Critics have derived these principles of agency—narration, "empirical" authorship, and implied authorship—mainly from print fiction. (Genette’s own groundbreaking work is a gloss on Proust.) But what application, if any, do they have for narratives in other media? What would happen, for example, if we took seriously the premise of film, not print fiction, as the paradigmatic instance of any narratology? Or, to put it more broadly, if narratology seeks to understand the functions and perceptions of narrative texts, then it should apply to stories told in any medium (print fiction, comics, dance, opera, etc.) while still being flexible enough to accommodate the instances of style unique to each medium. As useful and even necessary as it has been, is the print fiction paradigm sufficient to be a viable model for all narratology? The issue of agency, I suggest, is a good place to start exploring that question.

One complicating factor in understanding narration and agency is the near-universality of narrative. Almost any medium can be used to tell a story. The same basic fabula/story of "Cinderella" exists in many oral and written versions, in Rossini’s La Cenerentola, in Prokofiev’s ballet, in a poem from Anne Sexton’s Transformations, and in several film versions, including Disney’s animated one. Even if we attend more strongly to the actual construction of each work’s plot or its foregrounding of music, dance, verbal imagery, or the antics of animated mice, we are still engaged in reconstructions of essentially the same story. Of course, any narrative medium also can and does convey original stories. But in what sense do these other media "narrate" their stories? Are the agencies of "narrator," author, and "implied author" applicable in all instances—or any?

A related factor is the near-universality of the human ability to perceive narrative in almost any circumstance. In The Scarlet Letter, the guilt-stricken adulterer and minister Mr. Dimmesdale sees a meteor shower that seems to form a celestial "A." Hawthorne’s narrator sardonically comments, "Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all meteoric appearances, and other natural phenomena . . . as so many revelations from a supernatural source. . . . It was, indeed, a majestic idea, that the destiny of nations should be revealed, in these awful hieroglyphics, on the cope of heaven. . . . But what shall we say, when an individual discovers a revelation, addressed to himself alone, on the same vast sheet of record!" (127). Dimmesdale, like so many others then and now, perceives the "book of nature" as a narrative in which he is a character and whose implied author is God Himself. Even if an individual is not attuned to the possibility of supernatural causes, human cognition is prone to find narrative connections in the most tenuous of circumstances. Narrative is a way of structuring perception and life itself. As Umberto Eco puts it, the "consoling function of narrative" is "to find a shape, a form, in the turmoil of human experience" (87).

The power of the desire for narrative finds connections through the elements of any given medium. The mere juxtaposition of still images can suggest links of time, space, or cause and effect. Our ability to understand comics, Scott McCloud proposes, derives from the juxtaposition of "still images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer" (9), regardless of who or what creates that "intention." Movement within moving images also tends to prompt viewers to infer a narrative context. As the abstract filmmaker Robert Breer complains, "It’s hard not to [tell a story] when you having people doing things."

Finally, there is the near-universal human tendency to personify and anthropomorphize the non-human. As David Bordwell remarks, "We project humanlike properties onto so many domains of activity that we ought not to be surprised that they also feature in that esoteric realm known as film criticism" (Making Meaning 151)--and filmmaking, we might add. Thus, critics and filmmakers can ascribe human qualities to the camera (as it "shows us" a character doing something) or even to the film itself (as it "tries to tell us" something). We may attribute qualities of human agency to the actions of diegetic characters as we infer social causes and psychological motivations for their actions, and to the real or implied author(s) of the narrative as we speculate about their artistic, social and psychological motivations (MM 158, passim).

Together, these complicating factors make it difficult to isolate narrative and narration as typical of a single form or medium or to give priority to that medium. These complications do suggest (to personify an abstraction) that print fiction holds no more of a monopoly on the principles of narrative than any other form.

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