Every narrative is about something else, something more, something within and beyond the maker’s telling (a ‘makar’ was poet or bard in fifteenth and sixteenth century Scotland. They were seen as crafters of language. I prefer this term, whether referring to literary, visual or other kinds of culture, because it seems to me to include the physical and the imaginative act of making). Call the latter ‘unconscious’. Something(s) is represented, each of which contains its own sub-narratives. My list consists of four different ‘things’, each of which contains it’s own sub-narratives…but my list is not exhaustive…and each sub-narrative generates sub-narratives of its own.
We can carry on dismantling (I like the physicality of this word) what we mistakenly call a “single narrative” endlessly because, of course, each dismantling (which I mean in a multiple x multiple sense: dismantlings, dismant-les) is a re-mantling; in the act, I construct another narrative (multiplicities of narratives) that can themselves be dismantled by re-mantling…and each re-mantling reveals (not ‘tells’; a ‘tell’ is something conscious and calculated) something hidden about me, and the environment (the society, the country) that produced me.How could we not be produced (I’m using this term deliberately) by society: language; clothing; patterns of thought; clothing; happiness. An ‘evolution’ of sorts: we become the product of our different-narrative days, each one unique in itself, a process that we can extend into minutes or seconds.
‘We’ only think that ‘we’ are the same. What is the same about ‘we’ today and ‘we’ yesterday? A physical resemblance, but one that is older, more damaged, more dismantled than yesterday. A ‘we’ that I begin to re-mantle on waking, using the assumptions that ‘we’ have been trained to use.
We become a series (after Quine, “time slices”) of impositions forced upon ourselves, our surroundings and other “we’s”. We are taught to produce ourselves in the singular: the singular is easier to manage, easier to control, for all concerned.
The problem is that a narrative is never singular, always a multiplicity. My narrative is a product of my physical and intellectual environments. To use, an admittedly awful analogy, we could think of each of our days as like walking through a field of long grass. As we walk through it, we leave a trodden path, a path we can look back to see, but we can we identify every blade? What about those we only brushed past, or those that remain ‘untouched’, but caught in a ripple effect? (Ok, grass is different to water, but you get the idea.)
A narrative is, from the moment of it’s naming (does this need to consciously take place?) a deluge of readers, hearers, tellers, of bystanders, of casual acquaintances, of each theoretical perspective applied to dismantle “the narrative”, and all of these carry their own multiplicity of narratives. Why choose this one over that? Another set of narratives, but narratives are never ‘sets’, they ebb, flow, ripple, splash and break on the rocks – maybe those nineteenth century writers were right (George Elliot, Matthew Arnold, Charles Dickens), water and streams, becoming rivers, becoming the sea is a far better metaphor. We see the what’s on the surface, but underneath is vast, unknown but interconnected universe (which is why I’m afraid of water – haven’t been in the sea since I saw Jaws…).
Talking this into account, the insistence that narrative “is just a story” becomes untenable. Not even a story is a story: a film may claim to be the story of X, but what about all the other stories in shot? And the stories outside the shot? The photograph of a person against a plain background is never just that – posture, expression, arrangement of limbs, clothing and how it’s worn and so forth.
People refer to their ‘story’ or stories they’ve read, missing the multiplicities of their statement. Is every singularity a plurality, every plurality a multiplicity? Yes. Opposite singularities only make sense in a constructed, apparent, world. They don’t, because they can’t, arrive at ‘truth’, especially if we accept (for a moment, for the sake of argument) a division into rational truth and emotional truth. Look at Wittgenstein: in the Tractatus he wrote,
– The world is all that is the case. The world is a totality of facts.
But, in Philosophical Investigations he revised this to,
– Don’t ask for the meaning, ask for the use.
One can argue, however, that both meaning the same thing, but distinguished by power. The ‘we’ that is ‘you’ has the power to project an ‘I’. The ‘we’, ‘you’, ‘I’ is never true, it’s just a projection. Sometimes – most of the time? – it isn’t yours. The ‘we’ of others, that narrative ‘we’, simultaneously dismantles and re-mantles a presumptive ‘we’.
‘We’ is imagination, an imaginative ‘unity’, where truth is partial, if it can to be said to exist at all. Nothing is solitary, nothing is separate; all ‘we’s are connected, a drifting, billowing wind of invisible strings.
Is human progress possible? I think Constance Debré approaches this question in her novella, Offenses. To me, it’s a work that bears comparison with Camus’, The Outsider.
Murmurs from the Forest 