whole
landscape in a bean. Precisely what the first analysts of narrative were attempting: to see all the
world’s stories […] within a single structure: we shall, they thought, extract from each tale its model,
then out of these models we shall make a great narrative structure, which we shall reapply (for
verification) to any one narrative: a task as exhausting […] as it is ultimately undesirable, for the text
thereby loses its difference.55

Such criticism is largely justified, and ultimately it was the impossibility of developing models that
could fully account for all texts (including deliberately anti-narrative postmodern literature) that led
many to a general dissatisfaction with structuralism. Fortunately I need not concern myself with such
problems of universalism. All I require of an analytical methodology is that it should help to make
sense of just three closely related ‘texts’; the Old Testament, the New Testament and Christian
hagiography. Provided that this methodology can accommodate these narratives in any textual or
visual form, I shall be content. This is perhaps one model of how structuralism can still be useful - not
in the search for universals but as a loose tool-set or paradigm for investigating specific types of
narratives.

[53]
2.e) a structural model of narrative

The structural model adopted in the remaining sections of this thesis can be defined thus:
A narrative can be broken into sections, call them ‘functional units’, whose function is determined
not by their literary or pictorial form but by what they contribute to the meaning of the narrative as a
whole (for the supposed target audience).
Narratives are constructed from four types of function; ‘nuclei’, ‘catalyses’, ‘indices’ and
‘informants’. The first two are elements of emplotment - they determine the direction and movement
of the story-line. The other two contribute to the mood and meaning of the story but without changing
the plot.
‘Nuclei’ are the junctions or nexus points in a story. These are the plot decision points where
choosing one option or another will lead the overall story off in one or other direction. Complete
narratives normally begin with a nucleus and most will also end with one.
‘Catalyses’ extend the narrative along its chronological axis but do not involve the possibility of
branching off. Catalyses often provide the filling-in of plot details and the extension of the story but
without actually changing the plot.
A series of nuclei and catalyses can constitute a ‘segment’ - effectively a meaningful and self-
contained sequence of linked episodes or fragments forming part of a larger narrative, complete with a
beginning and an end of its own. Nuclei can initiate or conclude segments but catalyses can only
continue or extend an existing one.
An ‘informant’ provides contextualising data about the temporal and spatial conditions of the story
(‘It was a dark and stormy night...’ in a text or stylised trees indicating an exterior setting in a
narrative image). They are the seasonings of narrative; adding richness to a plot without changing it.
An ‘index’ is a pointer to meanings or interpretations beyond the immediate story level. Indices
can be internal (e.g. proleptic or analeptic references to other parts of the story) or external (references
to something outside the story). Recognition of an external index is culturally specific, being
dependent on the reader/viewer’s familiarity with a complementary semiotic system that extends
beyond the discourse.
Nuclei and catalyses are primarily functions of the fabula (though of course they will also be
reflected in the discourse) - they provide it with the change/eventfulness that [54] was discussed
mentioned in chapter 2.a as a necessary condition of narrative. Indices and informants are primarily
functions of the discourse level, contributing whatever is distinctive about different tellings of a story.
Each functional unit can exercise one or more function - for example a catalysis can also be an
index.
 These various points will become clearer over the course of the case studies that come later - but
for the meantime a quick example may help to begin the clarification (particularly of point 9) Take for
example Genesis 22:6, where Abraham is preparing to comply with God’s command that he should
sacrifice his only son:

And he took the wood for the holocaust, and laid it upon Isaac his son: and he himself carried in
his hands fire and a sword...

Here there is no nucleus - Abraham’s decision to obey has already been taken in the preceding
verses and this verse only continues the thread. Nor are there any informants in the text - the Bible is
often short on details about settings (though this never stops artists adding them when appropriate).
The two functional units of Isaac carrying the wood for his own funeral pyre and Abraham carrying
the fire and sword are both catalyses, since they continue the plot without changing it. However the
former is also an external index - a reference to Christ’s carrying of the Cross. Both the catalysis and
the external index relationship are made explicit in panel 04 of the New Alliance window at Bourges
(Fig. 2.02), where the continuation of the story leads into panel 05, while the external index relates to
panel 06.

dovde pročitati!
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2.f) on visual narratives

