Telling Lives
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Telling Lives

Exploring dimensions of narratives

Marianne Horsdal

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eBook - ePub

Telling Lives

Exploring dimensions of narratives

Marianne Horsdal

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About This Book

Both interest in and understanding of narrative analysis had developed rapidly in recent years and is now a mainstream element of research across many disciplines. In the groundbreaking Telling Lives: Exploring dimensions of narratives, the author illustrates as many facets as possible of the stories people tell about their lives. She demonstrates

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2011
ISBN
9781136645327
Edition
1

Chapter 1

Time and plot

Demarcations and pauses

“Read them,” said the King.
The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. “Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?” he asked.
“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
(Carroll, Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland
([1865] 1982: 109)
Punctuation is necessary if we are to make sense of a written text. The commas and periods mirror the pauses of oral language. Paragraphs and parts mirror more extensive pauses, and the blank sheets before the beginning and after the end of a book signify the demarcation of the story. In spite of the contemporary praise of flow, we cannot do without pauses, breaks, and limits if we are to make sense, and create meaning and coherence. This is obvious in a temporal sequence, such as a story, written or told. In the same way, music without pauses is as incomprehensible as pictures without frames; although the frames and other demarcations may be challenged in various ways, as we know from works of art and fiction such as the novels and plays by Samuel Beckett. The violation of demarcations and frames in works of art is, however, played out against their truism.
But how can we understand the beginnings and endings, so crucial for meaning and narrative? In the introduction to Philosophy in the flesh (1999: 3) Lakoff and Johnson express their basic understanding of cognitive science in the following three statements: “The mind is inherently embodied.” “Thought is mostly unconscious.” “Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.” I fully accede to these assumptions and find that, although Lakoff and Johnson do not focus on narrative, their description of conceptual schemas and conceptual metaphors based on embodied (sensorimotor) experience may deepen our understanding of narrative in significant ways. To Lakoff and Johnson, spatial-relations concepts are “at the heart of our conceptual system” (p. 30). They consider the container schema fundamental for cognitive categorization. We conceive of things and happenings to be either inside or outside or on the edge or border of the container as a matter of course, in a way similar to Aristotle's definitions of beginnings and ends of stories and dramas,1 that is, if we want to focus on them as a whole – a meaningful entity. The container category may include not only objects but spaces, periods, and mental states. We can be in or out of a room, of a decade, of a depression, and we can consciously focus our attention on something specific leaving other possible impressions or occupations out of account for the time being.
From a phenomenological perspective we are always visually framed by the horizon; and, although the horizon slightly changes as we move, we experience some degree of wholeness and sameness in spite of our movements in space.2 We can move about in a larger space (container) without crossing the border.
But when we are moving we can also focus on the changes. We can move from one room to another, walk round the points of the coastline to discover what lies behind, see a destination approach, or a place disappear. On board a train or a plane we may attend to the flux of the changing landscape, but our journey has a beginning and an end.
The continuous appearance and emergence and disappearance and vanishing is a crucial part of our experience of life, together with the reappearances and redundancies which make our world seem familiar. Changes as well as recognitions are basic and indispensable aspects of experience.
In the flow of time of appearance and disappearance we can perceive movements in organized periods. When we listen to a piece of music or to a story, the single tones or words form an organized coherence, in anticipation of what is coming, in extension to what went before.
In the opening paragraph of his fine book, The sense of an ending, Kermode says:
It is not expected of critics as it is of poets that they should help us to make sense of our lives; they are bound only to attempt the lesser feat of making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives.
(1966: 3)
One of our ways of doing this lies in our ability to exchange the chronological conception of time as mere succession3 to kairetic time by organizing and humanizing the perception of time into a duration between a beginning and an end, “ kairos is the season, a point in time filled with significance, charged with a meaning derived from its relation to the end” (1966: 47). The kairetic span may be vast, from the first beginning to the end of time, or tiny. According to Kermode, we are able to reproduce the duration from tick to tock of the clock but not the empty space between tock and tick. Kermode suggests that we borrow this organized perception of time from fiction that enables us to make sense of and create meaning out of lived experience. It may be so; at any rate, the cognitive category of a bounded space has some very coherent and formally organized expressions in works of fiction, while this is not always the case in human lives. We are in the middle in our experience of life, as Ricoeur stated in 1984;4 we may witness other people's birth and death, but not our own. According to Albright (1994), our beginnings and endings vanish into oblivion and nothingness; he speaks about “the Alzheimer of infancy” (infantile amnesia) as well as the impoverished memory of the old. It is exactly this perspective of being in the middle – from the individual point of view – that illustrates our need of others in order to make sense of and find coherence in a life course. We cannot establish our own beginnings and ends on our own. We owe our life to others and give life to others. Neither is the act of meaning making an individual achievement.

