SOURCE: Schultz, James A. “Why Does Mark Marry Isolde? And Why Do We Care? An Essay on Narrative Motivation.” Deutsche Vierteljahrs Schrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 61, no. 2 (June 1987): 206-22.

[In the following essay, Schultz studies the differing forms of narrative motivation employed by Eilhart and Gottfried in their versions of the Tristan legend.]

Although narrative motivation has only recently become a theoretical concern of literary scholars, it has always been a practical concern of storytellers, for anyone who tells a story must give some attention to the causal connections that join the events being recounted. It is not surprising then that storytellers who are inclined to reflect on their own activity will occasionally offer us their thoughts on the subject nor that Gottfried von Straßburg, surely one of the most self-conscious of medieval vernacular writers, should introduce such reflections into his Tristan. These reflections are formulated as an attack on another “Tristan” with which he assumes his audience is familiar and which closely resembles the somewhat earlier Tristrant of Eilhart von Oberg. At issue is the motivation of a crucial event in the story, Mark's marriage to Isolde.

Eilhart and Gottfried begin their accounts of Mark's marriage from the same premise: Mark has made his nephew, Tristan, his heir and has vowed to remain single; but the members of Mark's family and court, consumed by fear and envy of the young hero, begin to exert strong pressure on the king to go back on his word and take a wife. In both accounts Mark responds to this pressure with a ruse by which he thinks he can outwit his courtiers and keep his promise to Tristan. According to Eilhart, just when Mark has promised to respond to the courtiers, two swallows fly in the window and drop a strand of hair in front of him; Mark picks up the hair and swears that he will only marry the woman to whom it belongs—assuming, along with his courtiers, that she will never be found (ETr 1370-95, 1424-25).¹ According to Gottfried, Mark recalls the hatred that the king of Ireland bears him and vows that he will only marry the king's daughter, Isolde—assuming, quite reasonably, that the king's hatred will thwart any proposed marriage (GTr 8478-88, 8517-22).² Yet in both cases Mark's assumptions are mistaken, and the ruse by which he hoped to preclude marriage becomes instead a promise to marry Isolde. For Tristan accepts the challenge implied in the ruse, sets out, and returns with Isolde, the specified bride.

It is just as Tristan sets sail for Ireland that Gottfried's narrator interrupts his account of the story to attack that other “Tristan” for the ways in which its motivation differs from his own. Who ever heard of a Cornish swallow flying to Ireland for nesting materials? he asks (GTr 8601-13). And what king would be so foolish as to send the members of his council off in search for the source of a strand of hair? (GTr 8616-28). A story that depends on such reasons is talking nonsense (GTr 8614-15). Gottfried's narrator attacks such motivation because he finds it unrealistic (swallows don't behave that way and neither do kings) and because, he feels, such implausible motivation makes a story incoherent (it talks nonsense). In making these objections he raises two important issues regarding narrative motivation: first, the relation of narrative motivation to everyday standards of probability, and, second, the relation of narrative motivation to narrative coherence.

Of course the word “motivation” is not part of Gottfried's vocabulary but of ours. It was introduced into critical discourse by the Russian formalists and taken up later by the French structuralists.³ Since then it has been considered, usually more or less in passing, by a number of writers on narrative;⁴ but, as anyone who studies the literature will see at once, those who use the term have very different ideas of what it means. Before turning to the issues raised by Gottfried's polemic, therefore, it will be necessary to consider briefly the various kinds of narrative motivation. Then it will be possible to consider the questions raised by Gottfried's narrator concerning the relation between motivation and coherence, both within texts and beyond. First, in other words, I will consider the kinds of answers that can be given to the question, Why does Mark marry Isolde? Then I will turn to the more general question, Why do we care?

As seems almost obligatory in such matters, I begin with Propp, who states quite clearly: “by motivations are meant both the reasons and the aims of personages which cause them to commit various acts.”⁵ Motivations, according to Propp, are what cause personages to commit acts. If one attends to Propp's examples, however, it becomes clear that acts can be motivated not only by an actor's reasons and aims, but also by that actor's nature—by the “greedy, evil, envious, suspicious character of the villain,” for instance (p. 76). Later we learn that various props and other external stimuli can also function as motivations: a feather, a portrait, another actor, and so forth (pp. 76-77). The kinds of motivation mentioned by Propp are all constituent parts of the story itself: the aims of the personages are stated, the nature of the villain is specified, the appearance of the feather is noted. Because such motivational elements are actually part of the story, I will refer to this type of motivation as story motivation.

Story motivation is the most obvious sort of narrative motivation, and examples are correspondingly easy to find. The arrival of the strand of Isolde's hair, for instance, a motivational device to which Propp himself refers (p. 78n1), is explicitly written into Eilhart's plot: after the swallows flew into the hall and began to fight, “do empfiel in ain hăr” (ETr 1385). The consequences are also made explicit in the text: after the strand of hair fell to the floor, “deß wart der herr gewar … do nam der kúng den gedanck … ‘hie mit will ich weren mich’” (ETr 1383-92). Both the agents and the causal relations they engender are demonstrably part of the story: one can cite the words of the text by way of illustration, as I have just done. Thus story motivation not only motivates the story, it constitutes the story at the same time.

