Recursive Reading: Graphing the Values of a Narrative
As part of writing the first reading of a given narrative, you will need to attempt to graph the values within a given text, which will assist you in generating the controlling and counter ideas that structure the conflict in a narrative. This, in turn, gives you greater access to "getting the text."
Below is a formal and theoretical exposition of this method for reading narratives closely, called the Value Graph--a tool meant to assist this process, as it assisted me in close-reading the units from The Matrix that participate in the hermeneutic code. It is painstaking work to designate units within a text. However, the work will be well paid off in the resulting mastery you will acquire over the details of the text—how those details work together as a whole. It also will provide the sufficient means to work through multiple readings of a text. Thus, working through a Value Graph leads to generating a visual map of the text that aids one in thinking through the kinds of writerly decisions that created the text. The following serves as an example of how you might include in your second reading work on a value graph of your self-selected narrative. |
See McKee's "Structure and Meaning," the section on Idea versus Counter Idea, pages 118-120, for one way to approach the value graph. |
Instructions for graphing the values at conflict within a narrative
The example I will use in these instructions will be the film The Matrix by the Wachowski siblings. First, let me explain some of the basic features of the Value Graph. Here is the top portion of the graph:
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Keep in mind that the Value Graph is a tool: you may make the tool your own by creating your own version of the practice: how you make the Value Graph your own will comprise part of what you discuss in your readings and in your final reflection.
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Actually, the only thing one fills in here at the beginning of the process is the title of the work. The premise, and the purpose (controlling idea) and context (counter idea) of each controlling value will arise during and/or after the work of filling out the rest of the graph; be open for it to change several times.
The premise is an open-ended statement (see McKee) that initiates the controversy or stasis that grounds the dialectical struggle between opposing values—the struggle between what McKee calls the controlling and counter ideas. I will return to this after I have demonstrated how to do a few units of the film. Immediately below this on the graph is the following: |
Notice the words “value” and “opposing value” to the left of the parallel dotted lines. I will explain this further below, but for now, think of how in each unit of a narrative some value “wins” out over an opposing value and vice-versa. One value fails while the other succeeds. For instance, perhaps one character values the bond of friendship over and above everything else, but the friend she trusts ends up betraying her: in that unit, where the betrayal happens, the controlling value of “self-reliance brings security” may have won out over “faith in others creates community.”
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Keep in mind that you are looking for the principle opposing values at work in the text and these will likely emerge during and/or after graphing out several units of the text. As soon as any initial notions for the opposing values occur to you, write them down: write one of them right below “value,” and write the other right above “opposing value.” The first corresponds to the controlling value that dominates by the end of the text, while the second corresponds to the one that remains defeated by the end. As you go further into the text, keep rethinking the values, perhaps revising them if necessary. Once there is some clarity concerning what the opposing values are, then for each unit diagonal lines—either sloping upward or downward—indicate which value wins.
The next item to examine is the unit, and what to write in the two boxes that are attached to each unit. |
Needless to say, “Sequence” indicates a numerical, chronological step within the narrative, and each blank Value Graph has 20 such sequences or units—10 per row—to fill out. The task of determining the units or sequences always involves making arbitrary distinctions. Each person may determine where units begin and end differently and these determinations will likely change multiple times during subsequent readings. That’s why it is important to use a pencil, or to use Excel to generate the Value Graph.
Now here is where the writing begins. While reading a book or article, or watching a film, or even listening to a speech or a song, write out the key action that signifies the unit in the top box labeled “Cardinal (catalyser).” It should be a brief statement of action where someone does something. It may help to write out these units in a notebook first, and then transcribe them onto the Value Graph. These statements reflect what Barthes calls the "proairetic" code. Once all the units are written out, it will be possible to determine whether the unit serves as a cardinal turning point (otherwise known as a reversal, or "rub"), that moment where one value wins out over another, or if the unit merely serves a catalytic step that repeats the thrust of the previous unit. Here is an example of the first several units of The Matrix: |
Now what is the second box for, the one below the first? Here will be where you indicate elements of the text that are of the "semic" code, which will also point to other codes, such as the hermeneutic and symbolic codes.
