In a series of inspiring posts, Cécile Alduy has been putting forward an argument against narrativity. Like Cécile, I believe that narrative is important, valuable, and often indispensable. (She’s not claiming, with Hayden White, that historical narratives are inevitably distorting; or again, with Jean-François Lyotard, that grand narratives are necessarily totalizing; or even, with Galen Strawson, that personal narratives are, for many individuals, simply beside the point.)
Like Cécile, however, I feel that narrative has overstepped its bounds in recent years, infiltrating domains in which it has no business. You’ll find all kinds of people telling you that everything is narrative; when you give an example of something that isn’t, they’ll just turn around and tell you that there’s a hidden narrative behind it. (Ah, ideology: if X isn’t there, just make up a hidden X!)
Of course, for any significant moment there is always a background sequence of events. But conversely, for every sequence of events there is some result, some new state of affairs which is often why we care about them in the first place. We human beings live in the temporal and the atemporal at once, sliding easily from a focus on states to a focus on changes and back again. We can even undergo exercises designed to help us place the emphasis on one side or the other: meditation for the static, Robert McKee’s “story seminar” for change.
Our focus is, then, a choice. So here’s the question: why choose to focus, at least some of the time, on the static? Why is our obsession with narrative a bad thing?
Here’s one reason: because it rules out contentment with what there is.
Look at the way we treat our heroes: it’s never enough for us (any more) to enjoy them; we have to keep constructing narratives for them, which inevitably involves some kind of a fall (they are out of form, their marriage is failing, their box office take is dropping, they are mismanaging their money...).
Look at the way we treat our commodities: out with the old, in with the new. (Schopenhauer was right: we human beings are addicted to desire. We’ll buy the iPad even if it doesn’t really do anything.)
You want to save the environment? Start by turning down the volume on narrativity. Here’s Wendell Berry on why, counterintuitively, the arts can do more to rescue the planet than can the sciences:
we may have to remove some of the emphasis we have lately placed on science and technology and have a new look at the arts. For an art does not propose to enlarge itself by limitless extension.
He continues:
In science one experiment, whether it succeeds or fails, is logically followed by another in a theoretically infinite progression... In the arts, by contrast, no limitless sequence of works is ever implied or looked for. No work of art is necessarily followed by a second work that is necessarily better.
Wendell Berry is right, and importantly right. I may dump my cellphone in the landfill when the new model comes out, but I’m not about to throw away my copy of the Odyssey when I discover the Aeneid. For all its emphasis (in modernity) on formal innovation, the shape of the artworld encourages this spirit of conservation, this slower, more contemplative attitude. (No planned obsolescence here; quite the contrary!) And individual works of art encourage it too, with their emphasis on the local moment wrested from the stream of time.
Still, like everything else in the artworld, this works only if we allow it to. We always have the choice to focus on the chronological, to perceive each scene only in relation to what it causes and is caused by, each work only in relation to its “intertexts,” each genre as interesting only in relation to the history that surrounds it. (And of course to ignore poetry, that synchronic medium par excellence, like the plague.) The non-narrative is a saving oasis, but one which is ever threatened by the encroaching desert.
I confess I don't even understand the way the term "narrative" is being used here. It seems to be standing in for a lot of things, but must of these things I wouldn't identity with narrative per se. Maybe if you object to the overuse of this term in contexts where it doesn't belong, you should not yourself use the term in a way that is also stretched so far beyond normal usage.
Unlike Jonathan, I accept what Josh means by narrative: not so much a genre or a form of discourse as a way of construing the world through sequence and causation. To me, the second paragraph is most telling: narrative not only is a way of categorizing literature or discourse, but has become naturalized as identical with "explanation" or "causation"—or something of that sort. There are explanations that can be advanced through non-narrative means, but have we lost the capacity or the attention for those? I want to think about this for a day or two and add a new comment then. Thanks for getting me to consider this, Josh.
I just don't believe there was a time when we just contentedly accepted what was, and then later we became obsessed with narratives and lost our ability to accept stasis. That's seems a very unconvincing argument--or narrative if you will. That made me question what is even meant by narrative, since there seems to be a claim for a non-narrative past of some sort. I am very unconvinced that the way we treat heroes has anything at all to do with an obsession with narrativity, for example. It's like saying that in the past people didn't talk about things like this--when clearly they did.