Story motivation not only constitutes that stretch of the story where it occurs; it also contributes to the constitution of a fictional world defined in part by the causal relations it implies. The fictional world of Eilhart's Tristrant is one in which it is natural for swallows to travel overseas and return with a strand of hair. This fictional causality can be held up to our everyday causal assumptions and, if one is so inclined, taken to task for its deviations. That, of course, is what Gottfried's narrator does, thereby illustrating Tomashevsky's dictum that new literary schools always attack their predecessors for their unrealistic motivation.⁶ But within Eilhart's world international swallows are perfectly natural; indeed, by their behavior they help define what is natural in that world.

The story is motivated not only by the elements that constitute it but also by the narrator as he tells it. Gérard Genette notes the way in which narrators will offer a “justification of the particular fact by a general law, assumed to be unknown or perhaps forgotten by the reader and of which the narrator must inform or remind him or her.”⁷ Genette draws particular attention to the function of these “general laws” in disguising the arbitrariness of the narrative (p. 85): if the events of a story, in themselves perhaps quite improbable, can be shown to proceed according to laws valid not only within the story but in the world at large, then these events seem less improbable. It is not important whether or not such “general laws” are in fact generally valid; their function is only to appear so and thus to motivate the particular actions they pretend to explain. They constitute what Genette calls an “artificial verisimilitude” (p. 79). Because this motivation is not actually part of the story but is added by the narrator in telling it, I will distinguish it from story motivation by calling it narrator motivation.

Gottfried offers an example of narrator motivation at the very beginning of the episode in which the barons urge Mark to marry. Tristan has returned from his first trip to Ireland and is said to have the king and the court at his service—presumably this includes the barons (GTr 8316-17). But in the very next line the barons suddenly fall victim to “der verwazene nit, der selten iemer gelit” (GTr 8319-20); this causes them to turn against Tristan, to accuse him of sorcery, and to seek his death. At first glance the narrator's observation that envy never rests seems quite gratuitous: the barons could have been motivated by envy even if it had roused itself specially for their sakes after a long slumber. But in fact the observation is not gratuitous at all: it is one of those “general laws” that, by asserting a constitutive quality of envy, thus move the motivation out of the particulars of the story into the realm of common knowledge, a knowledge that claims validity outside of the narrative in the world at large. By invoking a “general law,” the narrator masks the improbable suddenness of the barons' change of attitude towards Tristan: if envy is always at work everywhere, then it is quite natural that the barons should succumb to its power. That there are many human relationships in which envy does rest is irrelevant; in the fictional world of Tristan is does not—by definition.

The narrator gives reasons not only for the events of the story he tells but also for his own behavior as storyteller. Gottfried's narrator explains that he has busied himself for the sake of the world of noble hearts, those who acknowledge both joy and suffering, that they might have partial relief from the sorrows of love (GTr 45-76, 97-100); he explains his activity in part with the “general truth” that lovers love tales of love (GTr 121-22). Later he tells us that stories about medicine are not suitable for courtly ears (GTr 7942-54) and that lots of talk about love is tedious to courtly sensibilities (GTr 12183-84). With maxims such as these he explains and justifies his choice of the story he tells as well as the way he tells it. It is no accident that the narrator relies so heavily on “general truths” in motivating his own behavior, for he stands closer than the hero to the extratextual world from which these truths are supposed to derive: on the one hand, he is the mediator between story and audience; on the other, he is the representative within the text of two real-world figures, the author and the performer. Thus the narrator has recourse to “general truths” to motivate two different stories: the one he is telling and the one of which he is a part.

Although story motivation and narrator motivation are both expressed in the words of the text, there are other kinds of narrative motivation that are not. Umberto Eco gives an illustration of such extratextual motivation with reference to a scene from a short story that takes place in a brothel. At a certain point in the story one of the staff is said to pick up a sheet and wrap it around her head—but, Eco points out, there is no explanation of where she got the sheet. This oversight, however, poses no particular threat to the coherence of the story since the reader “is furnished with a common frame: in brothels there are rooms, these rooms have beds, these beds have sheets. According to the previous frame ‘sleeping in a brothel,’ whoever sleeps in such places sleeps on a bed, and so on.” Anticipating our objections, Eco protests: “I am not playing a Byzantine game. That is exactly what a reader is supposed to do in order to actualize the surface intensional level.”⁸ The text does not have to supply this kind of information because it is perfectly obvious to us that there are sheets in brothels, and that which is “perfectly obvious” need not be stated: once the common frame has been activated, its contents need not be specially enumerated. At some point all narratives rely on common knowledge about the world, on shared assumptions about what acts are natural in a given situation, and on our ability to supply the “obvious” reasons for those “natural” actions that are not explicitly motivated. Since all recipients must be potential motivators of the story in order to understand it at all, I will call their (potential) activity recipient motivation.

