Ägyptische monochrone Einzelbilder als Erzählungen: Eine Fallstudie

Abstract

The contribution examines the potential of so-called monochronic single still pictures to constitute autonomous narratives. Their ability to do so has been explicitly contested in classical narratology (section 1) as well in transmedially oriented postclassical narratology (section 2). Allegedly, images in general and especially those which show only one moment in time do not possess a clearly-structured temporal program in the same way as textual narratives do, which progress, on the discourse-level of narrative presentation, in a linear and sequential manner. Monochronic pictures thus cannot, by definition, show events in their temporal-causal contiguity, which would be one common set of criteria that would define a narrative. Although this view has also been imported into Egyptology (section 4.1), it must be questioned from a cognitive perspective that is combined with a serious reflection on the medial specificities of representing time in images (section 3). The final part of this contribution (section 4) is devoted to the case study of an ostracon that shows an image which belongs to the so-called Egyptian genre-scenes – a variety of images that, according to Egyptological preconceptions, lacks any form of newsworthiness or tellability (section 4). First of all, it is argued for the need to alter the transcultural and transhistorical conception of the narrative criterion of tellability in a way that it is sensible enough to also suit Egyptian conceptions of events that are worth being told. It then can be shown that the chosen example of monochronic images can very well present an autonomous story by the way in which recognisable objects and movement-patterns are arranged across the pictorial space. Beholders are not only triggered to narrativize the image according to mentally stored cognitive schemes and scripts, but their reception of the image is also guided by the clearly defined temporal succession of the tellable event on the discourse-level of the image.