Media A2
Narrative
In media terms, narrative is the coherence/organisation given to a series of facts. The human mind needs narrative to make sense of things. We connect events and make interpretations based on those connections. In everything we seek a beginning, a middle and an end. We understand and construct meaning using our experience of reality and of previous texts. Each text becomes part of the previous and the next through its relationship with the audience.
Narrative Conventions
When unpacking a narrative in order to find its meaning, there are a series of codes and conventions that need to be considered. When we look at a narrative we examine the conventions of
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Genre
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Character
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Form
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Time
and use knowledge of these conventions to help us interpret the text. In particular, Time is something that we understand as a convention - narratives do not take place in real time but may telescope out (the slow motion shot which replays a winning goal) or in (an 80 year life can be condensed into a two hour biopic). Therefore we consider "the time of the thing told and the time of the telling." (Christian Metz Notes Towards A Phenomenology of Narrative).
It is only because we are used to reading narratives from a very early age, and are able to compare texts with others that we understand these conventions. A narrative in its most basic sense is a series of events, but in order to construct meaning from the narrative those events must be linked somehow.
Narrative and Life
The relationship between narrative and life has been subject to much questioning in contemporary culture. An example of this is a recent film’ which tells of an affair between two characters. The woman is a member of a cinema audience, and the man has escaped from the world of the screen to enter real life. As romance between these characters builds, they embrace for their first kiss. After a few seconds, though, the woman notices the man’s growing hesitancy. She asks him what the matter is. His reply is that he is only accustomed to kissing in films, and the lovers’ kiss alway’s fades out on screen; he does not know how to go any further. The film continues to explore the misreadings of the real world that occur when acting according to its supposedly mimetic represent a t ion on the screen. This play on the intersection between the real and the fictional world indicates at a popular level a similar concert] with the status of narrative in the way our world is actually lived as is found in some recent developments in the social sciences.
Narrative representation as a way of making sense of tile world has become an issue in various disciplines. Many literary critics have seen the realm of literature as allowing for the construction of models of the world of experience in ways that guide our actions (e.g. Frye, 1957; Hernnstein-Smith, 1978; Price, 1983). In the discipline of history, Hayden White’s Metahistory (1973) proposes the general thesis that, when historians provide an account of the past, they are partly concerned with finding a plot according to which the events can be ordered in a meaningful sequence. Exploring this notion further, philosophers such as Paul Ricoeur (1983, 1985) have been concerned with the manner in which our very experience of time is dependent on the narrative structures that we impose on experience. In political science, Frederic Jameson (1981) has proposed an interpretive scheme which claims that ideological systems are produced in part by the workings of narrative structures. Even in architecture, one finds the concern with fiction expressed in the young London-based group called Narrative Architecture Today (NATO), which, rather than attending to the formal properties of design, focuses on the possibilities of experience created by buildings. In each of these cases, theorists are concerned with the way our mode of living reflects the representational structures that are imposed on our experience. As such, these approaches reflect a post-modern concern with the nature of reflexivity: how our worlds are governed by our designs, and the abysses in time and space created in this process.
Although much of contemporary psychology still concerns itself with mechanistic models of human behaviour, there are fields of research such as action psychology (see Harré et al., 1985) which allow reflexivity to be entertained as having a role in individual lives. Later this entrance for narrative into psychology will be considered, but we should begin with its initial entry through the back door of psychoanalysis. Roy Schafer (1976) claimed that psychoanalytic therapy involved the restructuring of a person’s sense of the past so that it would make a more cohesive narrative. The aim of the therapy was to find a place for the analysand at the centre of this reconstructed life narrative.
While Schafer’s approach is instructive, it is constrained in a way that this chapter seeks to avoid. This limit is found in Schafer’s account of the factors that govern the process of employment in therapy. Apart from the agreement between the constructed story and certain ungrounded ‘visions of the world’, such as the ironic focus of psychoanalysis,2 his theory lacks a detailed exposition of -the dynamic process of finding a place for the self in a narrative.
How a storied sense of self plays a part in development is explicated more fully in recent approaches to this issue. Theodore :Sarbin (1986) proposed that mechanism as a root metaphor in psychology be replaced by narrative. Sarbin draws on both literary and psychological material to demonstrate the fundamental role of narrative in our making sense of the world, especially when this activity is sensitive to context. And, as Kenneth and Mary Gergen propose, it is regarding the construction of self in a social context that the use of narrative has much to offer (Gergen and Gergen, 1988). Here, stories seem to enable others to share one’s point of view. As a recent writer in this field states, ‘when we understand someone, we understand his or her stories’ (Keen, 1986). It is this concern with how one’s story relates to the social order that allows us to progress beyond the individualistic account of narrative construction provided by Schafer. Later in the chapter, I will attempt to establish how two forms of narrative enable this social construction of identity.
Why narrative should be the medium in which a social sense of self is constructed can be explained by contrast to the other modes of understanding. Jerome Bruner (1986) distinguishes the narrative mode of understanding from the more abstract scientific mode, which he calls the paradigmatic. While the paradigmatic mode is best for making sense according to principles that abstract from context. narrative understanding carries the weight of context, which therefore makes it a better medium for relating human experience and the contradictions that that entails. According to Bruner’s argument. therefore, encapsulating experience in the form of a story enables it to make sense in the interpersonal sphere. A further enquiry I ry into the dynamics involved in this process, although of great interest, is beyond the scope of this chapter. Rather, my analysis will assume that narrative adapts experience to the social context of meaning, and will pursue the implications of this in theories of identity.
