THE BEST DEFINITION OF NARRATIVE

 Though I've used the literary term "narrative" frequently since the beginnings of this blog, I've never stated an explicit definition of the term. In some of my early posts I more or less deferred to the definition provided by Tvetzan Todorov, as cited in TODOROV O TODOROV PT. 4: 

Only at one point in THE FANTASTIC does Todorov make an assertion that seems to put “the Fantastic” and “the Realistic” on the same plane as literary constructs, and it’s the only point where I can entirely agree with him, though probably not with any of his extrapolations from it. This appears in his final summing-up chapter: “…we must inquire into the very nature of narrative. Let us begin by constructing an image of the minimum narrative, not the kind we usually find in contemporary texts, but that nucleus without which we cannot say there is any narrative at all. The image will be as follows: All narrative is a movement between two equilibriums which are similar but not identical.” This is an apt restatement, in valid structuralist terms, of the narrative progress that Aristotle calls “complication and resolution” and that Frank Cioffi explores in terms of science-fiction “anomalies.”

In point of fact, I don't believe that I ever stuck to Todorov's rather value-neutral proposition, given that one of my earliest concerns was the identification of particular narratives in terms of their Fryean mythoi. My many meditations on centricity came a little later, and I've often stated, in one way or another, narratives always require organizing principles of some sort. Todorov, as a Marxist of one sort of another. probably didn't care for anything that implied hierarchical concepts. But now I would rephrase Todorov in this manner:

All narrative is a movement consisting of the interaction of one or more Primes (superordinate presences) with one or more Subs (subordinate presences).

Though the Primes are the organizing principles through which the authorial expresses whatever resolution he plans for the narrative's complications, this does not mean , as a hyper-Marxist might presume, that the Prime is always the Guy in the Catbird Seat. Hamlet is the Prime presence in the play that bears his name, but although he does manage to avenge his slain father by play's end, his quest creates so much ancillary chaos that one can hardly claim he's acted as an avatar of justice. In Borges' 1944 story "Death and the Compass," the author inverts the paradigm of the "genius-detective" subgenre and has his detective Elias Lonnrot outsmarted and slain by his criminal rival. But Lonnrot is just as much a Prime presence in his story as Sherlock Holmes is, and stories with tragic or ironic conclusions for the Primes are not inherently better or more mature than those in which the Primes enjoy the relatively "happy endings" typical of comedy or adventure.

And with that avenue explored, I can proceed to the matter of how Prime and Sub presences function within that species of narrative inbreeding known as the crossover.