Metapathways

 

There are different sorts of pathways.

There is the pathway we follow physically when negotiating a landscape,

and there is the pathway our eye follows when examining a landscape, or painting of a landscape, or indeed, in any image.

This is not the pathway we follow with our physical bodies to get from a to b. It is the pathway that the eye follows in scanning the picture.

It’s not the same for any two individuals, but that does not mean there is no scanning mechanism at work,

just that it has huge flexibility. Some of its features are revealed in this section.

 

In novels too there are equivalents to these pathways.

The narrative itself – the sequence of sentences leads ones eye from line to line through the book to the end.

This is like a pathway we follow physically with our bodies through a landscape.

But there are other pathways also – which refer from one point

in the text to another, and indeed from

one text to another.

 

Barthes refers to them in his analysis of the structure of narratives.

Talking of the types of unit present in a narrative he says:

 

“the purchase of a revolver has for its correlate the moment when it will be used ..,

picking up the telephone has for correlate the moment when it will be put down;

the intrusion of the parrot into Felicite’s home has for its correlate the episode of the stuffing,

the worshipping of the parrot, etc.”

 

These units Barthes sees as being in a way on the same level within the narrative, complimentary and consequential acts, and he calls them ‘functions’.

 

But there is another group also: units which refer not to

 

“a complementary and consequential act but to a more or less diffuse concept

which is nevertheless necessary to the meaning of the story:

psychological indices concerning the characters,

data regarding their identity,

notations of “atmosphere”,

 and so on.”

 

These units do not refer to one another, but to a wider concept in the narrative,

such as fear, arrogance, wealth. They are in a sense hyponymic –

one thing referring to something else of which it is a part.

But they cross levels.

 

As Barthes says:

 

“it is .. necessary to consider the different levels of meaning:

some units have as correlates units on the same level,

while the saturation of others requires a change of levels;

hence straightaway, two major classes of functions,

distributional and integrational.”

 

(R. Barthes, Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives)

 

Functions are distributed across the text,

pointing to one another. Indices refer not to one another, but to another concept,

of which they may well be the only evidence or manifestation.

The parallel to art and landscape visualisation is clear –

this chapter, developing the Explorer Hypothesis,

refers to Barthes’ “functions”,

 while the essentic forms we saw earlier, parallel his “indices”.

The Fang, Round, Wow, and Fan refer to the qualities of different elements within a landscape or bodyscape.

They describe character.

They are what make the Arctic landscape of ‘variations on the theme of black spruce’ different

to the Tuscan ‘variations on a theme of the umbrella pine and laurel’, and

both different to the variations on a theme of the

‘spreading acacia’ of the Serengeti.

 

 

Realms, Pathways, Portals, Obstacles, Secrets, Surprises, Prospects, and Refuges

all refer to one another, on the same level.

?

We use the same mental apparatus to analyse narrative, landscapes and bodyscapes,

or at least the mental apparatus used in each case is closely related,

and presumably derived from a single source.

It is no accident that homo sapiens in comparison with the Neanderthal is both an explorer and an artist.

The two go together. They are part of the same package.

 

But Barthes does not stop here. He divides functions further,

into hinge points in the text,

major turning points in the story –

and those that just fill in the narrative space, getting one from one hinge to another.

 

These hinge points he calls ‘cardinal functions’ or ‘nuclei’.

In the Explorer Hypothesis we have been calling them Portals.

The others the fillers-in, he calls ‘catalysers’.

We have been calling these Pathways.

 

“For a function to be cardinal,

it is enough that the action to which it refers open (or continue, or close)

an alternative that is of direct consequence

for the subsequent development of the story,

in short that it inaugurate or conclude an uncertainty.

If, in a fragment of narrative, the telephone rings,

it is equally possible to answer or not answer,

two acts which will unfailingly carry the narrative along different paths.”

(Ibid)

 

In the terminology of the explorer, then, cardinal functions are like Forks

(where one path suddenly becomes two)

or Portals (where we move into a whole new realm of possibilities)

or Obstacles, where one path is blocked.

And of course, all these alternatives exist in literature too.

Barthes makes an interesting point

about these functions.

 

“At first sight, such functions may appear extremely insignificant;

what defines them is not their spectacularity…,

but .. the risk they entail: cardinal functions are the risky moments of a narrative.

Between these points of alternative, these .. catalyzers lay out areas of safety, rests, luxuries.

Luxuries which are not, however, useless… the catalyzer ceaselessly revives the semantic tension of the discourse,

says ceaselessly that there has been, that there is going to be,

meaning.”

 

Exactly.