LITR 5831 Colonial-Postcolonial Literature                                                        Research Projects 2011

Jenny Brewer

20 Nov. 2011

Research Journal

Narrativity: Thirteen Concerns

Introduction:

            I asked to do this research journal on narrativity after my midterm research led me to an article titled “Narrativity and Knowledge,” by Paisley Livingston, which explored “postulated connections between narrativity and the epistemic merits or demerits of narratives” (Livingston, 25). Livingston had noticed a growing number of divergent claims in literature dealing with narrative: either scholars asserted that narratives generate epistemic irrationality, or that certain types of knowledge could only be portrayed through narrative.  One camp seems to be claiming that narratives distort truth, and the other hints that narratives reveal truth in ways that other representative forms cannot.  As our course objectives concerning narrative were intriguing to me, narrativity seemed an ideal topic for my project.

            I have two personal experiences which make this topic appealing to me. The first is actually more of a tendency- when faced with a dilemma in my day to day life, too often my first efforts at determining a course of action involve trying to think of a book or a movie where a character has faced the same situation, and seeking guidance from their decisions. I have often found this disturbing in myself, and have even toyed with the idea of creating a searchable website where people can post  their real-life dilemmas, so that this same kind of “research” can be done in the context of messy reality instead of the too-neat world of narrative. Fortunately, I am saved from this undertaking by the existence of  The Experience Project: “the world's largest collection of life experiences, personal stories, and the people who have had them” (experienceproject.com).

            The second experience motivating this research is a bit more serious: the experience of having lived through the greatest advances in civil rights for gays and lesbians in modern history. Credit for the progress we have made in the last thirty years is largely due to the coming out movement, in that discrimination decreases as visibility increases (D'Augelli, 126). This is because people's lives are narratives, so hearing stories about GLBT lives has been exponentially more effective than having homosexuality removed from the DSM.  An even stronger example of this principle at work is the “It Gets Better” video project.  In this case, rather than using our stories to gain acceptance from those who are ignorant of our reality, we have used our stories to save the lives of those who know it all too well.

.           These two examples show how I already had experience with both sides of the divergence being explored in “Narrative and Knowledge.” My temptation to seek answers in fictional stories demonstrates to me some of narrative's questionable powers, in that the made-up worlds I have been exposed to take root in my head in a way that makes them seem more real than the experiences of people I have actually met. On the other hand, the impact of the coming out movement and of the “It Gets Better” project have been a force for good in my day-to-day life.  Holding these two opposing perspectives simultaneously meant that happening upon Paisley Livingston's examination of   narratives rang bells in my head. Ms. Livingston lays out thirteen claims regarding narrative power: seven on the “con” side and six on the “pro.” For my research project, I proposed a journal - in which I would evaluate these claims for myself by finding examples of each within the colonial and postcolonial literature that we've studies this semester. My journal comprises thirteen entries, one for each of the claims in Ms. Livingston's article. Within each entry I have attempted to identify “classic” examples from mainstream culture, paired with examples from our class readings. Where possible, I have sought out the sources cited in Ms. Livingston's article and included thoughts from these, as well.

            All of the articles I read began by discussing a definition of “narrative.” I say “discussing a definition” rather than “defining” because there is some uncertainty. For the purposes of this paper, I will use the definition included in our class objectives, defining narrative as a “personal and cultural trajectory, direction, or history.” I feel fortunate to have this definition available, as none of my sources were able to agree. One scholar even referred to narrative as “a black box;” something that “recieves inputs from the determinants of narrativity and gives as outputs representations of certain favored states of affairs,” (Currie, 311).

1.        

            The first argument Livingston identifies accusing narrative of distortion concerns the potential for narratives to be “pseudo-explanatory: narratives embody or encourage the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc” (Livingston, 25).  Post hoc ergo propter hoc is Latin for "after this, therefore because of this." It is a logical fallacy in that it assumes that effects following an event must be caused by an event. A classic example of this occurs in romantic comedies when the geeky heroine finds love after exchanging her glasses for contacts. Geeky girls all over the world will now blame their glasses for their lack of dates, instead of understanding that the liberation from self-stereotyping represented by the change might have altered their lives regardless of eyewear. A variation on this tendency can be observed in Heart of Darkness, when Marlow assumes that his hired cannibals did not eat him because they share his English values of restraint (Conrad, 67). Marlow has a narrative in his head concerning Englishness and its causes and effects, so when an incident intersects with this narrative at a single point, he sees this intersection as an explanation. This is a variation in that the cause follows from a quality (the assumed Englishness of the cannibals' restraint), rather than an event, but it is still a good example in that it portrays a character attributing a false cause to an event.