Having considered what is meant by narrative in general, how it is to be measured and how it
might be analysed, I am almost in a position to turn to the specifics of narrative images. Paradoxically
it may be easiest to begin by considering what other types of images there are. After a brief
assessment of ‘non-narrative’ images, I will discuss the existing typologies of narrative images, before
proposing some criteria of my own.
2.f.1) Prelude - a typology of non-narrative images

In 1996, Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen published a highly original study of visual
semiotics which included a simple categorisation of the various possible types of images (or ‘visual
representational structures’, to use their splendidly inclusive term) that one might [55] encounter.56
With some minor adjustments, the categorisation they proposed can be expressed thus:
 Kress and Van Leeuwen presented this largely as an ‘either or’ classification of image types. I
prefer to think of all these categories as representing the various different communicative or
information storage functions a particular image is able to exercise, since images often participate in
more than one category of informational system. Their sub-division of ‘Conceptual’ image types is a
useful precursor for considering what constitutes visual narrativity because it helps to isolate, identify
and classify those image functions which are essentially extra-narrative. As discussed above, all
images can potentially be read as having a narrative element - extra-narrative in this context simply
means those images that are more likely to be interpreted as exercising a communicative mode other
than narrative.

The typology of ‘Conceptual images’ set out in Figure 4 may be better understood by considering
some typical examples from medieval art. The ‘narrative’ image type we shall return to shortly but for
the moment can be thought of simply as images which deal with the kind of diachronic processes of
change discussed in chapter 2.a. By contrast, conceptual images express stability and timelessness.
For example the iconic, hieratic figures of saints that stand as jamb statues in early Gothic portals, or
the angels and ancestors of Christ that appear in the [56] archivolts. Although most of the characters
represented in these statues are also capable of participating in narrative scenes, when they appear in
these contexts, it is their timeless and eternal character that is emphasised.

Conceptual images can be further divided according to the kinds of relationships they participate
in. ‘Classificatory’ images (of which Figure 4 is itself an example) deal with taxonomies, or
hierarchies of types, in which the defining relationship is the shared membership of some class or
group. These taxonomies can be ‘overt’, with the hierarchical relationships between the members
forming part of the representational structure itself, or they can be ‘covert’, in which case the
relationship to a shared super-ordinate is not shown but is implied by the similarities between the
subordinates. Common overt taxonomies in medieval art include charts of genealogy and
consanguinity, diagrams of the Pseudo-Dionysian Celestial Hierarchy, the familiar ‘Tree of Jesse’ and
images of the ‘Holy Kinship’ (see Fig. 2.03 for examples). Covert taxonomies are even more familiar
in medieval Christian art, which abounds in ‘sets’ of entities which belong to a particular category (or
which, in the language of set theory, share an implied superordinate). Examples include the virtues
and vices, the labours of the months, the signs of the zodiac, the twenty-four Elders of the
Apocalypse, the twelve Apostles, the four Evangelists, the twelve minor and four major prophets, the
seven deadly sins and seven acts of corporal mercy, etc. The increasing complexity of Gothic portal
sculptural programmes bred an insatiable appetite for such groupings. Covert taxonomies are limited
to two hierarchical levels, in which the superordinate is the ‘general class’ and the subordinates are the
members of that class. For example the class ‘Evangelist’ has the four subordinate members
‘Matthew’, ‘Mark’, ‘Luke’ and ‘John’. When visualised, it is normally the subordinates that are
depicted, rather than the superordinate class - one sees statues representing the individual Apostles but
never a statue representing ‘apostleness’. Even the Wise and Foolish Virgins, though they derive from
a parable (Matthew 25:1-13), generally appear in portal sculpture as covert taxonomies, stripped of
their narrative context and instead standing as markers of liminality and as warnings of the imminence
of judgement. Apart from the way they hold their lamps (and occasionally their exaggerated emotional
responses), the only element of the parable retained by these statues is their location by the doorway.

If classificatory images deal with relationships in the form ‘[X] is a kind of [Y]’, analytical images
describe ‘[X] is a part of [Y]’ relationships - rather like those engineering block diagrams that show
how the various components of a system fit together. Such images are perhaps less common in
medieval art, though there are still plenty of important examples, both in scientific and medical
manuscripts and also in theological texts. Mary Carruthers has written extensively about such images
and their roles both as mnemotechic devices and also as tools for [57] expressing concepts.57 The
example in Fig. 2.04A is a typical example, although arguably medieval maps and the portolan charts
(Fig. 2.04B) that emerged in the late thirteenth century also belong in this category since it is the
relationships between the places represented on them that matters. All of these images correspond to
Charles Saunders Pierce’s notion of ‘diagrammatic iconicity’, since what matters for the image’s
communicative effect is not an iconic resemblance of parts of the image to whatever they represent
individually, but the fact that the relationships of those sign-components to each other resembles the
relationships between their respective referents.