First some definitions to clarify metaphor and metonymy. A metonym is trope wherein something associated with another thing is used in place of the other thing, such as when the cause of something is used to mean the effect ("he has taken to the bottle"). All metonyms of a given text have some relationship with each other, either associative or causal. Particular musical motifs, images, characters, actions, objects, colors, words, all serve as metonyms within the narrative. If a character wounds another in an early scene, the wound is a metonym that points to all the other instances in which the wound appears, for instance, Frodo’s wound suffered at the hand of the chief Nasghoul, King Angmar, occurs metonymically throughout all three installments of The Lord of the Rings. If someone shuts a window and locks it, the wind stops blowing in the house, and perhaps a sufficient obstacle is in place to block the efforts of an enemy to get in the house later in the story. If someone leaves a gas stove on when it isn’t burning, later when someone lights a match, the explosion points back to the cause. Many metonyms serve this functional, denotative purpose, but many also serve another, metaphorical, connotative function. It is possible to see the repetitions of certain metonyms in different forms as metaphorical. A metaphor is a structure that claims to be one thing while at the same time possesses significance beyond its immediate, limited appearance. It sets up an equivalence between two sometimes completely incompatible things. Another way to consider metaphor is to think of it as that which replaces something that cannot be replaced or that somehow unifies what is irreducibly different. A metaphor stands in for something. In other words, while the collection of repeating metonyms work causally together to move the action of the narrative along (the proairetic code), they also point to meaning and values that are the “whole” the metonyms derive from (the symbolic and cultural codes). For instance: |
First of all, Trinity, as a metonym, plays a role in the first three units (Hmmm… Trinity…). Next, what or who is she? (this is a question that evokes the semic code). The first unit defines her as dangerous, dressed in black leather, criminal. In fact, this criminality continues through her supernatural escape from the police and the agents, and it continues with Neo making a shady deal and then meeting with Trinity at the night club by virtue of the repeating image or reference to the white rabbit. So somehow, the shady criminality has something to do with the white rabbit, which also is an intertextual trace that has culturally determined metaphoric significance: Alice in Wonderland. Neo, because he followed the white rabbit, defied what he was expected to do at a basic everyday level: he was late to work.
However, later the audience discovers that what at first appears criminal is only so in the point of view of the Agents; Trinity’s metonymic actions in the beginning units are simultaneously metaphoric for the entire project to free humanity from enslavement to the machine. Trinity escaping, as a metonym, points to Neo’s escape (his repeated “awakenings” from sleep and death—nine in total throughout the film—are also metonyms that generate this metaphorical significance) from the matrix. Both together are metaphoric for the ultimate value of the film, freedom (a symbolic code that opposes enslavement), which wins in the end, though not without a struggle the audience gets swept up in, perhaps adopting this value as their own, as the text seems designed to do. Returning to unit 4, where Neo’s boss scolds the late sleeper, threatening him with the loss of his job, we find again a metonym that repeats the narrative movement of reason and order attempting though failing to restrict the instinctual (reason versus instinct). Then with the Agents appearing within the maze of cubicles, a new, more potent force appears to work to keep Neo from operating beyond the square corporate structures. And against this a repeating metonym of supernatural guidance appears in the cell-phone delivery and call from Morpheus. Despite these efforts to locate and free Neo, the Agents succeed in not only finding Neo, but in deceiving him as well. The symbolic code emerges between the lines drawn between the dark, leathery, hidden figures of Trinity and Morpheus and the clean, ordered, well-lighted Agents. A commonplace reversal of good and evil signs also has occurred inside the field of metonyms that include cliches of hip, underground style versus square corporate-ness. Already I’m projecting a value struggle between order and chaos, reason and instinct, ignorance and knowledge, slavery and freedom; though chaos, instinct, knowledge, and freedom become the privileged values in the perspective of the audience, while the other values obtain a threatening light. Thus, through highlighting aspects of discrete units in a temporal progression, I cannot help myself from projecting ideological and symbolic values in the form of polar opposites. Below I have begun to make value judgments for each unit using diagonal lines. This assumes again that each unit asserts the dominance of one value over another. When the same value asserts itself more than once in a row, we may term each such instance (when following a cardinal "turning point") a catalytic unit. Thus, when an opposing value overcomes the dominance of the other, it is a cardinal turning point: |
The semic code defines characters, objects, and places through repetitively grouping a number of signifiers ("semes": words and phrases) around a proper name. Because this code defines characters, objects. and places, the semic code sets up relationships of power that often reinforce cultural codes (controlling values). |
Units 1 and 5 are cardinal units, while the rest are catalytic units. Actually, the first unit of any text would then be a cardinal unit, since it asserts a value from “nothing.”
