Actants and Actions

In Pentland and Feldman’s Narrative Networks: Patterns of Technology and Organization, they note that actants include both human and nonhuman actors. Hence in the source text of Genesis Chapter 3, the five actants identified are:

1. Adam
2. the woman (who later in the story is named Eve)
3. God
4. the serpent
5. the apple

After identifying the actants and with reference to the source text, I visualised the relationships between actants with directional arrows and wrote down the actions/interactions that involve any two actants.

Observations on the spatio-temporal aspects of the diagram

The spatial aspect of this visualisation tells us that the serpent does not interact directly with Adam, since they sit on opposite ends of the diagram. However, we do see a connection somehow, even if it’s an indirect one.

Another interesting point to note is that there is no explicit sense of time and sequence in the diagram. Due to the presence of multiple nodes, it creates multiple points for viewers to start reading at. Hence, there is a lack of unidirectionality and sequence that is more than often experienced in traditional texts.

Narrative Fragments

When the actants and actions are combined to form narrative fragments, each fragment can be read alone and still make sense since they are functional events. In narratives however, each fragment does more than state a functional event; they answer the question: what happens next? Though the source text contains a larger amount of text, I tried to identify narrative fragments that advance the plot. This would be helpful in the next section on narrative networks since the network starts to consider sequential relationships and advancements from one fragment to the next.

Narrative network

The intended narrative discourse

For a start, I arranged the narrative fragments in the order that they appear in the source text. In narratology, this is also known as the narrative discourse. Its counterpart is the story, the order in which events actually happen in the narrative.

The generative potential of the narrative network

After laying out the fragments in their intended sequence, I drew more arrows to indicate possible sequences from one fragment to another. The fragment which describes God’s warning to Adam and Eve about the tree in the middle of the garden technically happens even before the first fragment. This is one possibility of where the fragment could lead to. It could also lead to the second to last fragment — where God sends Adam and Eve out of the garden — since they disregarded his warning and had to be punished by God. Similarly, by association, the same fragment could lead to the second fragment of the woman feeding the apple to Adam. This depicts the narrative network’s generative role in creating alternate sequences between text fragments.

Creating a new discourse from the narrative network

I chose one fragment as a starting point and zoomed into that. Using the lines that connect text fragments, I would follow one path which then leads me to the next fragment in the new discourse. Making sure I didn’t repeat any fragments, this was the discourse I got from this quick exercise:

1. God punished woman with childbearing
2. Adam called his wife Eve
3. God punished Adam with toiling the fields
4. God sent them out of the Garden of Eden
5. God warned the woman and Adam not to eat of the fruit
6. Serpent gave the apple to and tempted the woman
7. God cursed the serpent
8. Adam hid from God
9. Woman fed the apple to Adam

The outcome shows quite a key change in the narrative where the punishments given by God to the other actants occur before the act of Adam and Eve’s defiance against God.

Actants in a timeline

As an attempt to recontextualise the story, I tried imagining as if the five actants were all in the same Whatsapp group. In the chart below, the five actants are each represented in a row. Reading the chart from left to right follows the narrative discourse from the bible which has been grouped into events.

Noticing the gaps

One key observation made when creating this chart was that it has quite a lot of gaps in the actants’ timeline that are unaccounted for. What are these actors doing when they are ‘inactive’ in the chat? This is probably a shortfall of traditional linear texts — its ineffectiveness to express simultaneous and non-sequential events.

Filling in the gaps

I tried to imagine what other actants would do during an event that involved them but wasn’t actually written. For example, the serpent, Eve and Adam’s reactions when they were being punished by God were not actually written in the bible.