Toward a Narratology of Disposition

Contemporary narratology has precisely described phenomena such as focalization, the representation of consciousness, and the management of narrative information; yet it still lacks a principle capable of accounting for them within a unified framework. This article proposes such a principle: disposition, understood as the stable mode of organization through which an instance configures whatever appears as a narrative landscape. Extending a philosophical tradition that includes Aristotle's hexis, Dilthey's Strukturzusammenhang, and Bourdieu's habitus, disposition is presented as a constitutive condition of narrative that precedes the contents of consciousness and does not depend on the presence of an embodied subject. Every narrative experience arises from the relation between disposition and landscape and comprises three fundamental elements: identity, landscape, and action. Action transforms the proposed landscape into an organized landscape, thereby making the organizing disposition perceptible. Narrative is further defined as the testing of a disposition. The article distinguishes between a constitutive test, inherent in every narrative experience, and a structural test, through which narrative design condenses that examination by organizing action around conflict. Building on these distinctions, the study develops an operative analytical schema—dominant trait, disposition, organized landscape, and conduct—for both narrative analysis and narrative construction; proposes three possible modes of resolution for the test—resistance, deformation, and substitution; and shows how this framework reinterprets central narratological categories while extending seamlessly to audiovisual narrative. By placing disposition at the center of narrative theory, the article offers a new organizing principle capable of integrating phenomena that have traditionally been treated as separate domains.