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I was struck by his comments at the end. He has a reasonably restrictive view of what a story is. It must have plot, character, suspense and require imagination of the listener. So the comments part way through the talk that stories play, in effect and not that he put it this way himself, the role of concepts in a Kantian account - a precondition for the world making any kind of sense - are all the more striking. (At the risk of flogging a dead horse, the dilemma for narrative approaches to social science is that either one offers a substantial but restrictive view of stories or narratives but thus limits the application of the approach to many social phenomena (which will not involve stories so understood) or one lets pretty much anything count as a story but in which case the approach threatens to blur with any other qualitative form of social science or understanding.) Since Frank thinks that the concept of story is restrictive (there are definite membership conditions) but also that experience must be - transcendentally, as it were - structured by or as just such a story to be so much as intelligible, then that is a brave claim.
The talk
“In research there is a key question of priority of what
to do and why one is doing it, its objectives. The former will seem needlessly
complicated unless latter is decided. What’s a story? The answer is dark and
deep. There is no easy relationship between humans and stories.
The talk will consider two popular culture quotations.
First, a verse from the 1960s pop song ‘Pack up your
sorrows’ by the folk duo: Richard and Mimi Farina which came to mind recently.
‘If somehow you could pack up your sorrows and give them
all to me,
You would lose them.
I know how to use them.
Give them all to me.’
Typically, subjects of narrative analysis have sorrows,
are sick. Some have become competent practiced story tellers. Others are
unaccustomed. We make a sort if promise that we know how to use them and that
they will lose sorrow. Interviews are a form of offing of oneself as a
sympathetic witness.
To do research is at some point to lose the thread. At
such points, one needs a simple statement to get back on track. Ask: who am I?
The song offers an answer to that. (Currently sceptical of the template of
academic journals to meet this idea.)
Three ways of lightening sorrows.
1: by just listening. Just doing the interview. Giving
attention. Hence having little by way of interview guide, though not listening without
judgement.
2: by amplifying stories. Academics have a public voice.
Hence can give credibility to the people whose voice may otherwise get post. Cf
Bernie Carter’s work on children or in an example to which we will return later,
homeless people.
3: connect people’s voices to each other. Researchers
hear many voices. All research is inherently comparative. Cf C Wright Mills:
task of sociology is to connect personal trouble to social issues.
None of these tasks requires much analysis. Pretty basic
stuff. Most mileage when really basic. Stories dark and deep, but also learnt
by children.
Second popular quotation, from Terry Pratchett:
People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact,
it’s the other way around.
Stories exist independently of their players. If you know
that, the knowledge is power.
Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped spacetime, have
been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And
they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and
they have grown fat on the retelling . . . stories, twisting and blowing
through the darkness.
And their very existence overlays a faint but insistent
pattern on the chaos that is history. Stories etch grooves deep enough for
people to follow in the same way that water follows certain paths down a
mountainside. And every time fresh actors tread the path of the story, the
groove runs deeper.
This is called the theory of narrative causality and it
means that a story, once started, takes a shape. It picks up all the vibrations
of all the other workings of that story that have ever been.
This is why history keeps on repeating all the time.
So a thousand heroes have stolen fire from the gods. A
thousand wolves have eaten grandmother, a thousand princesses have been kissed.
A million unknowing actors have moved, unknowing, through the pathways of
story.
It is now impossible for the third and youngest son of
any king, if he should embark on a quest which has so far claimed his older
brothers, not to succeed.
Stories don’t care who takes part in them. All that
matters is that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer
to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in
the service only of the story itself.
It takes a special kind of person to fight back, and
become the bicarbonate of history.
No analysis of stories can teach you what you, as a
person, are not prepared to learn. Socionarratology aims to level the playing
field between the idea that people shape stories and the reverse idea that
stories shape people. Both are true.
Experience depends on us already knowing stories. The
normal idea is that the experience comes first and then its telling in a story. That leaves
out the idea that stories precede experience. But then they make a second
entrance. (The real trickster in a story is the story itself.) Stories pull
patterns out of the chaos of life: the things that happen, the real, the
blooming buzzing confusion. The primary work of stories (the work of stories
not persons) is to turn the chaos into something symbolically representable
which can then be evaluated. Who acted well, and badly, who made choices, who
had bad luck?
We don’t, strictly speaking, have experiences but rather
discover them out of the confusion in which we are immersed. So narrative
analysis should ask what stories people already knew which made it possible for
them to have that experience. The story of most interest isn’t the subsequent
telling but the story that makes the experience possible. One could not, eg.,
see anything sensible whilst driving through the countryside unless one already
had a story of so driving.
Pratchett: stories exist independently of their players.
The story shapes the person. The researcher also a player in a story. Knowledge
is power. So how are we to make that power work for us and empower the people
we study? It would be going too far to say that one can take control of one’s
story. That is a popular phrase but not possible. Better to think of being able
to say ‘no’ to particular stories. Hence socionarratology is closely tied to
narrative therapy. It can help people say no by opening up reflective
understanding of the stories in which people are players. So a degree of choice
by understanding what different stories - eg. a patient story - requires of
one.
Pratchett: stories as “great flapping ribbons of space
time”
Cf Bakhtin in the 1920s on chronotope. Time and space.
Cf the clinic. Combines time and space.
Stories don’t just describe cronotopes but are also
cronotopes. Children learn stories to
Cf Frank Kermode’s ‘Sense of an ending’. Stories humanise
time.
One should always distinguish the work people do from the
work stories do. The total is ‘holding their own’. For humans, it is to sustain
dignity in the face of adversity. The first step of which is creating order out
of chaos, to humanise time and space. Chaos is having no narrative.