The final image function in Kress and Van Leeuwen’s model is the ‘symbolic’. This is the more
familiar form of image, such as the iconic/hieratic jamb statues, in which the sculpture stands as a
symbol for the saint thus represented (usually by means of a suitable attribute - an iconic sign
functioning as a conventional sign). As with the Wise and Foolish Virgins, the characters represented
by these statues may also appear in narratives - but there is usually a clear demarcation between their
narrative and non-narrative roles.58

As mentioned earlier, these categories of image functions need not be exclusive. For example a
jamb figure may individually constitute the symbolic representation of a saint or patriarch whilst also
participating in a covert taxonomy along with its neighbours. In some thirteenth century portal
programmes, such as central portal at Reims and the right portal at Amiens, jamb figures began to
incline towards each other and participate in narrative groups, albeit in a rather restrained fashion.
2.f.2) Early models for classifying visual narratives - Wickhoff and Weitzmann

Various Enlightenment authors discussed the suitability of the visual arts for depicting narrative,
most famously Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in his famous essay on the Laocoön. Such discussions
invariably followed the paragone tradition; concerning themselves with the relative merits of text and
image, and how the latter should be used, rather than how it actually had been used. As such they are
of limited interest here. One of the first serious attempts to analyse narrative art as an historical
phenomenon came with the 1895 publication of Die Wiener Genesis, by the Austrian art historian
Franz Wickhoff, who was primarily interested in the origins and development of late antique art.59
Wickhoff distinguished three ‘modes’ by which distinct events within a literary text could be
represented pictorially: [58]
Complementary (Ger. completirend ) - the representation of a particular narrative moment within a
story is ‘complemented’ by other elements which supply additional information about that moment
but without repeating any of the characters. Typically events which should logically be separate and
sequential are shown in a single scene. Take for example the four temporally distinct actions of; 1)
Judas kissing Christ to identify him, 2) the soldiers seizing the man thus identified, 3) Peter’s violent
response to this, and 4) Christ healing the resulting wound to Malchus’ ear. These four moments are
routinely shown combined in a single image (even in Italian Renaissance art), though logically these
consequential events have to occur one after the other to make sense. The separation of the kiss from
the arrest is an important element in the Gospel accounts - yet I know of only one example in the
visual arts where the two moments are shown as separate scenes. That exception is in the Augustine
Gospels (Cambridge Corpus Christi ms.296, f.125r), which does show two events; Judas kissing
Christ while the soldiers lie in wait in one panel, then the seizing of Christ in the next one (see Fig.
3.03B - the kiss is the third panel of the second row down, while the arrest is shown in the first panel
of the third row). As well as showing multiple moments from the story, complementary elements in a
scene may also be extra-narrative - the Gods on Olympus assumed to be watching a battle on a Greek
vase perhaps, or John the Baptist holding the Agnus Dei and pointing to the Crucifixion.
Isolating (distinguirend ) - the representation of a whole story, episode or segment in an image that
shows just one climactic or decisive moment, chosen in such a way that it encapsulates the whole
essence of the story (what Lessing called the ‘pregnant moment’). Unlike the complementary method,
such an image respects the unity of time, place and action.
Continuous (continuirende Darstellingsweise) - representation of multiple moments or episodes
from a story, showing characters more than once in consecutive scenes, united by a common ground
or landscape. Wickhoff gives the examples of the first miniature from the Vienna Genesis, in which
the Temptation, Fall and Expulsion are shown in three episodes, all set within a continuous landscape.
The canonical example from classical art is of course Trajan’s Column.

Writing some fifty years later than Wickhoff, Kurt Weitzmann also considered the relationships
between textual and visual narratives but based on a much broader range of material. Building in
particular on the work of Carl Robert (which in many respects had prefigured that of Wickhoff by
twenty, though the latter was apparently unaware of it), Weitzmann proposed a slightly different trio
of narrative modes:
Simultaneous (equivalent to Wickhoff’s ‘complementary’) [59]
Monoscenic (= ‘isolating’)
Cyclic (similar to ‘continuous’ but without assuming a common ground or frieze-like arrangement,
and thus more relevant to later multiple-frame narratives.)

