Storytelling and Ethics

Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative

Hanna Meretoja, Colin Davis, Hanna Meretoja, Colin Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351965774
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In recent years there has been a huge amount of both popular and academic interest in storytelling as something that is an essential part of not only literature and art but also our everyday lives as well as our dreams, fantasies, aspirations, historical self-understanding, and political actions. The question of the ethics of storytelling always, inevitably, lurks behind these discussions, though most frequently it remains implicit rather than explicit. This volume explores the ethical potential and risks of storytelling from an interdisciplinary perspective. It stages a dialogue between contemporary literature and visual arts across media (film, photography, performative arts), interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives (debates in narrative studies, trauma studies, cultural memory studies, ethical criticism), and history (traumatic histories of violence, cultural history). The collection analyses ethical issues involved in different strategies employed in literature and art to narrate experiences that resist telling and imagining, such as traumatic historical events, including war and political conflicts. The chapters explore the multiple ways in which the ethics of storytelling relates to the contemporary arts as they work with, draw on, and contribute to historical imagination. The book foregrounds the connection between remembering and imagining and explores the ambiguous role of narrative in the configuration of selves, communities, and the relation to the non-human. While discussing the ethical aspects of storytelling, it also reflects on the relevance of artistic storytelling practices for our understanding of ethics. Making an original contribution to interdisciplinary narrative studies and narrative ethics, this book both articulates a complex understanding of how artistic storytelling practices enable critical distance from culturally dominant narrative practices, and analyzes the limitations and potential pitfalls of storytelling.

Chapter 7 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

1 Introduction

Intersections of Storytelling and Ethics

Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis

In recent years, there has been a huge amount of both popular and academic interest in storytelling as something that is an essential part of not only literature but also our everyday lives—our dreams, fantasies, aspirations, political actions, cultural memory and historical self-understanding. It has become commonplace to describe humans as storytelling animals. The issue has been explored from innumerable perspectives, including anthropology, cognitive psychology, cultural studies, narratology, neuroscience and philosophy, and the field of narrative studies has developed in an increasingly interdisciplinary direction. The question of the ethics of storytelling always, inevitably, lurks behind these discussions, though most frequently it remains implicit rather than explicit. Even approaches that explicitly discuss the ethical stakes of literature and the arts have often been blandly affirmative, failing to confront the most complex, problematic aspects of the role of stories in our private and public lives. Plato’s infamous banishing of the poets from the ideal state in Book 10 of his Republic has rarely been embraced by later thinkers and artists, but it remains a powerful, to some extent still open challenge to our hopes for the ethical function of art. Storytelling practices may help define who we are, refine our moral sensibilities and open new possibilities of experience, action and self-invention, but, at the same time, they may be the vehicle of simplifications, obfuscations or plain lies that corrupt our moral standing. Although most of us probably disagree with Plato’s conclusion, many of us share its underlying assumption that art matters because it deals with truth, justice and the good life.

This volume explores the ethical potential and risks of storytelling from an interdisciplinary perspective. It stages a dialogue between contemporary literature and visual arts across media (film, photography, video art, performative arts) and different theoretical approaches many of which are interdisciplinary in themselves (debates in narrative studies, trauma studies, cultural memory studies, ethical criticism). The book analyzes ethical issues involved in different strategies that contemporary media employ to narrate experiences that resist telling and imagining, such as experiences of traumatic historical events, including war and political conflicts, and the intersecting histories of violence linked to the Holocaust, colonialism and migration. How do different modalities of storytelling enable diverse ways of addressing experiences of violence, trauma and political rupture? What ethical complexities do they involve? The chapters explore the multiple ways in which the contemporary arts engage with ethical issues as they work with, draw on and contribute to our historical and narrative imagination—to our existence as situated, historical beings who are constituted in culturally mediated narrative webs. The book highlights the potential of storytelling to unsettle dominant historical and political narratives by helping us to imagine alternative realities, possibilities, courses of action and orientations towards the future. Narrative, we want to argue, is bound up with power.¹ This may be sometimes repressive, sometimes emancipatory. Stories reflect, affect and change who we are, how we experience the world and what we think; but, many of the chapters here suggest, it would be premature to believe that this is necessarily for the good. The power of narrative can be used or abused. It can help us become better listeners, readers and citizens, or it can mislead, disturb and corrupt.

