The Limits of Narrative
Your story. My Story. Our Story. There’s a story behind everything, it seems. But is it actually a story? The language of narrative and narrative interpretation sometimes gets hijacked or pushed too far and encroaches on the territory of other ways of speaking. There are limits to narrative.
One final aspect of Ricoeur’s approach to narrative is important to highlight.
There is a problematic weakness inherent in a hermeneutic, an approach to language and interpretation, derived from structuralist assumptions of narrative. The weakness lies in the presumption of structuralist narratology of the pervasive presence of unitary deep-level structure in narratives, which then impairs the consequences of that conception, in particular that specific stories and narrative more generally are universally present.
Tautological repetition
It is a postulate — the assumed existence as a fact of universal underlying narrative structure that forms the basis of subsequent reasoning — that verges on a tautology: the argument ‘proves’ the original postulate, magically finding to be true what it originally assumed was true.
As a consequence, it is very easy to confuse and even conflate structuralism’s postulate of deep-level structure with pervasive deep-level story. Greimas’s actantial model that I described in my previous post asserts that there is a patterned relationship between defined actants universally present at a deep level in all stories. Other structural approaches do similar, as I said previously.
They assert that there is only 6 or 9 or 35 basic character types, or always 5 acts, or a defined rhythm or pattern of story ‘beats’, the flow of conflicts and climaxes, towards the final crescendo, or whatever. Writers, sensing a shortcut to assured success, base their writing on these models … and, lo! The mighty narrative god has commanded it, and it is so: there’s a matching cache of stories that obey the structural rules of narrative. But of course, that’s merely self-fulfilling.
Holding to the full force of this assertion is problematic, as I previously argued. There is, though, an even more perilous trap door if one were to take this notion as read.
Controlling stories, conformity and bias
Structural approaches to understanding and interpreting narratives make it easy to present a general overview or broad-brushstroke picture of a specific story, to summarise it in a few sentences. It is a short move from here to talking instead of narrative as substructure, as allusion, as implied, as ‘controlling’ story, as I described previously. However, and maybe in fact as a direct result of this, it is easy to mistakenly read a general ‘underlying structure’ as a specific ‘underlying story,’ and then to assert that the specific story is consistently present in the narrative substructure of every utterance, expression, argument or text thereafter.
It is easy to mistakenly read a general ‘underlying structure’ as a specific ‘underlying story.’
That makes sense in a large-scale fictional saga like Star Wars, where subsequent editions are reframed, recreated or resolved versions of the original. Here, then, certain trigger words are used that allude to the whole story, framed as it was in the very beginning: the pursuit of dominance over The Force by The Dark Side, for instance.
At first sight, this is not such a problem with fiction writing. It is, however, rather dangerous in political, religious or other polemic contexts, where readers are vulnerable to group dynamics, manipulative herd psychologies, groupthink and the power of conformity.
Social experiments on conformity are well-established. When these dynamics are allied to repeated assertions of a specific underlying story, they are downright damaging. We are living through a political era where this is being actualised.
In the US in recent years, the specific story of ‘The Swamp’ and everything associated with it led to one sphere of groupthink. On the other side of the political spectrum, repeated assertions of their candidate’s experience and steady leadership restated the story of bureaucratic liberal democratic governance by elites and led to a near-complete consensus in polling organisations, news media and pundits on the outcome of the election.
In the UK, Brexit and the withdrawal from the European Union are being fought over assertions of very specific stories. For one side, Britannia is the narrative symbol of a strong, independent, redoubtable nation taking back control so that, finally, the British people can determine their own destiny. For the other side, the story of continental unity is about overcoming differences that previously led, twice, to war, that the country is stronger, safer and better off working together with its friends and neighbours.
There’s two sides to every story, they say. Well, in both of these examples, the same events are assumed to be accounted for by a controlling story. And in both illustrations, there are two very different stories. So it’s not that there’s one story with two sides. It’s that there’s two stories that give a complete, self-contained and internally consistent account of the same events. But if there’s two stories, well surely there could be three. Ooh, and there’s a fourth story over there, listen. And a fifth. And … well, you get the picture.
Tacit agreements and consequent conformity are perilous products of structural approaches to story.
