RYAN, Marie-Laure (2006). “Narrative, Media, and Modes”, in Avatars of Story.

Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 3-30.

What Are Media?

The concept of medium is no less problematic than the concept of
narrative. As Joshua Meyerowitz observes, “it is a glaring problem
for media studies” that “we have no common understanding of
what the subject matter of the field is” (1993, 55). This may seem
a strange problem for the layman: don’t we all instinctively know
what media are? And yet, if we ask specialists of different
disciplines to propose a list of media, we will receive a bewildering
variety of an-swers. A sociologist or cultural critic will answer TV,
radio, cinema, the Internet. An art critic may list music, painting,
sculpture, litera-ture, drama, the opera, photography, architecture.
An artist’s list would begin with clay, bronze, oil, watercolor,
fabrics, and it may end with exotic items used in so -called mixed -
media works, such as grasses, feathers, and beer can tabs. An
information theorist or his-
 Narrative, Media, and Modes 17

torian of writing will think of sound waves, papyrus scrolls, codex

books, embossed surfaces (for Braille texts), and silicon chips. A
philosopher of the phenomenologist school would divide media into
visual, aural, verbal, and perhaps tactile, gustatory, and olfactory.
In media theory, as in other fields, what constitutes an object of in-
vestigation depends on the purpose of the investigator.
These various answers reflect the ambiguity of the term. The entry
for “medium” in Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th
ed., 2003) includes, among other meanings, these two definitions:
(1) a channel or system of communication, information, or entertain-
ment; (2) material or technical means of artistic expression. Type 1
regards media as conduits, or methods of transmitting information;
and type 2 regards them as languages. (I am borrowing these terms
of comparison from Joshua Meyerowitz.)10 Media of type 1 include
TV, radio, the Internet, the gramophone, the telephone —all distinct
types of technologies —as well as cultural channels, such as books
and newspapers. Media of type 2 would be language, sound, image,
or more narrowly, paper, bronze, or the human body.
In the conduit, or transmissive conception of medium represent-
ed by type 1, ready-made messages are encoded in a particular way,
sent over the channel, and decoded on the other end. Before they
are encoded in the mode specific to the medium in sense 1, some of
these messages are realized through a medium in sense 2. A paint-
ing must be done in oil before it can be digitized and sent over the
Internet. A musical composition must be performed on instruments
in order to be recorded and played on a gramophone. Medium in
sense 1 thus involves the translation of objects supported by media
in sense 2 into a secondary code.
Some media theorists (Ong 1982, 176) have objected to the
transmissive conception of medium, arguing that it reduces them
to hollow pipelines, through which information passes without
being affected by the shape of the pipe. It is almost an axiom of
contemporary media theory that the materiality of the medium—
what we may call its affordances, or possibilities —matters for the
type of meanings that can be encoded. On the other hand, if we
regard meaning as inextricable from its medial support, medium-
free defi nitions of narrative become untenable and we fall back
into the doctrine of radical medial relativism. This doctrine, as we
have seen, makes it illegitimate to compare messages embodied in
different media and to view them as manifestations of a common
18 Narrative, Media, and Modes

narrative structure. To maintain the possibility of studying narra-

tive across media we must fi nd a compromise between the hollow
pipe interpretation and the unconditional rejection of the conduit
metaphor. This means recognizing that the shape and size of the
pipeline imposes conditions on what kind of stories can be trans-
mitted, but also admitting that narrative messages possess a con-
ceptual core which can be isolated from their material support.
Insofar as they present their own configuring properties, channel-
type media can be simultaneously conduits and languages. Take, for
instance, the case of television. As a transmissive medium it can play
any kind of movie, but as a means of expression it possesses its own
idiosyncrasies, which have led to the development of new forms of
narrative, such as the soap opera or the reality show. Moreover, the
experience of watching a movie is significantly different when it is
shown on a small screen in the home and on a large screen in a dark
theater that holds spectators prisoner for a couple of hours.
Media may or may not be conduits, but they must be languages
to present interest for transmedial narratology. This leads to an-
other question: what do these medium-specific languages consist of,
and what kind of features distinguish them from each other? The
answers of the imaginary informants quoted above suggest three
possible approaches to media: semiotic, material/technological, and
cultural.

