Narrative Drive would make a good name for one of those winding streets up in the hills around Los Angeles. But for post-avant writing, it’s a conundrum. Jena Osman proposes the category in her poem “Starred Together.” I think it’s definitely worth exploring.

Kevin Davies writes:

The blog asks if the narrative drive that Jena proposes is related to eros or the death drive or what. I don't know either. But last week I was reading a book by the classicist Yun Lee Too. Socrates, in Plato's Symposium, recounts a speech by the prophetess Diotima. Her story is about the birth of Eros:

At the divine [drinking] party the deity Penia (whose name means "poverty" or "lack") enters uninvited to find Poros (whose name means "resource" or "plenty") lying in a drunken stupor. Contriving to remedy her condition as lack, Penia sleeps with the god of plenty and conceives and begets Eros, the supernatural being (daimon) who partakes of both his parents' natures. . . . Eros is accordingly a being of middles and in-betweens. He is neither god nor mortal, but a daimon who moves between the immortal and mortal spheres. . . . He is neither simply good and beautiful, nor for that matter base and ugly, but something between these extremes. Daimonic Eros is poor . . . squalid, unshod, and homeless. But in relation to others, he is resourceful, providing counsel to good and beautiful people. He is brave, a clever hunter, a weaver of tricks, a practitioner of philosophy, a clever sorcerer, and a sophist.* (66)

Death drive? For Lacan = Antigone. Eros and Antigone? In a tree? The combination of barefoot in-betweeness and steely-eyed, suicidal refusal of Creon's tyranny? Not sure it's a drive. Definitely a story.

I searched around on the Net for references to narrative drive but could find nothing that spoke of it in terms of psychological drives.  Most of what I found has to do with plot fluidity, dramatic construction or character motivation in fiction or cinema, mostly used in a judgmental fashion:

But whereas Distant Voices, Still Lives had at least the central conflict between the abusive father and his long-suffering wife and children to sustain audience interest, The Long Day Closes lacked even the rudiments of any narrative drive. The result was self-indulgent and tedious, as well as a critical and commercial failure.**

Where it does show up constructively from time to time is on creative writing “how-to” sites & ancillaries thereof. Thus Literary & Script Consultants offer, as one aspect of their screenplay analysis service, a critique that includes this category:

STORY: Plot, sub-plots, and story dynamics - story holes - narrative drive, logic, and focus - momentum - pace - theme -   subject matter - freshness - narrative and dramatic power

In an interview I found on Borzoi Reader Online, suspense novelist James Ellroy claims:

Language, style, narrative drive and characterization are a novelist's basic tools; they must always be deployed to the limits of their power.

But even in this frame of reference, nobody seems to define it.

But if narrative drive is a category without definition even in the best of circumstances – a James Ellroy novel– what does it mean to apply the concept to Bruce Andrews or Clark Coolidge or Lee Ann Brown? What, literally, motivates the eye – & the mind behind the eye – left to right along the line & down again until the page itself has been consumed? To use the category I borrowed from cognitive linguistics in The New Sentence, the Parsimony Principle, doesn’t seem adequate either. The Parsimony Principle may well explain how the reading mind invariably will make sense even from a phrase such as Wittgenstein’s “milk me sugar”***, but it doesn’t speak to the problem of why the mind joins words in the first place, moves through them, carries on.

What, I ask, is that about?

*Too, Yun Lee. The Pedagogical Contract: The Economies of Teaching and Learning in the Ancient World. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2000.

** Drowning in Style: Terence Davies Smothers Another Story, by Caveh Zahedi, at TheStranger.Com.

*** Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: MacMillan, 1953):

498.         When I say that the orders “Bring me sugar” and “Bring me milk” make sense, but not the combination “Milk me sugar”, that does not mean that the utterance of this combination of words has no effect. And if its effect is that the other person stares at me and gapes, I don’t on that account call it the order to stare and gape, even if that was precisely the effect I wanted to produce.

But this phrase can be entirely meaningful in a sexual context – one can hear it as a line from a rap song without much difficulty. & that interpretation is even more evident in the German where the capitalization of nouns – “Milch mir Zucker” – insinuates at one level that Sugar is a nickname. Thanks to Alex Young for bringing this passage to my attention (even though he was trying to debunk my “reading” of Bruce Andrews!).