Narrative theory holds that narrative is a basic human strategy for coming to terms with fundamental elements of experience, such as time and process.
In a live audiotaped performance, the British artist Tris Vonna-Michell begins telling a story at a leisurely pace, then gradually accelerates the delivery until the words turn into a coloratura stream of leaps and repeats, all the while holding the narrative thread.
The characters' lines of dialogue are spoken, most often in voice-over, holding the narrative together and pushing it ahead while allowing the images to flow in an associative freedom that makes almost all other movies look, by comparison, like the stodgiest vestiges of filmed theatre.
But I wanted to model a way of holding those narratives in your head at the same time.
The stories have such a closely held interior narrative that this idea makes sense, and the narration isn't used to explain exactly what's going on in the women's heads but rather to outline their dilemmas.
Nobody would expect to read here anything that diverged from the tightly held official narrative of events.
In moments like these, Ghosh holds the narrative in perfect suspension between the worlds of language and silence.
But with Stevie it's just such a joy because she is so articulate and it's her voice that holds the narrative for the whole two hours.
Because Sayre does not provide a thematic link, and makes scant use of her own persona to hold the narrative together, it seems as if these experiences were not being filtered through a particular mind.
The true masterpiece of these later decades, however, is Timebends, a profoundly sharp and honest memoir that plays fast and loose with conventional chronology, but holds its narrative firm by the seductively conversational tone in which it is, almost like music, often composed.