Movement in space and temporality

A narrative can be defined as a course of events with a beginning and an end, as a bounded temporal sequence. A narrative unfolds in a time span from its beginning to the end. As the container category is at work in the demarcations of the story, the temporal course of events implies the cognitive schemata of a path from a point of departure to a destination.
Lakoff and Johnson mention the “source-path-goal” schema as a cognitive topological schema with an internal spatial “logic” (1999: 33).5 This schema is applied when you imagine a trajectory traversing a route from a point of departure to a destination.
A narrative structure can be described as a cognitive blending of the two sche-mas through which we infer spatial relations, the container schema – a bounded region in space – and the source-path-goal schema through which we may infer a temporal course of actions and events.
In spite of their focus on concepts for philosophical reasoning, rather than on narrative, Lakoff and Johnson's discussion of our conceptualization of concepts such as “states,” “changes,” and “events” may shed light on our understanding of the embodied experience behind the narrative structure. “States are conceptualized as containers, as bounded regions in space. Changes are conceptualized as movements from location to location” (1999: 176). In the description of the Location Event-Structure metaphor they write:
[The Location Event-Structure metaphor] is a single, complex mapping with a number of submappings. The source domain is the domain of motion – in space. The target domain is the domain of events. This mapping provides our most common and extensive understanding of the internal structure of events, and it uses our everyday knowledge of motion in space that comes from our movements and from the movements of others that we perceive.
Some movements are movements to desired locations (called destinations). Some movements begin in one bounded region of space and end in another. Some movements are forced, others are not. The force of a forced movement may be internal or external. If someone moves to a desired location, that person must follow a path. There are various kinds of impediments that can keep someone from moving to a desired location, for example blockages or features of the terrain. What this mapping does is to allow us to conceptualize events and all aspects of them – action, causes, changes, states, purposes, and so forth – in terms of our extensive experi-ence with, and knowledge about, motion in space.
(1999: 179)
Lakoff and Johnson could well have added that this mapping allows us to conceptualize a narrative time span. I am suggesting that our physical experience of motion in space is the source of our conceptualization of a temporal sequence. The temporality of narrative, the time span from the beginning to the end, is thus more than an arbitrary form of a certain literary or discursive genre, it is rather a conceptualization of lived time based on our experience of the spatial relations of our moving bodies.
Our physical and perceived experiences of movements in space, and our experiences of moving from one place to another, from a point of departure to a destination (with the inferred “logic” of a relation between the temporal and the physical extent, as a longer distance takes more time to cover than a shorter) makes up the embodied foundation for our cognitive understanding of the temporal space of time and, thus, of the format of a narrative. The form of a narrative, a course in a space of time, beginning in one place and ending in another, builds on our experience of physical movements in space. By definition, a narrative covers a time space.
The experience of demarcations between spaces, and between time spaces where we call the limits beginnings and endings, may be regarded as a very commonplace, or “natural” part of life based on innumerable experiences of bodily interactions accompanied by cognitive-emotional processes. This is far from being a new thought. Through my reading of Ricoeur (2004) I became aware of the fact that Aristotle in De memoria et reminiscentia connects intervals to movements and assumes that simultaneity and succession characterized the relation between remembered events.6 Ricoeur quotes Aristotle:
This primitive character of a sense of intervals results from the relationship time maintains with movement. If time “has something to do with movement,” a soul is required, in order to distinguish two instants, to relate them to each other as before and after, and to evaluate their difference (heteron) and to measure the intervals ( to metaxu), operations thanks to which time can be defined as the “number of motion in respect to ‘before’ and ‘after’ ” (Physica 4.219b).
(Ricoeur, 2004: 154)
From a developmental perspective, infants experience the movements of others who approach or disappear even prior to their own ability to crawl or walk. Infants are carried around or transported in prams or other vehicles. But soon they begin their self-propelled movements from place to place. Physically, each human being travels a path in time and space from infancy to the end of life. Apart from Siamese twins, no two single individuals traverse the same path in time and space. As individual mobile bodies, our journeys throughout life are truly individual.
Cognitively we are able to focus on a specific part of this journey that we travel in time and space. We can focus on a certain period, a certain distance, or a certain place. And we can imagine new routes and destinations, new paths to follow.

