Notes on Narrative and the Self

 

José Angel García Landa

Universidad de Zaragoza

Notes (2003) on

Kerby, Anthony Paul. Narrative and the Self. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991. 32-64.*

 

 

Kerby, “the self is given content, is delineated and embodied, primarily in narrative constructions and stories” (1).

 

The self as a product of action (and representation, I would add - JAGL).

 

“The stories we tell of ourselves are determined not only by how other people narrate us but also by our languages and the genres of storytelling inherited from our traditions” (Kerby 6). Self-narration as interpretive activity (7); the meaning of past is refigured in the present.

 

“our conscious narratives inevitably refigure and augment the prenarrative level of experience” (9).

 

Alasdair MacIntyre and Hannah Arendt: self-understanding as emplotment of one’s experiences: “storytelling animals” (MacIntyre), Kerby 12.

 

“Experience gains its density and elusiveness precisely through a continuous contextualizing or meshing of part to changing whole” (Kerby 16).

 

“The experience of our identity is in fact so interwoven with difference that neither pure identity nor pure difference can be granted complete precedence” (Kerby 17).

 

The present is meaningful because it is linked to past and future (Augustine’s ‘living present’: not instantaneous; the narrative articulation of temporal connectedness plus body identity gives us our sense of personal identity (18-19). Husserl: “The ego constitutes himself for himself in … the unity of a ‘history’ (Geschichte).” (19) (Cartesian Meditations).

 

The roots of the narrative unity of self are to be found in Locke, anti Cartesian (before Hume) (Kerby 25): “Nothing but consciousness can unite remote existences into the same person: The identity of substance will not do it” (Essay vol 1 p. 449), qtd in Kerby 25. Hume relies on causality and imagination to ground the self —beyond Locke).

 

Kerby: “My identity for myself is the identity I am conscious of, the identity I can bring to awareness” (25). (But cf. law: body, for others).

 

Kerby: Link between access to memory and emplotment (28). The narrative structuration of memories generates our understanding of the past.  There is no definite meaning of the past (31), we cannot escape “the historicity of our gaze and our interests” (31); “our talk of the self is self-constituting rather than referential to an ontologically prior subject” (31). “The meaning of a life can be adequately grasped only in a narrative or storylike framework” (33). “True” narratives of the past are only canonical versions of stories (38). 

 

Distance between the experiencing self and the narrating self (38).

 

Difference between Kerby’s definition of narrative:

 “narration can be conceived as the telling (in whatever medium, though especially language) of a series of temporal events so that a meaningful sequence is portrayed—the story or plot of the narrative” (39)

 

and mine (JAGL):

“the semiotic representation of a series of events” (no talk of meaning- which is a shortcoming in my definition).

 

“The prenarrative is, in its most general form, the drama we call our lives” (39); “we are constantly adopting the narrator’s position with respect to our own lives and also the lives of others” (39). Beyond the body: events and habits associated to the body generate the meaning of our existence. Actions are understood in relation to before and after, etc. 

 

“Life is inherently of a narrative structure, a structure that we make explicit when we reflect upon our past and our possible future” (40). “The actions of human agents, to be intelligible, must be seen against the background of a history, a history of causes and goals, of failures, achievements, and aspirations. (40). “The self, and this is a crucial point, is essentially a being of reflexivity, coming to itself in its own narrational acts” (41). 

 

Ricoeur: self-knowledge mediated through signs, symbols, cultural works, etc. Barbara Hardy: “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” (41). Cf. Ricoeur (experience is too unstructured perhaps before narrative in his account). 

 

“The progression from prefigured to configured and refigured receives a technical elaboration in Time and Narrative in terms of three stages of mimetic representation: mimesis1 (the everyday world of action), mimesis2 (the stage of creative narrative configuration), and mimesis3 (the appropriation of the work of mimesis2 to the world of the reader).” (Cf. my own emphasis on interaction. Interaction as reelaboration, renarrativization, resignification). “Narration should not be seen as creating order where there once was pure chaos or dissonance” (44, quoting Ricoeur). 

 

There is no precise starting point in interpretation dividing bare content from interpretation. “Rather, interpretation has always already started” (44). For Ricoeur: “the game of telling is included in the reality told” (45). (Cf. my narrating narrative, or Shakespeare’s doubling emphasis on metatheatre - JAGL).

