Subjectivity conditioned by narrative form: A narratological approach to emotion in narrative journalism

Abstract

In recent years, media researchers have displayed an increased interest in emotion as an element of the content in both news journalism and narrative journalism. These studies lack a theoretical definition of emotion and do not usually specify what characterizes narrative journalism more than it being “not objective” and, consequently, not similar to conventional journalism. In practice, they identify emotion through frames of personalization or explicit expressions of feelings and evaluations. However, narrative journalism integrates implicitly conveyed emotion. To enable a broader understanding of the function of emotion in narrative journalism, this article gives examples of and analyzes how emotion and the related concept subjectivity is used and discussed in two different fields of research: social sciences-influenced journalism studies and literature-influenced studies. The dualistic view on journalism as either subjective or objective is questioned when narrative journalism (also known as reportage or literary journalism) is placed in a professional context, where the genre is based on its own tradition and represents its own form of knowledge, due to its main characteristic: a narrative form. Finally, the article demonstrates how tools drawn from narratology can illuminate diverse storytelling techniques that transmit emotion implicitly rather than explicitly.

Introduction

Emotion in journalism is a relatively new field of research that has primarily been dedicated to feelings among reporters, editorial routines, and the public’s emotional response (see, for example, “The Emotional Turn in Journalism,” special issue of Journalism, 22 (5), 2021). When it comes to content, researchers have examined both news articles and narrative journalism. However, there is no unitary definition of “emotion” and “emotionality” in these studies, nor of what “narrative” in “narrative journalism” means. Different researchers refer to different aspects of form, style and content, which makes it difficult to compare their results.

The research is mostly performed in a tradition of social sciences-influenced journalism studies. Here, “emotion” is contrasted with “facts” and the related “subjectivity” with “objectivity” (Wahl-Jorgensen in The Emotional Turn in Journalism, special issue of Jounralism, 2021: 1148; Habers and Boersma, 2014: 640). Since objectivity and a factual focus are considered the norm for professional news journalism, researchers have identified emotion as deviations from the neutral style that is associated with that norm. Consequently, they have identified expressions of personal feelings and personal opinions as signs of emotion. That kind of research practice is in turn related to an idea of news journalism as being the only tradition with a prominent history of its own (see, for example, several chapters in Hanitzsch and Wahl Jorgensen, 2009).

If we instead turn to literature-influenced studies on narrative journalism, emotion is understood as an integrated part of the narrative construction and “subjectivity” is associated with form and a literary style rather than a value-laden vocabulary. This view can for example be found in the journal Literary Journalism Studies and Routledge anthologies. Most of this research is based on literary methods for close-reading, and scholars who perform the studies have few connections to the field of social sciences-influenced, comparative journalism studies. Consequently, we can notice a gap between two kinds of theoretical approach to emotion and subjectivity in narrative journalism.

This article gives examples of and analyzes how emotion and the related concepts subjectivity, narrativity and storytelling are used and discussed in the two fields in relation to the genre of narrative journalism (also known as reportage, literary reportage or literary journalism). ¹ My main examples are studies by social sciences-influenced Karin Wahl-Jorgensen and John C. Hartsock, a representative of the more literary tradition. A theoretical starting point for my discussion is an understanding of textually constructed emotion as divided into how emotions can be expressed and what may cause an emotional response in the form of readers’ feelings. In other words, I distinguish between explicitly expressed and implicitly conveyed emotion, and here narratological theory offers a valuable addition.

In order to question the dualistic view of journalism as either subjective or objective, I regard narrative journalism as a journalistic tradition and form of knowledge in its own right. Such an approach may broaden our understanding of how emotion is constructed—not only in narrative journalism, but in journalistic content in general. Finally, I give an example of how a narratological analysis can highlight varying constructions of implicitly working emotion in narrative journalism. The findings illustrate the complexity with which emotion can be transmitted to readers of journalism.

An influential study of emotion in the journalistic content

Many studies of emotion in the journalistic content are performed with quantitative methods and within the field of journalism studies. I will concentrate on an influential study by Karin Wahl-Jorgensen because it is referenced by a large number of researchers who have done similar studies. Her material consists of different categories of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism between 1995 and 2011, and the results are presented in two articles (2013a, 2013b). From her references to different kinds of leads, it is possible to conclude that conventional news journalism is in the minority since only 20% of the articles are written with leads of the inverted pyramid-type. This is in line with her conclusion: “what prevailed, across all news genres, was a narrative form more closely resembling that of literary journalism.” (2013a: 137).

