Just as it is problematic to discuss an essentially literary term (narrative) in the context of images and painting, to discuss the devices used among similar works in text and image will come up against the same problems of analogy. However, it seems that this difficulty, the difficulty of analogy, is exactly the one that we're confronting this week.
Zhang Zeduan's Spring Festival on the River scroll gives a certain sense of narrative mostly as a result of what Julia Murray would term, its 'format.' The format of the scroll is such that only a limited section can be viewed at any given time. Thus, it feels appropriate to view the scroll linearly, moving from one section to another over time. In this way, time (real time) is controlled. Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope seems relevant here. The chronotope, as Bakhtin defines the term, refers to the way(s) in which a literary work fuses time and space into a unity, manipulating both in different ways, at different points, towards a unified effect. This notion applies more easily, of course, to works of text.
In Meng Yuanlao's Recollections of the Northern Song Capital a sense of space is controlled very exactly with the used of absolute spacial indicators. The text is rife with words like east, west, above, below and so on. At many points, exact distances between objects are given. This, combined with the virtual lack of characters, gives a sense of timelessness to the capital. Given such exact spacial dimensions, we are supplied with context but no action. It is as if the capital always was and always will be.
Yet, at other points, Yuanloa's descriptions manipulate the chronotope. When we learn of the different festivals that occur and how they work, suddenly there is action, and people. The process of the festival is described in close, chronological detail such that we know what happens in the morning, the afternoon and the evening. The increase in action actually narrows the spacial dimension of the work as we focus closely onto the festival area and spend time watching its happenings. Yet, in the end, this too has a timeless feel to it as well. These sections (along with most of the work) are written in a generalized present tense. We do not learn of a specific festival with specific people on a specific date, but rather a formula for a festival that we are told had been more or less repeated during Yuanloa's experience of the city. Or, to use the structuralist terminology which Murray cites, the discursive time is generalized to the point of being static, while the story time (the time referred to) repeats itself ad infinitum in a lost, indeterminate past. I think this, perhaps, is what we generally mean when we say that something is 'timeless': it suggests an action that is static as we experience it, but refers to something endlessly repeating, but not repeatable.
A similar sense of timelessness is achieved in Zeduan's scroll. Like Yuanloa's Recollections, the scroll is filled with people, but lacking in characters. Much is happening in this snapshot of a moment, but it is a generalized moment, a moment rooted in place and time, yet somehow lacking these things as well. All this is to simply say, it has no story, and I think Murray would agree with this point. A story requires a transformative action or event happening to or through a character. In the impressive, realistic detail of this immense scroll, I think we are given an excellent setting for such a story, but no story proper.
The way in which the format of the scroll limits and segments our viewing is analogous to the segmentation of Yuanloa's text. We see episodes of events, but no specific chronology. Such episodic viewing gives a real sense of chronology, of time passing, but I think it is only a reaction to the form; such a sense is not borne out by the content.
To the question, "can either of these works be called narratives?" it is probably clear that I would conclude "no" in both cases, but there is one thing which seems to contradict a lot of what I have been saying. In the Yuanloa text, there are points at which he slips into a past tense and refers to "the old days." Usually these sections describe the author's own experience in the city, but in other places it does not. On page 413, to choose just one of many instances, the author describes several floating pavilions on "where people were allowed in to enjoy the spring" (413; emphasis mine). This subtle reference to a present time significantly different from the time of which he writes may in fact refer to a story, rather than tell it. This story would be the story of the fall of the Song empire and the sudden exodus south. In this way, the entire work could be seen in terms not unlike the way we talk about chinese "episodic" art which reference specific stories with specific characters with specific trajectories and transformations but don't seem to give all the information upfront. Perhaps the city itself is just such a character, and perhaps the timeless sense that Yuanloa's descriptions give is meant to access a collective mourning for a city and a life taken from an entire people.
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