Diagramming Narrative

1 Diagramming narrative
5 MARIE-LAURE RYAN
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12 Abstract
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14 The use of diagrams as a tool of narrative analysis is a fundamentally

15 semiotic project whose origins can be traced back to the emphasis placed
16 by the structuralist movement on the synchronic systems that underlie sig-
17 nication. Dening diagrams as a spatial presentation of information
18 which conveys meanings that could not be expressed in the linear form of
19 a text, a list, or a formal coding system, this paper focuses on attempts
20 to represent individual narrative plots, as opposed to diagrams that model
21 a universal narrative structure or discourse phenomena. Through the
22 analysis of diagrams relating to three aspects of plot time, space, and
23 mind this paper argues that graphic representations are not merely a
24 tool for representing narratological knowledge, but an important way to
25 produce this knowledge. At their very best, they can be the seed of a new
26 theory.
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29 Narrative is routinely and summarily dened as the representation

30 of a sequence of events. If this formula captured all there is to narrative,
31 stories could easily be modeled by the temporal medium of language. But
32 the physical events take place in the space of a storyworld, a dimension
33 much easier to represent through images than through language; and
34 they are motivated by, or lead to mental states and events which may
35 last for a while and overlap, rather than following each other like beads
36 on the string of the narrative timeline. Causal relations the cement that
37 holds the events into a story may connect temporally separated events.
38 And nally, the buildings blocks of narrative may present a symbolic di-
39 mension, or second-order signicance, through which they are woven into
40 networks of contrasts and analogies that transcends the purely local rela-
41 tions of temporal succession. Following Joseph Frank, literary theorists
42 refer to these networks as the spatial form of narrative.
Semiotica 1651/4 (2007), 1140 00371998/07/01650011

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12 M.-L. Ryan
1 All these features speak in favor of complementing the purely verbal

2 analysis of narrative with graphic models that translate narrative infor-
3 mation into spatial structures. In the past twenty years, thanks in part to
4 the work of artists and scholars such as Edward Tufte (1997), Stephen
5 Kosslyn (1994), and Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen (1996), who
6 have studied the language of images, and thanks in parts to the develop-
7 ment of graphic tools for personal computers, through which diagrams
8 can be easily generated and inserted into papers and presentations, the vi-
9 sualization of information has emerged as a major cognitive and commu-
10 nicative issue in all domains of knowledge. But the use of diagrams as a
11 tool of narrative analysis did not await the advent of personal computers,
12 the World Wide Web, and PowerPoint; it is a fundamentally semiotic
13 project whose origins can be traced back to the emphasis placed by the
14 structuralist movement on the synchronic systems that underlie both spa-
15 tial and temporal modes of signication.
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18 1. The semiotic status of narrative diagrams

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20 The most famous diagrams in the history of narratology are also the
21 earliest. One of them is A. J. Greimas (1966) semiotic square (gure 1),
22 which claims to captures through a visual shape the atemporal semantic
23 deep structure of narrative. The square organizes basic semantic ele-
24 ments (whose content varies from story to story) according to two types
25 of relations: S1 and S2 are contraries (for instance, black and white);
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41 Figure 1. Greimas semiotic square with values for a possible story (see story in note 1);
42 from Johansen (2005: 524)
Diagrammatic narrative 13
1 and S1 and S2 are the negations of S1 and S2 (i.e., non-black for
2 S1 and non-white for S2). The square decribes the semantic deep struc-
3 ture of narrative as a mediation between the values represented by the
4 four corners, and the dynamics of plot as a movement that follows the
5 arrows.1
6 The other famous diagram is Levi-Strauss (1955) analysis of the Oedi-
7 pus myth through a table which combines the diachronic and the syn-
8 chronic dimension of narrative (gure 2): while the rows of the table
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42 Figure 2. The thematic structure of the Oedipus Myth (Levi-Strauss 1955: 433)
14 M.-L. Ryan
1 stand for the chronological succession of events, the columns cut across
2 this temporal order to highlight analogical relations between narrative
3 elements. The design is brilliant in its economy, clarity, and exploitation
4 of the space of the page to convey meaning, even for those who dispute
5 Levy-Strauss particular choice and arrangement of content elements (cf.
6 Scholes 1974: 6974).
7 Probably every reader will regard Greimas semiotic square as a dia-
8 gram. But the visuality of the Levi-Strauss design is much more problem-
9 atic: doesnt it use mainly language, rather than lines and shapes, to con-
10 vey its meaning? The contrast between these two analytical tools raises
11 the question of the semiotic status of diagrams. Kosslyn denes them as
12 follows: Diagrams are pictures of objects or events that use convention-
13 ally dened symbols to convey information to show the wiring of your
14 kitchen, the nitrogen cycle, or the assembly of your model 1968 Mustang.
15 Diagrams combine literal elements (pictures of parts) and symbolic ones
16 (arrows to show movement, direction, or association; shading to show
17 curvature) (1994: 244). But this denition overlooks a basic element
18 of diagrams: the legends that explain the meaning of the visual elements.
19 Diagrams are complex semiotic artifacts that combine, in variable pro-
20 portion, quasi one-dimensional language-based information (for language
21 can be inscribed on a line whose length far exceeds its height), and two-
22 dimensional visual information.
23 By mentioning symbolic and literal elements, Kosslyn singles out two
24 of the three types of signs dened by Peirce: the symbol, whose meaning
25 is based on a conventional relation between sign-vehicle and object, and
26 the icon, whose meaning is based on a relation of similarity. A diagram
27 may use abstract shapes circles, squares, triangles that signify con-
28 ventionally; it may complement these shapes with iconic elements, such as
29 stick gures to represent characters or a square topped with a triangle to
30 represent a house; and it may use the two dimensions of the page to rep-
31 resent space and time (directly in the case of space, and through a trans-
32 position in the case of time that translates temporal ow into a continu-
33 ous line). Rather rare in diagrams, but not totally absent, is the third type
34 of sign dened by Peirce, the index, whose meaning rests on a causal rela-
35 tion between sign-vehicle and object. But a case could be made for the
36 indexical nature of the positioning of an object on a diagram to indicate
37 its location in space.
38 Through their multiple modes of signication, diagrams are semioti-
39 cally located between the poles of purely verbal and purely visual rep-
40 resentation of information. In the case of narrative, the purely visual
41 pole is represented by illustrations of individual scenes relying on iconic
42 signs, while the verbal pole is occupied by plot summaries, standard
1 interpretations, classical narratological investigations, and, on the level of