It occurs to me that the distinction that Josh is making much resembles Walter Benjamin's distinction between "information" and "story" in "The Storyteller," especially regarding information's propensity toward obsolescence. Would these terms perhaps lend some precision to the discussion?
The thing about narrative is that it is well-suited to language's capacity for linear exposition. The more things you treat as narrative, the more things you can grasp though one of language's simplest capacities. OTOH, if you want to understand the dynamic relationships between the plants and the Sun, language is not so useful there. There you need some equations involving the simultaneous relationships between the masses and forces involved. At the moment I'm attempting to construct a "narrative" about three early manga by Osamu Tezuka. This involves relationships among themes and tropes in each manga and how they are reconfigured from one to the next, from Lost World, to Metropolis, to Nextworld. Characterizing those relationships is difficult, which, in turn, makes it difficult to characterize the successive reconfigurations. Whatever expository success I achieve is sure to "float" on conceptual failure.
Knowing there's been a lot of interest in medical narrative, I googled "medical narrative" and yikes! almost 7M hits. The top hit was for Columbia's MA program in medical narrative (a sponsored link). I have no idea what this stuff is about.
... I believe that narrative medicine focuses on treating the patient not as the site of a single instance of disease, or even the culmination of a history of health, but as a "complete" person with overlapping histories and contexts that determine how he or she should be treated. In this sense, narrative might be somewhat of a misnomer, since a holistic understanding of a patient probably has to depart from a linear narrative, even though it's perhaps the case that patients rely on their storytelling to communicate their overlapping histories.
Thanks very much to Roland, Natalia, Bill, and Meredith for these very interesting thoughts. I welcome the Benjamin suggestion (all the more so as that’s one of my favourite pieces by him!). Mind you, I’m trying to point to a distinction that is quite broad, broader perhaps than the one I take Benjamin to be referring to; my position is closer, then, to Roland’s excellent characterization.
For me the choice is simply between a synchronic and a diachronic approach to any given object of attention. The synchronic approach might indeed involve what Benjamin is calling “information,” but it might just as well involve emotions, or sensations, or virtues (standing dispositions), or definitions, or epiphanic revelations, or interactions (Bill’s point), or unchanging properties, or all kinds of other features that stand outside of sequentiality.
For most if not all objects of attention, both approaches—the synchronic and the diachronic—are possible; in many cases, the diachronic approach is positively essential (think for example of planning, which involves what one might call a narrative of the future); in some cases, however, the diachronic approach is in the way of the appreciative attention we might accord the synchronic qualities of the object.
My sense is that the normative ratio between synchronic and diachronic thinking is culturally variable, and that we're living in a time and place in which the diachronic has become, so to speak, the go-to mode. If that's true, it may be worth thinking about the various ramifications.
Oh, dear. I was imagining that Benjaminian information more or less mapped onto what you were calling "narrative," with its local, time-bound (and obsolescing), psychologized qualities. I'm afraid I understand you much less than I thought I did.
You know, Josh, Mary Douglas spent the last decade or more of her life thinking about ring structures,* narratives in which the last episode answers or mirrors the first, the penultimate answers or mirrors the second, and so forth. Like this: A, B, C, . . . X . . . C', B', A'. So, you read them from beginning to end, and you may not even notice the mirroring going on (most likely you don't). Part of her argument is that at least some of these ring forms have given the appearance of being without form (e.g. Book of Leviticus in the OT). But once you're aware of their ring form then seem coherent. To some extent rings work against the linearity of narrativity.
At the moment I'm working on two of the segments from Disney's Fantasia, The Nutcracker Suite and the Sorcerer's Apprentice. Both are rings, but the Nutcracker doesn't even present the appearance of linear narrative while Sorcerer's is a simple narrative. But both of these rings seem "weighted" toward the central episode. In Nutcracker it's wide-eyed fish dancing sensuously under the water and flirting with the audience with their eyes. In Sorcerer's the middle segment is Mickey in a dream where he dreams of commanding the forces of nature as Stokowski commands the forces of the orchestra (and he uses the same gestures as Stoki).