Narrative analysis studies how people are holding their
own, against forms of adversity. Three aspects to the work:
1: stories describe people holding their own. Medium.
2: telling the story is a means of holding one’s own.
Means.
3: stories get in the way of people holding their own.
Either their own or other people’s.
But if stories shape people, resiliency depends on
internalising helpful stories. People are the agents (NB not agency in the
active sense) / players of stories and the stories hold their own.
Empirical example: effects of multigenerational
unemployment. 6 months of unemployment significantly drop chances of getting a
job. So employment stories grow thin because they are not told and so people
don’t configure their worlds that way. Ie don’t have the narrative capacity to
become players in employment stories. Stories as deeply etched grooves. People
tend to slip into stories, such as patient stories, because they are deeply
etched. It is rare to resist.
Narrative analysis seeks to determine which story are
empowering and which are dangerous. Cf Pratchett’s comment about the king’s
third son. People are experts on their own lives, they know their own stories.
But they often don’t know which are good and bad for them. They know what they
are doing, but not what their doing does, to echo Foucault.
Since stories shape people, the stories don’t care who
takes part. That’s part of the Pratchett quote and he also talks of parasites
but ‘symbiosis’ seems a better word. Stories still needs people to tell them
and hence needs them as hosts. Pratchett shares a weak theory of human agency
with most social science. So when someone tells you a story, you should ask how
the story is using the person who tells it to get fatter. This is a problem for
the researcher though not the storyteller. Weak agency isn’t entirely bad news
because stories help us in three ways:
1: they keep us company
2: show us useful ways to act
3: give us courage to act.
Socionarratology is more pedagogical than analytic since
the latter require an object whereas the former a dialogue. As researchers we
need to take seriously what we study. Cf Actor Network Theory. It takes
physical stuff in labs very seriously. Scientists may use equipment but so also
the equipment uses the scientist. The aim is to take stories as seriously as
ANT theorists take equipment. Further, just as ANT authors like Latour don’t
give clear guidance on how to do ANT, so socionarratology needn’t offer
prescriptive guidance.
A good example of socionarratology is the book ‘My dog
always eats first’ by Leslie Irvine.
Irvine visited homeless people with companion animals –
dogs – going with vets, who were trusted by the owners and hence could gain access.
The book describes the kinds of story people tell as types. Two, among others,
are: protection narratives and redemption narratives.
In former, the dog scares off someone who threatens the
storyteller. In redemption stories, the dog can play one of two roles. The
storyteller starts off with self destructive behaviour. In some, the animal is
taken away leading to its loss or death. And that gives the teller the resolve
to give up the behaviour. A kind if sacrifice. Or, a variant, the animal stays
but provides motivation for self care and hence care for the animal. Although
there could be any number of possible eventualities for homeless people to
experience, still only a finite number of deeply etched grooves are followed.
The story grows fat. In some, speaking parts are even ascribed to the dogs. The
dog tells the owner not to smoke and drink, for example.
Irvine found that there were various kinds or degrees of
homeless living. She sketches some ideal types of homelessness. And she found
that for these different types, there were distinct kinds of stories told. So ‘travellers’
– one kind of homelessness – did not tell protection stories. We may not think
of homelessness as a coherent plot. But Irvine shows that there is a collection
of narratives that makes this possible.
This is not always true. In Nazi concentration camps, the
conditions were so ‘assaultive’ that no narratives could survive or be
formulated. Homelessness may be bad but it isn’t Auschwitz. It admits narrative
formulation.
Note that Irvine does not try to synthesis a
metanarrative. She does not flatten out differences or formulating a common
synthetic story. We should attend to the different stories. But there aren’t
usually very many stories.
A symbiosis between the homeless person, the animal and the
story that allows them to be the kind of person they are. Companion story as
well as animal.
Irvine also found her subjects to be moral actors with
strong operational conceptions of the good, towards which they are orientated.
Hence ‘my dog always eats first’ is a statement of moral competence, an
Aristotelian telos. Irvine shows how the stories, about the good, are also the
means of living more organised lives than might otherwise be available.
By the end of the book, the apparent difference of AF and
the homeless is lessened.”
(In questions Frank said that he was not really offering
on ontology of stories as mind-independent entities. (I suggested that like ANT
he might be saying something false in order to say something else true.) Rather,
his way of speaking, echoing Pratchett, was a pragmatic way of carrying out
sociological research. So my postscript here seems right after all.Some closing remarks ran thus:)
“Not everything is a narrative. Not all narratives are
stories though all stories are narratives. Stories have characters, plots, suspense.
They can go one way or another way. They invoke imagination. If there is no
imagination needed to understand the speaker, it isn't much of a story. So we
have first to ask, do we have narrative? Sometimes people just don't tell
stories.
If you begin ethnographic contact with a subject ask: whose
agenda predominates? Signing a consent form, one declares an agenda. So there
are difficulties in asking an omnibus question such as 'tell us tell me how
your life is going'. One can warn the subject that the agenda is thus and so
but will come to an end and then one will invite a further account.
There is a huge difference between information and
stories. People may be more or less reluctant story tellers. If they are reluctant,
one – as a researcher – may need to coach then on the basis of a prior
knowledge of what makes a good story. Lay guides to story telling can be good social
science interview guides too.
Frank is, these days, interested mainly in the narrative
itself. Narrative analysts need to share this interest for a while. One needs
to read and think about lots of stories from a lot of sources so that one can
later ask: who tells this kind of story. One cannot tell where the deeply
etched grooves are from a limited selection.
Finally, what of the question ‘where am I in this?’ The passive
mood is very poor social science. The researcher is there taking up space and
so should feel free to use the word ‘I’. Frank wrote a memoir and this gets
telling his own story out of the way. Hence his research isn't about him. Not a
fan of autoethnography”