2 structural analysis, by linear lists of constituents, such as Propps (1968
3 [1928]) formulation of narrative functions:
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1. One of the members of a family absents himself from home.
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2. An interdiction is addressed to the hero.
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3. The interdiction is violated. (etc.)
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The reader may wonder at this point where the dierence lies between
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Propps list and Levi-Strauss heavily language-dependent design, which I
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regard as a rudimentary diagram. For me the decisive criterion resides in
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the use of space as a visual dimension of signication. The verbal descrip-
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tions of narrative events in the analysis of the Oedipus myth mean as
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much through their disposition on the page as through their conventional
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linguistic meaning. It could be argued that Propps functions are chrono-
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logically ordered, and that the vertical axis of the page represents time.
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But the ordering is already signied by the numbers that precede each
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function, and the use of space is therefore redundant. The list would con-
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vey the same meaning if instead of using a new line for each entry, the
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text ran the functions and their number together in a compact paragraph.
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Yet one cannot deny that the disposition of Propps functions on the
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space of the page presents information more eciently than a compact
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paragraph. This suggests that the dierence between a diagram and a
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list is not just a matter of communicative eciency, it is a matter of
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expressive power. A presentation of information will be considered a
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diagram when it conveys meanings that could not be expressed in linear
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form.2
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By this criterion, diagrams should be distinguished from formal lan-
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guages, such as the systems for the coding of plot proposed by Tzvetan
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Todorov (1969) in Grammaire du Decameron and by Claude Bremond
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(1973) in Logique du recit. Here is how Todorov (1969: 75) codes the
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story Calandrin is stupid and miserly, but happy; Bruno decides to pun-
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ish him; he plays a trick on Calandrin that makes Calandrin unhappy:
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XA XB ) XA opt Y ) Ya ) XA
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37 where X Calandrin, Y Bruno, A happy, B stupid and miserly,

38 a play a trick, the logical operator AND, opt wish and )
39 cause. This coding makes no use of iconic visual shapes and it is read
40 linearly from left to right. A diagram, by contrast, is a two-dimensional
41 image that does not impose a rigid order of decoding: while it can suggest
42 direction through arrows, it lets the eye move freely among its elements.
16 M.-L. Ryan
1 2. Diagramming narrative: An overview

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3 Narrative can be diagrammed on several levels and from countless per-

4 spectives. Expanding a typology proposed by A. J. Greimas (who accord-
5 ing to Johansen 2005: 524 recognizes three levels roughly corresponding
6 to 1, 2, and 3), I propose to distinguish the following potential objects of
7 visual description:
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1. The universal deep structure, represented by a system of atemporal
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logical relations between units of content.
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2. The universal narrative structure that temporalizes the deep structure
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into actions performed by agents ( the minimal set of semantic fea-
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tures shared by all stories).
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3. The particular narrative structure, a conguration in which the struc-
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ture of level 2 is diversied into a wide variety of individual stories.
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This level can be further subdivided into (a) wireframe plots ( what
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is common to all versions of Cinderella), and (b) what Greimas would
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call the surface structure, a particular thematic and spatio-temporal
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concretization of the wireframe plot ( the French version of Cinder-
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ella). For diagramming purposes, however, the dierence between
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these two sublevels is rarely signicant.
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4. The discourse level: the many ways of presenting level 4 through lan-
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guage or other media (the various retellings of the French version of
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Cinderella). Variations on this level are created by the discourse strat-
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egies that form the main concern of classical narratology: for instance
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a given story can be told through rst, second or third person narra-
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tion, through various types of focalization, in dierent orders or lev-
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els of detail, and so on.
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29 Each of these levels has inspired its own visual models. On level 1, the
30 prime, and perhaps the only example is Greimas semiotic square. The
31 fact that virtually no competing model has been proposed does not neces-
32 sarily imply that the semiotic square is universally accepted as the deep
33 structure of narrative: it could also mean that for many scholars, the es-
34 sence of narrative lies in its temporality, and narrative theory has no need
35 for a structure of level 1.
36 On level 2, we nd schematic representations of what is common to ei-
37 ther all stories, or to all stories of a certain type. An example would be
38 Greimas actantial model of the folk tale (gure 3). Since models of this
39 level are supposed to describe all the members of a certain class, they
40 should present generative power. This is the case for the owchart
41 through which Claude Bremond (1970) captures narrative dynamics (g-
42 ure 4), or for the story trees inspired by Chomskys generative grammar
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Figure 3. Actantial model of the folk tale (Greimas 1966: 80)
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23 Figure 4. Narrative dynamics (Bremond 1970: 251)

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25 (Prince 1973; Rumelhart 1975; Mandler and Johnson 1977). Bremonds

26 owchart produces dierent stories by going around the circle any num-
27 ber of times, while the structural trees of story grammars are the visual-
28 izations of rewrite rules that generate many dierent diagrams. In this
29 second case it is not the diagram itself that is generative, but the rules
30 that produce it.
31 Let me skip for now level 3, which will form the main focus of this ar-
32 ticle, and move to level 4. The investigation of discourse phenomena has
33 traditionally been the least dependent on visualizations, and most of these
34 visualizations take the form of tables, the least graphic of all diagrams.
35 Tables are commonly used on level 4 to create taxonomies based on the
36 cross-classication of two sets of distinctions, one represented by the col-
37 umns and the other by the rows. For instance, in Figures III, Genette
38 (1972) uses a table to illustrate the four narratorial possibilities yielded
39 by the cross-classication of two dichotomies: extradiegetic versus in-
40 tradiegetic narration, and heterodiegetic versus homodegetic (gure 5).
41 More complex taxonomies require a circle rather than a table: for in-
42 stance, F. K. Stanzel arranges modes of narrative presentation (such as:
18 M.-L. Ryan
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Figure 5. Narrator types (Genette 1972: 256)
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14 rst person versus third person, reector versus narrator, internal versus
15 external) on a wheel divided into six main wedges with multiple interme-
16 diary categories (reproduced in Cohn 1981: 162), and Dorrit Cohn simpli-
17 es the model into a circle with four areas (reproduced in Cohn 1981:
18 179). The trademark of level 4 visualizations is their comparative nature:
19 rather than diagramming individual stories, most of them organize for-
20 mal features instantiated by dierent narrative texts.
21 Of these four levels of analysis, the third one is the most challenging for
22 the narrative cartographer because of the complexity of the cognitive
23 pattern that we call a story, but it is also the most stimulating, because it
24 oers the greatest freedom to the visual imagination. Whereas the other
25 levels depend mostly of tables, some trees, verbal captions linked by ar-
26 rows, and abstract shapes complemented by labels, the representation of
27 plot has inspired rhizomatic networks, trees, maps, Venn diagrams (the
28 overlapping circles of set theory), iconic images, abstract shapes, and, as
29 we shall see below (gure 14), articulated visual languages. What we will
30 not nd on this level nor on any of the others are diagrams that
31 depend on quantitative information, such as pie charts, bar graphs, and
32 the plotting of variables on Cartesian coordinates. As Franco Moretti
33 (2005: 9) has argued, these diagrams are non-interpretive, while a visual-
34 ization of plot is always based on a personal reading (ideally widely
35 shared), because there is no objective way to extract plot from a narrative
36 text.3
37 There are two ways to study the visualization of narrative information:
38 Start from various types of graphs and ask: what aspects of narrative
39 can they represent? or start from a denition of narrative and ask: how
40 can its various components be visually represented? I will choose the sec-
41 ond option, relying on a denition of narrative that distinguishes three
42 dimensions:
1 1. Spatial dimension: Narrative represents a world populated with indi-

