Telling or showing

One never knows which way the inspiration is going to come from, but the subject of narrative entertainment (like books and movies) is proving to be a quite fertile this week because, against all odds, I will be giving it yet another twist today. It all folds back to just how important narrative is as a concept and as a practice for humans. In a recent interview with Scottish scholar and author Angus Fletcher I heard him say that narrative, and not logic, is the superpower of humanity, our ability to link causes with results and to project the probable (and the improbable) consequences of our actions. And there is no doubt that a certain amount of experience has to be earn first hand, but our ability to tell stories allows us to learn from experience that we have not had and save ourselves a lot of effort, and even pain, along the way.

Any story-telling is, in fact, an act of mediation where the public learns about certain events which they did not witness directly from an author who was present (or who invented them, so they saw them with their "mind's eye"). But when it comes to communicate what happened, there two distinct approaches, which are not entirely disjoint but have substantial differences. As we will see, there are modes of expression that follow both approaches at the same time or that teeter between them, but I think they constitute the two extremes of the spectrum.

Photo: liz west

The most basic approach is just showing what happened, either by bringing the public to the scene to contemplate the results or by creating visual reproductions (pictures, films, dioramas or even immersive virtual reality spaces) so that the audience can see for themselves. This is so natural that even a toddler, with very limited expressive capabilities, can grab the hand of the adult in charge and drag them to the place where the disaster happened. Of course, the communication in this case is not perfect because the audience (the adult) will have to infer what happened from the results, so they may be able to figure out how the disaster came to be but probably not why. On the other hand it is also entirely possible that even the author (the child) does not know why either. Taking pictures, making movies or even capturing the scene in a painting are other examples of what we can call "visual" storytelling. As you can see, this is as old as the stone-age wall paintings.

The appealing nature of this approach is that it lets the audience form a relatively unmediated opinion: they look at the scene and they can pass their own judgment. However, this immediacy is only relative, since the author has a lot of leeway when it comes to the completeness of the picture (pun intended). Just to mention one salient example, the famous picture of "V-J Day in Times Square", by American photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, might seem like the epitome of romanticism, but is in fact the portrait of a sexual assault (admittedly, a minor case, but an assault in any way). The photograph alone does not tell us that the nurse actually resisted the kiss, as it is visible in other frames taken around the famous one, so, to a certain extent, we inadvertently fall prey to the expressive techniques of the photographer. However, this is not any different from the special effects we see in the movies, where the important aspect is, for instance, that Ned Stark dies in the ninth episode of "A Game of Thrones", not the fact that Sean Bean did not die for the take, because the intention of the authors is make the audience feel like they were in the story so that they can experience it almost first hand.

The second approach is the oral one, base on word and therefore inextricably linked to language, and therefore encoded: while visual representations might be more or less true to the object they represent based on the technique and the ability of the author, they are indisputably iconic, because they resemble what they represent; words, on the other hand, with the only exception of onomatopoeia, are only liked to the object they represent by a cultural association. As an example, a photo or a drawing of a tree does resemble a tree, whereas the word "tree" is just randomly associated to it. There is nothing in the tree that indicates that it should be represented by a word of four letters, one syllable, two consonants and two vowels. And while two people speaking different languages might not be able to understand each other's words, they are almost certain to be able understand each other's pictures.

However, this process of encoding has three effects in the perception of the events: first, it removes the simultaneity of the sensations intrinsic to eyesight; second, it limits the scope, since any detail not included by the narrator goes missing; and third, it add a certain amount of "noise" to the story, since the translation of images and sensations into words is not always perfect. This is the kind of storytelling present in tales, books, songs and poems, and it is precisely the complexity of the encoding process what makes a toddler choose to show you the disaster that has happened rather than trying to explain it.

Of course, the communication would be much clearer if, on top of showing the aftermath of the accident, some could explain something about the events. This is a mixed solution, which leverages on the visual impression (very impactful but hard to produce or reproduce) to support the oral narration (much easier to produce but intrinsically more convoluted to grasp). Given that the technical feasibility of taking visual recordings of movement is relatively recent, this mixed technique has been in use for centuries. Churches in the Middle Ages were covered in colorful frescoes to support the explanations of the priest. It was not possible to produce animated pictures, but a static one was enough to provide the general layout of the scene that then gets animated through the words. And this mixed technique (using spoken language) has the additional advantage of not requiring literacy from the audience.

Another mixed technique are comics and illustrated books, where snapshots of the action are in display and get together by the action of the text, letting the audience fill in the gaps between the frames. If you have a vivid imagination, it is almost like cinema, only much cheaper to produce because you do not need to pay for the actors, the costumes or the trips to exotic locations: they all come out of the paper by the magic of pencils and inks.

Yet a different mixed solution is theater, which resembles video but has a substantial difference: with the physical distance between the audience and the stage it simply not possible to appreciate the details in the same way that we would do if we were part of the scene ourselves. To account for that, actions are exaggerated to make them clearly visible even from a distance, while the dialogue usually supports the action. For instance, a dying character would make a great display of the fact (thus the expression "theatrical") and avoid being mistaken for a sleeping person by either saying it explicitly ("I'm dying!") or by an exhale at the moment they go limp on the floor.

Beside the ease to produce them in comparison with images, words have another very important advantage: they are the only means to talk about immaterial things and abstract concepts, which do not have an "aspect" on its own. Things like peace or death or love do not have a visual manifestation that may be stylized to an icon. At most, they can be represent by means of an index, a different object the is intimately related to the concept, like the white doves for peace, a skull and bones for death or a heart for love. However, this association is still cultural and while almost any human will recognize the picture of a tree, a white dove, a heart or a skull can often be interpreted literally instead of as referring to the the abstractions we have just mentioned.

In spite of the limitations that the linear expression of the words have, they also have the advantage of focusing the attention of the audience. Looking at the V-J Day picture, you might get distracted by the people in the background, the confetti on the floor or the streetcar tracks, but when you hear or read about it you can only pay attention to the next word, and then to the next and all the time the speed of progress is entirely controlled by the speaker, which chooses the rhythm at which the words are pronounced and even the amount of words to be devoted to each element that they are describing.

For millennia, these two narrative approaches have complemented one another, one being more evocative and instantaneous, with the other one being more detail and deep, and I am glad to see that there seems to be chance of one of them definitely displacing the other. The production of visual elements has become, thanks to the technological developments, faster, easier and cheaper, but all along the verbal commentary has stayed a necessary element when the visual lacked the depth. In fact, it has almost become a joke of the entertainment industry how often books get turned into movies (i.e. losing in the process a non-negligible part of its depth for the sake of the immediate enjoyment) and vice versa (allowing the authors to explain the profound part of the narrative that did not fit in the visual show).

I have to admit that if find great pleasure in both approaches and I could not honestly say that I prefer one over the other. What I can assert without hesitation is that being force to give up on any of them would be a great loss for me. The pandemic has severely curtailed my options for traveling to places far and near, but as long as the option of traveling in my mind is available the wait is bearable. I just hope that following the stream of my words provides you, at least, a modicum of enjoyment. Have a nice evening.