The Writing Experiment by Hazel Smith

why must you thrust your

varicose tongue down my throat when it’s

all in vein. all feigned.

Jeanette sweats and, unfortunately, doesn’t speak her thoughts

aloud.A squirm in the hay never goes astray.That’s George’s all-time

favourite motto. He ripples his tooth in an eager smile, and gets

down to business.

‘An All-time Favourite Motto’ (Trezise 2000, pp. 37–9)

NARRATIVE RESTRUCTURING

In this section we will explore the structure of the narrative and the way
that events are shaped and ordered. The major factor in this is the organ-
isation of time.

The arrow of time

Time is a very important factor in a narrative, because both the past and
the future have a bearing on the present. It is through the organisation of
time in the narrative that we confront both history and memory, which are
non-linear, and involve complex two-way interactions between the present
and the past. When we remember, for example, we do not simply dig up
buried memories: our current experiences are constantly affecting the
way we conceptualise what has happened. In fact Freud used the term
Nachträglichkeit , meaning ‘afterwardness’, to convey this idea that our
impression of the past is constantly being transformed by the present (see
King 2000; Middleton & Woods 2000). Again, then, the way the narrative
is structured is not simply formal but ideological and political: for
example Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1988) , in telling the story of Sethe, an
ex-slave, keeps moving backwards and forwards in time in relation to the
abolition of slavery. The complex structure is not simply a means of order-
ing the story, it is a way of showing the massive, continuing impact of
slavery—and the suppression of the history of slavery—on those who
were slaves, their descendants and American collective memory.
It is tempting to think that writing a good narrative simply consists of
thinking up a good story and then letting it unfold for itself. But the creation
of narrative involves a radical restructuring of the raw material of the story,
particularly with respect to order: it means bending and breaking what

Narrative, narratology, power 103