2 viduated objects and intelligent agents (the characters).
3 2. Temporal and evenemential dimension: This world must undergo not
4 fully predictable changes of state that are caused by non-habitual
5 physical events: either accidents or deliberate actions by the char-
6 acters.
7 3. Mental dimension: The characters must be emotionally aected by
8 the physical events, and their actions must be motivated by goals
9 and plans.
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Except for the spatial conguration of storyworlds, which can be repre-
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sented as an autonomous domain, these dimensions of narrative cannot
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be isolated from each other. My divisions will therefore be relative: some
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of my spatial diagrams will show time-consuming processes, my temporal
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diagrams will be lled with events that take place in space, physical
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events will be linked to mental states, and my diagrams of mental activity
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will involve a temporal dimension. Needless to say, I can do no more in
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the scope of this article than discuss a limited sample of the diagrams that
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have been proposed for each of the three dimensions. My criteria of selec-
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tion will be two: (1) give the reader a general idea of the problems in-
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volved in diagramming stories; and (2) present diagrams that deal with
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what I regard as the most fundamental features of narrative diagrams
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that expose the cogs of the narrative machine.
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25 3. Diagramming space
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27 A story is an action that situates characters and their private worlds in the
28 concrete four dimensions of space and time. The main diculty that faces
29 the designer of narrative diagrams is consequently the reduction of these
30 multiple dimensionalities to the at area of the page. The spatial congu-
31 ration of the storyworld is the easiest aspect of narrative to represent vi-
32 sually, since there is a natural isomorphism between the space of the page
33 and the space of a world, and since only one axis (generally the vertical)
34 needs to be sacriced. A diagram of narrative space is simply a geograph-
35 ical map of the storyworld, and it can rely on all the techniques developed
36 for real-world cartography.
37 Literary narratives are frequently accompanied by maps of the setting
38 drawn according to the specications of the author. These maps facilitate
39 immersion, by allowing readers to follow the movements of characters
40 and to visualize their surroundings. When narratives come without a
41 map, a global view of the geography of the storyworld must be gradually
42 reconstructed out of textual information that describes this world one
20 M.-L. Ryan
1 object and one region at a time, leaving the spatial relations between
2 landmarks frequently indeterminate. Diagrams of ctional space are usu-
3 ally overspecic when compared to the mental maps spontaneously con-
4 structed by readers, because they must situate every object precisely on
5 the page, while the mind of the reader will often be satised with oating
6 locations and partial visualizations that do not necessarily cohere into a
7 whole.
8 In contrast to the other types of diagrams discussed in this article, maps
9 of ctional worlds are not attempts to capture how narrative works
10 what I call above level 3(a) but interpretations of particular texts (level
11 3b). They are drawn not only by authors and professional critics, but also
12 by ordinary readers as a means to navigate mentally the ctional world
13 and to deepen their understanding of the plot. Narrative mapping is par-
14 ticularly useful in mystery stories and fantasy narratives. In mystery sto-
15 ries, it helps readers emulate the mental activity of investigators, who
16 often draw sketches of the crime scene to solve a case, while in fantasy
17 narratives; it helps follow the adventures of characters through vast imag-
18 inary worlds. Entire atlases have been devoted to the worlds of Lord of
19 the Rings and of the online video game EverQuest.
20 A temporal dimension can be added to static maps, without losing the
21 correspondence of the two dimensions of the page with latitude and lon-
22 gitude, by representing the movement of characters through the story-
23 world. One of the most celebrated achievements in the art of narrative
24 cartography is Charles Joseph Minards map of Napoleons Russian
25 campaign of 1812, redrawn (and somewhat simplied)4 in gure 6. This
26 diagram represents the tragedy of Napoleons campaign through six vari-
27 ables: the itinerary of the Grande Armee in a two-dimensional space, the
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41 Figure 6. Charles Joseph Minards map of Napoleons Russian campaign (redrawn by

42 author)
1 direction of movement (gray for the advance toward Moscow, black for
2 the retreat), the size of the army, the rate of progression (marked through
3 dates) and the temperature for each date. Taken together, these variables
4 tell the story of an army decimated by desertion (the branch above Wilna
5 that rejoins the army on its way back) and then by the sheer length of the
6 journey. The battle of Borodino seems to have had a relatively minor ef-
7 fect on the size of the army, compared to the bitter cold that sets in dur-
8 ing the retreat from Moscow. The reunion of the stray companies with
9 the main group near Studianka temporarily boosts the strength of the
10 army, but the crossing of the Berezina represents the nal blow. Only
11 10,000 troops out of the 422,000 who started the campaign will cross the
12 Niemen again. It takes a narrative based on a steady progression through
13 space to lend itself to this type of spatio-temporal representation. En-
14 hanced maps can tell in their broad lines stories of military campaigns,
15 of patterns of migration, of the advance and control of res, and of pica-
16 resque wanderings, but they can no more represent the particular episodes
17 and the abrupt changes of state that punctuate these processes than a
18 diagram of the itinerary of the Tour de France can give an idea of the
19 drama of the race.
20 The storytelling power of maps can be greatly improved by adding tex-
21 tual annotations. Figure 7 is my simplied redrawing of a type of illustra-
22 tion frequently used in the daily press to help readers visualize stories in
23 which the conguration of space plays a decisive role in the fate of the
24 characters. The diagram, published in the Denver Post, is a step-by-step
25 reconstruction of the grisly attack of a 10-year-old boy by three pit bulls
26 (the boy survived, but lost an arm and sustained severe facial injuries). It
27 makes use of a variety of semiotic resources: an iconic image of the house
28 from an oblique and somewhat distorted perspective that combines the
29 advantages of vertical projection and horizontal view (the former cap-
30 tures spatial relations, the latter makes objects recognizable); arrows to
31 represent conventionally direction of movement; captions to identify ob-
32 jects, and a chronological listing of events that ties them to specic loca-
33 tions. This type of diagram is particularly ecient in the case of stories
34 that involve violent attacks, because it gives the reader a sense of being
35 involved in a police investigation.
36 Through the superposition of annotations and lines of demarcation
37 upon maps of storyworlds, it is also possible to diagram the symbolic
38 conguration of space, such as the division of the world of a fantasy tale
39 into zones of dangers, zones of safety, and zones of recovery, the contrast
40 in the world of a myth between profane areas and portals that give access
41 to the sacred, the organization of a realist novel into a series of concentric
42 circles leading from the village to neighboring small towns, the big city,
22 M.-L. Ryan
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26 Figure 7. Events in space: Attack of a boy by pit bulls. Redrawn by author from The Denver
27 Post, November 4, 2005
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29 foreign countries, and lands of emigration beyond the sea, or even the
30 geometric gures traced by the locations of important events, such as the
31 double equilateral triangle outlined by the murders in Borges Death and
32 the Compass. In all these examples, narrative cartography needs to be
33 supplemented with narrative topology.
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36 4. Diagramming time
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38 If space is a container for objects, time, as Drucker and Nowviskie (n.d.)