The manuscript history of Eilhart's Tristrant offers a useful example of how recipient motivation can function. Of the two extant manuscripts that contain the scene with the swallows, one states merely that two swallows started to bite each other in Mark's hall and then a strand of hair fell to the ground (ETr ms. D 1381-82, 1386). The other reports the same but adds that the swallows flew in through a window (ETr ms. H. 1381-82b, 1385). When Gottfried's narrator refers to this scene he ignores the window but adds that the swallows (he gets by with only one) had been to Ireland to collect nesting material (GTr 8602-07). Obviously it is not particularly important how the birds get into Mark's hall or why they had been abroad: as long as they drop Isolde's hair in front of the king the story can proceed. And yet we do not find any of the additional information surprising: we know that birds enter buildings through windows and that they carry nesting materials, perhaps strands of hair, in their beaks. In adding this information, the more elaborate versions have merely recorded the “obvious” reasons that we or any other recipient might automatically supply for any action that we regard as “natural” in a given situation. Because the reasons for “natural” actions are always “obvious,” they need not be mentioned explicitly; indeed, no narrative could possibly give reasons for every detail it contains—why did the swallows need nesting materials? why do swallows need nests? why do swallows lay eggs? why is there life on earth?

If, however, no reason is given in the text and we cannot supply an “obvious reason” on our own, then the narrative seems incoherent. This is the reaction of Gottfried's narrator when he confronts Eilhart's swallows. Posing as a recipient of the earlier version, he recognizes the context and sets about explaining the appearance of a swallow with a strand of Isolde's hair. He invokes a common frame for birds and concludes that the swallow has the strand of hair in its beak because it was collecting nesting materials (GTr 8604-05). Not content with this he wonders why it had a strand of Isolde's hair and concludes that it must have been collecting nesting material in Ireland (GTr 8602). According to the everyday common frame the narrator has activated, this is impossible: Cornish swallows do not fly to Ireland in search of nesting supplies (GTr 8608-15). By not explaining how the swallows got Isolde's hair Eilhart implies that the reason is obvious, that it can be supplied by reference to a common frame. But Gottfried's narrator finds that this is not possible and concludes therefore that the story is incoherent.⁹

Although there are many ways the recipient is involved in motivating narrative, there is also a sense in which narrative motivates itself automatically. As Peter Brooks explains: “plot starts (or must give the illusion of starting) from that moment at which story, or ‘life,’ is stimulated from quiescence into a state of narratability, into a tension, a kind of irritation, which demands narration. … The ensuing narrative … is maintained in a state of tension, as a prolonged deviance from the quiescence of the ‘normal’—which is to say, the unnarratable - until it reaches the terminal quiescence of the end.”¹⁰ As long as the state of tension is maintained, however, the story must continue.¹¹ In other words, an action that generates disequilibrium, narrative tension, must be followed by another, it is not so important precisely which other, until some sort of equilibrium has been attained. Thus one action can motivate another simply because it, like most actions, generates disequilibrium rather than the reverse. Because this kind of motivation inheres in actions as such, I call it actional motivation.

One can illustrate the way this works by trying to imagine a “Tristan” essentially the same as Eilhart's or Gottfried's except that it stops just after the courtiers urge Mark to marry. For example: Tristan enjoyed such renown at court that Mark decided to remain single and make Tristan his heir; this so upset the courtiers that they pressured the king in every way they could think of to take a wife; then they all lived happily ever after. This is impossible: the courtiers' pressure on Mark requires a response from him; disequilibrium requires resolution. As it turns out, Mark's response only generates more disequilibrium: he agrees to marry but the bride he specifies is hard to find or dangerous to approach. Thus one action will lead to another until some sort of equilibrium has been achieved. Not only does one action lead to another, but we tend to assume, from the mere fact of their sequential arrangement, that there must be some causal connection between them. After Tristan returns from his first trip to Ireland, for instance, Eilhart tells us that he acquired great renown for his valor at tournaments and in battle (ETr 1332-36b). This is followed at once by news of Mark's decision not to marry: “der kúng waß im so hold, daß er durch sinen willen wolt nicht elichß wib pflegen. er daucht, daß er den tegen wolt zů ainem sun hon, und daß er im unterton sin rich wölt machen” (ETr 1337-43). We automatically assume that Tristan's prowess and renown are somehow the cause of Mark's decision to make Tristan his heir—although the text does not say this and other explanations are surely possible.¹² We make this assumption because we tend in general to assume that subsequent events are caused by prior ones. According to Roland Barthes, “Everything suggests … that the mainspring of narrative is precisely the confusion of consecution and consequence, what comes after being read in narrative as what is caused by.”¹³

Our expectation that disequilibrium will be followed by something as well as our assumption that consecutive events are causally related are attitudes we bring to narrative from everyday life. If I trip going through a door you expect something to follow: I will regain my balance or, more likely, fall on my face. If Lybia invades Egypt we again expect something will follow: Lybia will withdraw or, more likely there will be a war. Conversely, if you see me sprawled on the ground in front of my door you assume something has caused me to fall: perhaps I tripped going through the door. And if two nations are at war, we assume something caused them to start fighting: perhaps one of them invaded the other. Although philosophers question such logic, we ordinarily assume that most everyday events have causes and consequences¹⁴—and we assume the same of events in narrative. Actional motivation, then, does not describe a property of narrative actions themselves but rather a property they have because of the expectations and assumptions we bring to them; because we expect them to proceed causally one from the other and assume they will cohere, we think that they do. Actional motivation is, then, a sort of recipient motivation, but a very general and basic sort.

