Fiction and Social Reality (Mariano Longo)

FICTION AND SOCIAL REALITY

This is an eloquent, erudite and original study on the relationship between literature and sociology. Drawing on an impressive range of sources, Mariano Longo invites us to challenge the seeming incompatibilities between rhetoric and fact, narrative and objectivity and to think afresh about the literary text as a powerful device of sociological imagination. His achievement is to offer us an illuminating account of sociology as a creative art, as a poetics of science. Lilie Chouliaraki, London School of Economics and Political Science, U K 7 1 0 2 y l u J 7 1 6 4 : 9 0 t a 4 5 1 . 9 6 . 7 1 2 . 7 1 1 y b d e d a o l n w o D

Classical and Contemporary Social Theory Series Editor: Stjepan G. Mestrovic, Texas A&M University, USA

7 1 0 2 y l u J 7 1 6 4 : 9 0 t a 4 5 1 . 9 6 . 7 1 2 . 7 1 1 y b d e d a o l n w o D

Classical and Contemporary Social Theory publishes rigorous scholarly work that re-discovers the relevance of social theory for contemporary times, demonstrating the enduring importance of theory for modern social issues. The series covers social theory in a broad sense, inviting contributions on both ‘classical’ and modern theory, thus encompassing sociology, without being conned to a single discipline. As such, work from across the social sciences is welcome, provided that volumes address the social context of particular issues, subjects, or gures and offer new understandings of social reality and the contribution of a theorist or school to our understanding of it. The series considers signicant new appraisals of established thinkers or schools, comparative works or contributions that discuss a particular social issue or phenomenon in relation to the work of specic theorists or theoretical approaches. Contributions are welcome that assess broad strands of thought within certain schools or across the work of a number of thinkers, but always with an eye toward contributing to contemporary understandings of social issues and contexts. Also in the series David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy Edited by Keith Kerr, Kerr, B. Garrick Harden and Marcus Marcus Aldredge ISBN 978-1-4724-2848-6 Max Weber’s Weber’s Theory of Modernity The Endless Pursuit of Meaning Michael Symonds ISBN 978-1-4724-6286-2 Sociological Amnesia Cross-currents in Disciplinary History Edited by Alex Law and Eric Royal Lybeck ISBN 978-1-4724-4234 978-1-4724-4234-5 -5 A Sociology of the Total Organization Atomistic Unity in the French Foreign Legion Mikaela Sundberg Sundberg ISBN 978-1-4724-5560 978-1-4724-5560-4 -4

Classical and Contemporary Social Theory Series Editor: Stjepan G. Mestrovic, Texas A&M University, USA


Classical and Contemporary Social Theory publishes rigorous scholarly work that re-discovers the relevance of social theory for contemporary times, demonstrating the enduring importance of theory for modern social issues. The series covers social theory in a broad sense, inviting contributions on both ‘classical’ and modern theory, thus encompassing sociology, without being conned to a single discipline. As such, work from across the social sciences is welcome, provided that volumes address the social context of particular issues, subjects, or gures and offer new understandings of social reality and the contribution of a theorist or school to our understanding of it. The series considers signicant new appraisals of established thinkers or schools, comparative works or contributions that discuss a particular social issue or phenomenon in relation to the work of specic theorists or theoretical approaches. Contributions are welcome that assess broad strands of thought within certain schools or across the work of a number of thinkers, but always with an eye toward contributing to contemporary understandings of social issues and contexts. Also in the series David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy Edited by Keith Kerr, Kerr, B. Garrick Harden and Marcus Marcus Aldredge ISBN 978-1-4724-2848-6 Max Weber’s Weber’s Theory of Modernity The Endless Pursuit of Meaning Michael Symonds ISBN 978-1-4724-6286-2 Sociological Amnesia Cross-currents in Disciplinary History Edited by Alex Law and Eric Royal Lybeck ISBN 978-1-4724-4234 978-1-4724-4234-5 -5 A Sociology of the Total Organization Atomistic Unity in the French Foreign Legion Mikaela Sundberg Sundberg ISBN 978-1-4724-5560 978-1-4724-5560-4 -4

Fiction and Social Reality Literature and Narrative as Sociological Resources


MARIANO LONGO University of Salento, Italy

First pu publis lished 2015 by Ashgate Publis lishing ing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2015 Mariano Longo


Mariano Longo has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, Act, 1988, to be identied as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for

ISBN 9781472445230 (hbk)


To Lucia and Michele


Contents

Introduction


1

1

Features and Structure of Narratives

11

2

The Cognitive Value of Fictional Narratives

27

3

Narratives and Sociology: At the Roots of a Forgotten Tradition

53

4

Writing Sociology: Social Sciences as Texts

85

5

When Sociologists Use Literary Sources

101

6

On the Sociological Use of Narratives

125

Bibliography Index

151 161


Introduction


As laymen, at least intuitively, we know that tales, stories, and narratives are relevant. Indeed, our perception of the world, our knowledge of other people, our cultural perspectives (including behavioural standards, social norms and values) are both the output of our lived experience, and the result of experiences we share with other fellow people, where narratives play a relevant role as a mode of communication. This book concerns the sociological relevance of narratives, of literary narratives in particular. When I started thinking of the subject of this monograph, I turned to my own recollections and memories. I tried to recall the stories which were part of my biographical background. Some traditional fables came to my mind, which my grandmother used to tell me in my southern Italian dialect, as well as some family stories, which moulded my identity during my childhood. As for literary narratives, I was able to recall a remarkable number of plots, characters, milieux, and atmospheres, almost as vividly as the oral stories of my childhood. They were real to me, just like the tales of my early life, although they had been experienced outside the lively context of social interaction. The literary narratives I have read are part of my personal experience, as much as the stories I heard in my family and social context. These brief autobiographical remarks are relevant to me for at least two reasons. The rst is connected to the fact that the stories I have heard and read (as well as the stories that I still hea r and read), contributed to dening the man I am, including my professional role as a professor of sociology and a social scientist: they are relevant components of the models of thought I adopt to approach reality, the concepts I use to categorize social facts and events, the typication upon which I construct my explication of the social; secondly, they justify, from a subjective and biographical perspective, my interest in the use of narratives (including literary ones) as a source for sociology. The theme of narratives is ambitious, yet I will treat it from a consciously partial perspective. My partiality is unavoidable since the topic has a great variety of thematic implications, as narratives may be considered one of the most relevant forms of human communication (Fisher, 1987). Indeed, narratives are everywhere (Barthes, 1975): they may be oral or written, ctional or true; they cover a wide range of genres (jokes, police-reports, newspaper articles, metropolitan legends, novels – some of which are distinguishable as sub-genres: romance, detective stories, historical novels etc.); they tend to colonize all available communicative media (print, old as well as new media) (Ryan and Thon, 2014). Moreover, the theme is relevant as an object of scientic scrutiny in a wide range of related disciplinary elds (sociology, anthropology, psychology, literary criticism, semiotics, history, to mention just a few) and a specialized interest in narration