Wahl-Jorgensen does not explicitly distinguish between news journalism and narrative (literary) journalism in her analyses but instead applies a modified version of appraisal theory to all texts, regardless of genre. She notes (in percentages) when affect, judgment or appreciation are expressed by reporters and, mainly, by sources. A conclusion is that reporters can use a technique of “outsourced emotion” when they allow sources to express their feelings within a frame of objectivity and that this can be perceived as an institutionalized “strategic ritual of emotionality” (2013a: 129). Wahl-Jorgensen describes how “journalists rely on the outsourcing of emotional labor to non-journalists – the story protagonists and other sources.” (2013a: 130). Here, the implicit condition is to search for a vocabulary that is non-neutral. So perhaps it would be more appropriate to talk about a “strategic ritual of non-neutrality”? Furthermore, Wahl-Jorgensen associates emotion with the reporter’s descriptions: “In fact, in none of the stories studied here did journalists discuss their own emotions. Instead, journalists described the feelings of groups and collectives in just over half of all cases.” 2013a: (138, my bolds).

Accordingly, what we get is expressions, descriptions and types of leads. Wahl-Jorgensen mainly uses quantitative content analysis, and, for natural reasons, the findings become schematized and focused on vocabulary instead of narrative form. This means that to a great extent they are restricted to explicitly expressed rather than implicitly conveyed emotion. Of course, they are valuable when we want to understand how expressed feelings gradually have become more and more accepted in U.S. award-winning genres. However, explicit feelings are but a part of the much bigger area of how emotion works within a narrative construction and, consequently, but a part of the ritual to generate emotionality in the text.

A study that investigates the emotional response of readers instead compares different frames (Maier, 2017). The researchers examine articles about mass suffering and find that a frame of personalization—in this case a frame that puts individual victims at the center of the article—evokes a stronger emotional response among readers than a factually centered frame. This is in line with Wahl-Jorgensen’s results where she finds that outsourced feelings can be combined with a focus on individuals’ experiences. However, articles that are categorized as personalized are not further defined. We do not know if a person’s story is dramatized or rendered by a combination of quotes and background information. In other words, we do not know if the articles are told in a narrative form or not.

When narrative journalism is explicitly discussed, conceptual uncertainties are recurrent. Some researchers, like Thomas R. Schmidt, treats “emotional journalism,” “narrative journalism” and “narrative storytelling” equally, without specifying what these concepts have in common other than being the opposite of “hard news” (2022). Put differently, these kinds of journalism are defined by what they are not rather than by what they are in their own right.

Two parallel professional genres

The movement known as New Journalism arose in the U.S. during the 1960s as a reaction against the objectivity norm in news journalism (Hartsock, 2000: 202). This time the coveted subjectivity was defined by its style and form, and reporters were encouraged to imitate novels written during the realist era. Tom Wolfe, a reporter himself, later wrote what has been referred to as a manifesto. He recommended a style based on scene-by-scene construction, dialogue, environmental details, and internal perspectives in the third person (Wolfe, 1973).

However, regarding New Journalism as a counter reaction has often meant the same thing as reducing its function. Wahl-Jorgensen repeats a widespread statement when she writes: “this form of story-telling actively resisted the neutrality, impersonality, and factuality of more conventional journalistic forms.” (2013b: 308). It is true that style and form are personal in the meaning of literary and narrative. But the dualistic view of New Journalism as non-neutral and non-factual must be questioned, and I will come back to that. Furthermore, literary writing among journalists was not so new as Wolfe claimed. It could equally well be seen as a development of an already existing tradition; from the 1840s and onward—a long time before objectivity became a norm in news journalism—American reporters had experimented with stylistic features similar to those in literary realism. As John C. Hartsock points out, this kind of journalism had its breakthrough during the 1890s (2000). The following decades it survived in parallel with conventional news journalism and reached a second peak during the 1930s and 1940s (Hartsock, 2000).

If we focus on the genre’s origins, we can establish that early newspaper reportage became a genre in its own right when reporters left the newsrooms and roamed the urban cities in Europe and the U.S. to depict whatever came their way (Ekecrantz and Olsson, 1994: 129–130; Bech-Karlsen, 2000: 64–69; Connery, 2020: 58). These reporters wrote their articles in a narrative form based on their experiences as eyewitnesses. This classical type of narrative journalism is still alive today (Aare, 2018; Aare, 2023).

