Thoughts On #Narrative III: In Defense Of.

By Isaac Butler

Via George Hunka  I happened to stumble upon this essay about narrative in the online magazine Exeunt, in which the “ethics of narrative” are critiqued. As I’m a few steps down this winding garden path of narrative issues, I thought I’d see what author Deborah Pearson had found so problematic about narrative. I left the essay scratching my head.

The essay begins with Pearson’s shock to find out that narrative and the self are hardwired together in the brain. This prompts her to ask “If the human need for narrative is not restricted to dramatic conventions but originates from our very sense of self, then how do we extricate ourselves from it in performance? Should we?”   Frankly, I’m shocked by her shock.  Narrative isn’t simply “dramatic convention”—although this essay is rife with term-level confusions between narrative and western conventions about narratives—it’s something that every culture everywhere has engaged in for pretty much ever.  From the Bayeaux tapestry to Sanskrit dance performance, we’ve engaged in narrative and story telling. It’s one of the universal human activities (and there’s some research that it’s not just humans that engage in it).  It wasn’t invented by Aristotle.

My answer to these questions would make for a very short essay.  The answer to both is “no, you can’t, so stop trying.” Even if the performer makes an ostensibly narrative-less work, the audience in its hunger and desire for a narrative will impose one on the proceedings. If you want to work in performance and don’t want to deal with story, go make modern dance (which, by the way, would be fine, I vastly prefer non-narrative dance to narrative dance).

Next we get into some of Pearson’s problems with narrative:

The political problems that narrative throws up are not so tough to recognize. Narratives must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. They must have a “controlling idea”, one main point (moral) we can take from the series of events that have unfolded. And they must have consistent characters with easily described natures – cowardly but kind, or irrational and insincere, for example.

The problem is, none of this is true of narrative (except for maybe—and only maybe—the beginning, middle and end part). It’s true of certain kinds of narratives that hew closely to certain tropes.  There are all sorts of narratives with inconsistent, unstable characters. Characters in both Shepard and Pinter are famously inconsistent. Chuck Mee deliberately builds character through contradiction, not coherence. And even if characters are generally consistent, the part about easily described natures is simply false.  While there are plenty of great characters that can be described simply (melancholy Jacques comes to mind) there’s plenty that can’t.  Iago, for example, overtly defies simple interpretation, he rubs it in his audience’s face with his gleeful deployment of impossible explanation after impossible explanation.  Paul in Six Degrees of Separation remains a total enigma, most of Chekhov’s characters can’t be so easily put into boxes, and moving into novels, novels give the writer plenty of space to create deep, rich, surprising characters.

Furthermore, while most narratives have a controlling idea (less so in the postmodern era) the idea that narratives are supposed to have only one idea/moral, one main takeaway just doesn’t wash.  I can’t tell you what the one takeaway from Hamlet is. Or Oedipus (don’t fuck your mom?) or—looking around my bookshelves right now—White Noise or Uncle Vanya or Footnotes in Gaza or Waterland or Then We Came To The End or Sandman or Joe Turner's Come and Gone or Song of Solomon or Ma Rainey's Black Bottom even a work of genre fiction like The Blunderer.

The rest of the paragraph from Pearson is quite telling as well, as it finally reveals (sort of) what the (supposed) political problematics of narrative are:

 Narratives are psychologically comforting because they provide resolution, and often impose a logic onto a frustratingly fluid reality. As anybody who has ever had to edit a play or story can tell you, narratives are highly selective, shamelessly omitting facts and events in search of a coherent story. This is all well and good for Oscar bait – but when these rules are applied to a political situation (as in the media they often are) the omissions and cuts are real people with real experiences.

The above quote reveals that there’s a category error at the heart of Pearson’s essay.  All narrative—with all of its richness and diversity and thousands of years of history—is reduced here to “Oscar bait.” Pearson is confusing narrative with a specific kind of highly conventionalized trope-fueled narrative.  They’re not the same thing.  Furthermore, it isn’t narrative that’s “highly selective,” it’s art in general.  Narrative might do it in search of a coherent story—and I think that construction is problematic but life is short—but all art uses careful selection of marterials and details. The most abstract modern dance eschews some gestures in favor of others. Even an abstract expressionist painting leaves out certain colors, certain kinds of brush strokes. And let's not even gets started on the fact that both of those examples leave out all the kinds of stories that Pearson worries narrative leaves out. No work of art can contain everything. Art works through selection and expansion, the ruthless culling of the extraneous so that the necessary can then be exploded into sublimity. 