In my field, in Biblical studies, a similar move is made in asserting that ‘the gospel story’ informs all of the writings of the apostle Paul, for instance. Whilst Paul’s epistles are undoubtedly shaped by the Early Church’s oral stories of Jesus of Nazareth, questions like ‘What gospel?’ or ‘Whose gospel?’ underlies the Pauline writings does not accompany this scholarship in sufficient depth. Instead, scholars all too frequently proceed on the assumption that their readers have a tacit agreement about the nature of the underlying ‘gospel story,’ only for it to become clear that the assumed ‘controlling story’ is the scholar’s gospel that is masquerading as Paul’s gospel or Early Christianity’s Gospel — the underlying story proceeds from the scholar’s own presumptions.
The ‘controlling story’ problem
These sorts of tacit agreements and the consequent conformity are perilous products of structural approaches to story. This vulnerability is easily exposed in non-fictional accounts of ‘real events,’ but fiction is written and read by real people who are susceptible to being hoodwinked by the notion of a singular specific controlling story. That means that fiction is just as vulnerable as non-fiction to the ‘substructural’ and ‘controlling’ story problem.
Structural narratology does not have the philosophical tools in the bag to understand that things happen outside the bounds of the text.
By way of example of the consequence of fiction proceeding on the presumption of a tacit agreement of a controlling story, you may like to watch the outstanding film critic, Mark Kermode, review two recent films: Sex and the City 2, and Entourage.
Famous though he his for his occasional rants at awful films, in these reviews Kermode pointedly challenges the assumption that ‘everyone thinks like this, everyone wants this’ that is a natural consequence of the ‘controlling story’ notion. Structural narratology smuggles in the presumption that ‘everyone thinks like this,’ and that is pernicious.
Structural narratology does not have the philosophical tools in the bag to understand that things happen outside the bounds of the text, that the things explored in stories are not necessarily universals. Ricoeur’s theory of narrative, on the other hand, and specifically his understanding of refiguration, the third moment of narrative, equips us to perceive how the proposed world of the text and the lived world of the reader interact in just the manner seen in Kermode’s reviews above. On this, more below.
The multiple mishaps of universal narrative
One of the most problematic manifestations of the controlling story problem is the ubiquitous use of the terms and concepts of narrative in non-narrative contexts. The problem of thinking this way is multi-layered.
Firstly, narrative is ever-present — where it is not explicit, it is understood as being alluded to or substructural.
Secondly, it is a singular narrative that lies underneath everything else — there is a unitary worldview formed by many stories that draws them all together into one meta-narrative.
Thirdly, that narrative is not only ever-present but also ubiquitous. Phrases like ‘British values’ or ‘the American way’ or ‘… like any good Canadian’ indicate a presumption of universalisation. This recapitulates the idea we encountered above that structural narratology assumes everyone thinks like this i.e. ‘ … like every good South African … ’. But that then begs questions about whether being an Italian, Indian, Iranian, whatever citizen is a good/bad binary, whether someone could be a semi-good Australian, a goody-goody Spaniard, or maybe mostly a good Argentinian but with a few bad bits, and whether that would sway to what degree individual citizens hold to the universalised substructural story. What is the lived experience of a semi-good Norwegian, Mexican or Zambian?
Fourthly, with narrative being ever-present, unitary and ubiquitous, it is also tyrannical such that all other genres or modes of discourse are subordinated beneath it — narrative is the only game in town, as it were, and every letter, song, speech, philosophy or whatever is saturated with the underlying story.
This is clearly deeply problematic. It allows the scholar or critic or campaigner or spin doctor to assert that almost any text conforms to the ever-present, universal, ubiquitous and ultimately tyrannical substructural narrative.
It is my contention that this problematic position is a direct consequence of a narratological hermeneutic derived so directly from structuralism. But, and it is an important but, a more chastened approach to narrative, a post-structural and post-classical narrativity, does not have to suffer from this totalitarianism. In particular, Ricoeur takes pains to express the limits of narrative.
The game being played
A first avenue of response is built on a reorientation from narrative to interpretation as the game being played.
Interpretation is an interaction between the text and the reader.
As I described previously when discussing refiguration, the signs, symbols and structure, the characters, events and the plot of the narrative text propose a world and a way of being-in-the-world. They speak of a way of understanding and configuring the world:
‘what is to be interpreted in a text is a proposed world, a world that I might inhabit and wherein I might project my ownmost possibilities.’¹
Structuralist narratology does not account adequately for the world of the text: semiotic analysis makes the story conform to the structure and does not allow the story to speak for itself. Rather, the interplay between these two worlds — the world of the text and the world of the reader — enables narratology to concern itself with the ‘meaning’ of a narrative.
Structural narratology makes a story conform to the structure and does not allow it to speak for itself.
