Homo narrans
There are countless forms of narrative in the world. First of all, there is a prodigious variety of genres, each of which branches out into a variety of media, as if all substances could be relied upon to accommodate man’s stories. Among the vehicles of narrative are articulated language, whether oral or written, pictures, still or moving, gestures, and an ordered mixture of all those substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fables, tales, short stories, epics, history, tragedy, drama [suspense drama], comedy, pantomime, paintings (in Santa Ursula by Carpaccio, for instance). Stained-glass windows, movies, local news, conversation. Moreover, in this infinite variety of forms, it is present at all times, in all places, in all societies; indeed narrative starts with the very history of mankind; there is not, there has never been anywhere, any people without narrative; all classes, all human groups, have their stories, and very often these stories are enjoyed by men of different and even opposite cultural backgrounds: narrative remains largely unconcerned with good or bad literature. Like life itself, it is there, international, transhistorical, transcultural.
—Roland Barthes1
In the late twentieth century, homo narrans joined various other anthropological concepts defining the human being as a rationally gifted and speaking creature. The concept goes back to two texts published by the communication theorist Walter Fisher in the 1980s.2 According to Fisher, human beings relate to their various environments and to themselves less through pure observation and rational deliberation than through the narrating of believable stories.3 “Human beings are inherently storytellers,” weaving their image of the world from the stories they tell.4 Or to cite Alasdair MacIntyre’s somewhat different way of putting it: The human being is a “storytelling animal.”5
Insight into the verbal constitution of the human relationship to the world extends back to the eighteenth-century’s linguistic thinking, to Vico and Herder. It was deepened by Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and other thinkers and manifests itself as a paradigm in the linguistic turn of twentieth-century humanities. Since then, it has become common currency that human beings are, in an elementary sense, symbol-using creatures dependent on this symbol usage – that they do not move within the world as it is but through a field of sign systems and discourses.
What does it mean to supplement and render precise the idea of the ineluctably verbal nature of human access to the world through a model of narrative organization? What do we gain by underscoring the aspect of narration? And what are the consequences of tying the idea of a genuinely narrative relationship to the world, as manifest in the concept of homo narrans, with Barthes’ approach to narrative as a culturally universal phenomenon running through all epochs, peoples, social strata, and media? What qualities allow narration to so supply embrace the most varied possible circumstances, and to do so usefully in every possible way? How does this function, and what functions does narration fulfill?
Often, anthropological efforts at an explanation have recourse to definitions of myth – just as work on narrative in general has taken up and developed older research of that sort. The approaches that have emerged here can be grouped around a few key categories: overcoming anxiety, creating meaning, orientation.
“Stories are told,” we read in Hans Blumenberg’s Work on Myth, “in order to ‘kill’ something. In the most harmless, but not least important case: to kill time. In another and more serious case: to kill fear.”6 But if telling stories is really a universal cultural activity, then narrowing its scope to the two motifs of diversion and overcoming angst is hardly satisfactory. In addition, the motif of primal conquest of anxiety contains the questionable premise, stamped by colonial-period ethnography, of a primitive human developmental stage: one on which human beings, still full of terror, encountered a universe of opaque natural forces that they had to fantasize away as gods and spirits.7 It is doubtless the case that an important psychological spur for stories – for instance children’s stories – is the ability of their sound to illuminate the world. But narration’s task of alleviating angst by furnishing it with names and forms is by no means universal. Likewise, narration only sometimes represents a response to a need for security or solace; entire genres specialize in spreading insecurity, horror, and desolation, and they do not always serve a therapeutic purpose.
Another anthropological motif, related to that of overcoming angst, centers on an effort by human beings to embed the reality of their lives in a comprehensible broader context through storytelling: an effort grounded in the unbearable nature of simply being delivered to either haphazard or iron law without any deeper relation to their existence. (The modern catch-phrase for this effort is coping with contingency.) In this framework narration brings meaning into the world, supplies its course with goals and intentions, populates it with anthropomorphic actors, and renders it into an intelligible form in the first place, thus transforming human beings, who are obliged to find their place in the world not only practically but also symbolically.
As important as this function of storytelling is, it does not exhaust the range of possible cases. For as we will see, narration can just as easily be placed at the disposal of dismantling efforts at making sense, for example hegemonial semantic edifices. As an activity that is to large extent formless, narration can correspondingly play out precisely the quality of formlessness in the process of cultural semiosis – whether through deformation, or through the dissolution of solidified patterns of meaning. In many narratives, contingency is not expelled but rather called on.