39 observe, is a container for events. Since time is linear, its diagramming
40 will take up only one of the two dimensions of the page, leaving the other
41 dimension free to represent something else, or simply to provide room for
42 the verbal description of the states and events listed on the timeline.
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10 Figure 8. Order of story versus order of discourse

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20 Figure 9. Order of story versus order of discourse. Adapted from Mamber (2005: 153)
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22 The simplest way to represent narrative chronology is to assign a spot

23 on the timeline to each event. This makes the other axis of the page avail-
24 able for comparing the order of events in the storyworld with the order of
25 their presentation by narrative discourse, as shown in gure 8. But when
26 the disruptions of chronology are extensive, this leads to unreadable spa-
27 ghetti logic. Stephen Mamber (2003) has come up with a more elegant
28 design in which the horizontal dimension represents chronology in the
29 storyworld and the vertical dimension the order of presentation (gure
30 9). This diagram makes it much easier for the eye to see the deviations
31 from chronological order which would follow the diagonal and to
32 measure the extent of the jumps forward or backward in time. When used
33 to plan a lm, the design enables the scriptwriter to try various possibil-
34 ities of presentation, by moving events up and down on the grid, without
35 altering their horizontal relations.
36 A serious weakness of gures 8 and 9 is that they presuppose more or
37 less punctual events that follow each other in a determinate order. But
38 there are many exceptions to this situation. As Herman (2002: ch. 6) has
39 noted, narrative may involve radically free-oating events, such as dream
40 sequences (a feature particularly prominent in lm). On a model like g-
41 ure 9, dream sequences could be assigned to a special column that situates
42 them outside storyworld chronology, but inside the order of presentation.
24 M.-L. Ryan
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12 Figure 10. Order of relatively free-oating events in The Hare and the Tortoise. Adapted
13 from Scharfe (2005: 153)
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15 Narratives, especially those with parallel plot lines, may also present rela-
16 tively free-oating events, this is to say, events that can occur any time
17 during a specic interval.5 In a storyworld ( just as in the real world, ac-
18 cording to Einsteins theory of relativity), there is no absolute clock that
19 times events occurring in dierent locations and tells us when they hap-
20 pen relatively to each other. Henrik Scharfe (2005) notices for instance
21 that in the fable of The Hare and the Tortoise, after the two protago-
22 nists begin the race, the story splits into two branches, and we do not
23 know whether the hare wakes up from his nap and starts running (again?)
24 before or after the tortoise crosses the nish line. To deal with this situa-
25 tion, Scharfe proposes a diagram (gure 10) that situates temporally inde-
26 terminate events within a shaded area that represents the interval during
27 which these events can take place.
28 In Scharfes diagram, the vertical axis is used to represent the lifelines
29 of dierent characters. This renders the design unable to show the entan-
30 glement of destinies that turns individual biographies into a unied plot.
31 Figure 11 is my attempt to remedy this situation by showing the manage-
32 ment of multiple strands in a narrative with a large cast of characters and
33 a massively parallel action, such as a soap opera. In this diagram, the
34 horizontal axis stands for time and the vertical axis stands for a collection
35 of discrete spatial locations. Dierent types of lines represent the destinies
36 of dierent characters, circles represent events, and the lines that run into
37 each circle show which characters participate in the event. A circle tra-
38 versed by one line denotes an action with only one participant, a circle
39 with two lines involves an agent and a patient, and a circle with many
40 lines (a relatively rare case) involves either characters acting as a group,
41 or some observers in addition to the direct participants. The strength of
42 this diagram lies in its ability to show who is where at every temporal
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Figure 11. Multiple plot lines (Ryan 2003: 357)
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19 juncture, since characters must be in the same locations to participate in

20 the same event. (In the age of telecommunications it would be necessary
21 to develop a special symbolism to represent actions whose participants do
22 not share spatial coordinates: for instance a vertical line connecting two
23 superposed circles.) But when we try to increase the expressivity of a dia-
24 gram in one area, we often lose in another. Compared to gure 9, gure
25 10 is overspecic with respect to the relative timing of events on dierent
26 plot lines, and compared to gures 6 and 7, it is unable to represent with
27 any precision the itineraries of characters, since it reduces space to a sin-
28 gle dimension.
29 All of the diagrams of narrative time proposed so far are drawn from
30 the point of view of an external observer for whom everyone of the events
31 of the storyworld is in the book of history. Whether or not they can be
32 determined, the temporal relations between events cannot be changed.
33 This mode of representation correspond to a notation that logicians, fol-
34 lowing J. E. McTaggart (1908), call the B-series (Scharfe 2005: 52). Based
35 on the operators before and after, the B-series constitutes a stable chro-
36 nology. Logicians contrast it with another system of notation, known as
37 the A-series, which is based on the relative predicates past, present, and
38 future. Since what was once future eventually becomes present, and then
39 sinks into the past, the attachment of A-predicates to certain events re-
40 ects the transitory nature of time. Whereas the B-series represents an
41 objective but external clock time, the A-series captures a lived experience
42 of being-in-time.
26 M.-L. Ryan
1 As Scharfe suggests, a diagram of the A-series provides an ecient