Both recipient motivation and actional motivation engage us in a kind of complicity with the narrative, for in both cases we supply reasons or assume connections where the text is silent. We motivate it where it does not motivate itself. In the case of recipient motivation we supply a prior cause of which a given event is the effect, while in the case of actional motivation we assume a subsequent action for which the given event is the cause. Recipient motivation engages us in a retrospective complicity, actional motivation in a prospective complicity. Both coincide in the extreme case in which we posit the coherence of the narrative absolutely: the swallows arrive with a strand of hair because that's the way the story goes. In such cases our complicity reaches its maximum (we merely assert the sequence of events) while our motivational involvement reaches its minimum (we no longer trouble about causes).

The four varieties of narrative motivation represent four different ways of explaining narrative events: they differ according to their site (textual or extratextual) and their nature (story element or commentary). Story motivation and narrator motivation are situated in the words of the text: they are ways a narrative motivates itself. Recipient motivation and actional motivation are brought to bear on the text from outside: they are ways we motivate narrative. Story motivation and actional motivation explain narrative events in terms of other story elements: they generate story. Narrator motivation and recipient motivation offer reasons for narrative events: they generate commentary. Each kind of motivation represents a different combination of site and nature and thus a different way of explaining the existence of a given narrative event.

Those familiar with the scholarship on narrative motivation will recognize that my understanding of the term is, in important respects, more inclusive than others that have been advanced. There is a long tradition, stretching from the Russian formalists down to the present, that considers motivation to be merely a disguise. The real “motivation” for the order of the elements of narrative is held to be artistic and therefore arbitrary; explicit motivation hides this arbitrariness behind more or less credible everyday explanations. To study motivation from this perspective one must first come to some understanding of the artistic order—what Propp calls the “functions or connectives,” Tomashevsky “the laws of plot construction,” Genette “le pour quoi?,” and Sternberg “the functional requirements of art.”¹⁵ Then one considers the quasi-mimetic ruses by which this artful order is made to seem plausible and natural—“the feelings and intentions” attributed to the “dramatis personae,” “realistic material,” “le parce que,” “referential processes and linkages analogized to life.”¹⁶ These ruses are said to motivate (that is, disguise by providing realistic motivation for) the essentially arbitrary order of the artistic text.

This approach is unneccessarily restrictive in two ways. First, it relies on an untenable and exclusionary distinction between the artistic order and its motivation. Mark's marriage to Isolde, for instance, follows a widespread narrative pattern, the bride quest or Brautwerbungsschema, that has helped many fictional princes to find their brides; Mark's agreement to marry is a conventional element of this traditional scheme. If one assumes that the Brautwerbungsschema is responsible for the (arbitrary, artistic) order of events in this portion of the Tristan story, then one can ask how any of the (conventional) constituent elements of the scheme—like the prince's agreement to marry—is motivated in a given instance—in Eilhart, say, or Gottfried. But one must not forget that Mark's agreement to marry is not only an element in need of motivation but also itself a motivating element: it causes Tristan to depart for Ireland. To assume that any element is either an arbitrary element or a motivating element is to ignore the double functionality of most narrative events: Mark's agreement to marry is both story and motivation.

This common understanding of motivation is unnecessarily restrictive in a second way as well, for it cannot accommodate those motivational elements that are unrelated to the task of disguising the arbitrariness of art. Take, for instance, the appearance of the swallows in Mark's hall. Is the manuscript version of Eilhart's Tristrant in which they are said to fly in through the window somehow less arbitrary than the one in which no explanation is given for their entry? It hardly seems so. The swallows' entry through the window is representative of a large number of motivational explanations, present everywhere but especially important in realist narrative, that seem to be introduced for their own sakes, not to disguise the artificial functionality of a particular plot element.¹⁷

My own definition of narrative motivation attempts to overcome the restrictiveness of the traditional one by emphasizing description rather than purpose. It embraces all causal explanations for narrative events, regardless of whether they happen to disguise traditional structures, to create new artistic patterns, or to generate the “effect of the real”—even, as is often the case, when they seem quite gratuitous. Only with such a definition is it possible to describe the motivation of narrative as a phenomenon in its own right.

There is, however, a second tradition in the scholarship on motivation in comparison with which my use of the term is considerably narrower. This tradition, which also stretches back to the Russian formalists, includes in the category of motivation all those procedures by which we, as recipients, explain nonmimetic features of literary texts to ourselves. Confronted with the improbable appearance of Isolde's hair in Mark's court, for instance, a reader might recall that in certain genres, like folktale and romance, unmotivated coincidences are quite natural. Another reader might decide that Isolde's hair is a synecdoche for Isolde and conclude that its appearance actually increases the meaningful coherence of the text. One might go further and argue that the hair represents the woman, absent and present, distant and desired, who is known only from hearsay or other traces and that the strand of hair thus symbolizes the distinctive long-distance love that inspires the bride quest in so many medieval narratives.¹⁸ Finally one might invoke the author and conclude that Eilhart was “motivated” to introduce the strand hair by his respect for tradition, his love of tropes, or his desire to generate meaning. If these can all be called motivation, then the term embraces virtually any kind of explanation for any kind of textual phenomenon.