Ricoeur argues that the ‘“meaning” is not confined to the so-called inside of the text. It occurs at the intersection between the world of the text and the world of the readers. It is mainly in the reception of the text by an audience that the capacity of the plot to transfigure experience is actualized.’² When working with texts, the game (in which narrative is a player) is interpretation.
Postmodernity, narrative, history and novels
Ricoeur indicates a couple of other arenas in which narrative is at its limit. Working with history, he acknowledges that the model of emplotment he had derived from Aristotle is pushed close to breaking point and should be expanded to talk of quasi-characters, quasi-events and quasi-plot, lest history lie beyond the reaches of narrative.³ (By way of illustration, The Allies are a quasi-character in the quasi-event of the D-Day Normandy Landings of the Second World War, in the quasi-plot of Operation Overlord.)
Ricoeur also notes that postmodernism may have had a similar effect on the novel such that ‘we no longer know what narrating means,’ but, through arguing for the centrality of reference in narrative refiguration, he rebels against ‘the fatal mutation that would result from the passage of humanity to a stage where no one any longer had any experience to communicate to someone else.’⁴
Narrative and the aporetic
However, a more significant area of limitation for narrative is encountered as it addresses the aporetic: those things that are incomprehensible and irresolvable.
The issues raised by history and the postmodern novel are both concerned with narrative’s ability to narrate — its capacity to refigure time through its internal mechanism, emplotment. The aporia of time presents a whole other level — ‘the very limits of such a refiguration of time by narrative.’⁵
This limit has two senses: an internal and an external limit.
It has an internal limit in that narrativity exceeds itself to the point of exhaustion as it attempts to describe the indescribable. At moments of extreme concentration on an aporetic theme narrative finds itself at limit-experiences — places at the extremes of being human — and in doing so encounter the transcendent.
With the aporia of time, these limit-experiences are ‘worthy of being placed under the sign of eternity.’⁶ Each narrative multiplies these limit-experiences, and in each instance, ‘it is in a different possible world that time allows itself to be surpassed by eternity.’⁷
It has an external limit in that narrative must, at the limit, overflow into other genres and modes of discourse that have the capacity to speak about time (or whichever aporia is being addressed). In other words, there comes a moment ‘where we must admit that narrative is not the whole story and that time [poverty/justice/grief/love/etc.] can be spoken of in other ways, because, even for narrative, it remains inscrutable.’⁸
Ricoeur notes that the Hebrew Bible has been for him a particular focus of attention for this conjunction of genres,⁹ being as it is a library of texts of different modes: stories; songs; poetry; letters; polemics; propaganda; edicts; laws; histories; theses; and so on. He further points out that just as this necessary confluence of genres to speak of the aporetic occurs in the Bible, so it is also with other texts.¹⁰
The limits of narrative
In Ricoeur’s theory of narrative, then, we have two important dimensions:
- a more developed, comprehensive and thoroughgoing understanding of narrative, formed through a phenomenological approach to philosophy (i.e. paying close attention to real human experience), and,
- a more chastened apprehension of its applicability, and a more humble conception of narrative’s place amongst other modes of communication in language.
These are indications that this approach may offer a way of working with narrative that is closer to the way real human beings use and encounter narrative than the structural methodologies that are so problematic.
In particular, Ricoeur’s theory incorporates in its essence an understanding of the nuances, the complexities, the variations and contradictions in the way real people both tell and respond to stories.
That is promising.
Photo credits
Sweet Ice Cream Photography on Unsplash
Warren Wong on Unsplash
Footnotes
¹ Paul Ricoeur, ‘Philosophy and Religious Language,’ in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (ed. Mark I Wallace; trans. David Pellauer; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 43 [35–47].
² Paul Ricoeur, ‘Toward a Narrative Theology: Its Necessity, Its Resources, Its Difficulties,’ in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (ed. Mark I Wallace; trans. David Pellauer; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 240 [236–48], emphasis original.
³ Ricoeur, Time 1, 175–225 ; Time 3, 270.
⁴ Ricoeur, Time 3, 270.
⁵ Ricoeur, Time 3, 270.
⁶ Ricoeur, Time 3, 271.
⁷ Ricoeur, Time 3, 271.
⁸ Ricoeur, Time 3, 272.
⁹ Ricoeur, Time 3, 272. Indeed, he notes the Hebrew Bible ‘can be read as the testament about time in its relations to divine eternity,’ given his previous reservations about the ‘equivocity of the word “eternity”’ (272).
¹⁰ Ricoeur, Time 3, 272–73.