2 model of what I have called in Ryan (1991) virtual embedded narratives;
3 this is to say, the characters mental representations of the past, present
4 and possible futures of the storyworld. I call these private constructs nar-
5 ratives because they present the same logical structure as the narrative
6 that embeds them; and I call them virtual (although some of them are ac-
7 curate representations of facts) to stress their status as mental representa-
8 tions, and also to distinguish them from the standard kind of embedded
9 narratives the stories actually told by characters. Mental representa-
10 tions play an essential role in motivating the actions of characters, and
11 their inclusion in a diagram would consequently bridge the gap between
12 the temporal and the mental dimension of narrative. But since a printed
13 image is static, it would take a whole series of distinct diagrams to cap-
14 ture the continuous updating of embedded narratives that takes place in
15 the course of a story, as well as their variable relations to the actual facts
16 of the storyworld.
17 Figure 12 is an attempt to model one moment in this evolution. It
18 presents time as a double tree with branches that reach toward both the
19 past and the future. But the ontological status of the two trees is not
20 equivalent. Philosophers generally agree that time splits toward the
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42 Figure 12. Temporal branching
1 future, because the future is open to all possibilities, but it cannot split
2 toward the past, because the past cannot be changed. If time allowed
3 backward branching, this would mean that a given individual would
4 have several dierent personal histories, and mutually incompatible prop-
5 ositions would both be true: for instance, John was murdered by Paul
6 and John died of old age. But from an epistemological point of view,
7 the past does indeed encompass multiple possibilities. A detective investi-
8 gating a murder contemplates for instance numerous scenarios, and until
9 one of these scenarios is veried, they all constitute possible pasts. The
10 ontological dierence between forward and backward branching is that
11 all forward branches are actualizable from the point of view of the pres-
12 ent, while from the same point of view, one branch of the past is always
13 already actual, and the others non-actual, whether or not one knows
14 which one corresponds to facts.
15 In gure 12, the observer stands at the moment labeled t3. The forward
16 branches 4, 5, 6 and their subbranches represent the future possibilities
17 that the observer contemplates from t3. One of them may correspond to
18 the future he wants to actualize, the others to the developments he wants
19 to prevent. He may have an active plan to actualize his favorite branch,
20 or he may be just passively wishing. The backward branches are possible
21 interpretations of the past; for instance, the branches that converge at t1
22 may be competing solutions of a murder that occurred at t1. But as the
23 detective pursues his investigation, some of these possibilities are elimi-
24 nated: while at t1 three branches were open (1, 2, and 3), at t2 only 2
25 and 3 remain viable, and at t3 the case has been solved and only branch
26 3 remains: the observer at t3 has now a clear grasp of the past. As time
27 moves forward, turning the future into the present and the present into
28 the past, the forward-pointing branches become either actual history or
29 counterfactual events. From the point of view of t1, branch 7 was a viable
30 possibility, just as 4, 5, and 6 are from the point of view of t3. But from
31 the point of view of t3, 7 has missed its chance of actualization, and it has
32 become forever a counterfactual sequence. When the present moves along
33 one of the forward branches say branch 5 it will be the turn of 4
34 and 6 to pass into the realm of the counterfactual. But these changes in
35 ontological status (from possible past to discarded or veried past, and
36 from open possibility to counterfactuality) cannot be shown on a static
37 diagram. All we get in gure 12 is the retrospective view of the past of
38 the observer at t3 (for he hasnt forgotten his discarded possible solutions
39 of the murder case), and his prospective view of the future.
40 In the age of digital technology, there is no reason to be held back
41 by the limitations of the printed page. Johanna Drucker and Bethany
42 Nowviskie (n.d.) have developed a computerized modeling system for
28 M.-L. Ryan
1 temporal relations that updates the display as the reader moves back and
2 forth between events. The system invites the user to create models of his-
3 torical or ctional narratives by arranging information along a variable
4 number of parallel timelines. In the authors model of the Salem witch
5 trial, for instance, the various timelines correspond to the unfolding of
6 the trials, to the frequency of sermons against witchcraft, and to the lunar
7 circles (that supposedly inspire witches), but separate timelines could also
8 be used to represent the fates of individual characters, as does gure 10.
9 Insofar as they show events in a rigid chronological order, these timelines
10 correspond to the B-series described above. But the subjective dimension
11 of the A-series is injected into the system through an interactive device
12 that the authors call the nowslider. This term designates a visual marker
13 that the user can move along the horizontal dimension of the screen by
14 holding down the mouse button. As Drucker and Nowviskie describe the
15 process, Nowsliding is the subjective positioning of the self along a tem-
16 poral axis and in relations to the points, events, intervals, and inections
17 through which we classify experience and make time meaningful. When
18 the nowslider passes over a certain area on a timeline, another timeline
19 appears that shows how the characters in the story apprehend the future
20 and the past at this particular moment. The color-coding of the prospec-
21 tive and retrospective sequences expresses the characters emotional atti-
22 tudes toward these embedded narratives, such as fear and hope for beliefs
23 about the future, and regret or satisfaction for beliefs about the past.
24 The accuracy of the characters anticipations and memories can be as-
25 sessed by comparing them with the events of the objective historical se-
26 quence. Moreover, by moving the slider along a timeline, the reader can
27 determine how long a certain vision of the past or the future is held in
28 the mind of a character, and what events cause a change in these private
29 narratives.
30 In the current state of development of Drucker and Nowviskies sys-
31 tem, nowsliding seems to reveal only two personal narratives for each
32 character: beliefs about the future, and beliefs about the past. But by
33 diversifying the narratives about the past, the system could show the mul-
34 tiple conicting interpretations contemplated by the same character, as
35 does gure 12, and by coloring them dierently when the slider moves
36 along the timeline, it could show the passage of a given narrative from
37 hypothesis to either rm knowledge or discarded belief. A similar diversi-
38 cation among the prospective narratives would enable the system to rep-
39 resent the mental model of action proposed by the philosopher G. H. von
40 Wright (1967). For each character contemplating action, the nowslider
41 would reveal how the character envisions the development of the world
42 if he does not take action, as well as the plan through which he hopes to
1 block this development. As the plan is implemented, its various steps

2 would be subtracted from the characters projected actions, and added to
3 his narrative of the historical events. But this suggestion already belongs
4 to my next topic.
5
7
5. Diagramming mind
8
9
If the subject matter of narrative had to be captured in one formula, I
10
would describe it as the evolution of a network of interpersonal rela-
11
tions.6 What determines these relations are the mental states of the partic-
12
ipants, and what makes them evolve, primarily, are intent-driven actions,
13
such as pleasing, annoying, promising, forbidding, violating interdictions,
14
punishing, rewarding, betraying, forming alliances, helping, deceiving,
15
and taking revenge. It is imperative to diagram these basic building
16
blocks of narrative, if we are to develop visual models of the dynamics
17
of plot. But since physical actions are driven by emotions, goals and
18
plans, they are themselves manifestations of the mind in action, to use
19
Alan Palmers (2004) felicitous expression. An analysis of action is there-
20
fore inseparable from an analysis of its mental underpinning.
21
The force that inspires action, and that drives narrative forward, is the
22
desire to solve problems. Before there is action, there are minds that expe-
23
rience conict. Figure 13 proposes a model of conict inspired by Possible
24
Worlds theory. The foundation of the theory is the idea that reality the
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41 Figure 13. Narrative conict as relations between private worlds; Left: intial stage of a
42 story; right: nal stage
30 M.-L. Ryan
1 sum of the imaginable is a universe composed of a plurality of distinct

