Identity, Narrative and Politics

Maureen Whitebrook

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781136367403
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Identity, Narrative and Politics argues that political theory has barely begun to develop a notion of narrative identity; instead the book explores the sophisticated ideas which emerge from novels as alternative expressions of political understanding. This title uses a broad international selection of Twentieth Century English language works, by writers such as Nadine Gordimer and Thomas Pynchon.

The book considers each novel as a source of political ideas in terms of content, structure, form and technique.

The book assumes no prior knowledge of the literature discussed, and will be fascinating reading for students of literature, politics and cultural studies.

1 Introduction

Identity, narrative, narratives and narrative identity

DOI: 10.4324/9781315011455-1

In 1991, in a lengthy article in the New York Review of Books, Joan Didion discusses the ‘wilding’ episode, an incident of rape which had taken place in Central Park, New York in 1989, when a white woman investment banker jogging in the park was attacked and raped by a gang of black and Hispanic youths (Didion 1991).¹ Didion’s mode of analysis was to place the incident in relation to the city of New York and the ‘story’ or ‘stories’ of that city, taking off from the account of the rape and subsequent capture and trial of the alleged rapists to make certain points about the narrative of New York.

The victim of the crime was not generally identified by name, but ‘abstracted’ and her situation ‘made to stand for that of the city itself’. Her employers thought her ‘the personification of “what makes this city so vibrant and so great”’ who had been ‘struck down by a side of our city that is as awful and terrifying as the creative side is wonderful’. Didion comments:

It was precisely in this conflation of victim and city, this confusion of personal woe with public distress, that the crime’s ‘story’ would be found, its lesson, its encouraging promise of narrative resolution … For so long as this case held the city’s febrile attention, then it offered a narrative for the city’s distress, a frame in which the actual social and economic forces wrenching the city could be personalized and ultimately obscured.

(Didion 1991: 46, 54)

As Didion comments on the case, she discusses this narrativization of both the particular incident and the life of the city as such. For instance, New York is ‘rapidly vanishing into the chasm between its actual life and its preferred narratives’. As reportage switched from a pragmatic acceptance of the danger of open spaces at night to an ideal construct whereby New York – including Central Park – had been, or should be, safe, she notes that ‘the insistent sentimentalization of experience’ is habitual in New York, along with a ‘preference for … the distortion and flattening of character’, and ‘the reduction of events to narrative’ as the ‘heart of the way the city presents itself’. And this narrative, ‘with its dramatic line of “crisis” and resolution, or recovery’, obscures race and class tensions, civic and commercial arrangements, ‘the conspiracy of those in the know’. The history of Central Park is shown to be such a ‘story’ – an artificial construction, a ‘story’ that ‘had to do with certain dramatic contrasts, or extremes, that were believed to characterize life in this as in no other city’.

From this reading of the crime, and its location, the park, Didion draws general conclusions. For example,

Stories in which terrible crimes are inflicted on innocent victims, offering as they do a similarly sentimental reading of class differences and human suffering, a reading that promises both resolution and retribution, have long performed as the city’s endorphins, a built-in source of natural morphine working to blur the edges of real and to a great extent insoluble problems.

And even more generally:

The imposition of a sentimental, or false, narrative on the disparate and often random experience that constitutes the life of a city or a country means, necessarily, that much of what happens in that city or country will be rendered merely illustrative, a series of set pieces or performance opportunities.

So this case allowed, for example, ‘a narrative based on the magical ability of “leaders” to improve the common weal’.

Didion’s conclusion is that

among the citizens of a New York come to grief on the sentimental stories told in defense of its own lazy criminality, the city’s inevitability remained the given, the heart, the first and last word on which all the stories rested. We love New York, the narrative promises, because it matches our energy level.