Although Weitzmann’s terminology has proved more widely influential and longer lasting than
Wickhoff’s, the problem with both their classifications of narrative image types is that each was
developed in order to support the author’s own particular ‘grand narrative’ concerning the early
evolution of narrative art. Although they differed over the details, both authors assumed a teleology in
which artists developed their illustrative methods from the ‘primitive’ (because of its lack of respect
for the Renaissance ideal of unity of time and space) complementary/ simultaneous mode, through the
use of monoscenic and cyclic images in scrolls and on classical monuments, towards their adaptation
for the codex format.

In reality however, all three modes of narrative depiction continued to coexist and thrive
throughout the late classical and medieval periods and (for certain subjects) survived well beyond into
the Renaissance, when a strict ‘unity of time and place’ in images was rather less common than is
commonly supposed. The biggest problem with both Wickhoff’s and Weitzmann’s classifications is
that in practice, for medieval narrative images at least, there is no clear binary distinction between the
Simultaneous (Complementary) and Monoscenic (Isolating) modes - distinctions which seem to have
been irrelevant to the producers and consumers of such images alike. As well as the more extreme
cases like the Betrayal/Arrest of Christ, or Moses striking the rock of Horeb (where, as Schapiro
pointed out, we normally see the striking of the rock, the surprised reaction of the Israelites and the
resultant watering of the herds, all presented as if in a single momentary scene), a high proportion of
narrative images contain elements which are internal indices of earlier or later moments of the story
(visual prolepses and analepses) or else elements which, like Wickhoff’s complementary mode, are
extra-narrative.

A classification based on whether or not key characters are depicted only once, or more than once,
within the image field reflects an overly simplistic attitude to frames; should we see the repetition of
Potiphar’s wife in panel 11 of the Auxerre west façade Joseph cycle (see chapter 6.e) as being
‘primitive’ because it ignores the supposed ‘ideal’ of unity of time, action and place - or should we
recognise the narrative skill of an artist whose inventive and flexible approach to framing allowed him
to create more dramatic effects than would be possible by following some arbitrary rule? Ultimately
then, my reason for rejecting both these systems for classifying narrative images is that regardless of
whether Wickhoff, Weitzmann or neither were correct in their teleologies of early Christian art, their
terminology (and the assumptions that underlie it) had no relevance to the makers and consumers of
narrative art in twelfth and thirteenth century Europe.

[60]

2.f.3) An alternative approach to classifying visual narratives

Delimitation, classification, typology, it is all very nice as a remedy to chaos-anxiety, but what
insights does it yield? [...] the pervasive taxonomical bend of narratology is epistemologically
flawed.60

Whilst Mieke Bal’s belated realisation that the field of narratology has suffered from an excessive
fondness for inventing categories (rather than using those categories for anything useful) is welcome,
it should not be taken as an excuse to abandon such taxonomic activities once and for all. As an
alternative to the simple tripartite classifications of Wickhoff and Weitzmann, I would instead suggest
that narrative images should be considered in terms of their positions on five distinct axes. These axes
are summarised in Table 4 and discussed at length in the pages that follow.

Axis
Description
Possible/Typical values

Extent
The number of distinct images and/or episodes depicted as a recognisable group.
monoscenic, oligoscenic, polyscenic

Mode
The mechanism of narrative semiosis; how the images relate to a supposed underlying story.
denarrated element, charade image, word image, pseudo-narrative, closely tied

Visual Narrativity
The apparent narrative ‘richness’ specific to the image (regardless of the narrativity of any
underlying textual source or fabula)
high, average, low, minimal

Arrangement
For image cycles, the physical arrangement of individual frames; geometry/tessellation
grid, frieze, complex, irregular, banded

Direction
For image cycles, the trace followed between individual frames, in order to read them in narrative
sequence.
left->right and top->bottom, boustrophedonic, irregular

Table 4- Criteria for categorising narratives images

 My goal in proposing these criteria has been to devise a model that is as far as possible, purely
descriptive (making no value judgements or assumptions about teleology) but which encompasses all
the axes of variation that account for the narrative characteristics of images. With respect to Mieke
Bal’s warning quoted at the start of this section, the value of any taxonomy lies not in its ability to
define, categorise and mould its objects into a closed system but in its propensity to suggest a series of
questions that help to elucidate their underlying similarities and differences.

