Looking through more of that stuff on narratology, I came across something by Roland Barthes which fits very nicely in with some of the concepts I have been trying to articulate, about story-systems. Of course, he does it in a more complicated way though.

He talks about there being five different codes within all narratives, by which we derive meaning from a text. The first code he calls “hermeneutic,” and he says that this is information which is a mystery to the reader, but which is revealed through the temporal progression of the story (ie, plot). Detective stories is the example they use here. Why did this thing happen? Or, what’s really going on here?

The second code discussed is proairetic. Yeah, I don’t have any fucking idea what that word means either, but this code refers to like the outcomes of actions or something like that. The example they give is wanting to know what happens next when two characters in a movie get into a gunfight. Who is the winner? What will happen next?

Those first two codes he refers to as being “readerly” because they are the two main means by which a person experiencing a narrative will be concerned with. In my anatomy of story-systems diagram, this would correspond to the “Story” itself, taken on a literal level. From here, readers may delve further into a story by asking two main questions: (1) What larger stories does this fit into? This is the context. (2) What smaller stories exist or are implied within this story? This is subtext. Context could be understood as stories which are referenced which exist outside the story you’re currently focusing on. And subtext would be stories which exist or are sketched out inside the current story. Frequently, stories contained within (subtext) may be cues or triggers which pull in the outside references (context).

Starting to look at stories from this structural viewpoint takes you away from merely being a passive reader to entering the realm of the person who is writing or telling the story. Barthe’s next three codes he considers to be “writerly” because they are more the explicit concerns of the writer of the story, rather than the reader, who may not even notice them consciously. Barthe’s writerly codes are roughly equivalent to what I mean when I say “context” & “subtext”.

The next code he talks about is semantic. This refers to things like connotations and of words. He also considered “symbolic” to be another of the writerly codes, although the site I’m looking at doesn’t sufficiently describe the difference between symbolic and semantic. If I might fill in my own explanation, I would say that this has to do with psychological potency. Where semantic might refer more towards logical left-brained thinking, perhaps symbolic could be applied more effectively to holistic right brained picture-based types of thinking. Semantic is meaning which can be expressed in words. Symbolic is meaning which is equally real, but which is ineffable.

The last code he talks about is cultural. By that, he’s referring to bodies of outside cultural knowledge which the narrative draws upon. I personally don’t see how that is especially different from the semantic code, since semantic knowledge is built by socially agreed on meanings. I’d rather just lump those two together, although maybe he had a good reason for it. I just don’t see it at this point though.

One of the coolest things he talks about though is how narratives, since they operate upon the modulation of these five codes, form a multiplicity of meaning, rather than just one single fixed meaning. He talks about how narratives consist of constellations of meaning, and how the five codes come together in a narrative in a braiding of voices. That’s pretty cool, and refers directly to the meaning of the word “text” itself, which comes from the root “texere” which means “to weave”.