Didion, herself a novelist, specifically voices an awareness of the dangers of narrative. Social scientists may well sympathize with her suspicions: narrative accounts are suspect, because they lack objectivity; stories promote a certain point of view; there is a tendency to romanticize or sentimentalize in the process of storytelling. However, not only is Didion’s account itself a story, but, more importantly, her narrative analysis is flawed. Those factors taken together suggest that her attack on narrative deserves some attention, that her suspicions are unfounded and even, by extension, that narrative accounts can be positively helpful to analyses of the socio-political realm.

Her commentary on the city of New York takes the form of a narrative account: characters and events, together with commentary on them, have been put together to present – show – a certain interpretation of a set of facts. And her talk of conspiracy, or herself omitting to name the victim, are narrative or rhetorical devices employed in order to make her point the more strongly. Those features suggest how easily even the intentionally non-narrative writer slips into using narrative techniques. But Didion also makes explicit statements on narrative, which are misleading in their misunderstanding of ‘narrative’ and ‘story’.

Didion thinks that narrative’s effects can only obscure ‘the real world’ of facts and inferences to be drawn from those facts. ‘Sentimentality’ should not be a factor in political deliberation; nor should accounts that by their method distort or romanticize, that ‘reduce events to narrative’. Such objections do not correspond, though, to the formulation whereby at its most basic ‘narrative’ denotes the patterning or ordering of events – the fundamental element of narrative. Didion speaks of ‘a reading that promises both resolution and retribution’ but the imposition of a narrative framework does not thereby entail ‘resolution’. Narrative theory distinguishes between ending and closure; and indeed, Didion’s own account ends (concludes), but there is little or no sense of closure – the ‘story’ of New York is not resolved, the characters are not neatly disposed of.

Two major points emerge from Didion’s strictures on the (mis) use, or even danger, of narrative in real-life situations. One is that narrative method, explaining what is happening by way of narratives, is a commonplace human activity, and that the student of politics who seeks to understand that activity in more or less specific terms may need both to employ narrative techniques themself and to take other people’s narratives into account. The second follows from that: the need to understand what narrative is, and what its use entails. I take up these points in the study that follows.

Argument

My specific interest is in the relationships between narrative, identity and politics. My discussion moves around the interconnections, drawing out where there is – actually or potentially – interplay between narrative identity and politics,² and finally suggesting how the connections can be developed for the benefit of political theory.³

As one of the more recent works that claim to apply narrative to political theory points out, ‘At present there is a small cottage industry … awash in a sea of claims … about narrative’ (Dienstag 1997: 209). Or again, ‘References to narrative and storytelling have become an almost obligatory gesture for theorists who defy the academic norm of detached writing’, and who ‘use storytelling to shift knowledge from a center that purports to be impartial, uniform and omniscient, to a margin that acknowledges the heterogeneity and inevitable partiality of any standpoint’ (Disch 1994: 1, 10, and cf. 5–9). However, the increasing frequency of assertions about narrative identity in theory is not matched by explanation or even acknowledgement of what is involved in adopting narrative as a term for social and political explanation.

References to narrative, the narrative self and even narrative identity are now frequent enough in political discourse to suggest that it is time to consider more carefully than heretofore just what narrative implies for political understanding. There is an awareness of the narrative mode in political theory, but narrative has to be further understood as more than just storytelling taken to be so natural an activity that it requires no attention to technique, or to underlying technical requirements. ‘Narrative’, like most theoretical concepts, carries with it an accompanying baggage of technicalities, allusions, connotations, references. Those wanting to use the idea of narrative as ‘simply telling a story’ may object that they have no need of intensive work on narrative as such. But ‘telling a story’ is far from simple, as narrative theory discloses – and so even that most basic usage leads back into the technicalities, if narrative is to be given proper attention in theorizing.