[61]

Axis 1 - Extent

Extent, in this context, refers simply to the number of separate images or frames used to depict the
story. The obvious distinction here is between single images and multi-image cycles; what I shall
describe as monoscenic and polyscenic narrative. The re-use of Weitzmann’s term ‘monoscenic’ is
unfortunate but not really avoidable - in using this term I do not in any way imply an image which
aspires to a unity of time, action and place - simply one that functions as a distinct and unitary image
field. Monoscenic narratives can be used to tell the story generally (by focussing on the ‘pregnant
moment’) or they can pick out some easily recognised action or event in the life of a character - either
for its own sake or to help identify an associated non-narrative image (such images were often used on
socles to identify the jamb figure above).

The polyscenic narrative type encompasses most of the conventional forms of image cycles, such
as narrative windows, Psalter prefatory cycles and portal friezes. In all these cases, one can identify
multiple image fields which function in a spatially sequential manner to tell the chronologically
sequential stages of a single story, or a closely related group of stories. The latter often applies with
hagiographic windows, particularly those of confessors, where a series of unrelated miracles are
allotted a few panels each (see for example the St Nicholas windows at Chartres and Le Mans).

In terms of extent, there is also a third, less obvious possibility, which I will describe as
‘oligoscenic’, in which a narrative cycle is reduced to a very small number of images (the exact
number will depend on medium and context but is generally just two or three). Typically these
oligoscenic narratives are made up of scenes abstracted from a polyscenic cycle and serve not to tell
the story in detail but to identify an associated non-narrative image, such as the standing saint figures
in the clerestory at Chartres, or the jamb prophets at Amiens. As an example, Fig. 2.05 shows one of
the clerestory windows at Chartres (bay 142) which features extra-narrative iconic/hieratic standing
figures of St Laudomarus and St Mary of Egypt. Laudomarus is identified by a monoscenic narrative
image of his visit from the Bishop of Chartres (rather obscure perhaps but a key moment in his vita),
while Mary is identified by an oligoscenic depiction of two highly distinctive and important events in
her life - her first receipt of the sacrament and her burial by Zosimas, aided by one of the finest
pantomime lions in all of medieval art. Such ‘cut-down’ narratives often serve a dual function of
identifying the accompanying figure whilst also reminding the viewer of why they are worthy of pious
devotion - in effect the narrative images help to valorise the extra-narrative ones.

[62]