2.

            The second argument Livingston identifies accusing narrative of distortion concerns the potential for narratives to be “pseudo-justificatory: the persuasive appeal of stories is disproportionate to their real evidential support or reliability (narrative generates “cold” irrationality as a result of availability, salience, and confirmation biases)” (Livingston, 25).  In popular culture this can be seen in stories that romanticize the antebellum South, and thus minimize slavery's brutality.  Crusoe's relationship with Friday works in the same way- Europeans wanted to believe that colonial natives needed a civilizing influence, and Defoe's portrayal of Friday's gratitude confirmed this (Defoe, 295). Khushwant Singh, discussing his first published short story, admits to intentionally playing on confirmation biases: “it was kind of a hammy story, deliberately-- you know how the foreigner expects India to have stories about things like snakes […] so there was a snake in it” (Mahfil, 27).  Singh wanted to appeal to white Europeans, so he made sure that his work would satisfy at least one of the expectations they brought to it.

3.

            The third argument Livingston identifies accusing narrative of distortion concerns the potential for narratives to be “misleading: stories encourage the error of pars pro toto”  (Livingston, 25). Pars pro toto is the fallacy of  taking a part for the whole, and occurs when we assume that we fully understand a concept by virtue of having been exposed to it.  This is most obvious in “A Small Place.” Jamaica Kincaid speaks directly to those who would imagine they “know” the Antilles because they have been to a beach there (Kincaid, 257). We see in Jasmine how Bud Ripplemeyer's preexisting understanding of the East,  “plunges me into visibility and wisdom,” allowing him to believe he understands her despite an outright refusal to hear her story (Mukherjee, 178). The Western cultural narrative of colonialism allows him to believe he  knows her simply because he “knows” the myth.

4.

            The fourth argument Livingston identifies accusing narrative of distortion concerns the potential for narratives to be “seductive: a story’s narrativity is likely to lead to “hot” irrationality through its strong or even “irresistible” emotional appeal, which is obtained at the price of cognitive shortcomings” (Livingston, 25).  The War of the Worlds is a classic example. James Bruner asserts that “great storytellers have the artifices of narrative reality construction so well mastered that their telling preempts momentarily the possibility of any but a single interpretation- however bizarre it may be,” (Bruner, 9). Orson Welles so thoroughly manipulated text, context, and setting that listeners nationwide believed instantly in something that would have seemed ridiculous just one day before. We see the life story of Sir James Brooke work in this way upon Dravot and Peachey in “The Man Who Would be King.”  They are so seduced by the image of going from soldier to Rajah in one short military step that they fail to consider the vast differences between their characters and Brooke's, and in different circumstances of time and place (Kipling).  For example, involving themselves in local skirmishes did work to their advantage, but not nearly so well as it might have if they had done so in such a way as to inspire gratitude in someone equivalent to the Sultan of Brunei (Cavendish, 55). The lack of such a personage severely limited how high their fortunes could rise, but they were so impressed by the end of Sir Brooke's story that they overlooked this way in which his differed from theirs.

5.

            The fifth argument Livingston identifies accusing narrative of distortion concerns the potential for narratives to be “proleptic or “prophetic”: narrators provide a retrospective account of events, deceptively presented from an anticipatory perspective” (Livingston, 26). In Things Fall Apart, we see the British District Commissioner attempt to turn Okonkwo's death to this purpose (Achebe, 209). He contemplates how to insert the incident into an ethnography he is compiling as part of his plan to “turn the colonizing enterprise into a message and to cast agents of its violent spread as motiveless messengers,” (Adeeko, 39). Because Okonkwo dies by his own hand, the Commissioner can cherry-pick the events leading up to his death in such a way as to make suicide the inevitable result of rebellion. A classic example comes from Aristotle, who notes that “even coincidences are most striking when they have an air of design,” (Aristotle, 39). He is referring to the death of Mitys's murderer, who was crushed by a statue of Mitys that fell on him during a festival. The falling of the statue seems wholly random taken by itself, but seems fated when presented retrospectively.

6.

