Against Narrative ("A Boring Story")
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1. Against ...
[Narrative] is so familiar and ubiquitous that it is likely to be overlooked, in much the same way as we suppose that the fish will be the last to discover water. . . . [W]e organize our experience and our memory of human happenings mainly in the form of narrative—stories, excuses, myths, reasons for doing and not doing, and so on.
(Bruner 1991: 4)
The celebrated ubiquity of narrative in culture is both a fecund premise and, I claim, the bane of narrative theory today. While not outright against narrative, nor against theorizing about narratives, in this paper I nonetheless aim to remain fairly sceptical towards broad, overly eager uses of the notion: not necessarily the most promising stance in a collection devoted to narrative "as a way of thinking." No less ominously, my paper comes with the subtitle "A Boring Story"—though this is also the title of the story by Chekhov ("Skuchnaia istoriia," 1889) that I shall use to boost my argument, once we are done with theory.
Everybody knows the lure of broad notions. One well remembers such early, once eye-opening statements as those by Roland Barthes (1975: 235): "Like life itself, narrative is there, international, transhistorical, transcultural."1 Or by Hayden White (1987: 1): "To raise the question of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture, and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself." Hence, obviously, the [End Page 19] tacit consensus prompting the vast expansion of the narrative-theoretical approach in current research everywhere, from literary narratology (where it all started) to social sciences, cultural and media studies, cognitive science, and a gamut of other, most diverse interdisciplinary arenas.2
It would hardly serve my purpose to go against interdisciplinarity in research (a sacred cow, if any). Certainly, the concept of narrative may travel, and, without doubt, it can be put to profitable uses outside studies of fiction—this is not my point here. Neither would there seem to be much need in the present context for retracing the emergence of the narrative "turn" in diverse disciplines, or the concomitant broadening and transformation of the initial concept.3
But let us look at some exemplars of the overly broad and, to my mind, overly enthusiastic usage, stemming from this very turn. First, from the psychologist Jerome Bruner, again, whose wording may still look reasonable at first blush:
[O]nce the "cognitive revolution" in the human sciences brought to the fore the issue of how "reality" is represented in the act of knowing, it became apparent that it did not suffice to equate representations with images, with propositions, with lexical networks, or even with more temporally extended vehicles such as sentences. It was perhaps a decade ago that psychologists became alive to the possibility of narrative as a form not only of representing but of constituting reality.
(Bruner 1991: 5)
The notion of narrative form constituting reality (in the same manner, that is, as a literary narrative constitutes fictional reality) is developed further in cognitive terms—recklessly, in my view—by Mark Turner [End Page 20] in The Literary Mind. According to Turner's thesis, human thought always involves not only narrative construction (surely an acceptable assumption), but also literary construction and hence construction of fiction, a claim to which I will return:
Narrative imagining—story—is the fundamental instrument of thought. Rational capacities depend upon it. It is our chief means of looking into the future, of predicting, of planning, and of explaining. It is a literary capacity indispensable to human cognition generally. This is the first way in which the mind is essentially literary.
(Turner 1996: 4-5)
From here there is but a step to claims like Alan Palmer's (in his Fictional Minds)—empty and, I think, actually harmful: "[T]heorists from various disciplines have suggested that life plans are scripted on fairy-tale patterns and that in a sense we are all novelists" (Palmer 2004: 186).
2. What Narrative?
Where is the harm? Or, why should we not like such claims?
A short answer would be that, as literary narratologists, we might not like quite this quick...
