No amount of objective analysis or logical resolution can come to rescue when we try to navigate the most complex and nuanced tribulations of human interaction. Sometimes there is no substitute for the catharsis of talking things through or the empowerment of telling one’s own version of a story.
Logical resolution is subordinate to narrative thinking when we are attempting to understand people and their plights. Objective analysis and technical solutions are often inadequate for resolving the vicissitudes of everday life. The cathartic nature of story telling can help with, say, the loss of a loved one, a long-term family rift, rejection in love, betrayal by a friend or sustaining life-time commitments like marriage and parenthood.
Fiction can come to the aid of people wrestling with life’s exigencies large and small. Authentic parallels can be found in the archetypal characters and distilled versions of real life situations contrived in works of literature, drama, and mythology.
Andrew Brown (2002) Figure. Oil pastel, ink and charcoal on paper.
What is the role of tension and release when listening to a story, getting the punch line of a joke or appreciating a piece of music? Is there a physiological component to this?
Can the science of psychology reveal more about the human condition than literary works? Why are the essential differences between interpretation and the kind of objective analysis used in the natural sciences? When comparing the narrative approach with the logico-scientific approach is one inherently superior to the other? Are story-telling and myth making persisting vestiges of the pre-scientific thinking of a bygone age?
JEROME S. BRUNER
American Educational Psychologist [1915- ]
NARRATIVE SOURCES
PAUL RICOEUR
French philosopher [1915- ]
Andrew Brown (2006) Figure. Oil pastel and charcoal on paper.
Bruner (1996: 147) writes that “[w]e live in a sea of stories,” and like the proverbial fish who will be the last to discover water, “we have our own difficulties grasping what it is like to swim in stories.” In Life as Narrative, Bruner (1987: 31-32) may be revealing his true colors when he concedes that “[t]he fish will, indeed, be the last to discover water—unless he gets a metaphysical assist.”
Bruner (1996: 39-40) recognizes “ two broad ways in which human beings organize and manage their knowledge of the world, indeed structure even their immediate experience”:
One seems more specialized for treating of “physical things,” the other for treating of people and their plights. These are conventionally known as logico-scientific thinking and narrative thinking.
Bruner acknowledges the universality of these contrasting linguistic modes and suggests they are “givens in the nature of language.” He asserts that “no culture is without both of them though different cultures privilege them differently.”
Bruner, Jerome (1987) Life as Narrative. Social Research 54:1. Spring 1987, (11-32).
Bruner, Jerome(1996) The Culture of Education. Cambridge , MA: Harvard University Press.
In his three volume study Time and Narrative—Paul Ricoeur exploits the creative power of story and plot to address the classic aporias of time. He (1984: 52) points to the ontological aspect of narrative when he asserts that: between the activity of narrating a story and the temporal character of human experience exists a correlation that is not merely accidental but that presents a transcultural form of necessity.
In short: Ricoeur is announcing that story-telling is universal characteristic of being human.
Ricoeur, Paul (1984) Time and Narrative, Volume 1. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago : The University of Chicago Press.
Macintyre (1984: 211) is determined that "narrative form is neither disguise nor decoration." It is always already there long before poets, dramatists, novelists and songsters make their particular configurations. Macintyre quotes Barbara Hardy in this context. She observes that "we dream in narrative, day-dream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate and love by narrative…"
Macintyre (1984: 212, 217) champions the Aristotelian/Heideggerian theme that we are "the subject of a narrative that runs from one’s birth to one’s death." He reminds us of the historical character of human action and plight:
It is because we all live out narratives in our own lives and because we understand our own lives in terms of narratives that we live out that the form of narrative is appropriate for understanding the actions of others. Stories are lived before they are told…
Macintyre, Alisdair (1984) After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Second Edition. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press.
ALISDAIR MACINTYRE
Scottish moral philosopher [1927- ]
EMPLOTMENT
When listening to a story we make sense of the events as they unfold in time. This may occur incrementally in linear fashion, or in delightful twists and shifts. Configuring the plot for oneself relies more on interpretation rather than logical analysis.
Emplotment is the subjective cognitive process that allows us to follow a story. If we are enticed into entering a narrative—and become suitably provoked and engaged along the way—we care about what happens next and we make the story our own. In a metaphoric sense it becomes inhabitable. An interesting existential phenomenon is our tendency to imagine ourselves as actual participants in the stories that we hear and tell.
A good story is highly specific and rich in context. It gives the reader or listener some imaginative work to do. A story is more interesting if it shows, implies and alludes rather than explicitly tells.
RICOEUR ON EMPLOTMENT
Ricoeur (1981: 142-143) declares that
[t]he moment of ‘understanding’ corresponds dialectically to being in a situation: it is the projection of our ownmost possibilities at the very heart of the situations in which we find ourselves... what must be interpreted in a text is a proposed world which I could inhabit and wherein I could project one of my own most possibilities.
This proposed world is:
not behind the text, as a hidden intention would be, but in front of it, as that which the work unfolds, discovers, reveals. Henceforth to understand is to understand oneself in front of the text... exposing ourselves to the text and receiving from it an enlarged self.
In his philosophical writings on narrative, Ricoeur (1984: 67) stresses the importance of the Aristotelian concept of muthos or emplotment. It is emplotment which “transforms the succession of events into one meaningful whole... and which makes the story followable.” Ricoeur’s three-stage mimesis refers specifically to the interpretation of texts but it encapsulates the essential problem of human understanding. It has profound implications for the moment of learning. According to Ricoeur (1984: 53-54), it is emplotment (or mimesis 2) which, as mediator, conducts us “from one side of the text to the other.” Mimesis 1 or the “prefigured,”—is transfigured in a “new quality of time”:
We are following therefore the destiny of a prefigured time that becomes a refigured time through the mediation of a configured time.
Emplotment “draws a configuration out of a simple succession.” Ricoeur refers to this as a “synthesis of the heterogeneous.” a phrase which echoes the working through of incommensurability. Similarly emplotment’s creation of “concordant discordance” (1984: 64-66) seems to represent a temporal resolution of Gadamer’s polarity between familiarity and strangeness. Ricoeur declares that “mimesis 2 opens the kingdom of the as if.” This “configuration” leads us to mimesis 3, or “refiguration,” which “marks the intersection of the world of the text with the world of the hearer or reader” (1984: 81).
Ricoeur, Paul (1981) Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Edited and translated by John B Thompson. Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press.
Ricoeur, Paul (1984) Time and Narrative, Volume 1. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago : The University of Chicago Press.
