Rhetoric A–Z / Arrangement and style / Narratio

Narratio and Storytelling

Narratio is the part of the speech in which the speaker tells what has happened and where we stand, before the arguments take over. In a broader sense, rhetoric is about storytelling at every level: every story chooses a perspective and steers what the audience expects to happen.

From mythos to logos?

There is a common picture of the birth of democracy in Greece: the story, mythos, belonged to an earlier stage and was replaced by rational argument, logos. But the picture does not hold. Plato criticises the myths with the help of myths, as when in the Phaedrus he likens the soul to a winged team of horses, or tells of the god Theuth who invented writing. Storytelling has never left argumentation.

Narratio in the speech

In the classical arrangement, narratio comes after the introduction. It is to set the situation: where are we, and what has happened? Quintilian made three demands on a good narrative:

To these he added a fourth virtue, evidentia, in Greek enargeia: to narrate so that the listeners see the events before their eyes.

As for evidentia, as far as I have understood the matter, it is without doubt an important virtue in narrative, when a truth must not merely be stated, but must be told in such a way that it is displayed to the eye.

Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 4.2.63–64.

Aristotle on plot

In the Poetics Aristotle calls the plot, mythos, the soul of tragedy. Without plot there is no tragedy, but without characterisation there can be. The plot has a beginning, a middle and an end, and it must follow a logic, not just be a series of events. Several of his concepts are still in use:

The same structure is found in the speech. The introduction, the narration and the conclusion lead the audience from balance, through imbalance, to a new balance. But beware of reading ancient stories through the psychology of the modern novel: for Aristotle, plot comes before character.

Gorgias: the same event, another story

The sophist Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen is perhaps the best-known exercise in retelling. Helen, who left her husband for Paris and thereby started the Trojan War, was antiquity’s most maligned woman. Gorgias acquits her in four steps: if the gods or fate drove her, if she was carried off by force, if she was persuaded by words, or if she was struck by love, she bears no guilt.

The third argument is the most famous. Speech, logos, is likened to a drug, a pharmakon, which can heal but also poison the soul. In the last sentence Gorgias calls the whole speech his own plaything, paignion. What does that do to his speech? Read more about sophistics.

Burke’s pentad

In A Grammar of Motives (1945), Kenneth Burke developed a theory of the grammar of stories. Every account of why people act as they do has five elements: act (what is done?), scene (where?), agent (who?), agency (with what?) and purpose (why?). The interesting question is which element determines the others.

“The weak market forced us to make staff redundant” lets the scene determine the act. “Our leadership took bold decisions that delivered record results” lets the agent do so. It is no coincidence that CEO letters often explain good years by the agent and bad years by the scene. But in 1984 the organisation scholars Gerald Salancik and James Meindl showed that companies with unstable results often take responsibility even for their setbacks. Appearing powerless can be worse than appearing guilty.

The storytelling animal

In 1984 the communication scholar Walter Fisher argued that we evaluate arguments through the stories they are part of, rather than through formal logic. The human being is homo narrans. A story persuades if it hangs together and if it fits what the audience knows about the world and what it values.

At the same time, the story has become a tool. In 1979 Jean-François Lyotard described an age of incredulity towards the grand narratives of progress and ideology; what remained were the small, personal narratives. In Storytelling (2007) Christian Salmon showed how companies, politicians and spin doctors have learned to set the narrative. The question for every storyteller then becomes: which world is the story brought into, and which world does it help to create?

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