Axis 2 - Mode

Narrative mode is a little more complicated to explain. Essentially it is an indication of the type of
relationship between narrative image and its associated story - of the mechanism by which the former
represents the latter. It is the how, but also to some extent the what, of narrative semiosis. To make
sense of this it might be better to consider the various different modes and some illustrative examples.
Discourse-oriented; image closely follows the details specified in the textual discourse from which
it derives. Generally with such images there are details that show a closer than usual attention to the
actual words of the source. For example, of the dado quatrefoils on the west façade of Amiens
Cathedral, quatrefoil 21a (upper) shows the words of the Lord, as reported in Zephaniah 1:12; ‘I will
search Jerusalem with lamps...’ - since the Vulgate text uses the ablative plural for lamp (lucernis), the
artist has carefully shown the Lord carrying not one but two lanterns (Fig. 2.06).
Fabula-oriented; image includes interpolated details not explicitly stated in the discourse(s) but
which are implied by, or necessary for, the underlying story. Requires the designer to ‘think beyond
the text’. This is often used as an opportunity to introduce story elements omitted from earlier tellings
which are of greater relevance to local/contemporary audiences - such as the funeral of Lazarus shown
in the Chartres Magdalen window as discussed in chapter 2.c above (Fig. 2.01).
Topic; generic image employed to represent a narrative scene which occurs in so many different
narratives that it has become a commonplace - a standardised way of encapsulating some common
narrative function. Examples include nativity, imprisonment, decapitation, apotheosis, etc. In such
cases, artists normally resort to a standard image - what I call a visual topos.61
Denarrated; image elements deliberately removed from their narrative context in order to change
their function or usage. The most obvious examples are the various types of devotional images which
flourished in the 14th century. These Andachtsbilder mostly developed from elements in the Passion
story, such as the Veronica, the Arma Christi,the Pietà, and even the Crucifix. Such images
encouraged the viewer’s meditation on the emotional content of the Passion story by minimising the
narrativity of the image itself. The wise and foolish virgins discussed earlier, who started life as
characters in a parable, but evolved into markers of liminality and warnings against the imminence of
judgement, are another type of denarrated image. [63]
Epitomic; a variant on the denarrated image in which an isolated element or scene serves to sum
up the moral or general character of the story.62 This differs from the conventional monoscenic image
in that its referent is not the specific story but the qualities that the story exemplifies. Occurs most
frequently on secular luxury products such as ivory mirror cases and chests which often carry generic
Arthurian romance imagery whose original narrative context is either lost or else is less important
than their general chivalric connotations.
Pseudo-narrative; images which have the appearance of being narrative and share the typical
characteristics of narrative images (in that they show things being done or happening) but which do
not reflect an a-priori fabula. Often these images are attempts to visualise figures of speech - some
excellent work has been done by Lucy Freeman Sandler and William Noel on pseudo-narrative
images in the illustrations of the Psalms, particularly in those manuscripts deriving from the Utrecht
Psalter tradition.63 Outside Psalters, the most common examples of pseudo-narrative images are in
depictions of covert taxonomies (such as the labours of the months and the virtues and vices) and in
various kinds of marginalia (I follow Michael Camille’s lead in not restricting ‘marginalia’ to the
edges of manuscripts).64 For example the scene of a young man sitting in an oak tree merrily feeding
an apple to some form of basilisk, which appears in one of the spandrels between the choir stalls at
Poitiers Cathedrals (Fig. 2.07A), or the image of a young nobleman flicking his finger at a bishop on
the west façade of Amiens cathedral (Fig. 2.07B) both show every sign of being specific episodes
from some narrative or other.65 With such images it is only the context that stops us searching our
stock of collected stories for some biblical or hagiographic narrative to account for these images.

[64]

Axis 3 - Visual Narrativity

Just as narrativity was discussed in section 2.a as a measure of the ‘degree of being narrative’, so
visual narrativity is a measure of how much ‘narrative content’ is expressed in an image itself
(regardless of the narrativity of its underlying story). Again, this is not an easy concept to explain
directly but it can be envisaged as a measure partly of how ‘richly’ an image tells its underlying story
and partly in terms of the richness of the viewing experience. In the case of oligoscenic and
polyscenic narratives, it makes sense to consider the visual narrativity of the whole cycle as well as
for individual frames.

In terms of the structural model presented in section 2.e, any narrative image will contain at least
one nucleus or catalysis. As a minimum, narrative images are ones in which something can be seen to
be happening. As visual discourses they depict actions or events representing the nuclei (decision-
points) or catalyses (continuations) that combine in a particular sequence to represent the underlying
fabula. In this respect even a frame in a polyscenic narrative that shows a character standing alone
doing nothing represents a minimal catalysis since it continues the narrative thread in spatial form.
However one could also regard visual narrativity as a measure of how many informants and indices
are present within the image since, although they don’t contribute to the progression of the plot, they
contribute to the richness of its telling. Often such indices refer to elements outside the actual story;
Christian typological references or even just extra-narrative cultural concerns of the work’s target
audience (such as the meticulously observed military equipment in the Morgan Picture Bible) - yet
these elements can still be thought of as contributing to the image’s visual narrativity, as can any other
elements or devices which encourage a more active viewer-response. In the same way, the depiction
of highly distinctive events, the quirky depiction of familiar ones, or the use of metalepsis and other
paradoxical devices (see chapter 6) all contribute to viewer engagement and hence to the narrativity of
the image.

Axis 4 - Arrangement

By arrangement I mean the physical disposition of the individual image fields that together
constitute an oligoscenic or polyscenic narrative. The actual arrangement of scenes in a narrative
cycle is often constrained by the medium and context of display; capital friezes (such as the one on
the west façade of Chartres Cathedral) and lintels are, like the oft-postulated classical scrolls,
effectively limited to a one dimensional, linear arrangement of image fields.66 Dado friezes, such as
one finds at the cathedrals of Auxerre and Amiens also privilege linearity, though the greater height in
both these cases allows for two rows of scenes. The tall, narrow lancet [65] forms of stained glass
windows apply similar constraints but in the vertical axis. In the early-thirteenth century glazing
programmes at Chartres, Bourges and elsewhere, glaziers excelled at finding complex tessellations of
medallions, though by the end of the century these had almost entirely given way to simple grid or
band arrangements of rectangular panels.