2


Fiction and Social Reality

gave rise to a dedicated eld of investigation: narratology. All that entails a wide range of scientic material on the topic, which has induced me to offer a highly selective list of references of authors and works. The specic theme of this book is the relation between sociology and narratives, literary narratives in particular. It is not an original theme. What is unusual, if at all, is the attempt to put the topics of everyday narratives and literary narratives together. The rationale motivating this attempt is justied by a common set of structural elements shared by everyday and literary narratives, 1 as well as by the fact that the use of everyday narratives is well established within sociological empirical methods. What happens when we choose to adopt as our empirical material a ctive narrative, that is a document which has as its object a pretend reality? Is asking a sociologist to use literary documents as tools to deepen their knowledge of social reality demanding too much? Indeed one of the tasks of my work is to show that sociologists, at least intuitively, have often turned to literature as a possible source, and that they have done so ever since the discipline developed as an autonomous eld of investigation. The relevance of literary narratives for our discipline has been carefully dealt with from a variety of points of view (e.g. the traditional sociological analysis of literature, empirical research on the reading public and the artistic milieu, cultural studies as a specic approach, to mention but a few). Nonetheless, this book is not concerned with the sociological analysis of literature as a social phenomenon, a task which has been assumed by the sociology of literature. On the contrary, my intent is to sketch the specic features of ctional narratives as compared with non-ctional narrations and to explore their potential as instruments for sociologically understanding reality. In this restricted sense, literary narratives are conceived of here as tools that a sociologist may adopt to get in contact with dense representations of specic aspects of the social (Jedlowsky, 2000; Turnaturi, 2003; Kuzmics and Mozetič, 2003). Employed as tools, literary sources force us to face a paradox, which will be dealt with in greater detail later, connected to the fact that constitutively ctive materials are here intended as instruments to better understand non-ctitious aspects of the world. Leaving this relevant question aside for now, I turn to the question of the sociological relevance of narratives. Narratives are part of our experience of reality (Jedlowsky, 2000) so that stressing their importance for a sociologist is both naïve and necessary. They mould our perception of events, by putting them into a meaningful connection. Their relevance is such that it is even possible to conceive of narratives as the prerequisites of cognition, as “they are the root of human thought” (Turner, 1996, p. 12). The social sciences have taken everyday stories seriously, hence producing a methodological debate about the use of narratives, the ways in which they may be adopted as a research tool to investigate specic aspects of the social, the best modalities by which to gather and employ them as 1 By everyday narratives (oral or written) I intend non-ctional narratives, both natural or provoked by the researcher, which are the source of data of most qualitative research and have therefore been put under the scrutiny of methodological reection.

Introduction


3

a peculiar sociological material (Czarniawska, 2004). Gathering narratives is one aspect of the everyday work routine of the social researcher, who adopts a whole set of well-established research techniques (in-depth interviews, focus groups, diaries etc.) in order to get rich narrative data, both natural or provoked. Everyday stories are sociologically relevant for a variety of reasons: they may represent privileged access to the subjectivity of the social actor, so clarifying ideas, values, or subjective forms of representation of reality; they help the social scientist dene the social dimension of the storytelling, which is culturally determined; they contribute to a better knowledge of how a social actor strategically adapts a story so as to produce a socially adequate presentation of his self and actions. Narratives are socially endowed with three main functions (aside from enhancing sociality as such). They are a useful tool for spreading information, by locating events within a logically coherent sequence. Thus, much of what we know about the world (what Umberto Eco, 1979, once called our encyclopaedia) derives from narratives. They are, moreover, instruments of value reinforcement, as they provide musters of virtues and vices, and thus behaviour-models to be emulated or avoided (Polkinghorne, 1988, p. 14). Finally, social actors use narrative strategies to justify their past actions, to negotiate the meaning of their interaction, to pregure their future activities and goals. This brief sketch shows how complex the social relevance of narratives is: narratives give order to events and, by interconnecting them, they also provide a schema to qualify action, as well as a linguistic set against which actors may legitimize their actions, in conformity with (but even against) established cultural values. Telling a story is not only a matter of ordinary oral communication in social face-to-face interaction. Although the very possibility of recounting emerges within the social situation of physical co-presence, narration adapts to contexts which are different from those in which it is generated. Narratives as reiterated soliloquies, for example, are a way to systematize knowledge and experiences from the earliest phases of cognitive development, as psychologists have clearly shown (Bruner, 1990, p. 87 ff.). As a mode of communication, narration is particularly exible, adaptable to different media and communicative contexts. The relevant distinction is not only that between orality and literacy (Ong, 1982). One may already detect different narrative genres in oral communication (e.g. myths, epic, fables), as well as in written and printed narratives. Paintings may be organized as a narration (Barthes, 1975, p. 237; Chatman, 1978, p. 34), as may other expressive forms (cinema, television, dance and, more recently, new media). By adopting an inclusive perspective, one becomes aware of the ubiquitousness of narratives, which makes a denition of the essential features of narration even more difcult. Which are the characteristics of a discourse, that may be qualied as a narrative? The debate which developed, beginning with Russian formalism up to French structuralism, aimed to detect a number of structural elements which a text (written or oral, it is not relevant here) had to posses in order to be qualied as a narrative. Indeed, if we assume that narratives are an ubiquitous element of communication, in so far as they are part of our knowledge of past

4



events, of our everyday representation of present reality, of our projection into the future, a clear-cut denition of the constitutive elements of a narrative seems of the foremost relevance. Narratives produce a suspended social vacuum, as compared with other forms of more transactional communication (Toolan, 1988, p. 4). In oral conversation, they produce a subversion of the usual turn-order, so that the narrator is accorded the privilege to hold the turn until the story has come to an end. Oral and written narratives cut off narrator and audience from the normal social processes of the immediate here and now. They re-create a circumscribed representation of time and space, of actors, actions, events and of the interconnections among them. They create worlds which are reality-like, as well as a temporally and logically coherent meaning structure, within which a portion of reality is represented, given signicance and relevance. Chapter 1 is devoted to this topic, in an attempt to dene the structural and social features of narratives (both non-ctional and literary). A theme of the recent sociological debate has been the so-called narrative turn (Berger and Quinney, eds., 2004) which stresses the relevance of storytelling in the construction of our experience of the (social) world. This approach underlines the constitutive role of narrative in the social construction of reality. If there is by now a generalized consensus on the relevance of everyday narratives for sociology and the social sciences, the question of the use of literary narratives as a source of sociological investigation is more complex. Literature is the subject matter of a specic branch of sociology: the sociology of literature. Although the sociology of literature has by now lost part of the appeal it had up to the 1980s (English, 2010), it allows an interpretation of literary phenomena from a variety of points of view. Literature has been the object of sociological investigation from a plurality of different perspectives: the relationship between a literary work and its social contexts (Goldman, 1975), the social determination of the reading public (Radway, 1984), or the constitution of competing elds among groups of artists endowed with different cultural and social capital (Bourdieu, 1995), to mention just a few examples. If one conceives of literature as a source of data rather than a eld of sociological investigation, the topic of the relation between sociology and literature has to be analysed from another point of view. As a rule, the most common attitude of sociologists towards literature has been a generic appraisal of the capacity of literary works to describe and understand reality (including the psychological substratum of the characters, their motivations, the social milieu in which they act and interact). It is assumed that the deep insight of the person of genius ought to make ctional narratives able to show (more fully than a piece of sociological analysis could), sometimes unwittingly, deep interconnections among events, psychological drives and actions. The emphasis has been put on literature as able to depict the features of an epoch, to describe a social context or a peculiar social environment (for example an underworld), to anticipate trends, social transformations and changes. Yet, at the same time, literary works seem to the serious sociologist devoid of the specic character which makes a narrative