2 worlds. At the center of this universe lies a world commonly known as
3 the actual world, and the periphery is occupied by worlds that are possi-
4 ble but not actual. The distinction between the actual and the non-actual
5 can be conceived in terms of the autonomy of their existence: while the
6 actual world exists absolutely, the merely possible ones are the products
7 of mental activity. If we adapt this model to narrative, the actual world
8 will be formed by the events reliably narrated as fact and the possible
9 worlds by the mental constructs of characters, such as their beliefs (K-
10 world), wishes (W-world), obligations (O-world), and goals and plans
11 (GP) (Ryan 1991). Whenever a proposition receives a dierent value in
12 two worlds, these worlds fall in a state of conict. In this model, the for-
13 ward movement of plot can be described as the attempt by characters to
14 eliminate conict by bringing all their worlds in harmony with the actual
15 world, as well as in harmony with each other.
16 Figure 13 represents the initial and the nal state in the story of a love
17 triangle. Lets imagine that John and Dorothy are a married couple, and
18 Amanda has her eyes on John. At the end of the story, she has succeeded
19 in seducing John, and Dorothy has learned about the aair. In this dia-
20 gram, compatibility between worlds is represented by their distance from
21 each other: a private world is in harmony with the actual world when it is
22 entirely contained in it and in conict when the overlap is either partial or
23 non-existent. At the beginning of the story, Amandas desires are unful-
24 lled, and she has an active goal and plan to satisfy them. Johns mar-
25 riage is a good one, not a great one, and he is hoping for a more exciting
26 sex life, but so far he has always been faithful to Dorothy, and his O-
27 world is satised. Dorothy knows nothing about what is brewing between
28 John and Amanda, and her Kworld conicts with reality, but she is not
29 aware of it: since characters hold their beliefs to be true, they can only be
30 learn about their own epistemological conicts when these conicts are
31 over. At the end of the story, Amanda has fullled her desires, and she
32 does not care about moral obligations. John has been unfaithful, but his
33 sex life has improved, though he wishes he did not have to be involved
34 with two women. As for Dorothy, she has learned about the liaison,
35 which alienates her W-world from reality, but she has maintained her
36 moral standards. Since this is the end of the story, nobody has an active
37 goal and plan. This diagram locates conict on three distinct levels: in-
38 compatibility between a private world and the actual world; incompatibil-
39 ity between the private worlds of dierent characters (the fulllment of
40 Amandas wishes causes Dorothy to be unhappy); and incompatibility
41 between two private worlds (as John wishes for better sex are satised,
42 his marital obligations become unfullled).
1 Figure 13 focuses on the movement of private worlds within the global

2 narrative universe, but it tells us nothing about the events that cause these
3 movements. A diagramming system developed by AI researcher Wendy
4 Lehnert (1981) lls this void by analyzing the basic types of actions (or
5 plot units, as she calls them) that tie together the lives of characters and
6 aect their relations.7 The system can be considered an articulated lan-
7 guage because it consists of discrete symbols linked by semantic rules to
8 specic meanings, and because these symbols can be combined according
9 to syntactic rules into larger congurations whose meaning exceeds the
10 sum of their parts. But it diers from a formal language (such as Todor-
11 ovs) through its use of space as meaningful element: the vertical axis
12 stands for time, through an analog mapping, while the horizontal axis is
13 divided into a right and a left area that stand for the private domains of
14 two participants. Listed below are the basic units of the system and the
15 restrictions on their combination:
16
, -: states that please or displease. More particularly, success and fail-
17
ure of actions.
18
G: intent, goal formed by character. (Embedded Gs mean subgoals.)
19
arc labeled m (leading into G symbol): situation motivates goal G.
20
arc labeled a (leading out of G symbol): character takes action to fulll
21
goal G.
22
arc labeled t: mental state terminates a previous mental state.8
23
diagonal arc: emotional state of a character causes emotional state of
24
another character.
25
26 With this basic vocabulary, the system is able to represent a number of

27 primitive plot units (gure 14, 14), which can be combined into a variety
28 of scenarios involving one participants (57). These representations are
29 not arbitrary codings but semantic analyses of the linguistic expression
30 that labels the unit; for instance, the coding for intentional problem reso-
31 lution tells us that a character experiences an unpleasant situation; forms
32 the goal to eliminate it; takes action to fulll this goal; and reacts posi-
33 tively to the outcome of the action. The use of the diagonal arc describes
34 interpersonal relations (middle row). Motivation tells us for instance
35 that a bad situation for a character leads to the formation of a goal by
36 another. Complex plot units, shown on bottom row, involve both single-
37 participant plot units and interpersonal relations. The diagram for the
38 plot unit revenge, in which we recognize the more primitive congura-
39 tions of mixed event, motivation, success, and another mixed event, codes
40 the same story as the example of Todorovs formal language presented
41 above, but the two models dier in what they leave implicit and explicit:
42 you must guess the emotional reactions of characters from Todorovs
32 M.-L. Ryan
7
8
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
Figure 14. Plot units; selected from Lehnert (1981)
23
24
25 coding, and you must guess the dierence between merely anticipated and
26 realized situations in Lehnerts model.
27 By allowing plot units to share constituents (for instance the same sign
28 can form both the end of a unit from the point of view of character A and
29 the beginning of another unit from the point of view of B), Lehnerts sys-
30 tem is able to code narratives of virtually endless length and complexity.
31 It could be objected that the left-right opposition limits the systems rep-
32 resentational power to events with two participants, while there is no lim-
33 its to the number of characters in a story; but I do not see this as a prob-
34 lem, for I doubt that narratively meaningful events can involve more than
35 two parties. (Similarly, the verbs of a language hardly ever involve more
36 than two animate arguments.) Additional participants are either individ-
37 uals acting as a group, passive observers of the action who gain only
38 knowledge from it, or individuals aected by accident (As bullet meant
39 for B kills C instead). To render Lehnerts system capable of dealing
40 with a large cast of characters, all one needs to do is divide the story
41 into a series of one-on-one transactions, and to vary the names of the
42 characters in the two columns.
1 Given the economy of its basic vocabulary, Lehnerts system is able