Then we get this odd final sentence that’s supposed to explain why narrative (as she misdefines it) can be politically problematic.  The use of the catch-all bugabear “the media” obscures meaning here.  Does she mean journalists? Or does she mean politically minded works of art like Ruined or Angels in America? Either way, again, there is no way that you can create something that doesn’t exclude something, probably something important.  What you can do—what I’d argue is the duty of both journalists and artists— is be responsible about what you omit, try to check your own ideological involvement in that decision and, if you’re a journalist, try to do follow up when possible.  The problem of leaving things out is as much a problem of time and space as it is how stories are constructed.

Throughout the essay, Pearson confuses narrative in general with the tropes of the “well made play.” They’re not the same, and as a result the essay doesn’t really question anything. Pearson is suspicious of how seductive a well-made, highly conventional story can be. And she’s right to be. It’s fun to be swept away, but we also need to be critical of the sweeping, or else we end up with hate crimes like Gone With The Wind for our classics. But that’s not narrative, that’s convention.

Ultimately, all that narrative really requires is things causing other things to happen. Causality isn’t a social construct, or a kind of meaning we impose on the world. If I punch you in the face, it’s not a comforting myth that you’ve then been punched. I’ve caused that to happen. And if in response to that punch in the face you kick me in the shins, we have a chain of causality.

 In her final paragraph, she floats an idea that’s quite popular in more high fallutin’ circles of academia, literature and performance, namely that we desire narrative out of fear, that the world is a chaotic, messy, not-understandable place, and we want a story to help make sense of it and our place in it.  Leaving aside for a moment that there are narratives that descend into utter chaos and incoherence (I just finished one, Stanislaw Lem’s Memoirs Found In A Bathtub, this morning), it’s an interesting idea, one I’m not sure if I agree with or not, frankly. Here’s Pearson’s version of it:

 Finally, I sometimes wonder if the real reason we need stories originates from the fear that our lives may never find a final resolution in any way that we will be conscious of. If this, mortality and the confusing nature of an ongoing existence, is what is really behind our desire for storytelling, then perhaps we should just see it as a neurotic quirk of the human species.

 I love narrative too much to dismiss it on these terms, but I hear and read things like this all the time, particularly from people who adhere to the “performance” tradition rather than the theatre tradition. Given that I remain a bit unsure how I feel about it, I will simply counter with another idea that a professor of mine floated the other day, one I’m still chewing over and unsure of my feelings about:

There’s a class dynamic to the above quoted approach to narrative that people don’t want to look at. Basically, since the enlightenment, we have wanted to see ourselves as having a large amount of agency to enact change in the world and decide our destiny. This is particularly true of members of the, shall we say, professional-managerial classes.

 Highly conventional narratives reject this idea. In highly conventional narratives, the protagonist is a cog in a machine that preexists her. She doesn’t have control, the rules have control. Those of us who have risen to a point where we (mistakenly) believe that institutions don’t govern the vast majority of what we do want to reject these kinds of stories because they are suffocating to us, because they remind us that we too are subject to rules and institutions that we (mistakenly) believe ourselves to have transcended.  But these highly conventionalized narratives actually reflect more honestly the experience of being, say, working class, where your choices are far more overtly narrowed by institutional realities.

 When asked about the “Shakespearean” and “Dickensian” qualities of The Wire, David Simon regularly draws the interviewers attention to the Greeks.  He says that with The Wire, he tried to reach back to a pre-enlightenment understanding of people, where they actually had very little agency to affect change.  For the Greeks, it was because the Gods controlled everything. For The Wire, the Greek Gods are replaced with large institutions.  Greek drama was also highly conventionalized. This isn’t a coincidence. Perhaps then Pearson seeks comfort in a rejection of narrative because it reifies her worldview and grants her more control.

 Again, I’m not sure how I feel about that one, but I think it’s a point of view equally worthy of thought and attention to the condescending idea that people like stories because they’re babies in need of a security blanket.

Comments

[Gwydion Suilebhan]

I have nothing to say here except to thank you for giving me so very much to reflect on. This is very thoughtful stuff.

[Alison Croggon]

Thanks Isaac, excellent disputation. I agree, Pearson's notions of narrative bear very little relationship to most stories I can think of, bar the most emptily generic. Puzzling.

