Il concetto di especial trascendencia constitucional del recurso de amparo

As in the previous chapter, imagine that you want to tell a friend a story. This time, however, you want to tell a story with which you want to reveal things that are perhaps not entirely rational, psychologically explicable or materially palpable. Perhaps you want to get across an indescrib-able feeling. Maybe you want to engage their more spiritual feelings, their feelings of awe, long-ing, love, sorrow or hope. To achieve this, the last thing you want your friend to be doing is sitting on the edge of their seat, adrenalin flooding through their system, worried about what is going to happen next or whether your protagonist is going to survive or achieve their aims. In a situation like this, you may want them to relax, forget themselves, lose themselves in the imagery of your story or the setting of your events. Perhaps you want them to link things in a less causal way and reflect on moments in the story with no regard for what might happen next. To achieve this different kind of engagement with your story, you would need to approach your discourse and narrative differently.

As with the classic narrative, there is still a reason for telling the story, an authorial purpose which you should interrogate with the question: why do I want to tell this story and why now?

There will still be a point to your story. There will still be a reason why you should tell it. And there will be a reason why you want to tell it now. At the end of the day, you will still be seeking to reveal something, show someone something or open our eyes to something. You’re just going to go about it in a different way, because what you wish to reveal demands that difference.

We are all very familiar with the elements of classic narrative. They are ubiquitous, palpable and make rational sense. Can we use these same elements to describe how one alternative approach – one based on the distinguishing of types of emotions and feelings – might work? Can we talk about defining such elements as protagonist, aims, obstacles, climax, resolution and so on? It should be possible to start with one similarity; namely, for anything to be a narrative it must have events – an ‘agent’ taking action, or something happening to an ‘agent’.

As mentioned earlier, at its extreme the classic narrative is concerned with survival and the alternative narrative approach we have, so far, been alluding to is, at its extreme, concerned with transcendence. If some of the key characteristics of the classic narrative are self-assertiveness, cause and effect, action, externalisation, psychological motivation, movement and change, then some of the key characteristics of the transcendental narrative are self-effacement, coincidence, stillness, internalisation, irrationality, inaction and immutability. What we are therefore talking about is how these events can be structured, organised and presented in such a way as to contain the qualities just described.

Introduction

Not much has been written about the notion of transcendental narrative. While it has been little written about in the context of fiction (Schrader, 1972) it has been written about even less in the context of documentary (Knudsen, 2008). You will find a lot of literature about the classic narrat-ive, but when it comes to genuine alternatives (as opposed to creative reworkings of the classic narrative) it seems that we lack the appropriate language and tools of interrogation. This term

‘transcendental realism’ describes a broad approach to storytelling that seeks to engage our participatory feelings, or spiritual feelings. In this chapter, we will explore what the key ingredi-ents of the transcendental narrative are, how they engage different feelings from those evoked by the classic narrative, and then we’ll look at how to connect this with the documentary genre.

Perhaps one place to start to explore this is to recount the story of how a Zen master came to learn about Zen.¹The Zen master explains that, when he first started learning about Zen, when-ever he looked at a mountain, a mountain was just that: a mountain. When he learned a little about Zen, whenever he looked at a mountain it had become more complex: a mountain was not just a mountain because there was more to it than that. When he finally got to grips with Zen and then looked at a mountain, he realised that a mountain was, after all, just that: a mountain.

This little story gives us an approach into one prototypical alternative to the classic narrative.² While we have a protagonist, there is no real aim, as we’re used to seeing it in a classic narra-tive, nor a clear premise, nor a climax, nor obstacles or the traditional resolution following a climax. What we have here are a series of events (looking) which are not driven by psychological drivers, but a series of changing states. The master was not looking at the mountain to under-stand Zen – that would have provided the aim in a classic narrative – but the looking at the mountain (the events of looking) was a reflection of a state. This state started in one place, changed, and then returned to where it started. Nothing has physically or rationally changed, yet there has been a change which cannot be psychologically explained. The relationship to the mountain at the end can only be described as a transcendental one. The process is illustrated in Figure 11.1.