Introduction


5

employable as a source of data: a clear-cut reference to something out there in the world. Literary works are ctive, and lack therefore the character of truthfulness. Chapter 2 is explicitly devoted to this question, by thematizing the cognitive value of narratives (both ctional and non-ctional). As far as literary narratives are concerned, the question of their cognitive value is particularly thorny. They may be plausible but, as Searle (1975) puts it, although they have all the features of assertive texts, they only play at being true. Indeed, the Searlean solution, linked as it is to the supposed truthfulness of assertive texts, assumes that non-ctional narratives are always to be conceived of as faithful reproductions of reality, the opposite being a deviation from what is normally expected. This referential stance has often been adopted by sociologists, chiey those who employ qualitative techniques, who tend uncritically to trust the truthfulness of everyday narratives. At a deeper inspection, the emphasis on narratives as a privileged access to the personal authentic representation of reality or the self seems methodologically misplaced (Atkinson, 1997). When adopting storytelling as a privileged way to understand reality, a social scientist may take a naïve attitude, overrating the capacity of narration to accede the true essence of the actor’s personal experience, his actions and the motives justifying it. A more sophisticated approach assumes that narratives are not faithful mirrors of reality, but instruments by which reality is represented and rationalized (Atkinson, 1997; Atkinson and Delamont, 2006): by narrating, an actor makes his personal experiences plausible for himself and other fellow people, giving it a social meaning. Even an everyday narration (e.g. an assertive text) is always a selection among possibilities: an actor may decide what to tell, how to describe what he has selected as relevant, which elements to stress and which to leave in the background. Yet, a prevailing realistic attitude towards narratives may be considered responsible for a positivistic scepticism towards literary works as sources of data. Indeed, if narratives are to be truthful depictions of reality, this quality may be attributed to everyday, non-ctive narratives rather than to literary narrations, which would make the use of literature, devoid as it is of the character of truthfulness, of no use as a sociological source. Although this solution might at rst sound sensible, by adopting it, a sociologist would disregard the articiality of the process of narrating as such. If on the contrary, one assumes the opposite attitude, according to which narratives are always articial reconstructions of reality, their cognitive potential resting on their capacity to construct verisimilar (Bruner, 1986, p. 52) rather than truthful accounts, then the distinction between non-ctional and ctional narratives appears less relevant, and the topic of their sociological use once again becomes plausible. Once the question of truthfulness has been left aside, literary narratives show their relevance as a mode of reality cognition and reality construction. Moreover, if we assume, as will be claried later, that narrating is less a way to report about facts than a peculiar form of cognitive approach to reality (Bruner, 1986; 1990; Polkingshorne, 1988), narratives (whether ctional or non-ctional) appear as relevant instruments through which we are able to give order to the fragmented

6



and apparently dissociated elements of our experience: by narrating, we connect events, propose relations (temporal, causal, of mutual implication) among differentiated aspects of the world. And, if one stresses the rhetorical dimension of narration (Fisher, 1987), one may notice that while recounting, a story is told and, at the same time, values are transmitted and reinforced. So, telling a story is not simply a form of sociality, it is one of the ways whereby social reality is reproduced, value systems strengthened and behavioural standards conrmed. And the former holds true both for everyday and literary narratives. Indeed, literary narratives contribute to constructing our sense of reality, the way we perceive events and relations. Some of the concepts we use to describe social types and social phenomena come directly from literary pieces (Kundera, 1988), which implies that literature is not only able to create its own peculiar ctional worlds by using socially available categories, it also creates categories of its own, now available for a diffuse social use (think of a Kafkaesque or Pirandellan situation, or of Bovarism as a typically modern malaise, to give just a few examples). The relation of the literary world with the real is, therefore, much more complex than the simple question of its truthfulness would suggest. A literary work may propose a ctional representation of reality, but that is just one aspect of a complex relation. It may also detect the relevance of themes and questions which are not yet on the social agenda. It may create new cognitive categories by which to understand social and psychological phenomena. In a few words, literary narratives may help dene and modify the way we make sense of our reality (Ricoeur, 1984). Thus, although ctive narratives may not have an identiable referent in the world, they still produce rich, culturally determined documents, which it would be naïve to exclude as sources for our sociological understanding, on the basis of a misplaced quest for referential truthfulness. Indeed, the idea of employing literature as a source is no post-modern novelty. Chapters 3 and 4 deal with the reconstruction of the debate about the use of literary sources, dating back to the rst decades of the 20th century. Authors such as Park and Burgess (1925) and Znaniecki (1934) dealt with the topic, from a methodological perspective (Chapter 3). Within a humanistic tradition, internal to the American social sciences, sociology could even be conceived of as an art form (Redeld, 1948; Nisbet, 1962, 1976), thus paving the way to the post-modern debate on sociology as a form of rhetorical writing (Chapter 4). Yet, regardless of relevant exceptions (notably Florian Znaniecki and Robert Nisbet) the reference to literary sources has either been intuitive, lacking an adequate theoretical and methodological conceptualization or, by taking the similarities between literary narratives and sociological writing to the extreme, has been adopted so as to propose a dilution of sociology into literature (and vice versa). By reconstructing the topic of the relevance of ctional narratives for sociology, my intent is to try and give a plausible explanation of an apparently trivial question: why does one nd in social sciences (in sociology in particular) so many references to the relevance of literature as a kind of substitute for or integration

Introduction


7

to sociological knowledge? Further, why is it so difcult to go from the simple appreciation of literature as a proper means to access and understand social reality to a systematic and well-thought theoretical and methodological reection on the use of literary sources? One possible answer is to be linked to the similarities between the objects we investigate as sociologists and the world as described by novelists. Indeed, one may envisage relevant overlapping areas between sociology and literary narratives. To offer a few examples, which will be dealt with in more detail below: action and the subjective motives giving impulse to human action are elements which belong to the sociological as well as the narrative understanding of reality (see Van Dijk, 1975; 1976). When Kenneth Burke conceived of the Dramatic Pentad (Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, Purpose), he traced the essential philosophical conditions of narrations (Burke, 1945, pp. xv-xvi). Narratives are about purposeful action, to be imputed to a conscious agent who does not act in a vacuum but within a specic environment. The description proposed by Burke shows more than one similarity with the accredited sociological theories of action. Hence, at the core of the attraction for sociologists to literature is an interest in human and social facts, treated from perspectives which are in many ways incompatible and yet, paradoxically, consistent. When a sociologist resorts to literary narratives, he confronts himself with complex texts, containing a wide variety of modes of discourse (including argumentation and description, etc.), which makes for extremely rich, meaningful material, highly compatible with the cognitive interests of sociological investigation: the description of social milieux, the display of physical or urban environments, the account of manners and mores as well as the presentation of moral ideas and values. Moreover, thanks to the peculiar structure of literary narratives, what is otherwise precluded from observation becomes ctitiously visible: the subjective interior world of characters, and thus the complex combination of instincts, environmental inuences and psychological motivations. This world would be otherwise invisible to a sociologist, who is methodologically aware of the fact that the actor’s subjectivity has to be treated as a black box, and thus he tends to be particularly careful in adopting intrusive techniques into the interior world of the actors he observes. Literature as a source gives a social scientist the opportunity to go beneath the surface of social phenomena, which results in a relevant cognitive reward, worth the methodological caution he has to adopt by managing data of a highly peculiar kind (Otto, 2007, pp. 78-9). In Chapter 5, I will sketch the ways in which sociology has made use of literature (novels in particular) as a source. Literature has been used as an exemplication of sociological concepts, especially in the teaching of sociology. That use has a long tradition, dating back to Coser’s Sociology through Literature: A Reader (1963). Since literature deals with people, their actions, interactions and the motives underlining them, literary sources may function as an exemplication of the phenomena sociology explains, adopting the somewhat abstract jargon of the discipline. Those who adopt literary sources as a didactic instrument conceive of literature as more apt than sociology for describing the minute aspects of social