And yet, although these kinds of explanation are advanced by the recipient, they are clearly different from the examples of recipient motivation given earlier. One of those earlier examples was provided by Gottfried's narrator when he assumes the role of recipient of Eilhart's story and tries to explain the appearance of Isolde's hair at Mark's court. To do so he invokes an everyday common frame about birds—birds collect nesting material, of which the hair is an example—and concludes that the swallow must have been to Ireland picking up building supplies. When, on the other hand, we explain the hair as a synecdoche, or a symbol, or as the product of Eilhart's intentions we invoke different sorts of common frames, specifically literary ones that allow us to identify tropes, to explain symbols, to elicit meaning, and to speculate on the intentions of the author. There is a great difference between the first explanation, which relies on the familiar nesting habits of birds, and the others, which have recourse to the special properties of literary texts and the presumed behavior their authors. The first represents a naive complicity with the narrative—the relatively automatic provision of obvious reasons for the actions of a story that is essential for ordinary reading; the others represent a sentimental complicity—the self-conscious provision of literary reasons that enables critical “readings.” The former is essential if one wants to make any sense out of narrative texts; the latter are essential if one wants to determine “the sense” of a narrative text.

I would restrict the term motivation to the former, the naive activation of an everyday causal common frame. And this for three reasons. First, there is no value to a category so broad that it includes everything: if the nesting habits of birds, the introduction of tropes, and the symbolic intentions of the author are all instances of narrative motivation, then the category is so imprecise as to be meaningless. Second, my restricted usage is closer to the ordinary one: we can say of a real-life swallow, just as Gottfried's narrator assumes for Eilhart's fictional one, that its need of nesting material “motivates” it to pick up strands of hair. Third, this definition of motivation insures that the categories of extratextual (recipient, actional) motivation remain equivalent to those of textual (story, narrator) motivation: Eilhart might have motivated the appearance of the hair with the explicit notice that the swallows had been to Ireland in search of nesting material (story motivation), just as Gottfried's narrator supposes (recipient motivation); but Eilhart would never have justified the appearance of the hair by labeling it a synecdoche for Isolde.

My definition of narrative motivation attempts to overcome the protean vagueness of the traditional one by insisting on the analogy to everyday causality. Needless to say, the two are not identical: only in Eilhart do swallows fly overseas to collect nesting materials; only in romance does the same knight win every battle. But these are merely modifications to regular causality and remain analogous to it; and they contribute to the constitution of the fictional world precisely because of this analogy. To call the strand of hair a synecdoche or a symbol, however, is to proffer a kind of explanation that we would neither find within the text nor advance in our everyday life. While to say that Eilhart was “motivated” by this or that intention is to turn the composition of the narrative into a story and to speculate on the motivation of its hero, the author. Such explanatory procedures do not contribute to the constitution of a fictional causality proper to the narrative text and should therefore be called something other than motivation—naturalization or recuperation, perhaps even biography or interpretation.¹⁹ If we would describe the motivation of Eilhart's Tristrant, however, then we must limit ourselves to what is possible within its fictional world: nesting swallows, storms, jealousy, love potions, and the like.

Narrative motivation is fictional causality. As a category, motivation comprises all causal explanations for narrative events, whether they are part of the text, assumed or implied by the text, or supplied in the reception of the text. It assumes that the fictional world is a model of the real world, that narrative events are more or less analogous to real-life events, and that the explanations of the former (motivation) will be similar in kind to the explanations of the latter (causality). Such a definition of motivation enables one to study two important related phenomena: first, the role of causal explanations in constituting the narrative; second, the role of causal explanations in generating narrative coherence.

To study the role of causal explanations in constituting the narrative one can begin by following the method of Propp or Genette mentioned above. Such an approach takes the story as given—in practice it is usually a particular story event—and then searches backwards to discover what caused it: given an arbitrary event, Mark's decision to marry, how is it motivated? One discovers the courtiers' campaign and is content. This retrospective operation of critical reading is analogous to a continuous operation of ordinary reading. As E. M. Forster puts it: over the plot, “as it unfolds, will hover the memory of the reader (that dull glow of the mind of which intelligence is the bright advancing edge) and will constantly rearrange and reconsider, seeing new clues, new chains of cause and effect.”²⁰ As we read from one moment in the story to the next, each new element is our momentary point of reference, our “given”: when we come to Mark's decision we put it in relation to what we already know and realize that it is the consequence of the courtiers' campaign.²¹ The analytic reading of Propp and Genette and the common-sense reading of Forster have this in common: the search for the cause follows the recognition and isolation of its effect. Or, in other words, the discovery of the cause is temporally subsequent to and logically subordinate to the existence of the effect.