And then there's "Kubla Khan," which has temporal markers but really is a-temporal, stating the relationships that co-exist among different realms of being. It's got ring structures as well -- the the middle diagram here:
http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/into_levi_strauss_and_out_throu...
And then there's Nietzsche's eternal return.
*Mary Douglas, Thinking in Circles, Yale University Press, 2007.
http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Circles-Essay-Composition-Lectures/dp/030...
Great point, Bill. Reminds me of your lovely point in a comment on The Valve about the circular rhyme scheme of Dylan Thomas’s “Author’s Prologue.”
I’m deeply fascinated by this kind of play, which we might call (following the Morson vs. Frank debate) the introduction of poetic into narrative modes. There are of course other, well-documented, ways of doing this, such as the arabesque of digression in Tristram Shandy, the weight given to motifs in Speak Memory, the temporal spirals of Robbe-Grillet, the emphasis on moments privilégiés in Woolf and others...
In terms of the current debate, my question is threefold: first, to what extent such play reflects a “shifting dominant” in the overall attitude toward phenomena; second, to what extent such play actually nudges us out of diachrony-hunting mechanisms (consider how hard we work to restore the “fabula” out of the “suzhet” in e.g. Memento!); third, to what extent this kind of literary play is designed to be on offer as a model for our own uptake of the world.
In many cases (I think Shandy would be one, and plenty of postwar fiction would fall here too) the poetic play finds its origin and end within the closed circle of literary history (not, as they say, that there’s anything wrong with that). In others, however (and I think Nabokov would fit here), there’s something else at stake: namely, the perception of a life—even in its diachrony—from a synchronic standpoint.
Is the circle actually available to us? That is, can it be part of “human time” (Ricoeur, Poulet)? There’s that old saw, of course, about rural life being (/having been) cyclical and urban life being linear. But I don’t quite buy it. Human time is at most spiral in shape. MacMann slowly spiralling in ever tighter circles toward home. The nostos, from Odyssey to Ignorance. The repetition with a difference.
Which brings me back to Dylan Thomas, and Kubla Khan, and all those other great examples you mention—works which clearly want both the narrativity and the nonnarrative forms of unity. I’m now starting to wonder whether the spiral isn’t in fact the dialectical resolution, the way to take up both attitudes simultaneously in relation to the same object. But I need to think a whole lot more.
Is the circle actually available to us?
A very interesting question, Josh. I've just just posted my current Fantasia work at The Valve and I've got a few methodological notes at the end where I point out that I didn't notice the ring forms in The Nutcracker or Sorcerer's Apprentice episodes even after having watched them a dozen or more time. It wasn't until I actually looked for them that I found them, and that required some careful observation and analysis. It wasn't difficult or "deep" in any sense. But it was real work and necessary.
Fantasia in the large presents the issue of cyclicity in a simple way. It consists of eight segments, each of which is introduced with a little chat by Deems Taylor. Think of the "space" of that chat as home base. Then the overall film takes the form of journeys from, and returns to that home base, except at the end, where there is no return.
Now, in the manner of mathematicians. Let's substitute night-time sleep for those little chats by Deems Taylor and the days activities for each episode in the film. Is that how we live our lives, as journeys from, and returns to sleep (and the dream world within it)? Or, think of a tight-knit community and substitute weekly religious observance for the Taylor chats and the rest of the week for the individual Fantasia episodes. Now we have the life of the community as a series of excursions from and returns to the collective sacred space of religious observance. During the excursions individual community members go about their business in whatever fashion. But on the days of observance, everyone is there in the same place and doing the same thing.
I spent a lot of time thinking in these terms while working on my book on music (Beethoven's Anvil). There I was thinking about music at the neural level -- not in terms of music areas in the brain, a real question, but not to the current point. I was thinking about music as an activity that orders brain states. If you think of the brain as going through a certain succession of states during, say, "So What?" (the Miles Davis tune), then each time you play, or listen to, "So What?", your brain returns to that same trajectory of states. And the return is real. At that level the life of the mind would seem to be, if not circular, at least cyclic. Sure, you can map the cyclicity onto a line, but the succession of neural states is one of real return.