 

            Personal identity is grounded on continuity of experience, “This identity, it should be noted, is not the persistence of an entity, a thing (substance, subject, ego), but is a meaning constituted by a relation of figure to ground or part to whole. It is an identity in difference constituted by framing the flux of particular experiences by a broader story” (46); “we often undergo experience in narrative sequences quite automatically, without choice” (47) or without explicit reflection.

 

Emotions as the product of reflection and interpretation, narratively articulated (48-49) “at least some emotions cannot be reduced to bodily states that the predelineated subject simply endures, but are, on a narrative account, part and parcel of what it means to be a subject” (49). 

 

There is a hermeneutic relationship between emotion and its narrative representation: the narrative articulation may change the emotion itself (50). A prenarrative quality of emotions: they demand an explicit articulation, but there are already narrative elements in them from the start (link to ideologies, beliefs, extraindividual, evaluative). (Charles Taylor, etc.).

 

“although narration is a secondary process, it is an essential one with respect to human understanding because it places acts in relation to each other and discloses those Gestalten and continuities without swhich understanding would prove infertile” (53).

Intertextuality in remembering: the retelling of a prior remembering, a prior emplotment, not of the event itself (53).

 

Narrative valorizes past action, retelling of past. “Narrative, howver, not only delivers the past but is also the medium of our aspirations and desires, imaginatively expressing, in the stories we tell ourselves and those others that we hear and read, a possible future with its attendant joys and hardships and, hence, possible selves” (54). Stories plot who we may become (cf. Walker Gibson, articulation not just through plot or character models but through identification or distance with speaking positions and implied stances). 

 

Telling a person’s story is an evaluation of the kind of moral agent that person is, (Telling also reveals the teller, I would add). Evaluative emotions (like a feeling of guilt e.g.). Evaluations are self-constitutive, they are grounded on our dispositions and expectations, and they transform them (like reading a novel). (58). (Taylor too). 

 

Narrative legitimizes practice, it accepts the embeddedness of moral practices in a variety of traditions, beliefs, dispositions (61). Vs. moral subjectivism and objectivism (missing word here: an interactional theory of morals, with narrative as a prime instrument).

“in the end it is the formation of character (along with its important social dimension) that is crucial in moral considerations” (62)

Formation of character as drive to the future, moral ideals. Pro conflicts being allowed in traditions, otherwise decline (63). “Much of our own narrating can usefully be seen as driven by some such conflict, tension or crisis in our own lives” (63). 

 

Vs. dogmatism, which imposes a predetermined closure. “But closure is often belied by the actual subtext of action (the prenarrative level); a subtext exhibiting divergences and contradictions that are not taken up in the explicit narrative enterprise. Self-understanding rides tandem with an encountering of otherness, with an imaginative empathy for the other that in turn discloses or develops possibilities for oneself.” (63-64) (cf. faultlines, crises, conflicts, traumas — JAGL).

 

“Systematization of the self in terms of a play of semiotic positions—of speaking, spoken, and implied subjects” (64).

 

Vs. the notion of the subject as a prelinguistic datum, directly present to itself (67). The history of consciousness is linked to the history of representation (cf. Calvin Schrag).

 

(Corollary: that the consequences for subjectivity of the contemporary explosion of mechanically mediated representations is surely both immense and not perceptible from our standpoint).

 

The speaking subject attains selfhood via its expressions (prenarrative becoming narrative) (69). The other’s body as site of his discourse. (But…) “Even when the speaker is absent some form of ascription to an embodied authorial origin generally occurs. This act appears to be fundamental to our society” (71).

 

 

Kerby:

 

Merleau-Ponty points out the delusive ‘transparence’ of language fading into the meaning expressed (77) (Vs. Martínez Bonati).

 

The experience of subjectivity in language (somewhat overstated) as desire and possibility of expression, of bringing something to language (77).

 

Becoming a subject of symbolic prefiguration as occasion of desire and torment (e.g. novels on finding one’s identity vs. impositions of others). Kerby 79.

“The symbolic does not directly represent or correspond to the real, for it generates a level of signification, and therefore meaning, in a more or less closed network of mutual relations that both refigure and transcend the level of the real.” (79)

(The spoken subject does not coincide with the speaking subject).

 

Mirror stage indicative of the role of self-representation in cultural life. (80). “Only by the detour of the other is self-presence attained” (81).

