“Numberless are the world’s narratives.” So began Roland Barthes’s “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative,” published in 1966 -- an essay that inaugurated the new discipline of narratology. “There isn’t, there has never been anywhere any people without narrative,” wrote Barthes. Stories (unlike poems) can be translated, transposed to other media, summarized; they can be retold “in other words” and yet still be recognizably “the same story.” Narrative, which, according to Barthes, the human child discovers around age 3, is one of the large categories we use to understand and order the world.
The notion that narrative is part of a universal cognitive tool kit, which seemed in the mid-60’s a radical discovery, is now one of the banalities of postmodernism. Scholars from many disciplines have come to recognize, in a phrase made popular by the psychologist Jerome Bruner, “the narrative construction of reality.” We don’t simply assemble facts into narratives; our sense of the way stories go together, how life is made meaningful as narrative, presides at our choice of facts as well, and the ways we present them. Our daily lives, our daydreams, our sense of self are all constructed as stories.
But Barthes never predicted the coming of a U.S. president who would introduce members of his cabinet with the phrase: “Each person has got their own story that is so unique, stories that really explain what America can and should be about.” And more simply (in presenting Secretary of State Colin Powell): “a great American story.” And simpler still (in presenting Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta): “I love his story.” One has the impression that George W. Bush’s construction of reality is wholly narrative.
And sure enough, in his brief inaugural address Bush used the word “story” 10 times, starting with, “We have a place, all of us, in a long story -- a story we continue, but whose end we will not see,” and ending with, “This story goes on."Again, one has the impression that “story” is Bush’s embracing category for making sense of the world.
Our political leaders’ love of story may no doubt have less to do with Barthes and his followers than with Ronald Reagan, who I believe was the first U.S. president to govern largely by anecdote. An anecdote, the American Heritage Dictionary tells us, is “a short account of an interesting or humorous incident.” It may also be “secret or hitherto undivulged particulars of history or biography.”
Reagan used the narrative of the interesting or humorous incident to lay claim to those “hitherto undivulged particulars,” as in the story of one welfare mom who had shucked off the dependency of her condition to find a job, and a new life. He even, it transpired, recalled incidents from old war movies and recounted them as part of U.S. history. No matter. The anecdote came to trump statistics that pointed to a different truth. Reagan understood that the concrete particularity of storytelling will always be more vivid than compilations of fact.
Now political candidates cannot debate without having at hand -- preferably in the auditorium -- an elderly citizen from Florida forced to sell her home to pay for prescription drugs, a crime victim mugged by liberal courts, or any number of other people who represent exemplary narratives. To launch his tax-cut initiative, President Bush assembled no fewer than three “typical” American families, each an economic story. A more traditional rhetoric of American politics, concocted of moral and sentimental abstractions, has largely been rendered obsolete. Narrative particularity -- a unique American story -- is what is required.
The narrative construction of reality is now everywhere visible. Pharmaceutical companies want to tell us the story of their drugs; stockbrokers pitch the story of the stocks they have to sell. A public event -- the death of Diana, Princess of Wales; the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990 -- at once leads to a reconstruction of its story, complete with plot outlines and diagrams and restagings.
In the Starr Report on President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, the special prosecutor chose to present his major findings in a section titled “Narrative.” No one even commented on how it might have been otherwise: how the report might have been presented as a collage of witnesses’ reports and legal argumentation, for instance. The choice to use narrative was a play for public acceptance of a certain formal construction of the events and their meaning. Had Starr chosen a more cubist approach, readers would have of course constructed their own narratives -- they did in any event. The claim that there was one narrative was a pre-emptive strike against dissenting opinions.
Storytelling also pervades many aca-demic discourses traditionally held to be governed by logic, syllogism, or mathematical formula. That is true not only in disciplines closely related to literature, such as anthropology and history -- where the return to narrative after a disillusioned romance with cliometrics and structural demography, for instance, has been much advertised. In his A History of Britain series for the BBC, the historian Simon Schama has even revived epic storytelling. Psychoanalysis increasingly is conceived as seeking “narrative truth,” as the psychoanalyst Donald Spence has claimed. Deirdre N. McCloskey, the economist, has argued that economics is essentially a narrative discipline -- “Economists are tellers of stories. ... It is no accident that the novel and economic science were born at the same time.” And the physicist Steven Weinberg claims that convincing narratives govern the spending of millions of dollars in scientific research. “Law lives on narrative,” we read in Minding the Law, by Jerome Bruner and the legal scholar Anthony G. Amsterdam -- meaning that the narrative presentation of events pervades legal adjudication.
I suppose that literary critics interested in the workings of narrative and the pervasive presence of “narrativity” in culture ought to be content that our subject of study appears to have colonized large realms of discourse, both popular and academic. The problem, however, is that the very promiscuity of the idea of narrative may have rendered the concept useless. The proliferation and celebration of the concept of narrative haven’t been matched by a concurrent spread of attention to its analysis.
There seems to be an implicit assumption that the storytelling mode trumps other forms of discourse. It is more immediate, concrete, persuasive. For instance, some legal scholars have argued that “storytelling for oppositionists” -- to use the law professor Richard Delgado’s phrase -- can be a way to empower those minority groups often marginalized or silenced by legal business-as-usual, a way to contest abstraction, the kind of reasoning that tends to efface human actors. But storytelling is a moral chameleon; it can be used to support the worse as well as the better cause, to promote dominant as well as marginal narratives. President Bush’s great American stories exclude as much as they include.
Barthes and others argued for the importance of narratology, a new science of narrative. The English word “science” overtranslates the French science -- which might better be rendered as “the disciplined knowledge of” -- but the point remains: the new attention to narrative and the myriad forms of storytelling was originally proposed in the context of an attempt to found a serious, disciplined study of them. Such a study would analyze their design and intention, how their narrative rhetoric seeks a certain result, an effect on the reader, a change in reality. But that sort of analysis isn’t much in evidence in the presentation of those stories that are supposed to explain what America is all about. The work done by narratology has not penetrated into other disciplines -- or into the public discourse.
Meanwhile, we have reality TV (Survivor, Temptation Island), which producers contrast to story-form TV (The West Wing), sometimes with predications that the former will make the latter obsolete. But reality TV is as narrative as can be: It invites the viewer to construct it as a continuing story, a grittier, or more titillating, sitcom. And now that the real West Wing seems to have become the place of great American stories, maybe we can forget about any analytic distinctions between the two. I have a friend who insists he will spend the next four years watching The West Wing as if it were the evening news. That may bring comfort for a while, so long as he keeps niggling narratologists -- who might want to analyze the differences -- at bay.
Peter Brooks is the author of Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (third edition, Harvard University Press, 1992) and Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law & Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2000). He is the director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University.
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