For a long period, the early history of narrative (literary) journalism in newspapers did not attract enough attention among researchers in the U.S. It has been a much-repeated statement that reporters belonging to the New Journalism movement introduced literary techniques in journalistic texts. Consequently, New Journalism and literary journalism have been mistaken for the same thing. Wahl-Jorgensen confirms the latter when she talks about “the movement known variously as New Journalism and Literary Journalism” (2013b: 308). However, recent literature-influenced research has underlined influences on New Journalism from the wave that culminated during the 1890s with reporters like Stephen Crane and Jack London (Connery, 2020; Mulligan, 2020). They were also fictional writers and as such belonged to the first generation of American naturalists, who wrote both journalism and fiction about social issues like poverty, illness and violence in urban environments (Mulligan, 2020).

If we turn to Europe, it is obvious that newspaper reportage has been an independent genre from the 1890s onward. Early examples can be traced back to the 1820s (Aare, 2021: 56). But it is a simplification to say that the genre got its narrative characteristics through influences from literary realism. Rather, the reportage and the realistic novel could be seen as two branches of the same tree (Aare, 2021: 54–72). It is hardly a coincidence that two of the most prominent representatives of the realistic novel, Charles Dickens and Honoré de Balzac, were at the same time reporters.

Another early type of narrative news journalism is literary war journalism. In the U.S., it has its origins in the Civil War in the 1860s and an actual birth date, according to John Bak, during the Spanish-American War in 1898–1899 (2020: 236). Until today, literary war reporting has been a vivid tradition, with some influences from New Journalism in recent decades (Bak, 2020: 235–255). Beside classical eyewitness reporting, a tradition of adventure reportage made the genre of narrative journalism popular during the last decades of the 19th century (Schudson, 1978: 69). Other kinds with an active reporter in the leading role include undercover reportage.

Within all these narrative traditions, journalistic articles are written in a personal, i.e. subjective form. When it comes to internal perspectives in the third person—built on reconstruction as a journalistic method—this technique became more common, but did not arise, with New Journalism. For example, I have found fascinating proof of reconstruction and a diversity of literary techniques in a reportage from 1913, written by the Prague German Egon Erwin Kisch, who is sometimes called “Europe’s first modern reporter” (Aare, 2021: 211–214). Other similar examples from the 1910s are reportages by Swedish Gustaf Hellström and Ester Blenda Nordström (Aare, 2023).

It is worth noting that the objectivity norm became firmly established in the U.S. as late as during the 1920s (Schudson, 2001). At that time, narrative journalism was widespread and largely accepted. In many countries in Europe, it took several more decades before a neutral, impartial style would become practice in news journalism (Schudson, 2001). Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s biggest morning paper, for instance, has historically encouraged its leading reporters to be personal. During most of the 20th century, the paper looked for reporters who were both politically neutral and appreciated among readers for their “personality” (Lundgren, 2002: 324–325). In other words, subjectivity was an argument for both attracting readers and employing reporters.

All this means that narrative journalism cannot be regarded just as a reaction against the ideals of objectivity. The genre developed as much from its own tradition, a tradition that existed before and, until today, in parallel with conventional news journalism. Sometimes the reporter is visible in the first person as an eyewitness or a participant; other times, the scenes are built on reconstruction and narrated in the third person.

Hartsock finds that prominent reporters together with influential American critics established a kind of myth about how radically new everything was with New Journalism. He adds that it was their influence, rather than the literary techniques, that was in fact new: “What does make it different from what preceded is that it achieved considerable critical recognition.” (2000: 191). For some reason—perhaps due to the gap between the two fields of journalism studies—this myth seems to still be alive in social sciences-influenced journalism studies. For example, Wahl-Jorgensen writes: “techniques taken from ‘new journalism’ [includes] a delayed lead, human interest detail, realistic dialogue, scene by scene reconstruction, interior monologue and several narrators within the text.” (2013a: 133, my emphasis). In fact, none of these techniques were invented by new journalists (Aare, 2023).

As long as social sciences-influenced journalism studies treat all kinds of narrative journalism as just a reaction against conventional news journalism, this may affect research on emotion in journalism to primarily associate subjectivity with expressed feelings and evaluations. It is time to become more exact in defining what journalistic subjectivity in narrative journalism is, has been and can be.

A form of knowledge of its own

When objectivity became the norm in U.S. news journalism, it was against an understanding of its opposite, subjectivity, as partisan journalism related to political parties (Schudson, 2001: 150). A professionalization of the occupation led to the ideal that news articles should be detached and fact based. However, and as we have seen, a genre like narrative journalism does not fit the dualistic model. Within this genre, the word subjectivity takes on a third meaning. A reportage is subjective with respect to a narrative form. Expressed opinions, evaluations, feelings, etc., are subordinate. What matters is that the reader is offered to share the “here and now” with the characters, just like in a novel.