Although there are now several studies which have focused on specific aspects of narrative, identity and politics – for example, in Anglophone theory, Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self (Taylor 1989) on the self and identity, Alasdair MacIntyre’s chapter in After Virtue (MacIntyre 1985) on identity and narrative, and Joshua Foe Dienstag’s Dancing in Chains (Dienstag 1997) on narrative and political theory – this discussion though is based on a particular definition of identity: that identity is a matter of telling stories – hence narrative identity – and that this has political implications deriving from storytelling’s public setting. The construction of narrative identity is a collective act, involving tellers and listeners. Certain aspects of narrative, its defining characteristics and elements, have a bearing on the political.

I suggest that identity is, primarily, a matter of the stories persons tell others about themselves, plus the stories others tell about those persons and/or other stories in which those persons are included. Defining identity in terms of narrative rests on claims about the naturalness of storytelling, and hence the construction of identity through stories (Nash 1994 a: xi and passim). Then inasmuch as identity means something like ‘what the self shows the world’ or ‘what of the self is shown to the world’, together with ‘what of the self is recognized by the world’, the construction of identity – narrating identity – entails placing the self in the public sphere, and thus a capacity for taking on a political role. The political aspect of identity rests on an understanding of the self as social, ‘situated’, and narratives of identity as embedded in other stories, including the wider stories of social and cultural settings.

I examine the use of narrative for politics by way of narratives – novels – as a way of expanding on what narrative may be understood to mean for political theorizing, taking it that modern novels have something to say about modern lives. Such novels exhibit – show in practice – features of narrative that are politically relevant, and their characters depict the problems of constructing identity. I draw from narrative theory to suggest that certain elements of narrative relate to some of the current concerns of political theory, and thence assist political understanding.

Theorists may, of course, use ‘narrative’ merely adjectivally, or to refer to historical narratives – or, as in the case of Dienstag’s Dancing in Chains, works of political theory may be classified as narratives. There would then be only tenuous reasons, if any, for links to literary narratives, and it would certainly seem over-scrupulous to apply narrative theory or the literary critical understanding of narrative to such usages. However, in the case of political uses of ‘narrative identity’, it might be expected that narrative identity would exhibit narrative features – and hence my attention to elements of narrative as understood in literary and philosophical studies.

The connection of identity to fictional narratives is not only a matter of the provision of appropriate models for, or occasions for reflection on, theoretical concerns but has a direct bearing on understanding narrative identity. I take it that there would be little or no point in yet another study of a political theme with literary examples – several theorists, notably Peter Johnson, have done that well enough already (e.g. Ingle 1979; Fishman 1989; Johnson, P. 1988). New work requires moving on from treating novels as exemplary or mimetic to look at narrative form as well as content, on the understanding that form is a metaphor for theme and/or that content is always mediated through form – both of which are commonplaces of literary criticism. If, then, a theme is politically significant – as I take identity to be – what can be learnt from the form of expression of that theme in literary narratives?

Storytelling that constructs identity is not a simple matter – there may be doubling, time shifts, gaps, any or all of the constituent and characteristic features of narrative. For that reason, I look at novels as accessible instances of narrative in practice. Turning to narratives – modern novels – allows for observation of how identity is constructed, through attention to content and form: plot and characterization; and narrative structure, style and techniques. The process of narrative construction is relevant inasmuch as it makes the point that identity is narratively made, and shows what that means for an understanding of political identity.

The outcome of this examination of narrative and reading of narratives is to show that identity is, or may be, uncertain: narrative does not necessarily ensure unity. Neither narrative theory nor modern narratives offer a direct link between narrative and unity, or order: narrative may exhibit lack of pattern, an absence of closure. Such instability may appear politically threatening, or even dangerous; but attention to narrative also shows how instability – disorder – can be a characteristic of coherent stories. The narrative process itsel...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: identity, narrative, narratives and narrative identity
• 2 The narrative construction of identity
• 3 Uncertain identity
• 4 Gaps and fragments
• 5 Contingency, identity and agency
• 6 Coherent identity
• 7 Narrative, identity and politics
• 8 Postscript
• Notes
• References
• Index