 

“narration cannot be said to aim simply at mirroring the prenarrative level” (82) (Cf. James Paul Gee, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis, 1999: interaction, ethical and projective function of narrative, making of communities, addressee contact... —JAGL). Narration as self-fashioning, not merely mimetic of previous self structures. Cf. Habermas’s notion of understanding as grounded on an interest (Kerby 88).

 

“Guiding our present investigation is this question: to what degree can the truthfulness of a self-narration be considered more a matter of pragmatic and creative adequacy than of a correspondence to the way things actually were or are?” (83) 

 

(Problem here: “actually” – a vicious circle. Actually for whom? Back to pragmatic adequacy - JAGL). 

 

Meaning of our acts in terms of both “because-of” and “in-order-to” motives (Alfred Schutz):

“The meaning of our acts, however, as this is worked out in terms of because-of and in-order-to motives, is a productof retrospective and prospective emplotments that draw upon the prenarrative past, refiguring it in light of the present demand for sense and coherence. Here again we find the dialectic of the prenarrative and narrative, a dialectic that is, to borrow a useful phrase from Merleau-Ponty, one of creative adequation.” (83-84)

 

“The truth of our narratives does not reside in their correspondence to the prior meaning of prenarrative experience; rather, the narrative is the meaning of prenarrative experience. The adequacy of the narrative cannot, therefore, be measured against the meaning of prenarrative experience but, properly speaking, only against alternate interpretations of that experience.” (84). 

 

(A problem here (JAGL): this pre-narrative experience will not be have been lived by others exactly in the same way as the narrator. A debate between narratives, or between interpretations. Kerby does not emphasize the role of others in the narrative debate — and the the agendas and projects of others. The question of friendly vs. unfriendly criticism, etc.)

 

Poetic language as overturning of ordinary categories, speaking from a prenarrative and presubjectived locus (Kristeva— Kerby 85). Cf. psychoanalysis: “overcoming prior and perhaps well-established interpretations of ourselves. This is also a reason why literature, at its best, is both disturbing and liberating” (86). 

 

“Indeed, a good case can be made for viewing narrative understanding as the most adequate approach to the human domain. To understand ourselves we must grasp our implicit history, for to be human is not simply to have a history (in a certain sense animals have this), but to be cognizant of this history” (87). 

 

(JAGL: In which sense? Animals have a history for us. Cognizance at a primary level and at a reelaborated level, the difference is essential. A role of criticism, of interaction and of the conflict of different representations and intepretations). 

 

Donald P. Spence pro interpretation as “a pragmatic statement that has no necessary referent in the past” (qtd. in Kerby 89). “The construction not only shapes the past—it becomes the past in many cases because many critical early experiences are preverbal and, therefore, have no proper designation until we put them into words” (89). 

 

(This is always the case in interpretation. There are nonverbal aspects to all experience, and nonverbal relationships between elements of the intepreted phenomenon and its context which need to be verbalized. e.g. the gesture of language, or the significance of the framed elements in another frame of reference. The interpretation therefore always brings out meaning which was only partly existent in the original before the interpreter’s action). 

 

Narrative emplotment must link elements “in a way that is intellectually and emotionally acceptable” (90). (The situational-interactive- community making dimension of narrative. Audience design, interaction with audiences). “It should also be noted that one’s own acceptance of a narrative may be significantly affected by whether or not other people accept one’s account” (90).

 

Refiguring of the past may also involve a disfiguring (96) Pro accuracy on facts, but global meaning is not a fact (96). Plausibility of historical account in a narrative which synthesizes various threads of the past into a coherent meaningful whole, “Such plausibility may depend on factors (e.g., future events) not at all present to the actors of the events being considered” (96). 

 

Disinterestedness, too, is not an ideal from the hermeneutic point of view (Gadamer, Habermas):

“Authenticity, after all, is not the mere recounting of one’s past but, as Heidegger has said, also the projection of one’s possibilities” (97).

 

Heidegger vs. subject/object dichotomy, Dasein situated the subject within a word and a language, new era in European philosophy. (101). 

 

(Anticipated by 19th-c. historicism in this sense - JAGL).