Another word that may cause confusion is story. Michael Schudson divides modern U.S. journalism in two kinds of ideals: “information” and “story” (1978: 88–89). The first is associated with quality papers and articles built on “hard facts,” the other with commercially oriented papers and “entertainment,” often in the form of “sensationalism.” Although “story” here refers to certain kinds of content and frame, including pictures and a personal style, media researchers often use the word in parallel with “storytelling” and, also, “narrative journalism” (Schmidt, 2022). Wahl-Jorgensen describes this view: “While quality journalism is traditionally seen as ‘objective’ and rational, tabloid news discourse is considered to be anti-rationalist or sensationalist in part due to its personalized storytelling and its intention to evoke emotional responses.” (2013a: 131, my emphasis). But sensationalism is not a necessary consequence of storytelling. In fact, it can be the opposite. Hartsock, who belongs to the literature-influenced research field, highlights how sensational journalism aims to shock the audience and thereby creates a distance between reader and described person while narrative journalism’s purpose is to create empathy (141).

When Wahl-Jorgensen summarizes her findings about Pulitzer Prize-winning stories, she concludes that they “rely heavily on emotional story-telling, deploying what has been referred to as the strategic ritual of emotionality” (2013a: 129, my emphasis). This implies that there are other kinds of stories than emotional ones. But if we think of a story as a narrative, it is obvious that every story can evoke the recipients’ emotional response, at least if we stick to Monica Fludernik, who states that a narrative must depict individuals who experience something (1996: 13). To read a narrative, then, is to be invited to take part in characters’ experiences and share their feelings.

If we want to clarify the role emotion plays in a reportage, it is worthwhile to regard emotion as a textual construction that can be divided into the expression of feelings and what may cause feelings, that is feelings in readers. Emotion can accordingly be explicit or implicit and constructed on different levels in the text. Furthermore, it is crucial to consider the relation between emotion and empathy, in the form of emotional response caused by a certain narrative technique. Suzanne Keen defines this as “the sharing of feeling and perspective-taking induced by reading.” (2013). A consequence is that the reader is invited to share point of view with a character. This is only possible in a narrative form. An ordinary news article can trigger the reader’s narrative compassion or sympathy; it enables the reader to feel “for” someone, as stipulated in cognitive narratology (Keen, 2013). But an internal perspective in a story with a narrative form will also, or instead, enable the reader to feel “with” someone (Keen, 2013). In other words, the reader is offered to experience narrative empathy, or, using a more technical concept, immersion.

How can we then define narrative journalism? My proposal is to leave out criteria that have to do with content, frame and style/vocabulary and just abide by the form. A narrative form implicates that: (1) Events are reported step by step, as ongoing, not as completed like in a news article. This means that scenes are part of the textual construction and readers are recurrently offered to share time and place with the characters. Such a construction has also been described as point-of-view writing (Van Krieken and Sanders, 2021: 1405). (2) The narrator does not primarily inform about facts. Instead, the narrator is someone who seems to accompany the reader through the events, like in a novel or short story. The difference has to do with separate functions—an informing contra a narrating function—rather than separate choices of words.

A narrative form invites us to take part in characters’ thoughts and feelings in the moment but also to fantasize about the characters’ relations and dreams and imagine what will happen next. According to David Herman, all this constitutes an “ecology of narrative interpretation” and is a result of what he calls “story logic”; as readers we build a “mental model” where we place our associations based on what actually happens and what could happen in the story (2002: 10–13). The story logic is closely related to our ability to imagine, which in turn is a product of the narrative form.

This indicates that we read a narrative and a non-narrative text in different ways (Herman, 2002: 64–66). In journalism, this means that an interpretation of narrative parts in a reportage cannot be verified against reality in the same way as an interpretation of the content in a conventional news article. It cannot be verified as true—but not as false either. A conclusion is that conventional news journalism and narrative journalism represent two kinds of knowledge that cannot be directly compared; they belong to separate traditions that do not exclude but complement each other.