[Ben]

I love narrative too and I'm not going to stop loving it, but I do think our innate love of narrative stems from the need to believe that we live in a universe where cause and effect can be divined.

One of the great pleasures of narrative is the feeling of being able to arrive at an event in a story and feeling: "ah, I know why this is happening! Because ____." Knowing the why, knowing the cause, is very pleasurable. Even in stories that end in chaos.

[isaac]

Hey Ben,

Granting that's true... why is that bad? or inherently problematic? or (in pearson's case) something to be condescended to?

[Tony Adams]

my .02 here

[Ken]

The human brain imposes order on chaos; for instance, that's how we see fluid motion from a series of still images flashed in front of us in rapid succession. And so, our brain processes a series of seemingly random unconnected events/words in a narrative, either loosely or tightly knit, depending on the raw materials provided us. Narrative organizes (or "packages," if you like) the torrential current of experience that flows past us every second of our existence like a rushing river. There's not much we can do about it. If, in our intellectual hubris, we intend to seek a world without narrative, it's not unlike seeking a world without romantic love, after complaining that it is bourgeois and often sentimental. You can if you like, but to me it amounts to a lot of heavy lifting without much concrete reward. There still exists a lot you can do with narrative that isn't cliched, sentimental, or obvious. I'd rather spend my time seeking out those new methods rather than burning everything down in the search of some ascetic ideal.

[George Hunka]

My response here.

[Deborah Pearson]

Given how radically you have misinterpreted my essay I'm not sure how much point there is in responding to this. I agree with many of the points you make, but not as arguments to my essay, which you seem to think is making a point it's not. I think you have a particularly difficult time "arguing" my essay, as you've chosen to do, because if I am making an argument it would appear that I contradict myself constantly.

I'm not making an argument.

Ironically, what I wrote is not meant to have a controlling idea, it is meant to have a controlling question, which I don't answer. The question remains unanswered for me, although parts of your response (when they are not trying to argue points of mine that aren't there) go some distance in further illuminating that question.

As you've taken so much of it out of context, I'm not sure what to start with here -

(Moral) is in brackets - because obviously I don't believe that all stories have a moral - I believe that (most) fairy tales have a moral - but regardless of a moral, I do believe that generally stories are About something. They usually have a controlling idea - from anecdotes, to memories, to linear and non-linear novels, films and plays - being that humans draw meaning from causality, narrative resides in this meaning. There is an entire field of psychology based around narrative that often focusses on helping people reinterpret the meaning of events in their lives - this is nothing new. Causality has meaning - and this is narrative. Often in history, in pursuit of this meaning, real lives and experiences are edited out, which I think is problematic, but possibly necessary, as I write in my essay.

Your point about characters is interesting - you write that many characters are too complex to be summed up in a sentence and point to several great characters who can't be. I would respond by saying that moments of dramatic tension or interest come from the places in a story where a character shows themselves to be complex by deviating from the nature we have ascribed to them (which could usually be summed up in a few words or a sentence), and the viewer is always aware of the nature the character is deviating from. This is why they enjoy watching them deviate, transform, develop. Characters stems out of the tension with and development of that sentence, or, if you prefer, meaning.

Also, I bring up Oscar bait, but admitting that I am aware of the Oscars does not mean that Oscar bait is my only model for story telling. But honestly, I think that you have misinterpreted and misappropriated both the purpose of my essay and its content - so maybe it's futile to niggle on your specific responses since they were taken out of context.

On a final point - interestingly from a narrative perspective, what I found most problematic about your response was its own narrative predisposition - "Pearson was SHOCKED to find" - When I read that you were beginning your response to my essay by caricaturing me behind a computer with a big exclamation point over my head (when the passage you are referring to is actually a simple introduction, as opposed to a reactionary headline - in no place in the essay do I appear to be, as you put it, Shocked) it took me about ten minutes to decide whether or not to even keep reading. I thought, "This person will not be engaging with the writing from a fair perspective. In his first paragraph he's already ascribed emotional qualities to my essay that aren't there." That said, I'm glad I did keep reading, not for your arguments, which were directed at an imaginary target, but for your insights.

All the best and thanks for the response,

Deborah

[isaac]

Hi Deborah,

FIrst off, thanks for writing in, and I'm glad we can have a respectful disagreement about some of this stuff (And learn that we agree more than we think, which is always a pleasant surprise).

