Abstract
Chapter 1 addresses the basic question of what narratives do, arguing that they play a key role in everyday knowing and being. As a way of knowing, narratives enable individual events to be understood in terms of larger complex wholes. This shapes both the perceived significance of events and how they are encountered. I argue that the human capacity for knowing and understanding the world through stories is, in turn, grounded in a more fundamental, ontological role of narrative in shaping our sense of being-in-the-world. Drawing on Heidegger’s account of Dasein as temporal being, I argue that human existence has an intrinsically narrative structure which provides the necessary ground for both storytelling as ordinarily understood and narrative understanding more broadly. The final part of the chapter draws on diverse traditions of narrative theory to provide a definition of narrative, used in the subsequent chapters, based on the key elements of: temporal and spatial specificity, relationality, figuration and a sense of an ending.
‘Narrative’ as a technical concept and an everyday-language term has been put to a bewildering array of uses across the humanities and social sciences over many decades. Theories of narrative are therefore unsurprisingly numerous, reflecting both the fluidity of the concept and the impossibility of producing any final definition or theory suitable for all times and places. Stories can be approached in terms of their sociality and role in intersubjectively constituting the social world (Carr 1986; Somers 1994; Somers and Gibson 1994). They can be studied semiotically in terms of structures of signification (Barthes 1975a; Chatman 1978; Rimmon-kenan 2006) as well as in terms of aesthetics and poetics, as seen in long traditions in literary (Culler 1975; Rimmon-kenan 2002) and historiographical analysis (White 1973; 1987). Stories can be viewed in terms of their cognitive function, as a mechanism for understanding (Bruner 1986; Polkinghorne 1988; Mink 2001) as well as in terms of their capacity for the communication of individual and collective human experience to others (Fludernik 1996; Herman 2009). Narratives can function as arguments to persuade others as well as providing the basis of a logic used in the everyday assessment of beliefs and actions (Fisher 1987).
The perspective presented here might be termed an existential theory of narrative, owing to its grounding in ontology and the phenomenology of human existence and reliance on Heidegger’s existential philosophy. This approach is not without risk. This is partly because ‘being is a word that hovers somewhere between the profound and the pretentious’ (Peters 2015: 10) but it is also due to the difficulty, and perhaps impossibility, of separating the ‘existential’, that is, that which is common to all existence, from the ‘existentiell’, that is, that which is specific to concrete individuals and thus defined by their own unique factical being-in-the-world.1 One of the great strengths of the narrative approach, as I will seek to show in the chapters that follow, is that it leads us to concrete, existentiell analysis, always asking which specific stories are significant in any given context and how they relate to one another. Nonetheless, it is important to first consider the fundamental and general assumptions according to which this analysis is conducted at the most basic level possible.
With this in mind, this chapter sets aside the goal of producing a definitive theory of narrative, aiming instead to outline an approach suitable for the task of understanding the nature and implications of fragmented communication in the chapters which follow. To do this, I rely primarily on twentieth century, at times early twentieth century, theoretical writings on narrative and hermeneutics, two approaches which have many points of connection yet have remained largely separate from one another.2 The chapter is comprised of two main parts: the first addresses the question of what narratives do and argues that stories play a key role in processes of knowing by enabling us to ‘grasp together’ things that happen as complex wholes. The seemingly universal human capacity for doing this is, I suggest, grounded in a deeper role of narrative in existence. The second part strives to give a working definition of narratives as we encounter them which, in line with contemporary narratology, emphasises variable ‘narrativity’ rather than a binary distinction between narrative and non-narrative. I argue that narratives are defined by the extent to which they exhibit four key characteristics: temporal and spatial specificity, relationality, figuration, and a sense of an ending. These features, I suggest, themselves derive from the characteristics of narrative as a way of being.
Narrative knowing
The literature on the relationship between stories and knowledge derives primarily from work in psychology (e.g. Sarbin 1986; Polkinghorne 1988; Bruner 1993; Bamberg 2004) and historiography (e.g. Mink 1968; 1970; Dray 1971; White 1973; 1980; Ricoeur 1984; Danto 1985; Ricoeur 1985; 1988; Mink 2001). These traditions differ in important ways and are themselves diverse.3 Nonetheless, they broadly agree that narrative can, and does, play an important role in making sense of things that happen. The basic assumption underpinning this is that happenings are not intrinsically meaningful in and of themselves but derive their significance through their connections with other happenings. Seeing them in terms of these connections allows them to come into view as meaningful events.4 The significance of Catalan leaders’ decision to hold an independence referendum in 2017, for example, is apparent only in relation to the events that led up to the referendum (including the repression of the Catalan language, culture and identity during the dictatorial Franco regime) and those that followed (such as the arrest and subsequent imprisonment of several leaders of the independence movement in 2019). If the act of holding the referendum were to remain the same, but the preceding or subsequent events were to have been different, the story would change along with the meaning of the referendum within it.