An example from Swedish Stig Dagerman’s reportage book German Autumn illustrates connections between a narrative form and implicitly conveyed emotion. The reporter travels with a crowded train to Hamburg in 1946, the year after the end of the war:

We journey on in the thick darkness, sweaty, furious, still not sufficiently exhausted to have given up being irritated. But in the darkness something strange suddenly happens. In Germany there is a kind of emergency pocket-torch whose bottom you have to press repeatedly in order to produce light, a yellow, intermittent gleam, and the torch buzzes like a bee while it reluctantly emits its light. Suddenly one of these torches start buzzing in the darkness down by a bench, and all those whose position will allow them look in its direction and see that it is shining on the palm of a hand, a young woman’s hand, and in that hand there lies an appe. A large green juicy apple, one of Germany’s biggest. Total silence falls in the compartment, such is the effect of the apple, for apples are rare in Germany. And the apple is simply lying there on the girl’s palm, and then the torch goes out and in the breathless silence of the dark there is heard the terribly distinct sound of a bite: the young woman has taken a bite of her apple. The torch buzzes again and there is the apple as before, clearly illuminated on her palm. (Dagerman, 2011: 105, my emphasis)

The information value is low here; this could not be a news article. But it is also not a personalized story; nor is it a depiction of dramatic events. The only thing that happens is that a woman illuminates an apple and takes a bite of it. From this, Dagerman makes a whole drama.

The scenic form invites readers to share the moment with the reporter; we can see what he sees and hear what he hears. A narrator is visible through adjectives (mainly in the first sentence), metaphors, and some background information, but there is no overall message. Rather, it is the technique with stylistic repetitions of keywords that dramatizes the seemingly ordinary in the scene (see my emphasis). We can also notice how the torch, the apple and the bite become subjects in the sentence construction and thus personified. Such a style feature enhances the depiction and helps a reader with some knowledge of the situation to imagine the effect of a single apple; many ordinary people in Germany at the time did not have enough food or proper homes. Furthermore, the greenness and juiciness of a big apple were probably provocative to those who did not believe in the future and only felt dejection.

Certainly, there are adjectives and metaphors in the quoted passage. But, taken one by one, they lack meaning. The important thing is what the scenic form itself mediates implicitly, together with the power of the language. It is up to us to interpret the kind of knowledge offered.

An example of narratological analysis

If we treat narrative journalism (or literary journalism or reportage) as a journalistic genre in its own right, it is natural to analyze texts belonging to this genre with help of methods aimed at analyzing narratives. Different kinds of narratology will offer excellent tools here. To illustrate their usefulness, I will initially revisit the unclear association between narrative journalism and sensationalism. Are we talking about the purpose, the style or the form? Schmidt mentions editors who make the same connection between narrative journalism and sensationalism as Wahl-Jorgensen and Schudson point out: “some editors and observers had the uneasy feeling that narrative writing signified a triumph of style over substance, a turn towards ‘soft and sexy’” (p. 1181). Here, like in Wahl-Jorgensen’s description of a common view (2013b), a purpose to shock the audience is highlighted (“soft and sexy”). A certain style and narrative form is supposed to emanate from or precede that. It includes personalization but no further narrative or stylistic specifications. We can also note that when Wahl-Jorgensen discusses in another context implicitly perceived constructions of emotionality, she is primarily referring to how information in the stories evokes readers’ moral evaluations rather than narrative empathy (2013a: 135).

Hartsock performs a more thorough analysis of narrative characteristics when, on the contrary, he points out a difference between the two types of journalism (2000; 134–151). He finds that “discursive mode” is typical of sensationalism in contrast to “narrative mode,” which characterizes what he calls “narrative literary journalism.” In the first case, the narrator evaluates people using adjectives and other expressions that are aimed at horrifying the readers. Hartsock argues that this reinforces differences between reporter/reader and the portrayed people (2000: 142). Narrative journalism, on the other hand, is driven by a purpose to “overcome the epistemological gulf between one’s subjectivity and what has been objectified as Other.” (2000: 141). In this case, value-laden adjectives are avoided in favour of narrative techniques that engage readers “with what their own common senses can generally tell them.” (Hartsock, 2000: 142). However, Hartsock admits that narrative journalism sometimes may contain expressed evaluations. In other words, it is possible to distinguish between sensationalism and narrative journalism with help of purpose (to shock the audience or not) but not with help of vocabulary or form.