Media as Semiotic Phenomena

The semiotic approach looks at the codes and sensory channels that
support various media. It tends to distinguish three broad media
families: verbal, visual, and aural. It is only our habit of not rank-
ing cuisine and perfume among media—probably because they do
not transmit the proper kind of information —that prevents this list
from including olfactory and gustatory categories. The groupings
yielded by the semiotic approach correspond broadly to art types,
namely, literature, painting, and music, but the three classes extend
beyond the aesthetic use of signs; language, for instance, has both
literary and nonliterary uses; pictures can be artistic or utilitarian.
In its narratological application, the semiotic approach investigates
the narrative affordances and limitations of a given type of signs or
stimuli. The following list of narrative can do and can’t do for lan-
guage, static images, and instrumental music illustrates the scope
and concerns of the semiotic approach. (Moving pictures without
 Narrative, Media, and Modes 19

sound track can be considered a fourth semiotic type, but I leave it

to the reader to figure out their narrative properties.)
Language
Can easily do: Represent temporality, change, causality, thought,
and dialogue. Make determinate propositions by referring to spe-
cific objects and properties. Represent the difference between actu-
ality and virtuality or counterfactuality. Evaluate what it narrates
and pass judgments on characters.
Can do only with difficulty: Represent spatial relations and in-
duce the reader to create a precise cognitive map of the storyworld.
Cannot do: Show what characters or setting look like; display
beauty (language can only tell the reader that a character is beauti-
ful; the reader cannot judge for herself and must believe the narra-
tor). Represent continuous processes. (Language can tell us: Little
Red Riding Hood took two hours to reach her grandmother’s
house, but it cannot show her progression. It usually segments time
into discrete moments.)

Images
Can easily do: Immerse spectator in space. Map storyworld.
Represent visual appearance of characters and setting. Suggest im-
mediate past and future through “pregnant moment” technique.
Represent emotions of characters through facial expression. Repre-
sent beauty.
Cannot do: Make explicit propositions (as Sol Worth observed,
“Picture cannot say ‘aint’”). Represent flow of time, thought, inte-
riority, dialogue. Make causal relations explicit. Represent possi-
bility, conditionality, or counterfactuality. Represent absent ob-
jects. Make evaluations and judgments.
Makes up for its limitations through these strategies: Use inter-
textual or intermedial reference through title to suggest narrative
connection. Represent objects within the storyworld that bear ver-
bal inscriptions. Use multiple frames or divide picture into distinct
scenes to suggest passing of time, change, and causal relations be-
tween scenes. Use graphic conventions (thought bubbles) to suggest
thoughts and other modes of nonfactuality.

Music
Can easily do: Capture flow of time in pure form. Suggest narra-
tive pattern of exposition-complication-resolution through relations
20 Narrative, Media, and Modes

between chords. Create suspense and desire for what comes next.
Arouse emotions.
Cannot do: Represent thought, dialogue, causality, virtuality.
Single out distinct objects, characters, or events in a storyworld.
Tell a specific story, since its stimuli have no fi xed meaning.
Makes up for its limitations through these strategies: Use titles
and subtitles to suggest a “narrative program.” Individuate char-
acters though musical motifs or distinct instruments (Peter as the
strings in Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf ).