8



reality, in a way that, paradoxical as it may sound, is a-referential and yet trueto-life. The other possible use of literary sources could be as a non-technical conrmation of theoretical insights. The relation between literature and theoretical thinking is analysed by adopting as a guiding light Coser ’s hypothesis (1963, p. 5), according to which literary sources give the sociologist deep intuitions which may be subjected to further theoretical systematization. Literary ction has, thus, an epistemic and exploratory function, since literary narratives may provide “insight into the structure of the world, society, mental structures, existing conventions, rules and laws” (Van Dijk, 1975, p. 292). Fiction may do even more: it may present reality from an unexpected perspective, giving access to the usual from a new point of view, which is an unsophisticated wording of what Bourdieu probably meant when he wrote of the literary discourse as a way “to reveal while veiling, or to produce a de-realizing ‘reality’ effect” (Bourdieu, 1995, p. 4). The complex relation between literature and social theory will be exemplied by making reference to Alfred Schutz (1964b) and Peter Berger (1970, 1984). The last chapter deals with the methodological questions linked to the use of literary narratives as sources. At the core of my argument is the idea that literary ctions, regardless of their ctionality, are life-like and may thus provide the reader with a representation of reality which is consistent with the representation of the layperson. This point is argued by making reference to Schutz (1962a) and his postulate of adequacy. The proposed idea is that, in so far as sociological analyses are written in a technical jargon and according to the theoretical, methodological and rhetorical norms of the discipline, they are incompatible with common sense and pre-scientic interpretations of reality. In its turn, literary ction is, as a rule, able to depict the world in a way that is consistent with common understanding. The distinction between ction and social sciences can be so re-specied: whereas ctional narratives provide a knowingly false yet likely representation of reality, social sciences reports are generally both more objective and (yet) untrue-to-life. It would be therefore unfair to qualify the function of literary ction solely as entertaining or emotional. Regardless of the obvious fact that literary narratives do not have objective references, regardless of the fact that they describe possible worlds (Eco, 1979; Doležel, 1998), their richness and the possibility that they offer of penetrating otherwise inaccessible contexts make literature relevant as a source of data for sociological investigation. From a methodological point of view, literary narratives are documents; that is, sets of data that are present in the public sphere and do not require any active role on the part of the social researcher in their production (Cardano, 2011, pp. 31-2). Yet they are documents of a peculiar kind and in so far as they are specic, they have to be treated with appropriate methodological accuracy. Indeed, every literary work says something about the imagined, ctive world it creates, the relation between the ctive world and life being the output of our interpretative activity (Gibson, 2007, p. 141 ff.). Thus the use of literature as a source entails a creative process of sociological interpretation, by which the text is subdued to the logic of sociological reasoning. There is no doubt that a sociologist has different tasks from a novelist.

Introduction


9

He has, moreover, a different language, a different form of representation of the worlds out there. So good sociology based on literary narratives has to re-specify its ctional material, making sociological sense of it. Whenever a sociologist adopts a literary text as data, two strong forms of representation of reality come into contact, which implies that a strong process of conversion from one mode of discourse (the literary) into the other (the sociological) is required. The process of selecting literary texts will be discussed, as well as the necessary reduction of the symbolic, stylistic and meaning complexity of ctional narratives. Any use of a literary source implies a necessary translation into the jargon of sociology, according to the cognitive objectives and the research strategies of the social scientist. It is a complex process, which requires not only methodological and theoretical competence on behalf of the sociologist, but also interpretative nesse in his use of literary material. The idea is here suggested that the complexity of the process and the specicity of literary narratives should represent no excuse for systematically denying sociology access to literature as a source.


Chapter 1


Sketching the Character of Narratives


What is a narrative? In its most simple denition, dating back to Aristotle (Eco, 1979, p. 30), a text may be dened as a narrative when it tells a story; that is, when it deals with one or more actors and describes a process of transformation from an initial stage x to a nal stage y. This minimal denition contains the fundamental feature of narrations: one or more actors and their actions are described in a temporal sequence. Thus a narrative, and that is its essential feature, has to do with changes in time. Indeed, the reference to action is, from Aristotle on, the characterizing element of narration, since it may be congured as a specic form of imitation (mimesis) of reality, e.g. the imitation of an action (Dowling, 2011, p. 1). Adopting a minimal denition of narrative is one of the possible options a scholar may take when confronted with the ubiquitousness and variety of narrations. This minimal denition is inclusive, so that the description of any process whatsoever may be intended as a narrative.1 The alternative attitude is to carefully dene which features a story should possess in order to be dened as a narrative (Labov, 1997), thus excluding all those texts that, although describing processes, are not to be intended as narrations. A minimal denition does not sufce to clarify the constitutive elements of a narrative text: in order to make the denition more rigorous, one has at least to single out the basic features of narratives. By telling a story (narrating) one is supposed to describe actors (it does not matter now whether real or ctitious) who do things. Yet, actions (things that occur which are imputable to one of the implied characters) are not the sole elements of a narrative. Following the suggestion proposed by Chatman, events are either in the mode of DO (changes consciously brought about by actors) or in the mode of HAPPEN (things which occur outside any conscious plan) (Chatman, 1978, p. 32). What is reported in a narrative, as well as the consequences of the events, is not always to be ascribed to the conscious efforts of the actors, but to a complex combination of chances, cases and plans, which makes the plot and its possible outcomes unpredictable. Even the simplest oral report of action may be intended as a narrative provided that it contains some unexpected elements: a narrative is never the sole description of the ordinary, but it deals with the introduction of the unforeseen into the taken for granted (see, for example, Labov, 1997; Van Dijk, 1975). A rst connection with social 1 Umberto Eco (1979, p. 30), just to offer a relevant example, shows how even an argumentative text (e.g. Spinoza’s denition of God) may be read as a narrative.