For an interesting experience, watch Last Year in Marienbad while reading Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. Seriously, though, the Calvino text addresses a lot of these issues in a dizzying, disconcerting manner. Why, says the "Japanese" novelist in one of the tales, can a leaf never simply be a leaf? Another great episode--picking up a phone call maybe not meant for you, but it pulls you into a storyline, a plot, and you are the protagonist and the victim at once. A good read, that "novel."
But why the separation between narrative and non-narrative? No co-existence? I'm thinking this may also be a"western" thing, and modern too?
Language Log has a post that intersects with this issue. It starts with a passage from a piece in The Chronicle Review written by one of your Stanford colleagues, Elif Batuman. She's explaining why she left linguistics for literature and says: "I had expected linguistics (the general study of language) to resemble a story, and Russian (the study of a particular language) to resemble a set of rules, but the reality was just the opposite."
The Language Log post has collected a nice pile of comments. I've not read through them all. But one Russell observes:
I'm interested in this claim that poetry is the ultimately synchronic medium. As an art historian and a Sinologist, I haven't encountered it before. Can someone please point me toward the source for this idea (which seems to be a commonplace of literary studies, given the way it has been invoked here)? It seems deeply counterintuitive from the point of view of cross-cultural definitions of poetry.
I guess it's a widely held view, but to give you one example, I just came across a mention of it while rereading Peter Brooks's Reading for the Plot. (See p. 20 there.) Of course, in such contexts "poetry" means only "lyric poetry," not epic, etc.; you're quite right that there are all kinds of poetic forms which involve narrative.
My point in the post -- and this is also a reply to David Palumbo-Liu's excellent question -- was simply that we live in a time and place in which the appreciation for non-narrative phenomena is on the decline. (In answer to David, I couldn't agree more that this is time- and place-specific! Excellent point.) My hunch is that this general cultural trend affects, among other things, the literature we choose to produce and consume. Not all or nothing -- as Jakobson rightly noted, it never is! -- but a noticeable shift of balance, nonetheless. Now one of the ways in which, if my hunch is right, this effect shows up is the relatively recent decline of lyric poetry. It can't be because we have ceased to believe in selves and inner lives (just look at how well memoirs are doing!). Rather, it's because we are more interested in the diachronic dimension of said selves and lives.
There have of course been numerous works that have "refused" narrative from within traditionally narrative domains. (Tristram Shandy, Rayuela, the Nouveau roman, etc.; related trends in cinema.) In fact, I consider some of these to be important counter-forces to the dominance of narrativity. (One recent example: Kaufman's Adaptation.) That said, it's important to note that the majority of consumers of culture are not consuming such works. And it's also important to note that the rationale behind these works varies from case to case. Not all of them are seeking, as Kaufman is, to loosen the grip of narrativity for the sake of an openness to the unchanging.
I'm glad to have Kate's voice here, as she brings me back to my first area of study, classical Chinese (I did a book on the poet and calligrapher Huang Tingjian a million years ago). I've always found Jakobson highly useful and problematic at the same time. Josh is right--matter of degree or emphasis is the best way to look at things. So whether poetry is synchronic--I don't know. Narratives can certainly be poetic (see for example, Anton Shammas, Arabesques--fantastic. Literary masterpiece, emotionally rich, politically volatile, incredibly poetic and "synchronic").
But still, why are we so engaged (linked into, welded to) this unfolding, prosaic axis of accretion and acquisition (experience, becoming, utility, what have you)? This is a large part of the reason I got into the Rational Choice issue (shameless plug to get people to check out my Arcade e-journal, Occasion, right side of your screen, for excellent articles not unrelated at all to this idea of narrative, by people like Jon Elster, Regenia Gagnier, Gayatri Spivak).
I was going to say "special effects in movies" as a possible counterexample but squelched that immediately since it is all subordinated to action.
One wonderful "real" life example--attending the poetry event Joan and Marilia did a few months ago: watching wonderful short film with graphic visual images overlaid by sound of Spanish language poetry. In this sole case the poverty of my knowledge of Spanish helped me--I just listened to the beautiful sound shapes. Could not make it a narrative if my life depended on it.
Maybe we have to look at other things that might instantiate similar effects.