2 to code a remarkably large number of the kind of events that bear the
3 weight of narrative interest. Figure 14 presents only a sample of the ex-
4 pressive power of the system; other diagrammable situations include, in
5 the one-person domain, fortuitous problem resolution, success born of
6 adversity, sacrice, killing two birds with one stone, and in the two per-
7 son domain, eective coercion, obligation, unsolicited help, and double-
8 crossing. But the coding of these various units is not equally satisfactory.
9 Rather than providing a valid semantic analysis of the unit under consid-
10 eration, some of the diagrams seem ambiguous or poorly motivated. The
11 conguration for mixed event tells us, for instance, that the event is
12 valued dierently by two characters, but it does not tell whether this dis-
13 crepancy is due to incompatible desires (two characters coveting the same
14 object), negative side-eects (a character solves his problem but inadver-
15 tently aggravates the situation of another), or pure malice (the goal of the
16 rst character is to annoy the second). Plot units containing this congu-
17 ration do not consequently provide a precise explanation of the contradic-
18 tory reactions. Another weak point of the system is its failure to clearly
19 distinguish factual events from events contemplated by the characters
20 but never actualized. The only clue to the virtuality of an event is an ar-
21 row leading from a goal to a state labeled -: we can infer in this case that
22 the goal has not been fullled. It would take a more detailed representa-
23 tion of the thoughts of characters to code deceptive intents, or to diagram
24 events such as mistake, discovery, recognition, violations of interdictions,
25 and the transmission of information. It would also be necessary to include
26 accidental events, in addition to intent-driven actions, to achieve a rea-
27 sonably comprehensive representation of plot.
28 In gure 15, I try to increase the expressive power of Lehnerts system
29 by making more explicit the relations between actual states and events,
30 and mental representations. The central column of the diagram holds the
31 facts of the actual world of the narrative universe, while the left and right
32 column stand for the private domains of characters. As in gure 13, this
33 mental space is divided into a number of dierent registers holding, re-
34 spectively, knowledge (which can be accurate or inaccurate), active goals
35 and active plans. (A register containing obligations, or moral debts and
36 credits could easily be added to the diagram.) Chronological sequence is
37 indicated by the dark line in the middle column, and relations of material
38 causality and enablement by letters between the boxes. As was the case in
39 12, the labels and show the aective value of a state or event for a
40 character. The impact of factual events on the characters minds, and
41 vice versa, the impact of mental events on physical events are shown
42 by labeled arrows: R (reaction) represents the cognitive acts by which
34 M.-L. Ryan
7
8
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25 Figure 15. Interplay of mental and physical events in The Fox and the Crow; redrawn from
26 Ryan (1991: 223)
27
28 characters register physical events and form new goals on the basis of this
29 knowledge; M (motivation) leads from goals to plans and from plans to
30 action; F indicates the fulllment of a goal, and T stands for the termina-
31 tion of a mental state, which can be either a belief or a goal.
32 From the diagram of The Fox and the Crow shown in gure 15, we
33 can tell that the fox and the crow have incompatible goals, that the plan
34 of the fox succeeds, and that the plan of the crow fails. But a representa-
35 tion of the fable in Lehnerts model would also lead to these conclusions;
36 what Lehnerts model cannot show, is the fox deceptive intent. The dif-
37 ference in expressive power between the two diagrams lies in the potential
38 recursivity of gure 15. The boxes that represent the mental life of the
39 characters can be lled with either individual propositions (Fox wants
40 to have the cheese) or with embedded narratives represented through
41 the same formalism as the story as a whole. The plan of the fox, for
42 instance, consists of the entire area contained within the box. We can
1 see from this plan that the fox cannot perform all the physical actions
2 that will enable him to take possession of the cheese. He needs the crow
3 to open his beak, and in order to persuade the crow to do so, he needs to
4 implant certain beliefs, a certain goal and a certain plan in the mind of
5 the crow. Not only that he also needs to implant in the crow certain
6 beliefs concerning his own goal and plan. In other words, the intent of
7 the fox species not only what the crow should think after the fox atters
8 him, but also, in a double mirroring, how the crow should imagine the in-
9 tent and beliefs of the fox. By comparing the foxs actual beliefs, goal and
10 plan, with the beliefs, goal and plan that he wants to induce in the crow,
11 we can tell whether the fox acts honestly or deceptively, while by compar-
12 ing the beliefs actually formed by the crow with these beliefs as scripted
13 by the fox, we can tell whether or not the fox is successful in his actions.
14 But these embedded narratives are too elaborate to represent in the nodes
15 devoted to beliefs and plans: it would take separate diagrams to show
16 the recursivity of mental processes without damaging the legibility of the
17 main diagram.
18 Figure 16 is my attempt to complement gure 15 by depicting the mir-
19 roring of thoughts that forms an integral part of plotting and planning.
20 Situation 1 shows an ordinary plan that the agent x can fulll all by
21 himself. On the basis of his beliefs, he forms a plan, which consists of a
22 series of actions. (The exact content of this plan is left open.) In 2, x
23 decides that he needs some help from y, and he believes that y is well
24 disposed toward him. Xs plan consists of disclosing his own beliefs and
25 plan to y, in the hope of motivating y to cooperate. The similar color
26 given to xs global plan, ys anticipated reconstruction of xs plan and
27 ys anticipated own plan show that these plans are either similar or com-
28 patible. 3 represents the deceptive situation of The Fox and the Crow.
29 X (the fox) has a certain plan (getting the cheese), shown in dark gray.
30 Part of this plan is to make y, the crow, believe that the fox has another
31 plan, shown in light gray (nd out if the voice of the crow is as beautiful
32 as his feathers), and to persuade the crow to participate in this pretended
33 plan. The responses of y depend on her construction of xs intent. In 4, y
34 believes that x has honestly asked her for cooperation, and she agrees to
35 do so. Of course, ys construction of xs intent can be either accurate or
36 mistaken. If 4 is a response to 3, we have the situation of The Fox and
37 the Crow: y wants to be cooperative, but in fact, she falls victim to xs
38 scheme. In 5, y suspects deception and refuses to be fooled. Once again,
39 this will be part of dierent stories, depending on whether xs intent was 2
40 or 3.
41 Some readers may object that gures 15 and 16 are needlessly compli-
42 cated. We readily understand what the terms cooperation and deceit man;
36 M.-L. Ryan
7
8
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
Figure 16. The mental structure of planning
29
30
31 and what it means to be fooled, or to see through deception; why do we

32 need to explain such easily graspable concepts through diagrams that
33 strain our mind? Arent people able to understand stories without visual
34 help? To this I will reply that the diculty of diagramming certain aspects
35 of narrative reveals the complexity of the cognitive processes involved in
36 their comprehension. We understand intuitively that the fox wants to de-
37 ceive the crow; but it is only after trying to diagram his beliefs and expec-
38 tations that we become aware of the intricate operations that we perform
39 so eortlessly when we tell or we read the story. The purpose of diagram-
40 ming stories should not be to make the simple look simple (why the need
41 for a diagram in this case?), nor to make the simple look complicated, but
42 to expose the hidden complexity of what appears self-evident.
1 6. Conclusion
2
3 The art of diagramming is a compromise between extent of coverage and