            The sixth argument Livingston identifies accusing narrative of distortion concerns the potential for narratives to be “empirically unsound by virtue of selectivity or closure,” (Livingston, 26). The example of Mitys's murderer gives us a clue as to why this is. The murder of Mitys and the death of his killer are not actually related in any way.  However, the two events combined make a good story, despite Aristotle's stated rule that an event in a plot “should be the necessary or probable result of the preceding action” (Aristotle, 41).  It appears that an exception to this rule exists for events that provide an emotional resolution (Velleman, 6).  Finding emotional resolution for a murder through a completely unrelated accident definitely qualifies as “empirically unsound.”  The quality of being empirically unsound through selectivity is probably why I tend to turn to novels and movies in my own problem-solving: a story is only worth telling if it is out of the ordinary (Bruner, 12). Therefore, when I am wracking my brain for examples of the situation before me, I am naturally going to find more examples in narratives – because every narrative I am exposed to features an unusual situation, and the flesh-and-blood people I know only have unusual things happen to them occasionally.

            The aforementioned example of the British District Commissioner's literary aspirations illustrates this contention as well: the closure provided by Okonkwo's hanging is what makes the incident so attractive – such an ending would appear to the outsider to constitute a ready-made cautionary tale against resistance (Achebe, 209). From the Commissioner's viewpoint, it is a perfect fable with an instructive moral, but from the perspective of one of Okonkwo's wives or children it is completely different. This is because Okonkwo's wife and children are outside of the neat circle of closure that limns the story for the commissioner.  This contradiction scales easily from the microcosm of Things Fall Apart all the way up to the macrocosm of all narratives everywhere. In fact, this is the issue which has split the study of narratology into structuralist and contextualist approaches - with structuralists tending to study individual narratives from within the context defined by the narrative, and contextualists asking whether narratology shouldn't “consider the acts in the real world that generate literary narratives [as being] more significant than the resultant products,” (Chatman, 310).  Our cross-textual studies in Colonial and Postcolonial narratives provide and excellent antidote to this, as our course has been structured in such a way as to “nest” each text inside an opposing text – meaning that whatever false closure a Colonial text sets up will be immediately exploded the following week. It is also important to note that, besides considering the context of the narrative's creation, a narrative's meaning is also affected by the context of its transmission and by the context of its reception.  Bruner reminds us that “narrative is a conventional form, transmitted culturally and constrained by each individual's level of mastery and by his conglomerate of prosthetic devices, colleagues, and mentors,” (4). On an unrelated note – Bruner also (amusingly) categorizes “excuses” as narratives.

            Besides the issue of the context within which a narrative is created, there is also the issue of realities that narratives create. Bruner speculates that evolution in narrative techniques - “the advent of 'inner adventure' in Tristram Shandy, the advent of Flaubert's perspectivism, or Joyce's epiphanizing of banalities” - have shaped the way we interpret events happening to us in our day-to-day lives (12).

7.

            The seventh argument Livingston identifies accusing narrative of distortion concerns the potential for narratives to be “empirically misleading by virtue of an overemphasis on agency, or on agents’ responsibility or freedom,” (Livingston, 26). An extreme example of this is the traditional use of Robinson Crusoe to justify Free Trade economic theory, which states that before Crusoe meets Friday, his consumption is constrained by his own production possibility curve, but after they meet they are able to specialize producing those goods in which they each have a comparative advantage (Samson ,143). This usage vastly overemphasizes agency, in that Crusoe had absolutely no choice in his isolation or in his partnership with Friday, making it outrageously misleading to imply that what was the only course of action for a fictional character could be the best course of action for economies. In fact, overemphasis on agency comes up in every armchair economist debate I allow myself to get sucked into: the “bootstrap myth” is ubiquitous among my relatives - even the ones on public assistance.

8.