Finally, we can raise a similar objection against an adjacent anthropological approach ascribing narration with the task of furnishing human beings with indispensable symbolic orientation. This as well involves merely half a definition, failing to take account of the phenomenon of narratively generated disorientation. Since the onset of storytelling, laments have circulated over the misleading nature of their fabulation, the invitation the activity extends toward denying reality, its creation of nonsense and disorder. Repeatedly this complaint had served as a source for discrediting storytelling as a cultural practice – and this with good reason, as it reveals a basic ontological deficiency. For within its realm narration rules uncontrolled and omnipotent; it does not have to care about any congruency with outside reality; it takes the liberty of declaring each and every possible thing an object in the world. Like thinking and speaking in general, narration does not have a sufficient intrinsic truth-sign at its disposal. As in a vortex, mixed within it are elements of truth, semblance, hearsay, ignorance, error, lies. Stories can slide back and forth between the two possible extremes, commit themselves to faithfulness to reality in a way that suits them or else entirely cut their relationship with it; but neither alternative touches on their inner constitution. For this reason, those speaking of homo narrans are conceiving of human beings in their capacity to say both yes and no to the reality in which they live. Put morally, this is the capacity to lie, or more precisely: to annul or cancel the difference between real and unreal, true and false, to play with the difference. In actuality, narrations are in a certain sense story games, guided by a system of combinatory rules, whereas despite the sometimes high stakes most of the game’s moves are free.
Homo ludens
Emerging at this point is the affinity between homo narrans and homo ludens, a preceding twentieth-century anthropological figure made common currency through a famous book by Johan Huizinga first published in 1938.8 In his book, Huinzinga argues that the “great archetypal activities of human society” – verbal communication, a mythic interpretation of the world, the creation of community within the cult – “are all permeated with play from the start.”9 Although for Huinzinga all culture is thus grounded in play, he defines social play precisely in terms of its removal from the context of everyday life. Huizinga sees play as representing a temporally and spatially framed activity, one following a voluntary but binding order and forming an autonomous world, a world free of the weight of reality. His definition is thus aimed at the form-side of the playful arrangement:
Summing up the formal characteristics of play we might call it a free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious,’ but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means.10
The deciding features are thus freedom, inauthenticity, singularity, adherence to rules, community formation, festivity, and a collective feeling of pleasure emerging from all of this. This framing of the situation allows construction of “an absolute and peculiar order” within the play: “Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, a limited perfection. […] The profound affinity between play and order is perhaps the reason why play […] seems to lie to such a large extent in the field of aesthetics. Play has a tendency to be beautiful.”11 It would appear inviting to follow up on this train of thought, developing parallels between art and social play. At least according to classical criteria, one of the artwork’s essential qualities is its closed or self-contained nature. Huizinga himself suggests interconnections with poetry, which he understands as a metrical, rhythmic play of the spirit emerging from song, dance, and music.12 In distinction to other cultural forms, poetry, he argues, has remained true to its playful roots, “for while in the more highly organized forms of society religion, science, law, war, and politics gradually lose touch with play, so prominent in the earlier phases, the function of the poet still remains fixed in the play-sphere where it was first born.”13
The same would basically apply to narrative art, aligned with poetry as a form of imaginative literature. As just cited, Huizinga’s definition of play refers to “a free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious,’ but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly”; narration, like play, “proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space”; in shared moments of story-telling it grounds a sense of community and is at the same time a source of extraordinary, namely aesthetic, pleasure.
However, as is the case for play in general, narratives are not only present in ceremoniously framed performances, but rather often step out of that framework and mingle with profane life. From a certain point onward, Huizinga’s categorical separation between social activities involving forms of play and “the sphere of necessity or material utility”14 is untenable. For many “serious” occupations also contain rituals, which are themselves such forms, and take place on separated “playgrounds,” to use Huizinga’s own term.15 Formal self-containment through the establishment of spatio-temporal hurdles, internal order according to rules of behavior not in force in any other context, a special dress code, outward secrecy and a feeling of affiliation shared between the “players” – all these features of social play characterize bureaucracies and other institutional formations as well, their ideally smooth procedures perhaps even furnishing the well-trained eye with some aesthetic pleasure. There is as much “play” in politics and courtroom as on the stock exchange – whose calculations are the province of game theory, emerging from the analysis of fictive situations of social play. Those demanding social participation have to “bring themselves into play”: in the sense of Latin in-ludere, from which the word illusion emerged, a word consequently signifying a readiness to believe in the game being played, in its importance and rules.16
Huizinga himself contributes to our understanding of the transitions, mixed forms, and transformations between “play” and “reality,” “inauthentic” and “authentic” action. More precisely, he operates with two different concepts of play, one being part of the dichotomies he uses, the other encompassing them. We see this most clearly in his reflections on the character of religions as play. Where for participants, to fulfill its function religious worship has to be “seriousness at its highest and holiest,”17 a “consciousness, however latent, of ‘only pretending’” is, he indicates, an element in many magical ceremonies.18 According to the reports of ethnologists, we are informed, those engaged in primitive magical rituals, whether actors or spectators, are ambiguous in their behavior, and probably in their state of mind as well, on the one hand skeptical and on the other hand believing, “knower and dupe at once.”19 Here the concept of play applied by Huizinga does not point to the other, inauthentic side of earnest piety but reaches beyond the alternatives to define the opposition’s hovering nature as such – a “play” of the second power between the two approaches of seriousness and non-seriousness. “The unity and indivisibility of belief and unbelief,” writes Huizinga, “the indissoluble connection between sacred earnest and ‘make-believe’ or ‘fun,’ are best understood in the concept of play itself.”20 And in another passage: “We are accustomed to think of play and seriousness as an absolute antithesis. It would seem, however, that this does not go to the heart of the matter.”21
