Narrative network

A narrative network is a system which represents complex event sequences or characters’ interactions as depicted by a narrative text. Network science methodology offers an alternative way of analysing the patterns of relationships, composition and activities of events and actors studied in their own context. Network theory can contribute to the understanding of the structural properties of a text and the data contained in it. The meaning of the individual and the community in a narrative is conditional on their position in a system of social relationships reported by the author. Hence, a central problem when dealing with narratives is framing and organising the author’s perspective of individual and collective connections in order to understand better the role of both the witness (viz. the persona that emerges from the narrative) and its testimony as reflected by the text. However, the category of narrative network is in its formative, initial phase and as a consequence it is hard to view as a stable and defined notion in linguistics, and beyond sociology.

In order to be an object of study and analysis, time has to be transformed into a causal sequence, and the only way in which this can be done is by narration. As a form of description, narrating inevitably requires sequencing in time. The direction of time is not a trivial thing, but the backbone of the information contained in the narrative itself. One has to bear in mind the fundamental concepts of Genette’s narratology, mainly the concept of ‘order.’ This distinguishes three entities: story, narrative, and narration. The story generally corresponds to a series of events placed its chronological order (the story time). When these events are rearranged and represented in a form that has its own sequence and features by the author, it produces a narrative. Even if the narrated events are not chronologically ordered, being reported in the narrative’s time, they always refer to a position in the story time.

The survey of any textual account ought to take into account its literary nature. Far from being a window that must be revealed in order to penetrate into a ‘historical truth,’ each historical document adds to the number of texts that have to be interpreted if an approachable and intelligible picture of a given historical milieu is to be drawn. As pointed out by Peter Munz, “narrative is the only literary device available which will reflect the past’s time structure.” The pretension in which history is conceived as the representation of the ‘actual’ should be put aside in order to acknowledge that one can only approach past structures by contrasting them with, or bonding them to, the imaginable world. In this way, and similar to Genette’s conception of narrative order and time, a historical narrative implies not simply an account of events that happened in the transition from one point in time to another. Thence, historical narrative is a progressive ‘redescription’ of events and people that dismantles a structure encoded in one verbal mode in the beginning in order to justify the recoding of it in another mode at the end. Narratives are, thus, structures that contain complex systems in which images of experience are drawn.

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