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sciences (sociology in particular) thus becomes evident. A narrative text consists of descriptions of actions, and action is among the c onstitutive elements of society. As action takes place within a physical and social environment, narratives show the interplay between individual intentions and the environment in codetermining the results of action. What is remarkable in narrative as a communication-mode is its effectiveness in combining processes and statuses. A narrative text is a hybrid, as it employs other text forms (description in particular) which accounts for the cognitive quality of narration: it tells not only what happens, but also something about the qualities of the actors and the environment in which actions take place (in Chatman’s vocabulary: existents). Even in its more elementary examples, a narrative often contextualizes actions and happenings, and in so doing it has to describe characters, milieux, the physical environment etc. The effectiveness that narratives (even in their simplest variations) show in describing reality lies in this mix of time-recounting and space- and character-description. The combination of modes of discourse as specic features of narratives accounts for their sociological relevance. A narrative (regardless of its ctionality) describes characters, their actions and their supposed motives, as well as contextual elements (fate, natural events, social opposition) which may prevent individuals from achieving their foreseen ends. This capacity to describe action in context ac counts for the relevance that the reports of the social actor have for social research. A combination of these structural elements is evident even in simple, short narratives, such as those analysed by Labov and Waletzky in their seminal work dating back to 1967. Labov and Waletzky (1967) refer to narratives dened from a specic, consciously narrow perspective. They are interested in short narra tives, i.e. oral reports of personal experience in everyday conversation. The presupposition is that, in order to understand the complex structure of more articulated narratives, one has to catch the constitutive elements of oral versions of personal experiences as told by common native speakers (ibid., p. 12). The analyses by Labov and Waletzky (1967), and their later development by Labov (1997), are based on extensive empirical work consisting in the collection of thousands of oral narratives among native English speakers. The collected material gives both scholars the opportunity to detect structures, rules and functions of oral narratives, in principle compatible with narratives of other kinds (e.g. myths and folk-tales – Van Dijk, 1975, p. 276). Both papers underline two important aspects of oral narratives: the structural and the functional. As to the structural elements, an oral narrative locates events in time and space and introduces the involved actors. (Labov and Waletzky [1967, p. 32] call this function orientation). The action is set in motion by some sort of interruption in the ordinary ow of events (complication – ibid., pp. 32-3) and its prosecution is intended as a reaction to the unusual (resolution – ibid., p. 39). In order to make the passage from complication to resolution clear, a narrative needs an evaluation; that is, the explication of the narrator’s attitude towards the events as reported (ibid., p. 37). As stressed by Labov (1997) the element of complication is essential to the narrative: by breaking the ordinary, a complication makes the narrated events ‘reportable’, i.e. relevant to the audience.



13

By elaborating upon Harvey Sacks’ (1995) analysis of turn assignment, Labov underlines how narration is one of the few cases in which the rules of taking turns in conversation do not hold, such that the narrator may keep his turn to the end of his recounting. A code clause implies a return to normal turn-taking, thus also precluding any request for further explanation related to the story. Oral narratives as a mode of communication have two main specic functions: the referential and the evaluative (Labov and Waletzky, 1967). An oral narrative is, rst of all, a way to represent events by reproducing them in their temporal sequence (ibid., p. 13). As Labov (1997) stresses, in personal narratives experiences tend to be objectively represented (they are referred more commonly to the state of fact than to inner states) and their credibility is strictly linked to their factuality. Moreover, narratives entail an implicit causal theory in relation to events, i.e. a series of causal connections, so that not only is a tale presented of what happened, but also a possible explanation of what occurred. Yet, the reproduction of events is not aseptic, as it is associated with a meaning construction process, by which events are given a specic signicance for the narrator or for the actors involved. Thus, even in this everyday referential dimension, a narrative is more than the report of former experiences: it entails a process by which events, actors and actions are presented on the social scene under a specic evaluative light. The casual explanation is linked to the possibility of assigning praise or blame to the actors and to the action as reported, which implies a moral and ideological dimension of oral narratives (ibid.). Therefore a narrative, even in the minimal form of an oral report, is a process of meaning construction, which implies the presentation of the events as perceived and selected by the narrator and a casual explanation of what is reported, as well as an evaluation of actions and a presentation of the moral value of the actors involved. Narrative as a mode of discourse proves to be a prototype, playing a central role in every conversation, able to convey information within a structure organized as a sequence (a beginning, a middle and an end) (ibid.). One may notice that the structural characters of narratives as exemplied by Chatman (time and action, reference to some unusual event, description of actors and context, to which we may add causal explanation and moral evaluation) are present in nuce even in simple everyday narratives. The work of Labov concentrates on narratives of a peculiar kind (oral speeches with a specic content) and, although his speculations achieve interesting generalizable results as to the structure and function of the oral narratives, they are conditioned by the specic empirical interests of the author. Let me go back to a more general presentation of narratives by selecting, from the enormous literature on the subject, a perspective which, by stressing the strong interconnection between action, time and narration, has a peculiar interest for the sociological investigation of the topic. The linguist Teun A. Van Dijk (1975; 1976), has tried to dene the structural traits of narrative texts starting from a general, philosophically-oriented denition of action. In his essays dating back to the 1970s, Van Dijk explicitly connected action, action theory and narrative. Since narrative discourse is about action or sequences of actions in time, an appropriate linguistic denition of

14



narrative should take into account what action is, from a general, conceptual point of view (Van Dijk, 1975, p. 273). As Van Dijk writes, “formal action description may yield insight into the abstract structures of narratives in natural language” (Van Dijk, 1976, p. 287). Action is to be distinguished from simple doings or involuntary bodily movements, in so far as it is characterized by intentions (motivating our doings) and purposes (broader tasks within which our actions are embedded) (Van Dijk, 1975, pp. 279-80). Thus an act may be dened as what an actor intentionally performs in order to bring about a certain state of affairs under a specic purpose (ibid., p. 277). By introducing the subjective dimension of intentionality and purposefulness, philosophical action theories (and I might add sociological action theories too) show the complexity of human acts and help distinguishing them from mere behaviour. An intentional act entails not only a change in state (from stage x to stage y), it also implicates a series of internal states (wishes, wants, fears, etc.) which become relevant as soon as one moves from the actual level of empirical facts to the linguistic level of action description. Indeed, whereas ‘doings’ are connected to what actually happens, an action has to be interpreted as a specic kind of intentional activity. Moving a pen on a piece of paper, for example, is a doing, which may be interpreted as signing a contract (ibid., p. 281), but also otherwise. Thus a narrative is an action description (or, when it consists of more than one sentence, an action discourse), which ta kes into account intentions, desires, inner emotional states, a whole grammar of motives which may be evoked in order to explain the subjective dimension of what is done (ibid., pp. 282-3). By making reference to the subjective element in narration, one makes a further step towards the denition of the sociological relevance of the narrative discourse: as it describes not only action but also the individual motives underlining it, each narration is an attempt (naïve or sophisticated, depending on the author and the context) to understand action from the perspective of the actor (for the sociological relevance of motivated action see Wilson, 1970, p. 698). As for oral narratives, Van Dijk intends them as structural elements of the socia l, with a series of functions not to be restricted to the exchange of information. A narration is a way to bring about a change in the knowledge of the hearer, although it may have additional functions. A story may be told so as to give the hearer an example of what it is sensible to imitate or to avoid, in which case a narrative converts itself into a model of experience (Van Dijk, 1975, p. 286). It may have an emotional function, when the narrator receives praise for the action performed or for his ability in telling the story. In any case, narrating appears not simply as a form of communication but also as a way by which society is reproduced. One may add that sociologically, a normal narrative (so not a simple description of events, but an everyday account of a fractured and re-established order) appears as an instrument of normalization of the unusual (Garnkel, 1967). Hence it is a strong communicative tool by which society constantly reconstructs the sense of its normality.