4 legibility. A richer model does not necessarily represent an improvement
5 over a model that limits itself to one aspect of narrative, because trying to
6 show too much often results in an unmanageable clutter of information.
7 The problem of clutter is particularly acute when the medium of diagrams
8 is print, and when gures have to t on the surface of a standard book or
9 journal page. But computer technology has brought relief to this situa-
10 tion. It is now possible to create interactive diagrams that modify them-
11 selves, or replace each other in response to the users commands. Is the
12 diagram too large to t on the screen? The user could pan, scroll, or
13 zoom in and out. Does it confuse the eye with a tangle of lines? By mov-
14 ing the cursor, the user could dim certain elements and highlight others,
15 or bring dierent types of information to the screen. We have already
16 seen how representations of time can be enriched by the use of the now-
17 slider. In the spatial domain, an interactive database could start with a
18 map of the storyworld limited to geographic features. Clicking on various
19 buttons would locate the events on the map, reveal the itineraries of char-
20 acters, or overwrite the map with lines and shapes that show the symbolic
21 structure of space. In a diagram like gure 15, we could display virtual
22 embedded narratives in full detail when the user mouses over the nodes
23 containing the beliefs or plans of characters. As we follow step by step
24 the events of the factual domain, we could bring to the screen, for every
25 stage in the story, diagrams of character location, diagrams of conicts
26 between private worlds, and diagrams of interpersonal relations. The ulti-
27 mate diagram that shows everything we know about narrative is a chi-
28 mera; but we can split this knowledge into many diagrams, and by inter-
29 linking them, we can produce a dynamic simulation of narrative action.
30 In narrative semiotics, as in other elds, diagrams are not merely a tool
31 for representing knowledge, but also an important way to produce this
32 knowledge. For some narratologists, admittedly, diagrams are more illus-
33 trative than constitutive of theories. Genettes groundbreaking Figures III
34 contains for instance only three gures, and they take the conventional
35 form of the tree and the table: hardly the mark of a visual imagination.
36 But for Richard Feynman, for example, who reportedly attributed his
37 contributions in theoretical physics to his discovery (or invention) of the
38 Feynman diagram, or for Noam Chomsky, whose theory of generative
39 grammar would be unthinkable without the tree diagram, visualizations
40 are not illustrations, they are heuristic devices. Without situating myself
41 in such elite company, I can say that a large proportion of my own
42 work in narratology started out as diagrams. For instance, my personal
38 M.-L. Ryan
1 application of possible worlds theory to narrative semantics was born as a

2 visualization of narrative universes as solar systems in which the many
3 worlds created by the mental activity of characters orbit around a unique
4 actual world. I am not saying that all new ideas about narrative origi-
5 nate in diagrams. But when it possesses sucient generality and versa-
6 tility, a radically new way of diagramming narrative is the seed of a new
7 theory.
8
10 Notes
11
12 1. Here is Johansens made-up example of a story whose deep structure is described by the
13 particular values given to the square in gure 1: An incognito prince clad as a peasant
(i.e., secret being non-appearing) . . . kills a monster and cuts o his head o to free
14
the princess. The princess recognizes him as her savior, they talk, but he falls asleep
15
from his wounds. An evil knight steals the monsters head and forces the princess to fol-
16 low him to her father, the king. Although the princess protests, the king is at the point of
17 giving her to him in marriage because of the proof that he has killed the monster (i.e.,
18 lie appearing non-being). However the prince recovers and he also claims the bride.
19
Because he can show the tongue from the monsters head, his story is accepted (i.e.,
truth being appearing). The knight is executed, and the prince is accepted as son-
20
in-law, but not until it is revealed that he s not a peasant but a prince (i.e., from
21 secret being non-appearing to true identity: being appearing (Johansen 2005:
22 524525).
23 2. Publishers of scholarly works usually make a distinction between gures and tables,
24
each of which must be numbered separately. Since the so-called gures often consist of
lists, which are much less visual and hence gure-like than tables, this distinction is
25
arbitrary.
26 3. Bar graphs, pie charts, and Cartesian plottings are common in statistical studies of liter-
27 ary data, such as Franco Morettis (2005) study of the numbers and genres of novels
28 published every year in England in the nineteenth century, or David Hermans compu-
29
terized study of the occurrence of motion verbs in various types of narrative (2005).
These automatically generated diagrams must be interpreted by the researcher to yield
30
meaningful information, while the diagrams I will be discussing are themselves (hope-
31 fully) meaningful information about the type of mental representation that we call
32 narrative.
33 4. I omitted numbers representing the size of the troops at various times, since this is indi-
34
cated by the breadth of the line, but I added the location of the battle of Borodino, sus-
piciously absent from the original.
35
5. See Allen (1991) on the formal modeling of events that must happen within a specic
36 interval.
37 6. One-person narratives, such as the story of Robinson Crusoe before the arrival of Man
38 Friday, replace interpersonal relations with a relation between characters and their
environment.
39
7. See Ryan (1991: 211222), for a more detailed discussion of Lehnerts model.
40
8. The system also uses an arc labeled e, which denotes equivalence between two states. It
41 is primarily used to indicate that an action has both positive and negative consequences.
42 I leave it out of my discussion to simplify my presentation of the system.
1 References
2
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1 Diagramming narrative

14 The use of diagrams as a tool of narrative analysis is a fundamentally

29 Narrative is routinely and summarily dened as the representation

Semiotica 1651/4 (2007), 1140 00371998/07/01650011

1 All these features speak in favor of complementing the purely verbal

18 1. The semiotic status of narrative diagrams

1 interpretations, classical narratological investigations, and, on the level of

37 where X Calandrin, Y Bruno, A happy, B stupid and miserly,

1 2. Diagramming narrative: An overview

3 Narrative can be diagrammed on several levels and from countless per-

23 Figure 4. Narrative dynamics (Bremond 1970: 251)

25 (Prince 1973; Rumelhart 1975; Mandler and Johnson 1977). Bremonds

1 1. Spatial dimension: Narrative represents a world populated with indi-

41 Figure 6. Charles Joseph Minards map of Napoleons Russian campaign (redrawn by

38 If space is a container for objects, time, as Drucker and Nowviskie (n.d.)

10 Figure 8. Order of story versus order of discourse

22 The simplest way to represent narrative chronology is to assign a spot

19 juncture, since characters must be in the same locations to participate in

1 As Scharfe suggests, a diagram of the A-series provides an ecient

42 Figure 12. Temporal branching

1 block this development. As the plan is implemented, its various steps

1 sum of the imaginable is a universe composed of a plurality of distinct

1 Figure 13 focuses on the movement of private worlds within the global

26 With this basic vocabulary, the system is able to represent a number of

1 Given the economy of its basic vocabulary, Lehnerts system is able

31 and what it means to be fooled, or to see through deception; why do we

3 The art of diagramming is a compromise between extent of coverage and

1 application of possible worlds theory to narrative semantics was born as a

5 Marie-Laure Ryan (b. 1946) is an independent scholar 3marilaur@gmail.com4. Her re-

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