Introducing narrative self construction.

…the self is given content, is delineated and embodied, primarily in narrative constructions or stories (1).

…the development of selves (andthereby of persons) in our narratives is one of hte most characteristically human acts, acts that justifiably remain of central importance to both our personal and our communal existence (1).

…it has bcome increasingly evident to numerous influential theorists and practitioners that narratives are a primary embodiment of our understanding of the world, of experience, and ultimately of ourselves (3).

Across many disciplines, the role of narrative in the construction of self has been explored. A concensus is developing to suggest that narratives – the stories that we tell of ourselves and our experience, to ourselves, and to others, play a vital role in framing the way that we view, interpret, and understand the world, and our place in it. Part of the reason for this lies in the fact that narratives offer a device for tying together otherwise fragmented and random events:

…narratives articulate not just isolated acts but whole sequences of events or episodes, thereby placing particular events within a framing context or history (3).

The significance of events is only realised when viewed in the context of other events; each narrative is like a chapter in a broader life-story (3-4). As Kerby notes, “it is in and through various forms of narrative emplotment that our lives … attain meaning” (4).

Kerby discusses the formulation for personhood in some detail; he reads bodies as “sites of narration”, with the self – the person – emerging from this, “the result of ascribing subject status or selfhood to those sites of narration” (4). It is through our bodies that we experience the world – this is something that I will discuss in detail in my chapter on fit & fat blogging – but it’s an interesting topic to think about in the context of the Internet regardless, simply because it does contrast with earlier readings of the body online (or, the lack of body online, as the case may more accurately be).

For the purpose of his reading, Kerby definges self as “the distinctive individual that we usually take ourselves to be” (4). However, he also emphasizes that “Persons only ‘know’ themselves after the fact of expression” (5). I think that this is something that came up in yesterday’s reading — the notion that self awareness is something which only ever occurs after the fact, never during. It is only in retrospect that we can know ourselves, for various reasons, but perhaps mainly because we are too close to the event as it happens to really garner the significance inherent in that event. The pieces of the narrative puzzle – including how that narrative event fits in with all the other narrative events that have combined to paint the picture of who we are – are yet to be placed together, and the lesson evades us until that time. Kerby urges us to think of the self as part-and-parcel of the narrative itself –

The self, as implied subject, appears to be inseparable from the narrative or life story it constructs for itself or otherwise inherits. The important point is that it is from this story that a sense of self is generated (6).

Selves, then, emerge of and from narratives, just as narratives emerge from the experiences of the subject. The two are so closely related that they are as one — there can be no self, in this reading, without narrative, as it is through narrative that we can formulate and understand the self. Even this process, though, is bound in a much broader context; the stories that we tell, and how we tell them, and how we frame the self in those stories, are all influenced by the cultural and social environment in which stories are told. He writes:

The stories we tell of ourselves are determined not only by how ohter people narrate us but also by or language and the genres of storytelling inherited from our traditions (6).

This holistic kind of view of self construction – story as self, self as story, story-self as part of cultural creation – is kind of a nice idea. It demands “coherence and continuity” (6); to remove oneself too far from stories of continuity could suggest a sort of disordered personality (6). The continuity and coherence is important because narratives – and human existence – are temporal. “We indeed find ourselves, collectively and individually, embedded in an ongoing history” (7), writes Kerby. We narrate our pasts because doing so allows us to make sense of our present and speculate about our future:

The storied nature of our experience is, for Crites, what holds the past (memory) and future (anticipation) together in the present, creating the more or less unified sense we have of our ongoing lives, a sense upon which our personal identity so thoroughly depends (8).

This is our coherence: the knowledge that we fit into a temporal narrative, that is not necessarily linear, but which deals with the same, unified subject. Narration is inherent, but it is not always conscious (although sometimes – espcially in the case of blogs – it very much is!). We are a part of many stories at once, and we tell them to ourselves and others at overlapping times.

I’m just thinking about my own experiences as a storyteller here. As a long-time blogger, I have gotten very used to the kind of stories that I can, and need, to tell to my blog audience, rather than my real world. Similarly, there are stories that I tell to selected few in my real world (using that term loosely, of course), that I would never tell on my blog – at least not now. Maybe one day, but not when it’s recently been happening. I constantly tell stories to myself in my mind, and plan out the narratives that I will tell when I am at a computer, or around my friends, or with my family. My narrative self is in overdrive; but, then again, I feel that at the moment especially, I am really engaged in a battle to know who I am and what I want from life, so perhaps that is why I’m more conscious of this narrative exploration of self.

Although we are not self-consciously narrating ourselves all the time, narrational activity of some sort is common to a great deal of our experience–from dreams to memory to future plans from emotional to moral experience… Both self-understanding and self-identity are linked with the coherence of our lives as reflected in our personal narratives (8).

I am constantly building this picture of who I am, but I still doubt whether I can really see that. Part of the reason for telling stories is surely to have others respond; by telling my story, you can tell me about the kind of person I am. By thinking about my past stories, I can perhaps gauge a sense of the kind of person I have been.

This chapter deals with phenomenology in some detail… but I’m somewhat hestitant to write about it here because it is one of those concepts that I just don’t know if I can adequately put in to words. I should really explore it for that very reason because phenomenology comes up again and again in my research, so I really do need to be able to articulate it and its use for my work. But honestly, presented with passages like the following, I just freak out a little:

…a hermeneutic philosophy can accept the phenomenological starting point of the human subject’s immediacy to phenomena. However, it does not delude itself into thinking that there is a priviliged mode of access to phenomena that would disconnect the categories of our particular historical and linguistic heritage (10).

Okay: let’s work through this.

Hermeneutics is the study of interpretation theory – so, the way that we understand things. A hermeneutic philosophy is therefore a philosophy of understanding; a framework, if you will, for comprehension. Phenomenology is the study of conscious experience. “Human subjects immediacy to phenomena” suggests that there are certain things – certain experiences – which are intrinsic to the experience of being human (the human subject). However, the place we come from – our language, our history – also informs the kind of experiences (phenomena) that we encounter.

Am I reading this right? I think so. This echoes the points from before about each narrative fitting into a meta-narrative of life. It’s foolish to think that because we are all subject to experiences, the experiences that we will have are the same as the next person’s, due to the fact that the other pieces to our life puzzle will differ, based upon the interactions we have had (symbolic interactionism link?).

I think I’m getting there.

references:

Kerby, Anthony Paul (1991). ‘Introduction’, Narrative and the Self. Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp. 1-14

• Crites, Stephen (1971). ‘The narrative quality of experience’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 39 (3)
  

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