15

Another plausible denition of narratives refers to the way events are connected together, i.e. to the coherence of the sequence in which they are ordered. Noël Carroll (2001), for example, has tried to identify narratives by concentrating on what he calls the narrative connection, i.e. the specic relation between events and states of affairs which congure a text as narrative. His analysis is explicitly directed to historical and ctional narratives, but it may also be applied to other kinds of text. According to Carroll, a narrative is an interrelation of at least two, and possibly more, events and/or states of affairs which have to be in a signicant connection with one another (Carroll, 2001, p. 120). Two elements are necessary although not sufcient to qualify a text as a narrative: a unied subject and an ordered temporal sequence. An ordered temporal sequence makes for a kind of text which historians call annal ; that is, the simple recording of signicant events in a yearly sequence. A unied subject connected to an implicit ordered temporal sequence is a chronicle which may be better qualied as “[a] discursive representation that (temporally, but non-causally) connects at least two events in the career of a unied subject so that a reliable temporal ordering is retrievable from it (and/or from the context of enunciation)” (ibid., p. 121). Both annals and chronicles are still not, according to Carroll, to be dened as narratives, as they lack a tight connection among events and/or states of affairs (ibid., p. 122). A structural feature is necessary in order to make the sequence of events a proper narration, which Carroll detects in some sort of casual relation (ibid.). By causal relations, a sequence of events in which the rst is sufcient to determine the subsequent in a direct and necessary connection is not what is intended. Rather, Carroll refers to a looser form of causality by which an event may be intended as part of a net of cooperating factors, enabling a state of affairs to come about (ibid., p. 128). The narrative connection, as described by Carroll, is an alternative, philosophical representation of the structural quality of narratives: a narrative is such in so far as it presents events and states of affairs which are temporally ordered, thematically coherent and which have some kind of casual interc onnection. The casual relation is loose, since an event is to be considered as a necessary but not sufcient condition for another event to occur, which makes its consequences unforeseen and the plot open to the unexpected. The openness of the plot is, however, conditioned by the previous events (owing to what has already been narrated, not everything can happen,), which complies with the principle of thematic and logical coherence. As Labov, Van Dijk and Carroll clearly show, a narrative, even in its more elementary manifestation (e.g. oral exposition of an experience) is always more than a sequential presentation of events: it entails a causal explanation of what happened as well as an evaluation of actors and actions. This shows the constructed character of narratives as such: a narrative presupposes a selection of aspects of reality from the perspective of the narrator, which makes any attempt to consider non-ctional narration as objective representation of reality, weak. Having identied the constructed character of narratives (whether ctional or non-ctional) and before turning to the denition of the specic features of


16

literary narratives, it is necessary to summarize which elements are indispensable to viewing a text as narrative. What follows is an attempt at summarizing the fundamental features of narrations: •

•

• 7 1 0 2 y l u J 7 1 6 4 : 9 0 t a 4 5 1 . 9 6 . 7 1 2 . 7 1 1 y b d e d a o l n w o D

•

•

•

Temporality: a narrative text has to do with time, in so far as it has to connect events, so even the most parsimonious attempt at dening a narrative has to take sequentiality into account. Action and events: the most common content in a narrative is action (Van Dijk, 1975) or at least a combination of action and unplanned events (or happenings) (Chatman, 1978, pp. 44-5). Connection among events: events are not only sequentially reported, they are non-randomly interconnected (Toolan, 1988, p. 7), in order to identify signicant relations (for example cause and effect) among everyday happenings and actions (Bruner, 1986, p. 12) Consistency: the interconnected events and actions have to be linked by some principle of coherence. Stories do not simply juxtapose events and actions. Events and actions are organized within a narrative in order to make the evolution of the story in terms of change and transformation plausible (Todorov, 1977, p. 233). Fracture in the taken for granted : in order to be perceived as a narrative, even in its most simple structure, a text has to tell a story of broken and re-established order (Labov and Waletzky, 1967, p. 32; Van Dijk, 1975, p. 289; Toolan, 1988, p. 8) which makes the related events interesting for readers or listeners. Coexistence with other text-modes: although one can hardly imagine a narrative text in which nothing happens, the complexity of a narrative text depends on the fact that other communicative modes are compatible with narration (e.g. description, argumentation, evaluation). So, a narrative text is a combination of other modes of discourse, provided that the narrative mode is predominant (Franzoni, 2010, p. 596).

Two Approaches to Fiction

When we consider literary narratives, the question of their truthfulness is to be taken into account. A literary narrative may be intended as a mode of discourse with no external referents. What is told is ctional, i.e. the output of individual, artistic creation. Yet, on the one hand narratives as such, regardless of their ctional character, may be regarded as the result of a constructive and selective process, by which the representation of reality that they convey may be intended as highly articial; on the other, if ctional narratives make sense, it is in so far as they greatly rely on socially shared knowledge. One may ask oneself: if one assumes that narratives are meaning construction processes, is a neat distinction between ctional (literary in particular) and non-ctional narratives still needed? To answer



17

this question, one may take Walsh as a guideline, when he writes: “I want to grant full force to the claim that all narrative is artice, and in that very restricted sense ctive, but I maintain nonetheless that ctional narrative has a coherently distinct cultural role, and that a distinct concept of ctionality is required to account for this role” (Walsh, 2007, p. 19). The task of this section is to take what Walsh calls ‘a distinct concept of ctionality’ seriously by sketching the chief features of literary narratives as compared to non-literary ones. Is there any specic character of a text which may help us to identify it as ctional? Or should one suppose that any narrative text is such in so far as it possesses a set of well-dened (linguistic, semantic, semiotic, structural) characteristics and that the differences between the ctional and non-ctional are to be located outside the text, in some social convention connected to its actual production and fruition? Both hypotheses have been sustained in the debate about the narrative. John R. Searle (1975) is here assumed to be one of the main supporters of the second hypothesis. In his inuential essay, The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse, Searle proposes a conception of ction as a simulation of referential speech. Searle’s intention is not to distinguish between literary and non-literary texts, his leading distinction being between serious and ctional utterances, where the character of the ctional is clearly dened by opposition (what is not serious, and is hence untrue). The essay deals with the vast number of narratives which have no reference in actual events or characters (e.g. comics or jokes) (ibid., p. 319). The question Searle poses is paradoxical: how is it possible that in ctional discourse the referential rules, attaching words to their meanings, seem to be operating and yet do not actually operate in their normal way? In other words: how is it possible to construct an apparently ordinary discourse about a simulated reality (van Ort, 1998, p. 439)? The logic underlining Searle’s argument is part of a conception of language conceived of as a realistic reproduction of reality (ibid., p. 445). Narratives are chiey made up of a peculiar kind of illocutionary act: assertions, which is to say, acts committing the speaker to the truth. Searle compares a narrative taken from a newspaper and one reproducing a passage from a novel and shows that, whereas the rst extract has to comply with the rule of truthfulness, the second clearly does not (Searle, 1975, pp. 321-4). Of course, even a newspaper article (as well as an oral narrative in an ordinary conversation) may transgress the rule of truthfulness: in that case, it is simply false and its author may be accused of an incorrect behaviour. Fictional narratives, on the contrary, are untrue without any social consequences for their author. A narrative ction may therefore be dened as a text that employs the character of assertiveness while overtly breaking the basic rule of veracity. According to Searle, the fundamental criterion by which to identify a text as ctional is extra-linguistic, in so far as this has to be identied in the intention of its author. When telling or writing a story, the author produces assertive texts which do not comply with the truth as the fundamental condition of assertiveness (ibid., p. 325). To make the paradox of an untrue assertive communication

