TU Braunschweig, Institute for Social Studies
Seminar: Film and Literature
SoSe 2002

Story-time and discourse-time in the novel and the film Beloved

by

Claudia Stehr

Table of contents

1. Introduction 3

2. The terms “story” and “discourse” 4-5

2.1 Story-time and discourse-time
2.2. Flashbacks and flash forwards

3. Summary of the plot 6-7

4. Comparison of book and film 7-10

5. Time structure of the first chapter 10-11

6. Conclusion 12

7. Bibliography 13

8. Appendix 14-17

7.1. Analysis of the Book
7.2. Film Analysis

1. Introduction

It is always very interesting how literature is adapted into the medium film. Often the results are very surprising for the viewers as the personal images one develops when reading a book do not match with the ones used in the movie. For instance the appearance of the characters, the look of the setting, the performing of the actors etc.. Questions are raised like: “Did the hero in the novel not have blond hair?” or “I thought the princess was described as the prettiest girl on earth – well, she definitely wasn’t in the film!”. People just have different tastes and anything but the same ideas. That is what makes life so various and why there can exist many different films on the very same topic. Every film adaptation of literature is a personal interpretation of the filmmakers. They have to think about ways how to translate the novel into film language, as every medium has its own characteristics.
This research paper shall summon up the peculiarities of film and fiction, especially under the aspect of time, and what changes the transformation requires. I want to point out the relation of story-time and discourse-time and with which problems the filmmakers have to deal in order to produce a film adaptation very close to the novel it is based on.. My source for the analysis will be the book “Beloved” written by Toni Morrison in 1987 and the film “Beloved” directed by Jonathan Demme in the year 1998, as in these story and discourse play an important role and are very complex.
First of all, I want to give a short definition of the terminology of discourse and story to get a good basis for the analyses of book and movie, which will be provided in the appendix. After that I will point out some important facts on “Beloved” including a short summary of the plot and the main characters. Then I will show the differences and similarities in the plot of both mediums. That is, to have an overview of the structure of film and novel, and to collect information about the translation of story-time and discourse-time. These results will support my closer approach on the first chapter of the book and the very same sequences in the film in comparing them under the aspect of time. At the end I will generalize my results in the conclusion.

2. The terms “story” and “discourse”

When dealing with narrative texts two questions are very important for the research, the question of what is told (story) and the question of how it is told (discourse). Therefore, the term ‘story’ can be defined as the content of a narrative expression which is the basis for the whole narration, and the term ‘discourse’ can be formulated as the form/ manner in which this content is shown and written. The content of a narrative refers to the events, persons, places. The manner how this content is arranged and stylistic organized demonstrates the connection of the events, the arrangement of time and place of the several parts of the action, and after the theorist Gerald Genette the narrative duration, perspective and frequency.¹
When analysing the relation between story and discourse two aspects have to be considered, firstly, the different relation between the narrated time (story-time) and the narrative time (discourse-time), and secondly, the arrangement of time in the action (= the use of flashbacks and flash forwards). These two aspects are the basis for my approach in this paper, that is why I will give a detailed description of these.

2.1.) Story-time and discourse-time

Usually, the duration to read a narration is not identical with the duration of the events told in that narration. That means, there is a great discrepancy between the discourse-time, “the time it takes to peruse the discourse” and the story-time, “the duration of the purported events of the narrative”.² These different times are only identical in scenes, for example when direct speech is used. Yet, a novel does not only consist of dialogues or monologues. A typical characteristic for fiction is the existence of a narrator who describes the settings, the action, the characters and often also their feelings and thoughts. Narrators are the ones who tell the plot of the diegetic level. They can summarize long passages or leave something out. Summaries and ellipses are very common in narrations and often used to cut out events which are unimportant for the story.³
The opposites of summary and ellipsis are stretch and pause. The reason for using these terms can be inserted descriptions, for instance to pause the narration to describe the characters, the landscape etc. or to show important moments in the life of a character in which time stands still. The alternating changes of summary and stretching, or ellipsis and pause is called rhythm which can be very characteristic for some genres, e.g. short stories are specified through summaries.⁴

2.2) flashbacks and flash forwards

[...]

1 see Beck, R.(ed.)1998: Forum Sprache: Terminologie der Literaturwissenschaft, p. 144ff

2 Chatman, Seymour 1980: Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, p.62

3 see Beck, R.(ed.)1998: Forum Sprache: Terminologie der Literaturwissenschaft p.144ff

4 see Beck, R.(ed.)1998: Forum Sprache: Terminologie der Literaturwissenschaft p.144ff