The relative narrative importance of the items on the “can do” and
“can’t do” lists for the three semiotic types confi rms Werner Wolf’s
(2002) ranking of the three major media families, or art types, in
this decreasing order of storytelling ability: verbal, visual, and
musical. Whereas verbal signs can implement the strongest nar-
rative modes —autonomous and determinate —pictures are either
illustrative or indeterminate, and music is either illustrative or
metaphorical. Because only language can explicitate the relations
that turn individual events into a story, such as “x caused y” or “a
did p because she wanted q,” it is the medium of choice of narra-
tive. In pictures and music, motivations and causal relations can
only be suggested indirectly, and as Wolf observes, these media re-
quire a far more extensive gap -fi lling activity than verbal texts to
be interpreted narratively, though they can usually be appreciated
aesthetically without paying attention to their narrative message.
It seems safe to assume that narrative competence developed con-
currently, and in intimate relationship with language,11 a semiotic
code that enables users to extend topics of communication to enti-
ties not situated in the immediate context, such as third parties and
past events. If language is indeed the native tongue of narrative, the
narrativity of pictures and music is not a feature original to these
media but a relatively late attempt on their part to emulate the cog-
nitive template that language activates so efficiently. The limited
storytelling ability of pictures and music doesn’t mean, however,
that they cannot make original contributions to the formation of
narrative meaning. The affordances of language, pictures, and
music complement each other, and when they are used together
in multichannel media, each of them builds a different facet of
the total imaginative experience: language through its logic and
its ability to model the human mind, pictures through their im-
 Narrative, Media, and Modes 21

mersive spatiality, and music through its atmosphere-creating and

emotional power.

Media as Technologies
Left by itself, the semiotic approach yields only broad families. To
bring further refi nement to media theory, we must ask about the
raw materials (such as clay for pottery, stone for sculpture, the
human body for dance, or the human vocal apparatus for music)
and the technologies that support the various semiotic types. It is
further necessary to distinguish technologies of pure reproduction,
such as sound recording or xerox copying,12 from technologies
that create new media objects and open new expressive possibili-
ties. Only the latter present interest for transmedial narratology.
Moreover, not all technologies that bring expressive diversity in a
media family do so in a narratively significant way. In the sound
category, for instance, diversity is created by the various musical
instruments developed through the ages, but none of them has sig-
nificantly increased the limited narrative potential of music. Much
more consequential for narrative are the technologies that affect
language-based and visual media. In the language category, these
technologies correspond to the various ways to inscribe verbal
signs (manuscript writing, print, and digital encoding),13 as well as
to the various methods of encoding and transmitting spoken lan-
guage (radio and telephone). In the visual domain, the most nar-
ratively significant technologies correspond to methods of capture,
such as photography, fi lm, and television. The digital encoding of
images has also brought new expressive possibilities, but their nar-
rative impact is questionable.
The technological approach not only refines semiotic categories;
it also cuts across them and reorganizes media into different fami-
lies: media of long-distance communication, media of the moving
image, and above all, “old media” versus “new media.” This label of
“new media” may be used in a narrow sense to cover media or sub-
media that only perform through the computer (VR installations,
video games, e-mail, Internet chat, hypertext), and in a wide sense,
to describe media that use digital technology as mode of produc-
tion but end up being taken out of the computer (digital photogra-
phy, digital recordings, and films with computer-generated scenes).
Technology also regroups semiotic families into multiple-channel
media (or “multimedia media”) that affect several senses.
22 Narrative, Media, and Modes

The classic example of an approach to transmedial narratology

based on technological categories is the work of Walter Ong on
the influence of writing on narrative form. The enormous impact
of writing technology on thought, and, by extension, on narra-
tive, can be captured in one brief formula: a permanent inscrip-
tion serves as a prosthetic memory. In oral cultures, narrative was
used as a mnemonic device for the transmission of knowledge; its
memorization was facilitated by prosodic features, fi xed formu-
lae, and standardized images; and the limitations of memory were
compensated by a relatively free episodic structure which allowed,
within reasonable limits, permutation of its units. The development
of manuscript writing transformed this open epic structure into
the tightly knotted dramatic plot described in Aristotle’s Poetics.
Though drama was meant for oral performance, Ong regards it as
the fi rst narrative form controlled by writing. With its organization
of events into an exposition, complication, crisis, and resolution, its
symmetrical, carefully controlled rise and fall of tension (known
as the Freytag triangle), and its climactic reversal of situation at
the apex of the triangle, the dramatic plot exploits the significance
of the sequential ordering of events to an extent that would not be
possible in oral improvisation.14 But as Ong observes, the chiro-
graphic age remained a basically oral culture, and its written texts
were mainly used for reading aloud or memorization. Its longer
narratives retained consequently the episodic structure and the
prosodic features of ancient oral epics.
The invention of print, by encouraging silent reading, made
mnemonic features obsolete and led to the birth of the novel,15 a
relatively unconstrained narrative form that took plot to unprece-
dented levels of complexity: framing, embedding, branching, di-
gressions, disruptions of temporal sequence, and multiple plot lines.
But it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the novel developed
an alternative to the episodic structure of its epic forbearers. This
alternative, according to Ong, is the “perfect pyramid” of the de-
tective story, a plot type heavily indebted to the dramatic structure:
“In the ideal detective story, ascending action builds relentlessly to
all but unbearable tension, the climactic recognition and reversal
releases the tension with explosive suddenness, and the dénouement
disentangles everything totally—every single detail in the story
turns out to have been crucial —and, until the climax and dénoue-
ment, effectively misleading” (1982, 149). By making reading a
 Narrative, Media, and Modes 23