 

The semiotic subject:

“The human subject must thus be situated within the structures that sustain it rather than posited as transcendent to them; it must be implicated in the production of such structures but need not be taken as foundational.” (101)

Kerby advocates a favorable interpretation of structuralism as a refusal to separate subject from the social order, rather than negating it. (102).

 

“The text’s future lies in the hands of its readers. But while the psychophysical author (the person) is left behind, what we have called a subject of speech remains” (102).

 

Motives for division and dispersion of the subject: “Given this diversity, the possibility of unity for the subject can only arise through two primary channels: routine activity at the level of praxis and acts of self-narration” (105) 

 

(Too pessimistic here: routine may refer to satisfactory acts of social interaction where the subjects achieve mutual recognition - JAGL).

 

Semiotic model for the subject based on a tripartite division: “the speaking subject or material agent of ediscourse, the subject of speech or purely linguistic subject of the discourse (designated by personal pronouns and other deictical indications), and the spoken subject or subject produced through or by the discourse as a result of its effect on a reader-listener” (105). 

 

(This should be further specified: the narratee, the subject as represented and favoured by the discourse, the subject as evaluated by a third party...).

 

The body is reintegrated into the communicative equation as site of narration and site of ascription (implied author 2) for the subject. 

 

“A split or noncoincidence in the subject is also apparent here due to the interpretive nature of this participation. One may not, for example, accept the expression as an adequater representative of oneself, which may cause the cycle to continue again. This cycle of ever new signification and appropriation is, of course, none other than the dynamic framework within which personal development takes place” (108). 

 

Reflexivity of interpretation, Taylor's Sources of the Self.

 

Conclusion: 

 

We act our part as selves but script is not pre-written: “as in a first-person narration, we interrupt the ongoing drama with retrospective assessments and refigurations and are not, therefore, completely engulfed in our roles” (109).

“The unity of the self, where  such a unity exists, is exhibited as an identity in difference, which is all a temporal character can be” (109). 

Identity is never settled, “the prenarrative out of which it arises need never have a definitive interpretation” (110). Desire for an identity is more unchanging than identity itself. The self not a prelinguistic given for which language is a tool, “but is an implicate of language usage” (110) 

 

(Here one should add other 'languages', models, frames... nonlinguistic signs which frame linguistic action - JAGL).

 

“When we are in the heat of conversation it is particularly evident that what ‘I’ say is not at all prefigured in consciousness but is a spontaneous and bodily response to the speech situation” (111). 

 

The body as and enduring locus, person as an embodied self… Person as a body of gestures, artificial division between body and mind or body and self. Pro expressive potential, vs. repressive society which treats expressive potential of the body as renegade or antisocial (113). 

 

Situating the subject in history and culture, it cannot be freed from psychological or ideological distortions. “The human subject is a self-interpreting animal that, via narration, is of necessity prey to its own ‘fictions’.” (114)

 

The subject as the product of a creative act, not pregiven to be simply recognized and respected.

 

115 n. 2: On the “implied author”:

“The latter term is employed in two primary and interrelated senses: (1) to designate the status of the author that a text sets up for the reader in and through itself, and (2) to stress that what the text reveals about the “author” cannot be directly identified with the flesh-and-blood author. The term implied subject  is intended to refer to the subject set up by our utterances, but which, in ordinary usage at least, does not contain the distance evidenced in point 2. That is, behind our speaking or thinking there is not another (more real) subject or author.”

 

118 n. 16: For Ricoeur, “Narrative will bridge the abyss between lived time and objective, or cosmic, time”

 

121 n. 34. Collingwood: an emotion is bound up with its expression, cannot be reduced to the bare psychological phenomena prior to expression.

 

125 n. 39 for Derrida, presence as the suppression of differance: “Presence is thus the overlooking or suppression of the mediating signifier, or, which is the same thing, the erasing of a primordial difference or otherness.”

 

125 n 45. In Lacan, “The ‘real’ is not what we tend to mean by ‘reality’, for this is primarikly a symbolic product.”

 

Oliver Sacks too gives a narrative grounding to identity (The Man who Mistook...),

“each of us is  a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, thorugh, and in us—through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations…. To be ourselves we must have ourselves—posssess, if need be repossess, our life-stories” (Sacks, qtd in Kerby 127 n. 69).

131 n. 2: importance of being as, of models or archetypes in order to tell our story and construct our identity (tragic or otherwise, etc.).

 

 

 —oOo—