It occurs to me that perhaps your question is not quite the one I earlier took it to be. I now think you may be asking why poetry rather than, say, painting. If that's the case, then I completely agree! The lyric should be understood (I feel) as the synchronic mode par excellence within literary production, but not of course within all cultural production.
In my post I was giving, as an example, a contrast between two forms of literary production: the story and the lyric poem. But of course the same kind of opposition could be drawn within other modes. One might think for example of non-kinetic vs. kinetic art. (Or indeed of portrait vs. history painting, depending on how one reads the latter.) But I see that you have started a new thread, so I'll stop here.
I just want to offer another answer to Kate's question about poetry as a synchronic medium (enlarging on Josh's and David's excellent points). To my knowledge, one of the central statements of this view comes out of Northrop Frye's genre criticism. Frye's "Approaching the Lyric" at the head of Pat Parker's still-useful Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism (1985) asserts this genre distinction between epic and lyric:
Epic: the poetry of “pure continuity” associated with the Homeric poems, a poetry that does not think in terms of versification, line, or page, and which therefore offers a verbal mimesis of unfettered temporal continuity consistent with the life-narrative of a human being.
Lyric, by contrast, for Frye, sings of disruptions and discontinuities. Either this takes shape as the ritual occasion that interrupts the life narrative (weddings, funerals, drinking and love-making). Otherwise, the disruption may be the obstacle or blocking point that leads the poet towards interior reflection: objects or problems solicitous of thought such as a lapidary inscription, a Stele in the Chinese countryside, or a cruel mistress. (In that sense, the actual stele in the chinese countryside, or other objects of art historical analysis, would surely do the same trick). As for this unrequited beloved, Frye has a biological definition that might give the new evolutionists some pause, wrapping lyric into a function that animal behaviorists like Tinbergen called a "displacement activity"--an activity NOT obviously serving any evolutionary purposes "as when the chimpanzee crossed in love starts digging holes in the ground instead.”
I think such biological determinism is meant as a provocation (getting "Beyond New Criticism" was a struggle, after all), and not as a way of accounting for three hundred years of largely epideictic conventions in the lyric from Beatrice to the Dark Lady. But it does gesture toward lyric as a long history of displaced verbal activities, not only vis-à-vis the frustrated love object, but equally, with respect to the geography of the new world (the metaphysical poets), the loss of the old (as the romantics decry), the alienating power of technological modernity (confronting Baudelaire and the symbolists), the new rhythms of urban life (the avant-gardes) and so on and so forth. Lyric can be read as a series of synchronic frustrations to both historical teleologies and individual life narratives.
OK, I think this is clearer now. Thanks to all who responded to my question (and sorry not to get to the discussion until now - I blame the three-hour time difference between Hawai'i and the West Coast). It seems that in saying (lyric) poetry is supremely synchronic, you are making claims about its expressive potential (basically, its content) rather than suggesting that works of (lyric) poetry are not themselves situated in time and space. The claim appears to be that lyric poetry can express the non-narrative supremely well. That makes more sense to me, though I haven't got a strong sense of agreement or disagreement, since I'm not a poetry scholar (and as far as I can tell, the lyric/epic distinction isn't a perfect fit for the Chinese poetry that I have studied).
Sorry, Joshua, my question was not about why poetry and not painting (or why a literary form and not a visual one). Rather, I was confused by what appeared to be the claim that poetry, among all literary forms, was supremely well suited to be appreciated in the absence of an understanding of the time and place that produced it. I've addressed some of these ideas in my first full blog post, and invite comments over there.
Harris--thanks very much for this. I will reread the Frye. I was with you up until the last line's "synchronic frustrations." I get the frustration (maybe also perhaps "interruption" or "disquieting" or any number of other expressions?), but how and why synchronic?