Yet this formulation contradicts our ordinary understanding of cause and effect, for ordinarily we assume that causes precede their effects and are independent of them. The “general law” that envy never rests must exist prior to the envy of Mark's courtiers if it is to motivate that envy. And the courtiers' envy must precede their campaign to have Mark marry, if the envy is the cause of the campaign—just as this campaign, if it in fact motivates Mark's decision to marry, must necessarily precede that decision. Again there is an analogue in the way we read. When the courtiers urge Mark to marry we wonder what will happen next: will he follow their advice? will he marry one of their daughters? will he have them all burned at the stake? In anticipating and speculating we assume that the courtiers' exertions will be the cause of something: any moment of disequilibrium must lead somewhere. We want it to lead somewhere, for, to cite Forster again, “we are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next” (p. 27). According to our ordinary understanding and according to the anticipatory aspect of reading, the expectation of an effect follows the isolation of a (potential) cause; the effect is temporally subsequent to and logically subordinate to the cause.

Well then, which is it? Are we to begin with the effect and then inquire after its cause, like Propp? Or are we to begin with the cause and anticipate its effect, like Scheherazade's husband? Is narrative motivation retrospective or prospective? It is, in fact, either—or, more accurately, both. In the series of narrative events, Mark's decision to marry is subsequent to his courtiers' campaign and prior to Tristan's departure for Ireland. As effect it is dependent on the courtiers' campaign for its very existence: Mark would not have decided to marry had he not been pressured. But Mark's decision is also dependent on Tristan's departure. Not for its existence: Mark will have made his decision whether Tristan leaves for Ireland or not; but for its status as cause: if there is no departure, Mark's decision can hardly be the cause of it.²² Thus Mark's decision is both cause and effect; as such it is dependent on what precedes and on what follows—although in different ways. Of course it was necessary to begin somewhere, so we began by taking Mark's decision to marry as “given” and rummaged about until we found its motivation. But what we took as given is in fact entirely dependent—as effect on what precedes, and as cause on what follows.

That Mark's decision is both cause and effect is another way of saying what we noted above, that story motivation motivates the story at the same time it constitutes the story. But the same is true of the other sorts of motivation as well. The observation that envy never rests (narrator motivation) motivates the actions of Mark's courtiers at the same time it constitutes part of the narration of the story. Our understanding that swallows seek nesting material (recipient motivation) motivates the story at the same time it helps constitute our reception of the story. And the same can be said of our assumption that the pressure exerted by the courtiers on Mark must be followed by some consequent action (actional motivation). Thus story motivation and narrator motivation not only motivate the story but at the same time constitute the narrative as text. While recipient motivation and actional motivation not only motivate the story but at the same time constitute the narrative in its reception. All forms of motivation are then both cause and effect, both means and end.

If narrative motivation is prospective and retrospective, if each motivational element is both cause and effect, then motivation not only constitutes the narrative as a network of causal relations but, precisely because of these relations, it fosters the coherence of narrative. Sometimes the causal coherence of the narrative events among themselves will be expressly noted by the narrator in telling the story—as when Gottfried's narrator informs us that the enmity of the courtiers grew so obvious “daz er [Tristan] ervorhte den mort” (GTr 8374); the subordinating conjunction makes the causal connection explicit. But many of these connections are not made explicit: neither Eilhart nor Gottfried, for instance, says outright that Mark's decision to marry is caused by the courtiers' campaign. Yet we are sure that it is. First, we are accustomed to assume a relation between adjacent events: we know that disequilibrium entails something; and we like to believe that what follows is caused by what precedes. This is that aspect of our complicity with the narrative that I have associated with actional motivation. Second, we observe that there is something in common between the campaign and the decision: the courtiers want Mark to marry; what follows are discussions between Mark, Tristan, and the courtiers on the subject of Mark's marriage; then comes the decision of Mark to marry. This is the usual sort of story motivation, and few of us require any more explicit statement of causal connection than it offers. The necessity that disequilibrium be followed by something; our assumption that consecutive events are causally related; the causal relations of story elements, whether these relations are expressed by the narrator or merely “obvious” to the recipients: all these conspire to link story events, to establish the causal connexity of narrative events among themselves. They generate what might be called diegetic coherence.

But there is another, equally important sort of coherence fostered by narrative motivation. When Gottfried's narrator explains that Mark's courtiers are motivated by envy, he explains this motivation in terms of a “general truth”: envy never rests. Such a “truth” is, ostensibly, valid in the world at large; and by stating it the narrator asserts the congruence of his narrative with such extratextual “truths.” In doing so he also provides an example for the recipient, who is expected to do the same. As recipients we are constantly engaged in motivating the events of the narrative from our stock of everyday causal explanations: yes, of course birds carry nesting materials in their beaks, we see it every spring. This is the aspect of our complicity with the narrative that I have associated with recipient motivation. In addition, we are constantly engaged, often without being consciously aware of it, in monitoring the adequacy of the story motivation with regard to received opinions about the world: we recognize that it is quite natural for kings to act on the advice of their courtiers. The explicit assertion that the narrative is motivated according to “general truths”; our complicit eagerness to supply explanations for narrative events from our everyday supply of motivational reasons, as well as our more passive complicity in monitoring the everyday plausibility of the explicit motivations in the text: these conspire to establish the congruence of the narrative with received opinions about the world. They generate what might be called mimetic coherence.