Figure 11.1 Basic tripartite transcendental structure of changing states

What becomes important here is not to fashion a series of events that will take us from one situation to another, in pursuit of a protagonist’s aims, but to fashion a series of events that will establish a state of normality, whatever that might be. These events will evolve into ones that then show us a state in which we see some sort of departure from that first state of normality, some sort of schism or crack which establishes a state of disparity or disharmony. It could be that there is a particular event, stage or shift in perspective that signals the beginning of this transition into a state of disparity. However, events continue to be linked by the need to establish this state and not, as in the classic narrative, to further the plot as we follow the protagonist’s pursuit of their aims. Likewise, there will be a particular event, decisive moment or turning point that will take us from the state of disparity back to a state of normality, in which nothing has physically changed, yet somehow, because we have been on this journey of shifting states, everything has changed.

With an approach like this, events may seem coincidentally linked, as they do not follow causal patterns. We will be asked to look at these events for their own sake, to link them in non-causal ways, to see elements within these events that do not necessarily serve the purpose of understanding psychological character motivations as we’re used to understanding them in a causal context. This kind of linking of events opens up possibilities for reflection and a re-evaluation of our usual engagement with narratives. Our emotions are not tied up with conflicts between aims and obstacles, or with questions of success or failure in achieving those aims or succumbing to the obstacles. Instead, we are invited to participate with our feelings in a series of events that do not direct us in a linear progression, but in a, seemingly, more random series of events that take us into experiencing shifting states of mind. Where events (and scenes) in a clas-sic narrative serve the purpose of leading from one plot point to the next plot point, the events (and scenes) of the transcendental narrative do not lead anywhere in particular in terms of plot.

If the transcendental narrative is about changing states, then let us explore some other pos-sibilities in terms of structure. We could, for example, also be looking at further structures as shown in Figure 11.2.

Where the climax of the classic narrative provides us with the clearest moment in the narrative to see the theme of the story, in the transcendental narrative the key turning point brings us back to the state we were first made familiar with and it is experiencing this first state with new eyes that should most powerfully reveal the theme of the narrative. Unlike the moment in the classic narrative where our emotions are at their highest state of engagement, in the transcendental narrative it is in the reflective moments of the final state that the theme should be most clearly visible, engaging our participatory feelings.

Let us summarise some key elements in the transcendental narrative.

Protagonist

As in the classic narrative, the transcendental narrative will also have a protagonist who is the main figure for our empathy. Similarly, the protagonist need not be singular nor, indeed, a human being. However, in the transcendental narrative there need be no aim for the protagonist.

What primarily engages us is their state and, perhaps, their predicament. Where palpable change in a protagonist is important to the classical narrative – often manifested in changed attitudes and/or circumstances – immutability in events and circumstances is, paradoxically, a key com-ponent of the transcendence element of this type of narrative. While the protagonist may be changed by events, this does not necessarily involve a palpable or psychologically explicable change. Indeed, it is the viewer’s changed perspective of seemingly unchanged circumstances, and the often unchanged protagonist, which is at the heart of the transcendental experience of the story.

Premise

It is hard to imagine a narrative without a premise – in other words, a reason for starting the nar-rative at this moment in time. As we have discussed, in the classic narnar-rative the premise is the event – past or future – which tells us why we are coming into the narrative at this point and, as such, it is this event that triggers an aim and a subsequent series of other causal events. In the transcendental narrative there will also be a reason why we are coming into the narrative at this

Figure 11.2 Possible variations to the tripartite transcendental structure of changing states

particular point. This event is likely to be associated directly with the change of state – i.e. we are coming into a particular narrative at this point because the protagonist is going to go through a changing state of some kind. This is, however, a little different because it need not be dealt with separately. It is not a precursor for events to happen, but perhaps a reflective narrative feature to be understood in retrospect.