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plausible, a set of social conventions is presupposed, which makes the expectation of veracity inessential among the audience (ibid., p. 326). Thus ction is not to be understood as a specic mode of discourse, but, as it were, as a parasitic form of communication, based as it is on the simulation of specic speech acts. Indeed, Searle seems to be aware of the relevance of ction, especially of literary narratives and, although his analysis is naïve in places (van Ort, 1998), it sets out the idea of ction as the result of an extra-textual implicit agreement between the author and the audience (Koten, 2012, p. 174). What if one tries to detect the character of literary ctional narratives by assuming that they represent not a simulation of other forms of communication, but a specic mode of discourse? A number of features have been detected by scholars, which are relevant in this regard, in so far as they qualify literary texts as documents of a peculiar type, i.e. documents which, “despite their ctionality … communicate profound truths about life” (Chatman, 1993, p. 13). A relevant approach is structuralist narratology, which proposes a deductive, theoretical perspective as a valid method for detecting the intimate structures which turn a discourse into a narrative. Narrative as a mode of discourse and narration as a social practice may be considered universal (Barthes, 1975, p. 237). Narratology is an attempt to make sense of the enormous variety of empirical forms that narratives may concretely assume. By advocating theoretical reection about the structural elements of narrative, the approach is the exact opposite as compared to the patient empirical labour brought about by Labov (see also Chatman, 1978, p. 18). It is a theoretically oriented quest for order in the bulk of possible empirical variations, based on a dismissal of inductive logic and what it implies: an impossible extensive knowledge of all the different forms that empirical narratives may assume. Roland Barthes (1975), to mention just one of the most inuential deductive analysts of narratives, tries to unveil the inner functioning of a narrative text. Although Barthes’ intention is to sketch the character of narrative as such, it is clear, even at a rst glance, that in his attempt to detect the elements of narration, Barthes has more articulated narratives in mind, literary ction in particular. In his hierarchical model, narratives are organized on three levels: functions, actions and narration. The rst level of the narrative structure is connected with its basic, constitutive elements (ibid., p. 243). Those elements are analytically detectable in so far as they have a relevant function for the narrative discourse (ibid., p. 244). Barthes distinguishes two types of functional units, somewhat overlapping with the distinction, proposed by Chatman (1978, p. 19 ff.), between events and existents: the rst (functions properly) are elements in the story able to reproduce the action ow (the purchase of a gun entails its possible use, for example). The second (indices) are connected to the atmosphere as well as to the physical and psychological description of characters and, although functional to the narrative, are not so to the development of the plot. A narrative constitutes itself as a sequence of nuclei; that is, cardinal functions, e.g. events particularly relevant for the story to progress, and collateral actions and events which, although not essential to



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the plot, enrich and complete the story and keep the attention of the reader alive (Barthes, 1975, p. 249). Action is the second structural level of a narrative: Barthes stresses that a shift has been made by narratology from actors to actions. Indeed, as has been shown by Russian formalists, Propp in particular, a great variety of narratives (especially traditional ones) place action in the foreground, the character being the mere expression of a narrative function. On the contrary, modern literary narratives (the novel in particular) by stressing the psychological component of the story, have given increasing relevance to the character, now narratively treated as an individual endowed with his or her own personality. The Western novel, especially in its golden age (in the 19th century), is often praised for the fact that it is a psychological study of the complex personalities of the characters involved, the protagonist in particular. The shift from actor to action, which Barthes proposes, gives the opportunity to dene a character not in psychological terms, but as an actant that is, only in so far as he participates in a restricted number of typied actions. By making reference to action, narrative theories may, “dene a character by his participation in a sphere of actions, such spheres being limited in number, typical, and subject to classication” (ibid., p. 258).2 The choice to theoretically put action in the foreground is closely linked to the cultural milieu in which Barthes developed his conception of narrative. Being deeply inuenced by structuralism (Greimas, 1966; Todorov, 1969), he aims at detecting the basic, ‘universal’ elements of a story. The ‘sphere of action’ is easier to categorize than the plurality of actors who may perform certain kinds of action. Yet, when one thinks of the sociological relevance of narratives (including literary ones) the analytical shift from actor to action seems to have advantages as well as disadvantages: it may give the opportunity to analyse a narrative text by adopting an aseptic scheme, linking actions to function rather than to subjective motivations (see Cardano, 2011, pp. 259-64, who, by adopting the actant model developed by Greimas analyses qualitative interviews as narratives); the risk is that one may lose access to the complex description of inner motives, feelings and thoughts (what Bruner, 1990, pp. 51-2, calls double landscapes of narratives – one of the reasons for the fascination of the social sciences for narrative texts) in favour of a more technical analysis of the textual elements and their functions. What is relevant, at any rate, is that a conception of narration emerges whose main feature is not mimesis but articiality. A narrative does not represent reality; rather, it shows some enigmatic aspects of it. Roland Barthes writes, “What goes on in a narrative is, from the referential (real) point of view, strictly nothing”. This does not imply that a narrative is devoid of meaning (Barthes, 1975, p. 271). What Barthes is aiming at, is demonstrating that a literary narrative is a meaning construction process, with its own rules and structures, its own temporality and its own conventions, which we naturalize, as we tend to remove the structural 2 The last level analysed by Barthes, the narrational, being the less relevant from a sociological point of view, will not be dealt with here.

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complexity of narrations and perceive them not as cultural processes, but as unproblematic descriptions of referents and their actions in the world (Barthes, 1972, p. 131 ff).

Sketching the Character of Literary Narratives


As a specic text, a narrative is about actions, events and changes (from an initial status x to a nal status y), which is a somewhat articial way of saying that a narrative tells a story. Since a narrative text tells a story, and does so by describing a series of actions or events, its more appropriate dimension is time. Narrative accounts of ordinary experiences respect the sequence in which events actually took place (Labov, 1997). On the contrary, a literary narrative produces a highly articial construction of time. Two dimensions may be distinguished, one connected to the actual temporality of events (story-time), the second linked to the way those events are represented within the narrative (discourse-time) (Chatman, 1993, p. 24). A series of inconsistencies between story-time and discourse-time are typical aspects of the way time is reproduced in literary narratives. In particular, the order of events may be modied, for example through the use of ash-backs and ash-forwards (Genette, 1980; Chatman, 1978, p. 63). Duration is another relevant element: discourse-time may not overlap with story-time (and actually it often does not) in so far as long lapses of time may be synthesized in a sentence or, on the contrary, a single day may occupy a whole novel (Toolan, 1988, p. 55). In a literary narrative, time appears as a construction of the narrator: the natural order of time may be subverted; it may be either compressed or expanded according to the necessities of the narrative process of meaning construction (Barthes, 1975, p. 251). Thus, although action and state-change are the chief elements characterizing a narrative text as such, the way temporality is represented in a novel or a short story follows rules which are strictly literary. As already stated above, literary narratives may contain other text forms, in particular argumentation and description (Chatman, 1993, pp. 7-8). Although ction shares this aspect with other non-ctional narratives (oral accounts, newspaper reports, for example) the combination of the sequence of actions and events and other textual forms has peculiar consequences in the case of literary ction. Description gives the opportunity for a double contextualization of action and events: actions are referred to characters, which may be described in their physical as well as psychological components; actions and events may be referred to settings (natural and human environments) which complete narrative temporality with the dimension of space. Within the perspective of structuralist narratology, both characters (Toolan, 1988, p. 91 ff.) and settings (ibid., p. 103 ff.) have been deprived of any mimetic value, in so far as it seems irrelevant to analyse them in their capacity of representing individuals or milieux, e.g. psychological qualities or environmental characteristics. By rejecting any traditional form of mimetic criticism (including psychoanalytical, sociological, Marxist), both characters and