It is for inadequate mimetic coherence that Gottfried's narrator attacks Eilhart's motivation: Cornish swallows do not fly to Ireland; kings do not send embassies off in search for the source of a strand of hair. Since these things do not occur in everyday life, the narrator implies, they have no place in narrative. Needless to say, this is an impossible standard. Improbable events abound in narrative, even Gottfried's own: it seems unlikely, for example, that Gottfried believed real-world lovers could really nourish themselves on love alone—the personal testimony of the narrator notwithstanding (GTr 16807-40, 16909-22). As noted above, we have various ways of explaining such troublesome events, as well as various reasons for delighting in them. Nevertheless, such instances of narrative “incoherence,” even when we welcome them, cannot disguise the very powerful investment we have in the coherence of narrative, both diegetic and mimetic. As Eco wrote years ago: “It is only natural that life is more like Ulysses than The Three Musketeers: nevertheless we are all more likely to think about it in the categories of The Three Musketeers than in those of Ulysses: or better, I can only remember life and evaluate it when I consider it as a traditional novel.”²³ Narrative, as others have pointed out, is an important way we make sense out of the world. It can only serve this function if it seems to make sense itself, and it will seem to make sense only if it conforms to the standards of what Eco calls the “traditional novel”; only, in my terms, if it manifests a certain degree of diegetic and mimetic coherence. Narrative motivation is one of the most powerful ways in which this coherence is generated—in the text and in the reception of the text.

The standards for making coherent narratives, of course, are no more absolute than those for making sense out of the world: they vary from one person to another, from one text to another, from one genre to another, from one generation to another, and so forth. They differ, as the example of Eilhart and Gottfried shows, from one author to another, even when they claim to tell the same story in the same language only a few decades apart.²⁴ The tracing of these differences is a largely untouched but potentially very fruitful field of inquiry: it can tell us of the historical variations in the ways we have explained events to ourselves, in the ways we have made events into coherent narratives, in other words, in the ways we have made sense out of the world.²⁵

Why then does Mark marry Isolde? According to Eilhart because of his relatives and some swallows and a strand of hair; according to Gottfried because of his courtiers and Tristan and his previous knowledge of Isolde. And why do we care? Because we want the story to continue and because we want it to continue in a coherent way. Why does Mark marry Isolde? So that the story will continue in a coherent and plausible way. And why do we care? Because we want narratives to make sense; because we want the world, as we tell it to ourselves, to make sense.²⁶

Notes

1. Eilhart von Oberg, Tristrant: Edition diplomatique des manuscrits et traduction en français moderne, ed. Danielle Buschinger, Göppinger Arbeiten zur Germanistik, 202 (1976). References to Eilhart will be given in parentheses in the text and distinguished by the abbreviation: ETr. Unless otherwise noted, I cite from ms. H.

2. Gottfried von Straßburg, Tristan und Isold, ed. Friedrich Ranke, 15th ed. (1978). References to Gottfried will be given in parentheses in the text and distinguished by the abbreviation: GTr.

3. Besides those texts cited in notes 5, 6, and 7, see: Viktor Schklowskij, “Das Sujet im Kinematographen,” in Viktor Schklowskij, Schriften zum Film (1966), pp. 17-25; Victor Shklovsky, “Sterne's Tristram Shandy: Stylistic Commentary,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (1965), pp. 25-57; Russischer Formalismus: Texte zur allgemeinen Literaturtheorie und zur Theorie der Prosa, ed. Jurij Striedter (1969, 1971) [includes the Šklovskij essay just cited, unter the title “Der parodistische Roman: Sternes ‘Tristram Shandy,’” pp. 245-99; see also under “Motivierung” in the index]; Oswald Ducrot and Tzvetan Todorov, Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language, trans. Catherine Porter (1979), p. 262-63.

4. Besides the substantial treatment by Culler cited in note 19, see: Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (1978), pp. 51-52; Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (1983), pp. 123-29, 142; Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (1985), pp. 130-32. The most important recent discussion of the issues is Meir Sternberg, “Mimesis and Motivation: The Two Faces of Fictional Coherence,” in Literary Criticism and Philosophy, ed. Joseph P. Strelka, Yearbook of Comparative Criticism, 10 (1983), 145-88.

5. Vladímir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott, 2nd. rev. ed. Louis A. Wagner (1968), p. 75. Subsequent references will be given in parentheses in the text.

6. Boris Tomashevsky, “Thematics,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (1965), pp. 61-95, here p. 82.

7. “… la justification du fait particulier par une loi générale supposée inconnue, ou peut-être oubliée du lecteur et que le narrateur doit lui enseigner ou lui rappeler” (Gérard Genette, “Vraisemblance et motivation,” in Figures II [1969], pp. 71-99, here p. 80). Subsequent references will be given in parentheses in the text; the translations are my own. For a feminist elaboration of Genette's essay see Nancy K. Miller, “Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's Fiction,” in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (1985), pp. 339-60, here pp. 340, 343-44. For a critique of Genette see Sternberg (note 4), pp. 160-62.

8. Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (1979), p. 36.

9. In Genette's terms, because Gottfried's narrator cannot supply a “maxim” to explain the swallows' behavior, he regards Eilhart's narrative as a “récit arbitraire” rather than a “récit vraisemblable” (Genette [note 7], pp. 98-99; see also pp. 71-78, 92-99).

10. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (1984), p. 103.

11. This may have been what Propp had in mind when he wrote that “the majority of characters' acts in the middle of a tale are naturally motivated by the course of the action” (Propp [note 5], p. 75, my italics).

12. In connection with Gottfried's version, for example, Rüdiger Krohn has suggested the possibility that Mark is motivated by sexual attraction for Tristan (Rüdiger Krohn, “Erotik und Tabu in Gottfrieds ‘Tristan’: König Marke,” in Stauferzeit: Geschichte, Literatur, Kunst, ed. Rüdiger Krohn, Bernd Thum, Peter Wapnewski, Karlsruher kulturwissenschaftliche Arbeiten, 1 [1979], pp. 362-76). I do not find Krohn's argument convincing, but it does give some idea of the range of alternative explanations that would be possible.

13. Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (1977), pp. 79-124, here p. 94. Frank Kermode puts the same idea more simply: “Sequence goes nowhere without his doppelgänger or shadow, causality” (Frank Kermode, “Secrets and Narrative Sequence,” Critical Inquiry 7 [1980], 83-101, here p. 84).

14. “The universality of causation [the assertion that no change ever occurs without some cause] has throughout the history of philosophy, until very recent times, usually been regarded as very obvious, sometimes even self-evident. … [But] what was once considered quite obvious is now at least controversial.” “No one, for example, has ever shown experimentally that all the simple voluntary actions of men are caused or that similar such actions always have similar causes, and the opinions of philosophers are, in fact, divided on these questions” (Richard Taylor, “Causation,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edward [1967], 2: 57, 60).

15. Propp (note 5), p. 75; Tomashevsky (note 6), p. 81; Genette (note 7), p. 97; Sternberg (note 4), p. 167.

16. Propp (note 5), p. 78; Tomashevsky (note 6), p. 83; Genette (note 7), p. 97; Sternberg (note 4), p. 167.

17. I assume here a causal aspect to Barthes's “effect of the real”: the generous provision of causal explanations merely to create the illusion that the story is well motivated—as we assume reality is (Roland Barthes, “L'effet de réel,” Communications 11 [1968], 84-89).

18. Here I paraphrase Gerhard Schindele, Tristan: Metamorphose und Tradition, Studien zur Poetik und Geschichte der Literatur, 12 (1971), p. 23.

19. Naturalization and recuperation are words sometimes used interchangeably with motivation but which are more properly differentiated from it. See the important discussion in Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (1975), pp. 131-60 as well as Sternberg's critique (note 4), pp. 163-65.

20. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1955), p. 88. Subsequent references will be given in parentheses in the text.

21. For a very brief (nevertheless, so far as I know, the only) consideration of how we construct causal connections as we read see Tzvetan Todorov, “Reading as Construction,” in The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation, ed. Susan R. Suleiman, Inge Crosman (1980), pp. 74-75.

22. Here I have parodied Aquinas's commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics, 1013a29-36. Aquinas writes: “The efficient cause is related to the final cause because the efficient cause is the starting point of motion and the final cause is its terminus. … Hence the efficient cause is the cause of the final cause, and the final cause is the cause of the efficient cause. The efficient cause is the cause of the final cause inasmuch as it makes the final cause be, because by causing motion the efficient cause brings about the final cause. But the final cause is the cause of the efficient cause, not in the sense that it makes it be, but inasmuch as it is the reason for the causality of the efficient cause. For an efficient cause is a cause inasmuch as it acts, and it acts only because of the final cause. Hence the efficient cause derives its causality from the final cause” (Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, trans. John P. Rowan [1961], 1: 308 [Book 5, Lesson 2, Section 775]).

23. I give here my own English version from the German translation: Umberto Eco, Das offene Kunstwerk, trans. G. Memmert (1973), p. 202.

24. I have tried to work out the differences between Eilhart and Gottfried in a related article: James A. Schultz, “Why Do Tristan and Isolde Leave for the Woods? Narrative Motivation and Narrative Coherence in Eilhart von Oberg and Gottfried von Straßburg,” to appear in MLN, 102 (1987).

25. It is motivation thus broadly conceived that has engaged Kenneth Burke in A Grammar of Motives (1969).

26. The impetus for this essay grew out of a seminar on narrative theory that I taught with David Wellbery at Stanford University in the spring of 1985. I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Wellbery for that extremely rewarding collaboration as well as to Professor Theodore M. Andersson for arranging my visit to Stanford. For their helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay I would also like to thank Professors Efraín Barradas of the University of Massachusetts-Boston, Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner of Boston College, and Ingeborg Glier of Yale University.