            The first argument Livingston identifies that supports the power of narrative is “the potential for narratives to be sound because of a correspondence with patterns of lived experience (such as temporality) or by virtue of descriptions of particular cases that are instructive counterexamples to bad theories or analytic generalizations,” (Livingston, 26). Evidence indicates that narrative comprehension is one of the earliest faculties to develop in children, and that narrative is one of the most common ways humans organize their experiences (Bruner, 9). Bruner posits an alternative to narrative seduction in “narrative banality,” which operates in precisely this manner: taking a narrative as “so socially conventional, so well known, so in keeping with the canon, that we can assign it to some well-rehearsed and virtually automatic interpretive routine,” (9). We can reveal correspondences between narrative and lived experience quite easily, simply by comparing the human life cycle to Freytag's Pyramid. Such comparison instantly reveals correspondences between youth and “exposition” and “rising action,” between adulthood and “complication” and “reversal”,” and between old age an “falling action” (Wheeler). This means that we have a tendency to automatically identify with any narrator, just because their story reminds us of our own in that both stories have a beginning, middle, and end.  This automatic identification means that we can be more easily forced into seeing things the narrator's way, even when the narrator's perspective is in opposition to our own.  We can then experience the metaphorical equivalent of “walking a mile in another's shoes,” and might be prompted to discard old prejudices. Feminist critics posit this as Lucy's entire program, noting that “Lucy controls the dissemination of knowledge to the reader so that her point of view is always visible first and helps to shape the reader's perspective,” and that “this narrative privileging allows Lucy to sift through Western binary power discourses,” (Nichols, 189).

9.

            The second argument Livingston identifies supporting narrative is that narrative is “a basic mode of thought and way of ordering experience that is efficient, modular, memorable, and engaging” (Livingston 26).  As my classmate, Keaton Patterson, states in his midterm essay, Robinson Crusoe takes advantage of this to shape the culture of imperialism in which it was produced. Crusoe's development of a parent-child dynamic between himself and Friday models the relationship between England and her colonial possessions. It is interesting that “even after decades of solitude, Crusoe is excited at the prospects of acquiring a servant rather than a relationship with an equal,” (Keaton). England echoes this behavior in the manner in which they never seem to consider asking their colonial subjects to simply sell them their rubber or oil, but rather proceed to extract it for themselves and abscond with it as if there were no question of ownership. As my classmate Jessica Peterson points out, this posture is obvious even in Crusoe's naming of Friday, in that Crusoe feels supremely comfortable choosing a name from within his own only-hours-old acquaintance with him, instead of attempting to choose a name that has any relation to Friday as a person. The Crusoe narrative's inherent power is amplified immeasurably by virtue of the book's status as “the first modern English novel.” Its powers worked all the more effectively because readers had not yet learned of narrative's potential. 

10.

            The third argument Livingston identifies supporting narrative is that narrative is “antidogmatic by virtue of 'context sensitivity and negotiability'” (Livingston, 26). Lucy very aggressively exploits the antidogmatic valence of literature by using the Lucy's vehement self-identification as an “outsider” to openly critique “the cosmopolitan American Left of the 1960's,” (Nichols, 187). “Kincaid is a spy in the house of American liberalism […] the reader benefits from her critique by seeing things through a narrative that shifts the dominant perspective out of the limelight,” (Nichols, 205).  This is especially obvious in Mariah's desire to confide in Lucy that she “has Indian blood”(Kincaid, 39). Mariah's middle-class leftist outlook leads her to believe that “having Indian blood” (never mind that it's only a drop, at the most, and nothing in any way similar to Carib Indian blood) gives her a special insight into Lucy's experience, and makes them “the same.” She offers up this declaration like a gift to Lucy – her most precious possession - with no concept of how erasing this is to one who has lived as an Indian. The idea of erasing racial differences by focusing on commonalities with  the oppressed is a classic fallacy of well-meaning whites, who seem to feel that by “rejecting” their privilege they are leveling the playing field – when, in fact, one cannot “erase” racial differences without erasing the experiences of those who have suffered racial oppression.  Lucy is antidogmatic in that Kincaid paints a very thorough picture of Mariah's ideas of herself as a liberal, only to smash it to pieces with this utterance that virtually all of the character's white liberal cohorts would have championed. Then, to make absolutely sure we get the full impact, Kincaid has Lucy explain further: this is the reason she's “so good at catching fish and hunting birds and roasting corn,” spewing stereotypes right and left as “proof” that she is more like Lucy than not (Kincaid, 39). This antidogmatice quality also explains the appeal of the “It Gets Better” project, as it challenges homophobic rhetoric by forcing its audience to see the real details of GLBT lives.  Even the tragic suicides that inspired the project played a role in this  - there is absolutely nothing new about suicides caused by homophobic bullying. However, having so many happen so close together - in a suddenly socially-networked world – revealed an “old” narrative with new force.

11.