Autonoesis

Not only are we moving creatures in space, able to travel in various environments and contexts, but we are also able to go beyond the current moment, we are not limited to the experience of here and now; in our minds we are able to go beyond the present.
In their article “Toward a theory of episodic memory: The frontal lobes and autonoetic consciousness” (1997), Wheeler, Stuss, and Tulving describe the amazing human capability mentally to travel in time as a specific type of con-sciousness which they name “autonoetic consciousness.”
One of the most fascinating achievements of the human mind is the ability to mentally travel through time. It is somehow possible for a person to relive experiences by thinking back to previous situations and happenings in the past and to mentally project oneself into the anticipated future through imaginations, daydreams, and fantasies.
(Wheeler et al. 1997: 331)
Mental time travel is mediated through a memory system connected to episodic memory (see Chapter 5). The activation of autonoetic consciousness is accompanied by a feeling of continuation and coherence in existence beyond the present, and between past, present, and the anticipated future. Autonoetic consciousness makes it possible for us to conceive the present both as a continuation of the past and as a prelude to the future (p. 335). This sense of coherence in the experience of life may, however, be disturbed because of brain damage as described by Tulving (1985). Furthermore, the experience of coherence may break down as a consequence of traumatic experiences (Horsdal, 2007a). Wheeler et al. recognize that the concept of autonoesis and the ability to mental time travel and the experience of coherence take us toward the domain of narrative. They write:
Our discussion focuses on episodic memory, with the realization that this system of memory develops along with, and is perhaps related to, the emergence of other complex abilities, such as language and narrative skills, reasoning and problem solving.
(2007: 343)
Autonoetic consciousness concerns more than the relationship to the past and to the developing capability for episodic memory (see Chapter 5). It is a precondition for our ability to plan, for our development of fantasies and ambitions for the future, and for the significant feeling of existence in time.
I want to propose that the development of autonoetic consciousness and the ability to mental time travel is also connected to the infant's actual physical travels and movements in time and space and, thus, connected to both interpersonal interaction and bodily experience. Repeated experiences of independent motion provide the infant with the potential to undertake new intended excursions, and mentally to replicate previous travels or imagine new destinations, targets, and possible experiences.7

Augustine's reflections on time

In the eleventh chapter of Augustine's Confessions we find the famous reflections on time, analyzed by Kermode and Ricoeur, among others. Augustine uses the example of the recitation of a psalm to discuss the extension of the attended present, encompassing the presence of the past, the present, and the presence of the future. In the act of reciting, the mind is extended to encompass a threefold presence. Ricoeur, in his analysis of Augustine, notes that attention in this way deserves to be called intention, as the transit of the future through the present to the past is an active transition by the attentive mind. Augustine says:
Suppose that I am going to recite a psalm that I know. Before I begin my faculty of expectation is engaged by the whole of it. But once I have begun, as much of the psalm as I have removed from the province of expectation and relegated to the past now engages my memory, and the scope of the action which I am performing is divided between the two faculties of memory and expectation, the one looking back to the part which I have already recited, the other looking forward to the part which I have still to recite. But my faculty of attention is present all the while, and through it passes what was the future in the process of becoming the past … What is true of the whole psalm is also true ...

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