Great post, Josh. I'm especially curious about the same question Kate asks -- namely, how lyric poetry is synchronic. On the one point, yes, of course, as you and Harris so clearly suggest, lyric poetry wanders from narrative, sending the reader through "disruptions" that (as any of us who have ever taught poetry know) seem besides the point for many readers. But, this is also ignoring the power such poetry has to argue (dare I say it, to narrate a claim). Roland's distinction between narrative as linked to sequence and causation and narrative as something not, perhaps, necessarily tied to such thinking seems important here. Circles, spirals and other nested narrative techniques can still be narrative, even if they don't plod through steps to get from one point to another (narrative might hinge on change and time, but it doesn't need progressivity -- I think one of the reasons we tend to think it does has to do with the disciplinary dominance of history in the humanities, but that might be another argument...). Unrelatedly (or perhaps only tenuously related): can the questions you raise be applied to that lovely old generic chestnut, the realist novel: is it time to turn our attention to the non-narrative parts of realist novelistic discourse? Your citations of Sterne and the post-war novel are interesting to me -- they often do get lumped together (and held up as exemplary of non-reductive novelistic modes, as though in order to get at the real innovation of the novel we have to skip the bulk of the 18th and all of the 19th centuries (though we like to bracket Flaubert in all of that)), but I'm thinking of ways that even the most canonical of the "progressive" (realist? narrative?) novelists embed in their texts anti-narrative moments -- think of George Eliot describing a gambling Gwendolyn...
I agree with much of this, and am particularly sympathetic to (excited by!) the point about fiction. (In fact I've been working lately on precisely this aspect of the realist novel: the insertion of the pregnant moment. Would love to talk more!)
Just for the sake of clarification, let me say where I stand on the other questions.
1. For me it's vital to distinguish between (a) making claims and (b) narrating. Even if poems can be said to argue (for my money they tend to be better if they don't, but that aside!), arguing has to be kept separate from narrating. One can make plenty of arguments without recourse to narrative -- for example, "since eating beef drives the beef industry, and since more cattle = more C02, we should eat less beef." (You can always make a narrative out of arguments, of course, but arguments are not themselves narratives.)
2. If lyric poetry is (essentially) non-narrative, this is not, in my view, because it sends reader through detours and disruptions. (That implies that there's a central path that is itself narrative, and that's what I'd deny.) You could have a very nice lyric poem that's highly linear. Rather, what makes lyric poetry (essentially) non-narrative is that it zeroes in on phenomena, taking them (primarily) in their momentary form rather than (primarily) attending to their history. That's the difference I'm after. To put it another way, borrowing your lovely example: lyric is full of gambling Gwendolyns!
new "narrative" toy? You type in sets of search terms and Google returns a YouTube flick (which you then can post to your YouTube account):
http://www.youtube.com/searchstories
From my music-centric POV, the most interesting thing about it is the fact that you've got to choose music for the sound track. I suppose you could make, say, three "movies" from the same queries, but using different sound tracks.
Mind Hacks has a brief post on Galen Strawson's 2004 article, Against Narrativity, quoting Strawson:
H/t Tyler Cowan.
This is a really interesting paper, and it's become the canonical anti-narrativity piece. Unfortunately it has a lot of flaws. In the normative part of the paper, Strawson singles out four desiderata--happiness, friendship, morality, self-knowledge--which he says are unaffected by (or improved by) a resistance to all narrativity. He seems on relatively solid ground with the first two, but the arguments for the other two are really rather flimsy. (In particular, he doesn't seem to reckon with the benefit conferred by future-oriented narratives.)
My own view is that we're going to need some kind of combination of narrative and non-narrative approaches. This is close, I think, to Daniel Kahneman's idea that there's an Experiencing Self and a Remembering Self, and that we do best by doing justice to both.
Of course, in an age where (if I'm right?) narrativity is dominant, we may have to emphasize the non-narrative more strongly in order to achieve a balance.
What's your sense, Bill?
Let me make an oblique observation, Josh. Literary critics interested in evolutionary psychology tend to focus on narratives and drama, rather than lyric poetry. Why? Because of what evolutionary psychology is, an account of motivation, desire and action. But not of feeling or perception or even of language, not in any robust and interesting sense. So it's suited to characters-in-action designs of narrative, but not the mind-in-motion feeling of lyric. I suspect that's a case of critics gravitating to texts that fit their methodological preferences; e.g. Joseph Carroll wrote a book on Wallace Stevens, but I don't think he's looked much at poetry, if at all, since he plunged into evolutionary psych.
Is there something in the larger methodological scene that favors narrative? Has language itself been abandoned as a focus of critical attention in any but the most superficial and formulaic way?
Here's a post where I argue that Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues crosses narrative with ceremony and cosmology.