            The fourth argument Livingston identifies supporting narrative is that narrative is “crucial to psychology and related fields because the self or person has an essentially narrative form, or because the self-concept requires storytelling,” (Livingston, 26). I wonder if humans are prejudiced towards narratives in the same way as we are prejudiced towards faces -

The phenomenon of pareidolia suggests that our visual system actively seeks to find and recognize certain objects in the world. People across the world consistently respond to pictures and other objects, even random patterns, as if they depict human faces or animals. Thus, artists can get away with ‘suggesting’ these specially perceived objects in their depictions, often with just a few hints that suffice as cues (Melcher & Bacci, 352)

- and whether we are prejudiced towards information that takes a narrative form for the same reason.       This is why we have spokespeople and “Poster Children” for our causes.  A disease may be perceived as tragic, but when we see a television commercial with a victim telling her story, we become more inclined to open our wallets.

            In the same way we prejudice information received in narrative form over raw data such as lab results, we also tend to prejudice dramatic narratives over straightforward ones- especially when these narrative concern ourselves.  For example, when Lewis leaves Mariah, but she becomes convinced that she wanted him to leave. This is more of a case in prejudicing one narrative over another than of prejudicing narrative in general,  but it is significant that the narrative Mariah chose is the one that best supports her self-concept.  There was a narrative in which Lewis abandons her, and there was a narrative in which he is banished. The banishment narrative has nobility and romance, and seems a much richer story than that of the discarded wife. She recast Lewis's desires into a story that disguised them as her own desires, and came to believe that she wanted what she did not (Kincaid, 119).

12.

            The fifth argument Livingston identifies supporting narrative is that narrative is “potentially instructive because they represent general possibilities for human lives,” (Livingston, 26).  This is the purpose for every myth, fable, and parable in human history. This is why we love underdog stories. Most humans have a sense of their smallness in relation the cosmos, the planet, and even their immediate community. Any time we are exposed to a narrative in which an individual prevails against great odds, we feel our own potential expanded. For such a narrative to have appeal, it has to seem at least technically feasible. This means that if a story features and outcome that theoretically could happen, it becomes a possibility for for the reader.  To a person shipwrecked, the existence of such a novel as Robinson Crusoe may be the only thing that keeps them going from day to day, despite how different the facts of their story may be from Defoe's 

13.

            The sixth argument Livingston identifies supporting narrative is that narrative is “the embodiment or expression of an otherwise ineffable wisdom,” (Livingston, 26). This is another feature of cultural stories, such as the parables of Christ. Christ was bringing a very radical message to the people of Israel, and what He was proposing was so unheard-of that He knew better than to approach it head-on. The use of parables in His teaching was a more effective way to communicate concepts such as humility (in the parable of the Pharisee and the publican, for example). Jamaica Kincaid achieves this in an very different, but incredibly elegant, manner, simply by writing A Small Place in the second person (Kincaid, 257).  For the middle-class American or European reader, it is reflexive to resist the image of oneself as the “incredibly unattractive, fat, and pastry-like fleshed” colonial oppressor (Kincaid, 261). This image becomes ineffable, as the reader's refusal to imagine himself in that role makes his complicity incommunicable. In using the second person, Kincaid grabs the reader by his lapels and steamrolls over this reluctance. This is a slight perversion of Goethe's  instruction to “treat him as if he were what he ought to be,” in that, by treating him if he were what she believes him to be, he will believe that too.

Conclusion:

            Peter Brooks said “narrating is never innocent” (Brooks, 286). The experience of peeking under the skirts of narrative, for me, has produced neither a “for” or “against” opinion, but rather an understanding of the sublime -  as defined in the context of this seminar: both dreadful and hopeful; and in the Burkian sense of that which terrifies and astonishes (Quinton, 72). It has long been my personal observation that the human psyche prejudices information that is received in story form over information received in something like an encyclopedia entry, and I can see the potential for gross manipulation in the seven arguments that Livingston identified “against” narrative.  The power is astonishing, the potential is terrifying. Narrative is alchemical in that it can work within the mind to  transmute questionable bases into unalloyed “facts,” which will be held all the more tenaciously for having been planted there invisibly, under a cloak of entertainment.  These “facts” seem to be organic - knowledge that has come to us through our own experience, and any dry academic information that attempts to supplant them may never fully succeed.  The scariest part is that the “facts” we create within each other are almost invariably about each other. Our stories are overwhelmingly human stories, and the power of narrative does most good when it serves to humanize an out-group so that we grow to sympathize with them.  There terrifying part, however, is narrative's equal and opposite power to demonize, instead.

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