Wolf Shmid on "Eventfulness"

     It has come to my attention that the scholar Wolf Shmid is one of the world's leading voices in the field of Narratology. This was totally unbeknown to me on April 24, the day he was to give his talk. Strangely enough, however, I was also invited to have lunch with him earlier on the same day. 

     Lunch rolled along awkwardly. A taciturn man, in my opinion, should not expose himself to these type of contrived situations. Ten of us sat around him expectantly, unsure of what to do, as Wolf looked down and calculatedly considered the spoon's trajectory from the plate to his mouth, plate to his mouth. 

     The day was sultry, and thin wisps of steam rose from the soup. Dark rings appeared under Wolf's armpits. Nervous twitches sporadically shook the table. I felt the food fall all the way down to my stomach, and could hear distinct crunching and slurping sounds around me. Good God, I thought to myself, am I the one destined to save us from this awful muck? I looked around, and confirmed it. Just as I cleared my throat, the man beside me spoke out.

     -"Hi there, Mr. Shmid, I was wondering if you had any advice for neophyte graduate students?" 

     It was too late to save now. The worst question that could have possibly been asked had been put forth as an ice-breaker. The frozen faces turning toward Wolf knew it was up to him now. 

    Wolf looked up from his soup at the man with a quizzical expression, and with a slight smirk, said "No." Honest and taciturn are a bad combination. 

    In any case, the lunch proved entertaining in the end, seeing all those students try to squirm their way out of the mire with meaningless questions. Wolf glided through it impervious to any nonsense, quietly self-assured throughout. I took a liking to him. 

    Hours later, Wolf sat at a long, wooden desk, before a group of 20 people, consisting of the ten students at the lunch, and ten members of the Slavic Department, all crammed in a tiny room.  

    The talk was about "Eventfulness," a category that was first introduced into the narratological discussion by the Russian theorist Jurij Lotman. Essentially, Wolf defined it as an important narrative phenomenon and a major narratological tool applicable to all media representing changes of state. Eventfulness gained the upper hand only with the prose of sentimentalism and romanticism around 1800. The event was increasingly modelled as a change in the internal, mental state of a character. 

    This development culminated in the novels by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, in which, of course, a varied abundance of event concepts are deployed. While the novels of the two realists show people who have the capacity to undergo fundamental transformations and transcend the boundaries of morality and the logic of personality, Wolf compared these to Chekhov’s post-realist narratives, which place a major question mark over the eventfulness of the world and the ability of people to change. 

    Chekhov’s narration is centered on interrogating the idea of a mental event, an existential or social insight, an emotional switch, or an ethical/practical reorientation. If an event does not occur, the tellability of the stories lies in how they represent its prevention, in how they illustrate the reasons that lead to the intention of change and prevent it from being realized.

     It was a dense lecture and a complex array of ideas to digest. It was excessively dogmatic, and one of my conclusions toward the end was how much more productive the approach we took in class was. It seems practical to be aware and informed about these theoretical concepts, but the art of storytelling and narrative can never be fully boiled down to a set of rules. I left with a question: Doesn't the exercise of narrative disembowelment go against the creative, delightfully immediate impulse of literature?