solitary activity, print also encouraged an inward turn that favored

the creation of psychologically complex characters —what E. M.
Forster called “round characters,” as opposed to the flat character
of oral narratives who delight the reader by “fulfilling expectations
copiously” (Ong, 151). In high modernism, the representation of
mental processes becomes indeed so invasive that it threatens to
expel narrative action from literary fiction. The last major feature
that Ong attributes to print is self-reflexivity, a feature most domi-
nant in the early and late stages of the novel: “The very reflective-
ness of writing—enforced by the slowness of the writing process as
compared to oral delivery as well as by the isolation of the writer as
compared to the oral performer —encourages growth of conscious-
ness out of the unconscious” (150).
Writing technology has recently taken a new leap forward with
the development of digital media, and a whole new chapter in the
technological history of narrative remains to be written. Theorists
such as Jay David Bolter, George Landow, and N. Katherine Hayles
have prepared the ground by investigating the differences between
print and digital writing, but we are still waiting for a comprehen-
sive study of the more narrowly narrative applications of digital
encoding, such as hypertext, blogs, or computer games. The sec-
ond part of this book initiates such a study; but as Terry Harpold
observes (2005, 108), we are still in the incunabula phase of digital
narrative, and we lack the temporal distance needed for the assess-
ment of the long-term viability of the current attempts to put com-
puter technology in the service of narrative. The understanding
and exploitation of the properties of a new medium are often slow
to develop. Ong observes, for instance, that chirographic and early
typographic cultures retained a “residual orality” that delayed the
development of the narrative features typical of writing technology.
Similarly, we have just entered the digital age, and our first attempts
with digital narrative may be more indebted to the print tradition
than we would like to think.16

Media as Cultural Practices

The third important dimension of media is their cultural use. This
dimension is not entirely predictable from semiotic type and tech-
nological support. In fact, some ways of disseminating informa-
tion are regarded as distinct media from a cultural point of view,
despite their lack of a distinct semiotic or technological identity.
24 Narrative, Media, and Modes

Newspapers, for instance, rely on the same semiotic channels and

printing technology as books, but “the press” is widely regarded
by sociologists as a medium in its own right, on par with the other
so -called mass media of TV, fi lm, radio, and the Internet. Drama,
similarly, is a well-recognized cultural institution, but as a live
performance using multiple sensory channels, it cannot be distin-
guished from ballet or the opera on strictly semiotic or technologi-
cal grounds. Yet we traditionally call drama, ballet, and the opera
media rather than genres.
By far the majority of media studies have been devoted to cultur-
al use. These studies will ask, for instance, about the social impact
of film violence, Internet pornography, television news reporting, or
multiusers computer games. In a study of cultural use, considera-
tion must also be given to the network of relations among media,
a network commonly described through the metaphor of media
ecology (Heise 2002). For instance, the cultural role of the cinema
shifted after the invention of television, though the technology it-
self did not undergo significant changes. In the pretelevision days,
movie theaters showed a variety of features: newsreels, documen-
taries, cartoons, and a feature fi lm. They combined reality-based
and fiction films in a continuously running show. This diversity and
continuous running has been taken over by television, and nowa-
days movies deal mainly with the fictional, with a distinct prefer-
ence for the fantastic, while TV favors reality (or reality effects),
in the form of news, documentaries, and fictional representations
of everyday life. It has even turned the real into a spectacle in the
increasingly popular genre of reality TV.
The evolution of narrative forms depends as much on cultural
pressures as on the semiotic or technological properties of the me-
dium. What Ong writes of the oral-written distinction is valid for
all contrasts between media: “Obviously, other developments in so-
ciety besides the orality-literacy shift help determine the develop-
ment of narrative over the ages —changing political organization,
religious development, intercultural exchanges, and much else, in-
cluding the development of other verbal genres” (1982, 139). Ong
observes, for instance, that in recent decades the tightly knotted
dramatic plot, a product of writing, has “fallen out of favor as too
‘easy’ (that is, too easily controlled by consciousness) for author and
reader” (151). This development was a cultural reaction against the
well-constructed plots of realism, though it cannot be entirely dis-
 Narrative, Media, and Modes 25