A tympanum offers more of a two-dimensional space, albeit one that narrows towards the summit.
This format favoured the traditional triangular arrangement of Last Judgement scenes (Judge at the
apex with the damned and elect in the lower corners) but it also encouraged the development of
banded narratives with a climactic scene at the top, such as one finds in the north transept portal at
Reims and in both the south transept and the north-western portal at Amiens. Round image fields such
as rose windows, tables, or parts of vessels such as the foot of the ciborium shown in Fig. 7.10 needed
to arrange their individual scenes in segments rotating around the centre - here we can distinguish
between centrifugal (heads towards the centre) and centripetal (feet towards the centre) arrangements.
Wall paintings generally offer more flexibility, though they may be constrained by doors, windows
and other architectural elements. Manuscript illuminations offer a far wider range of possible
arrangements, depending on whether they occupy a full page, an historiated initial or marginal or bas-
de-page setting. Other historiated objects such as enamel reliquary chests (see chapter 8.a) and
liturgical vestments tended to have the arrangement of their image fields determined by a delicate
balance between the functional needs of the object and the desire to ensure that their narrative scenes
may be viewed in an appropriate fashion.

Scale is another important factor in the arrangement of polyscenic narratives - with small objects
such as manuscripts or ivory diptychs, the viewer can take in all the image fields without moving their
head (facilitating a more personal and intimate viewing experience), whereas reading a sculptural
frieze, mural painting cycle or narrative window will require a degree of physical action (possibly
even a change of position) as part of the viewing process, making the act of reading a more public or
communal affair.

Axis 5 - Direction

Direction refers to the physical trace or pathway that would be taken through the individual panels
of a polyscenic narrative by a viewer following the story in narrative sequence, or by connecting
typological / extra-narrative hypotactic frames to their related narrative scenes. Whilst direction works
in conjunction with axis 4 - arrangement, it remains to some extent independent of it. A linear frieze
can read from left to right, from right to left, or a mixture of the two, jumping back and forth as the
physical setting and narrative content require. Such deviations from a normal linear pattern can be
significant for the discourse, as with the well-known examples in the Bayeux Tapestry, where, for
example, Edward the Confessor’s burial [66] precedes his death. More often however such variations
in the direction are driven by the physical setting and by the need to orient the narrative action in
relation to it. Thus in the Incarnation cycle in the capital frieze of the west façade at Chartres, the
direction of reading has been re-arranged so that, for example, the movement of the Holy Family
fleeing to Egypt or the Magi approaching the Virgin and Child are directed towards one of the
doorways, the story leading the viewer quite literally into the body of the Church.

Lancet windows can read top to bottom (the norm in twelfth and thirteenth century England) or
bottom to top (the norm in France). When there is room for two or three panels across the width of the
lancet, one enters the realm of properly two-dimensional arrangements, which offer far greater scope
for directional complexity.67 As well as the obvious text-like ‘left to right then top to bottom’
readings, together with its seven topological variants (right to left then bottom to top, top to bottom
then left to right, etc), there is also the boustrophedon form, which reads from left to right then right to
left on alternate rows. This latter figure is surprisingly common, appearing in a range of media but
particularly in ivory diptychs (e.g. the Soissons Diptych - Fig. 2.08) and in stained glass (e.g. the St
Eustace window at Sens - Fig. 2.09). Derived from epigraphy, the boustrophedonic form (from the
Greek, ‘as the ox turns in ploughing’) was not uncommon in archaic languages, where it seems to
have had thaumaturgical associations, something that survived in medieval palindromic or chiastic
formulations such as the famous ‘SATOR-AREPO-TENET’ square. Whether the form also retained
such associations in its medieval polyscenic narrative manifestations is impossible to say, though
there is also a purely pragmatic explanation. Its success, particularly in some of the larger narrative
windows with multiple vertical registers, may derive from the ease with which a viewer can follow
the story. On reaching the end of a row, the eye simply moves one frame upwards or downwards,
rather than having to scan back horizontally to find the start of the next row (a task which is easy
enough if following rows of text but which becomes quite challenging when nearing the top of a
lancet window, far from the reach of an index finger or stylus).