Now to the meat of your response: I think I'm far from alone in mistaking what to you is a deliberately contradictory, more essayistic casting about mental tentacles around the subject of narrative for a more deliberate argument. This suggests to me some craft-level flaws in the writing of the piece. There's a way to signal to your readers that that's what you're doing and-- having read a lot of that kind of work recently-- I would argue you haven't done it here. Amongst other things, those kinds of essays must rigorously interrogate the writer's own assumptions about the subject they are assaying, something that I don't think your essay on narrative does.

Secondly, setting that aside and assuming for a moment I'm a lazy reader who didn't get what you were going for (and it certainly wouldn't be the first time I've misread something) I think the criticisms of the individual points you explore still stand. For example, the piece still fails to define what you mean by the word narrative (or the word media, for that matter) and thus elides narrative, conventional narratives, oscar bait etc. and there's still the condescension inherent to using terms like "security blanket" to describe why people might want narrative, and I still reject what you consider to be the plainly visible political problems of narrative.. etc. etc. and so forth.

But I should also cop to being a bit of a dick with that all-caps-lock SHOCKED! that's a bit of the argumentative lefty political blogger in me. it's an internet meme to talk about people being shocked, SHOCKED to discover things that you think they should've already known, and it was misapplied to your piece.

[Jeremy M. Barker]

Isaac, I have to agree with Pearson here. The response is almost a willful misreading of what she's actually trying to address--she's responding and made clear that is to something she's seeing in contemporary theater (maybe just in Britain, but maybe not--I'd say it's also true of America). I'll agree that terms like "narrative" are very broad, and it makes it difficult to have a meaningful discussion, but if you'll at least grant her she's talking about certain types of narratives, maybe we can have a conversation about whether those certain types of narratives are increasingly common, are actually valid if they're as reductive as she finds them, or in general have a real conversation about this issue.

As it is, I think it's unfair of you to employ traditional narrative dance or Shakespeare (the complexity of which we imbibe through years of schooling, based on a few hundred years of critical discourse) to argue that a point about how contemporary theater is being made is invalid. Could Pearson have been more specific? I suppose, but I've had the same problem "naming" the things I find disagreeable with the trends I see in contemporary playwriting. It's not as simple as "devised" vs. "scripted," because we can all agree that there are fine playwrights making fine work. It's also not as simple as "art for art's sake" vs. "engaged" theater, either, because I'm certainly not arguing for a McSweeney's version of theater, either. Diversity is important and it takes all sorts.

What Pearson, Andrew Haydon (who wrote a very similar piece around the same time) and I are all saying is for whatever reason, a lot of the theater we're seeing is too neat and clean with a narrative constructed to make points, which the audience usually agrees with walking in to theater, which always leaves me wondering why bother?

What Pearson is clearly suggesting is that at the very least there's room for more narrative innovation, which is not necessarily the same as rejecting it totally (which I think she made clear by defining the sort of narrative she was talking about). Also, we could have more innovation in character. Mac Wellman via Witkiewicz pretty neatly summed it up as "Euclidean character" construction, a geometrically closed idea of character employed in such narratives which carries with all sorts of ideas and tropes about what character is or should be, just as various forms of Method-based performance also make assumptions about character and identity.

In the end, this isn't about us being Pearson or I being wrong or you being right; we're simply asking questions about the work we see being made, a mainstream primary mode of creating dramatic theater, the contemporary "well-made play," and we're trying to problematize it: in terms of how it represents character, identity, socio-political content, etc. How it works, in other words. And while your editorial critique of the piece has some validity, how dense, technical, and lit-crit speak should our writing have to become in order to have a conversation about what more people than just Pearson and I see as a primary model of playwriting?

[Myles]

I am currently getting a master's in contemporary theatre and we are working a lot in deconstructing theatre. And in that, narrative has been put in the background. Not forever, I'm a big believer in narrative. I'm in agreement that we humans are story making machines. In the thesis productions this year from the year ahead of us. Out of 10, perhaps 4 had some narrative. The others were tonal. Though the other 6 had some existential ruminations regarding content, it was really frustrating. Then make it into a movement piece. My thought is, narrative is vital, even in it's most gossamer form. It simply is a pleasure...except when its not.

[99]

This may honestly be the most depressing thing I've read today.