Narratives, then, are concerned primarily with events – they are the basic stuff of stories and without them there can be no narrative. Similarly, narrative’s explanatory power can be turned only to events, or to things viewed in terms of events – stories can tell us nothing about the chemical composition of a pencil but a great deal about the significance of a specific pencil in terms of what has been written with it, by whom, at what times and in what places. More precisely, narrative as a way of knowing is concerned with specific relationships between specific events – the narrative meaning of the Catalan referendum derives from the specific configuration of events in this unique instance, rather than from theoretical accounts of independence referenda abstracted from their occurrence in factical contexts. These relationships may be purely temporal and concerned only with sequence but are more commonly causal – most narratives of the Catalan referendum of 2017 refer to events understood to have caused the referendum to be held, rather than merely the events that temporally preceded it. It is this emphasis on causality which gives narrative its power to explain rather than to merely describe; a narrative account of the Egyptian military intervention of 2013 tells the reader not just what happened but also why it happened. This capacity for explanation is equally significant in daily life (e.g. a narrative explanation for arriving late to work) as it is in politics (e.g. a narrative explaining the factors which led to the implementation of austerity-based economic policies in the UK following the 2008 financial crisis) and history (e.g. a narrative explanation of the consequences of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990).
The events which provide the nodes in these networks of signification need not be ‘real’ in the sense of having materially taken place. For example, Donald Trump claimed in November 2019 that a significant proportion of recipients of the ‘Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals’ (DACA) scheme in the USA, which delays legal action against individuals brought to the USA illegally as children, had criminal records.5 The fact that only a tiny proportion of DACA recipients appear to have had criminal records (Valverde 2019) does not alter the capacity of Trump’s claim to shape narrative meaning. More significantly, narrative understanding is prospective as well as retrospective and not solely capable of making sense of events which have already, or are purported to have already, taken place. Indeed, the most important events in stories are frequently anticipated future events rather than those that are already in the past. At the time of Donald Trump’s selection as Republican nominee for the presidential election of 2016, for example, he was frequently criticised for his past actions. Yet the strongest criticism in many cases focused on what he might go on to do in future. The leading Republican Mitt Romney, for example, warned that ‘if we Republicans choose Donald Trump as our nominee, the prospects for a safe and prosperous future are greatly diminished’ before going on to specify that ‘his proposed 35 percent tariff-like penalties would instigate a trade war’ and ‘His tax plan … would balloon the deficit and the national debt’ (Romney 2016). In this case, hypothetical future events play a central role in a narrative of Trump’s, then only possible, selection as Republican nominee for the presidency.
By providing a means for perceiving and articulating temporal and causal relationships across past, present and future, narrative, as a mode of understanding, enables individual events to be ‘comprehended as elements in a single and concrete complex of relationships’ (Mink 1970: 551), through a synthetic process of ‘grasping together’ (Ricoeur 1984: 66). Central to narrative and hermeneutic theory is that the result of this ‘grasping together’ is not merely an appreciation of relationships but that networks of relationships together constitute larger meaningful units, drawing from ‘a manifold of events the unity of one temporal whole’ (Ricoeur 1984: 66). The whole and part are understood here to relate to one another dialectically: the individual parts of stories can be understood only in relation to the whole while the whole is itself defined by its constituent parts. Neither part nor whole can be comprehended in isolation from one another. As Taylor argues:
Narrative knowledge is, therefore, fundamentally characterised by the operation of the hermeneutic circle, defined by constant movement between mutually informing parts and wholes.
Narrative knowing should not be understood, however, as a primarily individual activity as it is social in two fundamental ways. First, stories enable not only the production of knowledge but also the communication of that knowledge to others. Grasping together as a narrative the complex events of the 2013 military intervention in Egypt provides a way of comprehending it as a whole. Telling a story of those events to another person allows for that understanding to be thematised and shared. Narrative therefore plays a central role in enabling shared understanding. Yet this does not mean that storied understandings are first produced by individuals and only become social when shared. In Heidegger’s words, ‘communication is never anything like a conveying of experiences … from the inside of one subject to the inside of another’ (Heidegger 2010: 157). This is because all narrative understanding is produced within an environment already structured by, and saturated with, other stories, whether those we encounter in face-to-face interactions and via the media in its diverse forms, or which pre-exist us and come to us through tradition (Gadamer 1989). As discussed in Chapter 4, any individual interpretation is a taking up and appropriation of public and shared possibilities and, as such, is already ‘outside’ any individual subject (Heidegger 2010: 157).
The close interrelation of these two aspects is captured in Heidegger’s concept of ‘rede’. Often translated as ‘discourse’ (Heidegger 2010; Gunkel and Taylor 2014; Heidegger 1962), rede is, in my view, more aptly rendered by Dreyfus (1990) as ‘telling’ so as to capture both the non-linguistic sense of ‘telling things apart’ and the linguistic sense of ‘telling someone about something’. Narrative participates in the ‘articulation’ of the world, allowing configurations of happenings to be grasped together as discrete, if complex, events (e.g. as a revolution, football match or making breakfast). This is a kind of ‘pointing out’ (Heidegger 2010: 149) which enables things to be seen in particular, determinate ways while also limiting the ways in which they can be encountered. Thus, stories are a way of ‘taking as’ – understanding the events of the summer of 2013 in Egypt as a revolution, or as a coup – and for identifying ‘joints’ – for example, understanding whether the ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood affiliated president Mohamed Morsi in 2013 following a military coup was something distinct from the resignation of the former president Hosni Mubarak following mass anti-government protests in 2011 or a part of a single complex of events. Telling new stories allows for these ‘joints’ to be redefined but we nonetheless always ...