What we can do is to distinguish between scenic and non-scenic representation, in other words between show and tell or, with narratological concepts, between mimetic and diegetic representation (Genette, 1980: 162–166, see also Booth, 1983: 40, 50, 94). All kinds of expressed feelings and evaluations, as well as metaphors, are examples of somebody saying something. As long as that person is not a character in the story, this must be the narrator, and we have to deal with diegetic representation. Previously in this article, I have referred to studies where emotion in journalism is associated with subjectivity, in the meaning of a non-neutral vocabulary. These studies indicate that being subjective is the same thing as expressing an opinion. They do not pay attention to parts of a reportage where scenes dominate the representation and a narrator is mainly invisible. The same could be said about parts where a narrator is personal but not explicitly emotional, for example when Dagerman’s narrator uses metaphors. Put differently, these studies miss all kinds of narrative constructions where emotion is mediated implicitly and the reader’s imagination is activated. Thus, they are badly suited to describe what is at stake in a narrative text.

Let us look at an episode from Polish Wojciech Tochman’s reportage book Like Eating a Stone from Bosnia a few years after the end of the Yugoslav war. In a scene, the reporter is going by bus together with the Bosnian woman Mubina:

The frost has gone from the windows now, the meadows are filled with flowers, and we’re driving along the Drina towards Bratunac. We pass villages Mubina has known since childhood. Last time she saw them was eight years ago. What she sees now looks different from how it looked then: there are heaps of rubble and the burned skeletons of houses, the plum trees are in blossom, and there are no people.

As soon as war broke out, Mubina, her sons and her parents left for Belgrade.

“I’m going home,” her father had announced once they were there.

“Stay here,” the woman had begged him.

“I’ll keep an eye on everything, things will calm down, and then you can come back too.”

“Stay here.”

“I’m where I belong,” he said when he telephoned from Bratunac. “I feel calm.”

But the area wasn’t calm at all. Next day Mubina’s father didn’t pick up the phone.

Nor did her husband, not at home or at the veterinary clinic.

“What’s going on?” thought Mubina anxiously. She called the neighbors.

“Yesterday your father came out in the front of the house,” the neighbor began. “He was standing in the street, having a look around.”

“He’s always done that,” Mubina interrupted. “Every morning for decades. So tell me, what happened next?”

“He may have done it yesterday for the last time. Some Chetniks drove up. They asked his name, looked at a list and shoved him into their car. Later on they stopped by again without your father. They took your Volkswagen; they had the keys.”

To this day Mubina doesn’t know what happened: who took her father and where?

“I must find his bones,” she says, wiping her eyes, and she takes out a lipstick and opens a powder compact. “We’re driving into Bratunac.”

[. . .]

Bratunac has only one distinguishing feature: it is next to Srebrenica.

You only have to walk five kilometers along the tarmac road directly south, passing some factory buildings in the village of Potocari, and you’ll find the town in a narrow green valley. For the entire journey the woman on the bus keeps asserting that this area is unusually attractive and rich of minerals. The local waters have healing properties – they are so rich in iron that they’re red – and good for anemia.

Mubina doesn’t want to go down to Srebrenica; she doesn’t even glance in that direction.

That’s where Hasan [her missing husband] went. (Tochman, 2008: 30–32, my emphasis)

I will now use narratological concepts to describe how emotion is constructed in the text. Firstly, the scenic form creates a here and now, a specific moment at a specific place, which the reader is invited to share. This deictic center can be experienced either through external or internal narrative perspectives. ² In the first case, the reader’s gaze is directed against what can be seen and heard from the outside. Göran Rossholm has named this as an afferent perspective, and it could be linked to both a present, experiencing character and an invisible observer (2005: 148–151). In the second case, the reader is invited to take part in a character’s thoughts and feelings from the inside and we get an efferent perspective (Rossholm, 2005: 148–151). It is well known that internal perspectives enable narrative empathy (Aare, 2021; Keen, 2013), not as a consequence of a certain vocabulary but of a certain narrative form (mimetic representation together with efferent perspective). Afferent and efferent perspectives can be combined since we can follow what a character sees and at the same time take part in the character’s feelings.

In the first paragraph of the quoted text, the perspective is initially afferent from the reporter’s point of view. We can see the bus window and the scenery with meadows through his eyes. But the reporter is only present as an eyewitness. He himself is of no interest. Instead, he serves as a bridge to Mubina. Already in the third sentence, the narrative perspective has altered to her afferent perspective. Now it is her gaze that the reader is invited to follow. We can also indirectly follow her thoughts (efferent perspective) when she compares the view with what she remembers from her childhood. Emotion is transmitted implicitly.