We are particularly interested in the intertwinement of narrative, memory and imagination. The chapters of this book explore the ethical dimension of the interaction between narrative practices of sense-making, cultural memory practices and the shaping of cultural imaginaries. How do culturally mediated narrative models of sense-making underpin contemporary identities and memory practices? Discussions in narrative studies and cultural memory studies have often failed lamentably to engage with one another.² We aim to bring them into a more intensive dialogue through reflection on how the interpretation, suppression and negotiation of the memory and experience of violence, oppression and trauma are interwoven with cultural narrative practices.

One of our starting points is that narrative imagination is integral not only to our visions of the future but also to our engagement with the past and the present.³ While traditional event-focused historiography has seen history as consisting of actions that can be observed and documented, new forms of cultural history emphasize that history is also constituted by what the people of the past thought, felt, experienced and imagined and by the ways in which they narrated their experiences.⁴ We are interested in how contemporary artistic storytelling practices address the imbrication of remembering and imagining as they engage with past worlds from the horizon of the present. In this context, we consider it important to acknowledge that we are situated beings whose life-world is shaped by historical processes and their configuration and reconfiguration through narrative imagination. Narratology has been dominated by ahistorical, universalist conceptions of experience.⁵ The storytelling practices of the arts, by contrast, often encourage understanding the specificity of someone’s experience in a particular situation, and they can thereby foster awareness of the historicity of experience. They have shown themselves capable of self-reflexivity and of establishing a critical distance from culturally dominant narrative practices. Artistic storytelling practices have potential to enlarge our space of experience in the present by creating new possibilities of experience, thought and imagination: they can transform the ways in which we, through our understandings of the past, orient ourselves to the future and imagine the yet-to-be.⁶

While poststructuralist and postmodern theorization tended to endorse an aesthetics of the ineffable which regarded narrative as a violent form of appropriation, recent years have seen a surge of interest in the ethical potential of storytelling. In relation to the five main strands of narrative ethics that we sketch below, this book endeavors to shift the emphasis of the discussion on the ethics of representation towards thinking about the ethical potential of storytelling in terms of imaginative reconfiguration. This does not mean, however, suggesting that storytelling would always be beneficial for us, even if it is an inherent aspect of our humanity. We argue that it is important not to idealize storytelling but to acknowledge both the ethical potential and the dangers of different storytelling practices. While certain storytelling practices perpetuate oppressive forms of power, others have empowering significance. We aim to provide analytical tools for engaging with both the positive and the negative power of narrative.

Ethics in Narrative Studies

Although narrative studies has become increasingly interdisciplinary, there are still clear differences between the debates that dominate literary and arts studies on the one hand and those that animate discussions of narrative in the social sciences. The former has been dominated by the structuralist legacy of narratology, despite the aspiration of “postclassical narratology” to expand the field of narratology and to take seriously human experientiality as central to narrativity.⁷ Structuralist narratology left little room for explicitly ethical reflection because its consideration of narrative had little or nothing to say about the experiencing subject. Narratologies, even in their current post-classical variations, still tend to focus on narrative structures rather than exploring the different functions that narratives have in our lives, the significance of narratives for human existence, or the entwinement of narrative with ethical agency. Narrative research in the social sciences, by contrast, frequently links analysis of narrative as a practice of making sense of experiences to reflection on the empowering aspects of storytelling.⁸ It would profit, however, from taking literary and arts studies perspectives more seriously in reflecting on narrative as a mode of engaging with experiences—one’s own and those of others. This book seeks to contribute to the ongoing interdisciplinary dialogue between these different approaches to narrative. It argues that literature and the visual arts provide important insights into the ethical significance of narrative for human existence. Our aim is to demonstrate that different artistic media (literature, film, theater, photography) and different areas of academic study (narrative studies, hermeneutics, cultural studies, memory studies, trauma studies) belong to a creative and intellectual continuum in which what is at stake is essentially the same: the value and values of our lives in a difficult, fractured world.

The rise of interest in ethical issues, over the past few decades, has emerged via different routes. In the French context, the structuralist approach met fierce criticism from divergent thinkers who were later grouped together under the term “poststructuralism”. In this heterogeneous strand of thought, ethical issues were addressed particularly under the influence of the post-phenomenological thinking of Emmanuel Levinas. Reading came to be perceived as an encounter with radical alterity. Rita Felski characterizes this line of ethical criticism as “theological criticism” (2008, 4, 12) because it often mystifies the literary text as an absolute Other, fundamentally ineffable and beyond comprehension. The form in which ethics emerged in the poststructuralist context was through critique of conventional narrative form, which was perceived as oppressive and ethically problematic. From Roland Barthes and Maurice Blanchot to the nouveaux romanciers and the tel queliens, the French postwar generation cultivated an ethics of non-comprehension and the ineffable.⁹ Deconstructionist ethics is suspicious of any claim to understand the other through narrative and valorizes the power of imaginative art to transgress boundaries and norms which conventional narrative forms were considered to perpetuate.

