A commentary on Narrative Platforms, Cinematic Universes, and Consumers Formerly Known as the Audience

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The NarrativeSomething has changed.Once, a hero with a small group of friends had to undertake a journey to solve a problem.Walking through unknown territories, facing the unexpected, the hero grew to be a 'man', saved himself and others, saved the world.Told in oral histories from the elder to the younger, remembered in melodies and rhymes, printed on paper, whispered into a microphone, banned on celluloid, multiplied as tapes, and then channels and files; changing names, places, times, attributes, and then gender; the hero's journey gave birth to a variety of narrative patterns.It was not the Odyssey destined to break open story structure, but rather Scheherazade and her struggle to stay alive by adding story after story, night after night, that traversed the narrative universe.She broke from the path of linearity, and in the process of her continuous creation of a world every night, the hero's journey took its essential pedagogical form in the multidimensional space of the narrative.But this is not what has changedthe 'hero's journey', that Vladimir Propp identified as a structuring form in traditional folk tales, continues to be the constitutive framework in contemporary popular narratives (Propp 2009).Once in an Istanbul coffee house, on a fabled and historic street in Beyoğlu, a storyteller had been sitting among the people on a slightly elevated seat, comfortably leaning back, raising his voice melodically, occasionally stopping and slowly inhaling deeply from his water pipe, and exhaling mesmerizing rings of smoke.Strangely, whenever somebody entered or left the place, there would be a little tic, a flick on his face, a micro second of hesitation.A careful listener would have realized that at every movement among his audience, with every new visitor, whether an older customer, a stranger or a seemingly well-known person, there was a swing in his narration, a slight change and adaption.And so, each time it was told, his had been a slightly different story.The talent of the storyteller was to keep us immersed in the world he was building with his words, adopting to the interrupting events that took place at the moment of narrating, incorporating them into the temporality of the story.Of course, the storyteller in the Turkish coffeehouse is an image; it is a projection of an ideal of storytellinga metanarrative device, constructed most powerfully in Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red (Pamuk 2001).Yet, this crystalized image of the storyteller appears through the condensation of the social functions of narratives.