In the next paragraph, the scene has changed to some earlier moments in Mubina’s life. Short dialogues are rendered in the form of flashbacks. We can understand that this is built on what Mubina tells the reporter. However, the interview scene is invisible. Instead of reproducing what she says in the form of direct quotes, Tochman has decided to depict her story as short, reconstructed scenes, a narrative construction that places the reader in the retold moment and thus offers narrative empathy; we can imagine ourselves being the person who guesses that her father has been executed by enemies. Any expressed feelings are redundant. The construction is built on the advice that Anton Chekhow is supposed to have given to writers of narratives: “Show, don’t tell!”

However, the narrator is not silent. Diegetic representation can be noted in several ways (see my emphasis for examples). The narrator serves as a neutral guide through the chronology (“As soon as war broke out”); he gives descriptions (“the meadows are filled with flowers”); and he gives background information (“Last time she saw them was 8 years ago.”) All these formulations are written in a neutral style that would be of no interest to a researcher who is looking for evaluative choices of words.

Admittedly, we can identify an evaluation in a meta comment (i.e., when the narrator comments his own story): “But the area wasn’t calm at all.” However, this is to a great degree an understatement. The readers must figure out the full meaning of this and the two following sentences for themselves. What is not told is of more importance than what is told. The same can be said about what Mubina comments to the reporter, when we get a glimpse of an interview scene: “I must find his bones.” This is not diegetic representation because a character within a scene utters it, not the narrator. Furthermore, it is a statement that expresses what Mubina intends to do rather than expressing feelings that can be measured in a quantitative analysis. When the interview scene is developed, Mubina first wipes her eyes and then “takes out a lipstick and opens a powder compact.” Here, the representation is mimetic, which implies that it is up to the reader to interpret the situation.

Narrative representation styles and narrative perspectives have to do with narrative structures. These can be described with help of discourse narratology, a field where researchers study the relationship between a narrative’s content (what is told) and a narrative’s form (how it is told). This kind of analysis is focused on narrative constructions, as I have illustrated above. More nuances can be identified with a complement of cognitive narratology. Within this field, researchers focus on how people react cognitively to narratives and narrating. One concept here is mind-reading in the context of readers’ reactions. ³ It designates how characters’ actions and gestures and what they say invite readers to imagine the characters’ thoughts and feelings in parts of a narrative where internal perspectives are missing. Certain background information can have the same function.

In Tochman’s reportage, mind-reading can be used to imagine Mubina’s feelings in the glimpse from the interview scene. Here, we understand that the narrative perspective is afferent from the reporter’s point of view since the next sentence entails a “we.” However, with help of the given information, it is possible to fantasize about Mubina’s point of view. We can imagine that she is sad (she wipes her eyes) but at the same time determined (she puts on makeup, perhaps in order to look respectable when she leaves the bus and starts searching for her father’s remains). Furthermore, her line about finding her father’s bones indicates her suspicion about what has happened to him. Once again, none of this is possible to interpret if the analysis is restricted to noticing a non-neutral vocabulary. Such analyses would completely miss feelings associated with Mubina’s life experience and, consequently, central emotion in the story.

A reading technique built on mind-reading is closely related to Herman’s previously mentioned story logic concept and the special kind of knowledge that separates narrative journalism from conventional news journalism. In the indicated interview scene, we cannot verify a certain interpretation of Mubina’s state of mind as true, but not as false either.

The rhetorical question “who took her father and where?” seems to mix the narrator’s and Mubina’s voices with each other. This construction is an example of the style feature free indirect discourse (FID). ⁴ The question expresses what Mubina might ask herself, but without being formulated in the first person and without addressing her as a source (i.e., without an addition in the form of “Mubina asked herself.”) This is a common technique to create narrative empathy in novels and short stories. There is no obvious scene, but the reader is offered a partly simulated internal perspective.

The last section of the quote starts with diegetic representation where the statement “it is next to Srebrenica” seems to be a simple fact. Here, however, a reader needs knowledge about the context to understand what is implied: Srebrenica was the place for a genocidal massacre in 1995. The description of the “green valley” creates a sharp contrast that reinforces the hidden message. After that, we are back in the bus scene where the reporter is on site together with Mubina and an anonymous woman who “keeps asserting that this area is unusually attractive and rich of minerals.” The mimetic representation is followed by a new FID construction. This time, it is associated with the woman; the assertion about the local water’s “healing properties” is probably her choice of words. We can also use the reading technique meta-representation to analyze the sentence. This concept, emanating from cognitive narratology, means that a reader tries to trace a source behind a statement (Zunshine, 2006: 47). The responsible instance can be an individual but also a group of people (Zunshine, 2006: 51). Meta-representation is a helpful tool that can sometimes complement discourse narratological analysis when the researcher wants to reveal more general evaluations that are hidden in a text and can be associated with a specific cultural or social context.