A second important development has been the revival of the neo- Aristotelian humanist tradition in moral philosophy (MacIntyre 1981; Nussbaum 1990), on the one hand, and in rhetorical narrative theory, on the other (Booth 1988; Phelan 1996). Of the neo-Aristotelian moral philosophers who have argued that narrative fiction is crucial for our moral agency, Martha Nussbaum has been the most influential. She emphasizes the way in which narrative fiction develops our narrative imagination, which she defines as the capacity to empathize with the experiences of others, that is,

to think what it might be like to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself, to be an intelligent reader of that person’s story, and to understand the emotions and wishes and desires that someone so placed might have.

(2010, 95–96)

Rhetorical narrative theory continues the tradition of humanist criticism in which literature is seen to have a didactic function. Wayne C. Booth famously formulates this view by arguing that “stories are our major moral teachers” (1988, 20). Rhetorical narratology aims to provide concrete narratological tools for analyzing the narrative strategies through which the (implied) author communicates ethical values or an ethos to the (implied) reader (Phelan and Rabinowitz 2013; Korthals Altes 2014). Often, the emphasis of rhetorical approaches is on the cultivation of a common sense of the good based on shared values. In James Phelan’s (2014) definition, for example, narrative ethics is concerned with the following question: “How should one think, judge, and act—as author, narrator, character, or audience—for the greater good?” This definition seems to imply that there is an unproblematic, shared understanding of “the greater good”, or at least that such a consensus could be reached.

A third direction from which ethics has emerged as central to narrative studies is constituted by cultural and social approaches to narrative. Postcolonial, feminist, queer, intersectional and ecocritical approaches, for example, have drawn attention to the ways in which hegemonic narratives marginalize experiences that do not fit white, male, heterosexual and anthropocentric normativity. These approaches are often influenced by the poststructuralist criticism of the universalist assumptions embedded in the European humanist tradition; but, in comparison to textualist versions of poststructuralism, these contextualist approaches see literature as fundamentally situated in concrete worldly contexts. They often emphasize lived, embodied experience in its complexity, the narrative representation of gender, sexuality, race and class, the conditions of production and reception of literary narratives and the ways in which narratives are entangled with relations of power. In the recent years, the representational approaches of cultural studies have been challenged by Deleuzean, new materialist and post-humanist approaches that place emphasis on processual ontologies of becoming and are more interested in what storytelling produces and creates than on what narratives represent.¹⁰

Fourth, the cognitive paradigm has influenced both literary and narrative studies, and it has provided new perspectives on the ethical aspects of such phenomena as empathy, immersion and readerly engagement. Empirical cognitive research has provided some evidence for the view that fictional narratives are more effective than non-fictional narratives in enabling readers to imagine the situation of the other and to take his or her perspective (Hakemulder 2000; Djikic et al. 2009; Oatley 2011). Such studies have encouraged literary and narrative scholars to discuss the possibility that reading literary narratives might make us more empathetic.¹¹ Particularly abundant attention, in both academic circles and the media, has been given to David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano’s (2013) study, which argues that even short-term exposure to “high” literature improves our capacity to take the perspective of others (or what cognitive scientists call our “theory of mind” capacities), but other researchers have been unable to verify the results (Panero et al. 2016). It is notoriously difficult to measure the short-term effects of literature, and even more difficult to measure any long-term impact it may have; and even if reading literature does improve our “perspective awareness” or “perspective sensitivity”, there is no guarantee that it leads us to ethical action.¹² As the emphasis of cognitive studies tends to be on general cognitive processes (which gives it a universalist slant), some cognitively oriented researchers have also emphasized the need to pay more attention to the ethical dimension of the cognitive processes that are specific to engagement with literary narratives, as opposed to popular narratives, for example; the former are frequently ethically difficult, ambiguous, challenging or unsettling (van Lissa et al. 2016).

Fifth, and finally, in recent years, there has been increasing interest in hermeneutic approaches to narrative, and the concept of narrative hermeneutics has been used to characterize an approach that understands narratives as culturally mediated interpretative practice...