connected from writing technology: it would be hard to imagine an

audience being held entranced by the oral presentation of a
plotless text, unless it is a multi channel dramatic preformance.
Culturally conditioned developments sometimes involve a return to
a previous medium, or an attempt to imitate another medium. An
example of this situation is the recent emergence of what I call the
“novel of pro-liferating narrativity,” a narrative type that replaces the
overarching climactic plot with multiple “little stories.”
Particularly prominent in fantastic realism and postcolonialism,
this narrative type devel-oped both as a reaction to the deplotting
of the New Novel and as an attempt to reconnect narrative with its
oral origins.
Notes
1. Narrative, Media, and Mod
10. Meyerowitz suggests a third metaphor, media as environments,
but it does not seem to me to stand on the same level as the other two:
while the language and conduit metaphors capture not only an approach
to media but also their function, and consequently their nature, medium
as environment leads one to ask “What are the characteristics of each
medium (or of each type of media) that makes it physically,
psychologi-cally, and socially different from other media and from live
interaction” (61). But media are not environments all by themselves;
they are rather 11. The cognitive researcher Mark Turner (1996) has even
argued that language is a product, not a cause, of the human need to tell
stories. This need, as Dautenhahn (2003) argues, can be attributed to the
complex social organization of humans, compared to that of apes.
12. Some artists, however, have used the Xerox machine in a creative way, by
placing three -dimensional objects on the glass plate.
13. This list should also make room for the kinds of objects that support these
various modes of inscription: papyrus scrolls, codex books, the computer
screen, and space itself for VR technology.
14. Against Ong’s claim that the dramatic plot is a product of writing, one
could argue that it has its sources in spontaneous oral storytelling. As William
Labov has observed, conversational narratives of personal experience follow a
pattern of exposition, complication, resolution, and coda which bears striking
resemblance to the Aristotelian plot. Rather than creating this structure ex
nihilo, writing allowed its expansion from the small stories of conversation to
the relatively large frame of dramatic performance.
15. Some scholars disagree with this. Margaret Anne Doody regards, for
instance, the romances of Greek and Roman literature (such as The Golden
Ass, by Apuleius) as the earliest form of the novel.
16. I am thinking in particular of the indebtedness of early hypertext fiction
to the aesthetics of the postmodern novel. The generally accepted explanation
for this phenomenon is that the forms of the postmodern novel anticipate the
new medium; but one could just as well argue that what Richard Lanham calls
the “extraordinary convergence” of digital writing and postmodern theory is
in fact a print tradition that continues in a new medium because of cultural
habits.
17. Media such as oral storytelling may seem at fi rst sight to illustrate the
purely temporal category, but insofar as they use visual information —
gestures and facial expressions —they belong to the spatio-temporal category.
This leaves only media of long -distance communication (radio and
telephone) as purely temporal manifestations of oral language. A case could
also be made for placing print texts in the spatial category, because of the two
-dimensionality of the page, but as the phenomenon of books on tape
demonstrates, the vast majority of print narratives can easily be transposed
into a purely temporal format and consequently do not take advantage of this
spatiality. When a print text relies on graphic effects — illustrated children’s
books, artists’ books, or calligrammes —it should be categorized as spatio
temporal.