In Tochman’s reportage, a possible source for the statement about the water can be people who pretend that the dark history of Srebrenica does not exist. Technically, the phrase is not only an FID construction but also an example of Fludernik’s concept reflectorization. ⁵ In this case, it means that the narrator’s voice seems to reflect or “echo” an opinion that can be traced among people who were blind for crimes committed by Serbs against Bosnian villages during the Yugoslav war. Such an interpretation sheds light on the following information that “Mubina doesn’t want to go down to Srebrenica.” The personal importance to Mubina becomes clear in the last sentence, where we are informed that it was to Srebrenica that her husband Hasan went before he disappeared.

In the complex combination of narrative techniques, the mediated emotion in the final paragraphs is the strongest in the whole passage. And yet, no adjectives, metaphors or expressed feelings indicate that. Altogether, this illustrates how constructions of emotion in narrative journalism are more sophisticated than in conventional news journalism and mostly cannot be identified by methods that are restricted to pointing out explicit evaluations. Instead, a microanalysis, performed using narratological concepts, is better suited to capture the complexity of the messages being conveyed.

I would like to end with a theoretical discussion of how it could be fruitful to distinguish between narrative empathy and narrative compassion in analyses of narrative journalism. ⁶ The first concept is related to a narrative’s structures. It is a technical product of an efferent perspective in a scene, and it enables the reader to share deictic center with a character irrespective of whether this character is a victim, hero or villain. What matters is the internal point of view; in other words if immersion is generated from the narrative construction.

Narrative compassion is something else. It designates when the reader is invited to feel something for a character, and it could be the result of diegetic or mimetic representation. Consequently, it could be both explicit and implicit. In Tochman’s text, we can feel compassion for Mubina as a consequence of how we interpret her feelings in the depicted moments (mimetic representation). But we are not invited to share the narrator’s feelings for her; they are constantly hidden. When narrative compassion is explicit—which is the meaning that Keen refers to (2013)—it is due to the narrator’s choice of words. For example, the narrator can describe a certain group of people as “stupid and lazy but living under poor and hard conditions.” Here, a reader can easily pity but not identify with the characters: “I feel sorry for them, but I am not like them.” A more positive kind of generalization is also possible, like: “Their primitive lifestyle may seem exotic to us but still admirable.”

This kind of writing creates a distance between reader and character that is typical of sensationalism but can be avoided if the form is changed to mimetic representation. Explicit narrative compassion is primarily related to generalizations and stereotypes while narrative empathy is related to what is specific or unique for one character in a depicted moment, for example Mubina when she goes by bus to Bratunac in order to find her father’s remains. Through the function of story logic, constructions of narrative empathy open a door to the reader’s imagination and therefore facilitate a deeper understanding. Noting the difference between the two forms is important if we want to understand how emotion works within narrative journalism.

Conclusion

This article has focused on how emotion is constructed in narrative journalism. I have highlighted connections between emotion and the related concept subjectivity, which here is conditioned by a narrative form. This means that events in the genre are reported step by step and scenes are part of the narrative construction. Consequently, it is not enough to identify expressed feelings and evaluations in the vocabulary as characterizing emotion in the content, as some media researchers have done. Instead, we must take into account that emotion is largely transmitted implicitly. To investigate these constructions, narratological tools can be a complement to the quantitative methods used in previous research.

In a reportage by Wojciech Tochman, I have identified implicitly conveyed emotion with help of the narratological concepts diegetic and mimetic representation; afferent and efferent narrative perspective; narrative empathy and narrative compassion; deictic center; free indirect discourse; reflectorization; meta comments; and mind-reading and meta-representation.

Furthermore, I have described narrative journalism as a professional tradition in its own right, with a continuous and internationally widespread history, and as representing a kind of knowledge that cannot easily be compared to the kind of knowledge that characterizes conventional news journalism. This distinction affects the duality in the concept pair objective–subjective; narrative journalism cannot be primarily defined by what it is not (i.e., not being governed by the objectivity norm). Its type of subjectivity is related to a personal form, not expressed feelings and evaluations. With that in mind, researchers could use narratology to nuance and further develop investigations of emotion in journalism. This could be done through qualitative but also minor quantitative analyses where, for example, identified differences between narrative compassion and narrative empathy can tell us something about the view of people conveyed.