Following are the value strokes and corresponding functions that I have assigned to each of the first six sequences.
But suddenly, this last opposing value (in units 5 and 6) takes on another dimension, one that accents the threatening power of reason to control and manipulate to the point of physical coercion, even against instinctual resistance. This shift in value emphasis is, as I have already pointed out, a unit called a cardinal, while the other units that then separate this cardinal from other cardinals are called catalysers. It is at these cardinal moments where the value struggles come to light most directly. It is also at these moments that the narrative reveals the larger cultural codes (controlling values) engaged in a dialectical struggle.
While cardinals either posit or resolve uncertainty, thereby presenting some form of reversal in the narrative, catalysers fill narrative space between cardinal points. Catalysers are merely consecutive while cardinals are both: they are consecutive and also posit or resolve some uncertainty (hermeneutic code). Signs, comprised of signifiers (words) and signifieds (concepts) bonded together arbitrarily, occur successively in time, each conditioning the next in a contiguous series that are comprised entirely of these cardinals and catalysers. In the process of identifying these cardinals and catalysers as functional units, two other levels of significance, actions and narrative, receive articulated form, as with key reversals that bring transformations to characters in the narrative.
For example, while several signs occur through the first five units of The Matrix that point to supernatural qualities within the narrative, it is not until the sixth unit that this supernatural quality ruptures completely the everyday “reality” of the film. The first and fifth units possess traces of the supernatural. Trinity and the agent leap across buildings while the police officers gasp in wonder, and Morpheus demonstrates prescient knowledge in attempting to guide Neo to safety. But when Agent Smith seals Neo’s mouth shut without touching him, and then has a robotic bug penetrate Neo’s navel, something uncanny announces itself in Neo’s interpretation, and by extension, in the audience's interpretation too. The action within this unit both resolves the uncertainty initiated with the first unit and posits a new uncertainty (the hermeneutic code). It both refers functionally to the next cardinal where Trinity removes the bug from Neo’s navel, but it also points to the agents as metonyms struggling over Neo’s mind and body, and thus the narrative’s network of controlling values revealed in the domination struggle. |
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Determining the Premise
There are at least two ways to use the word premise. One way concerns the syllogistic form: given the major hypothetical premise (the general rule) and the minor premise (the particular case), the conclusion by necessity follows. For the Value Graph I am using a different meaning of the word. Here, the premise is the statement or question that opens the playing field for a dialectical struggle of values to ensue.
Each of these might serve as a premise for The Matrix, or even other narratives, too. For instance, Terminator, Blade Runner, Minority Report, I Robot occur within the first premise. Each of these films takes up and elaborates different networks of controlling ideas that dance inside this particular, though quite wide realm. A premise is also called the stasis, the turning point of dialectical controversy.
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Bibliography
Barthes, Roland. “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives.” Image-Music-Text. 1977. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1997. 79-124.
Jakobson, Roman. “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances.” Fundamentals of Language. 2nd Rev. Ed. Paris: Mouton, 1971. The Matrix. Dir. Andy & Larry Wachawski. Perf. Keanu Reeves. Laurence Fishburne. Carrie-Anne Moss. Groucho II Film Partnership, 1999. McKee, Robert. “Structure and Meaning.” Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and The Principles of Screenwriting. New York: Harper Collins, 1997. 110-131. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966. |