21

settings have been conceived of as the results of detectable linguistic procedures. Characters have not been intended as representations of psychological traits to be potentially found in actual individuals, but as linguistic artefacts; settings have not been conceived of as representations of actual environments, but as the outputs of well-dened descriptive procedures. Indeed, a diffuse sense of unease has spread towards the structuralist reduction of literary ction to its linguistic functions (Walsh, 2007, 10) and although one may not ignore the constructed character of ctional worlds, there are elements in the way a ctional narrative depicts actions, characters and milieux which may not be simply reduced to their linguistic qualities: they are modelled on our ordinary conceptions of reality and in this they are reality-like (see Rimmon-Kennan, 1983, p. 33 who refers to the quasi-mimetic qualities of the sole characters). Aside from the technical aspects of its structure, a literary narrative comes out of the interplay between ‘pretended assertiveness’ and ‘actual ctitiousness’ which guarantees an unproblematic acceptance of two apparently contradictory aspects: the made-up character of what is reported, and the perceived reality of the ctional construction (including actions, characters, and settings). Thus, the articiality of literary ction (and, one may add, its usefulness as a document) may be better understood by taking into account the results of its ‘structuredness’. One of these results, connected to the co-presence within literary ction of narration and description, is its capacity to create a dual landscape (Bruner, 1990, pp. 51-2); that is, the coexisting possibility of describing both the external landscape of physical objects and the interior landscape of the characters’ feelings, thoughts and motivations. Indeed, what would be rejected as unnatural in an everyday narrative is assumed as normal in a novel or a short story: the direct access to the interior complexity of the actors. The dual landscape of ction implies that “ … events and actions in a putative ‘real world’ occur concurrently with mental events in the consciousness of the protagonists” (ibid., p. 51). The combination of the interior and the exterior landscapes seems plausible to the reader not only as a consequence of the articial pact between the author and the reader, but also as a result of the reality-like character of literary narratives. A thought (or an emotion) can have no reference outside the pretended identity of the narrated characters: it is, evidently, a construction of the narrator and yet it can be acknowledged by the reader as compatible with what he knows about reality. From a technical point of view, the possibility of accessing the inner complexity of the characters’ psychology is a qualifying feature of ctionality. Only in literary narratives is it possible to describe someone else’s inner processes (including decisions taken and motives to act), within a convention which allows the narrator to penetrate the black box of the character ’s individuality. Of course, the character’s individuality is the author’s construction, yet the reader has the impression that he may share in the otherwise inaccessible world of the intimate thoughts and feelings of other (albeit ctional) human beings. In everyday narratives, on the contrary, one can describe one’s own inner feelings

22



and motives or deal with someone else’s only de relato (in so far as one has been told about them) (Van Dijk, 1976, 41-3). The conventional possibility to accede the characters’ interior being may be intended as the output of another feature of ctional narratives: the conceptual distinction between the author and the narrator (Genette, 1990). Whereas in factual narratives the author and the narrator necessarily overlap, this is not the case in ctional narrations (ibid., p. 764 ff.). The supposed objectivity and truthfulness of non-ctional narratives (e.g. oral reports of personal experiences, historical accounts, journalistic reports etc.) are chiey to be imputed to the coincidence of author and narrator: in this case, “the author assumes full responsibility for the assertion of his narrative and, consequently, does not grant autonomy to any narrator” (ibid., p. 765). The contrary holds for literary narratives, where the narrator is intended as a narrative function rather than an identiable social actor and, in so far as he does not overlap with the author, the latter is not subdued to the rule of truthfulness. By being logically separated from the author, the narrator (no matter which technical form he has been given by the author) has the textual function of unveiling aspects of the plot (incidents and events) and aspects of the personalities of the characters which would otherwise remain unknown to the readers. Narratologists have adopted a series of distinctions (e.g. extradiegetic/ intradiegetic; internal/external; intrusive/detached) to dene the different roles the narrator may assume within a literary ction (see Toolan, 1988, p. 82; Genette, 1990; Chatman, 1993, p. 91). Indeed, the narrative function of the narrator has assumed in time a wide variety of different technical features, all related to the attempt to make the conventional access to the interior landscape more plausible and realistic. In more general terms, a process was set forth, which Wayne C. Booth (1961, pp. 3-20) once effectively described as a transition from telling to showing. By ‘telling’ one should understand a wide range of variations, from the omniscient narrator of classical ction to more recent techniques (character-narrator or witness-narrator, for example), whose main characteristic is that the reader may perceive his presence: he interferes with the story, makes ethical comments on characters and events, or is often implausibly aware of hidden aspects of the related events and characters (Chatman, 1988, p. 91). By ‘showing’ Booth refers to the opposite stance, related to a more objective and detached narrator, who is now devoid of any perceivable presence, his function, similar to a camera, being reduced to showing actors, events and settings from a peculiar point of view (ibid., p. 92). The process from telling to showing may be intended as a quest for realism, an attempt to produce a more impersonal and objective representation of reality, the unexpected consequence of which may be, as Ricoeur puts it, the end of our capacity to narrate (Ricoeur, 1985, p. 10).


23

Fictional Worlds or mimesis?


Literary narratives open up a number of opportunities which are closed to other kinds of narrations. The dual landscape as described by Bruner is a relevant example, connected with the narrator as a specic discourse function. It gives the opportunity to describe the complex reality of characters, w ith their psychological, cultural and ethical implications. It creates a world of interplaying levels open to a great variety of possible interpretations (including the sociological). Yet a question emerges here, connected to the use of ctional narratives as a way of better understanding the non-ctional world: Are literary narratives independent constructions; that is to say, possible worlds, with no contact with the actual world, or is there some detectable relation, which justies the use of ctional material as showing something about the world? It is by now clear that no naïve conception of literature as simply reecting reality is plausible. This idea, based on a referential conception of language, made Searle puzzle over the very possibility of a ‘pretended assertiveness’. Literary narratives are not simply to be conceived of as simulations of assertive texts. They are texts endowed with a constructive power, which results in the creation of alternative worlds. Indeed, more than representing reality, they construct a ctive world which did not exist prior to the process of artistic production, and for this, are to be distinguished from descriptive texts: … constructional texts are sharply differentiated from descriptive texts. Descriptive texts are representations of the actual world, of a world existing prior to any textual activity. In contrast, constructional texts are prior to their worlds; ctional worlds are dependent on, and determined by, constructional texts. As textually determined constructs, ctional worlds cannot be altered or cancelled, while the versions of the actual world provided by descriptive texts are subject to constant modications and refutations. (Doležel, 1988, p. 489)

By contrasting the idea of literary narratives as mimesis (i.e. a referential representation of the world out there) Lubomír Doležel (1988, 1998) has analysed the product of artistic poiesis by adopting the philosophical concept of the ‘possible world’. This concept has been developed within contemporary philosophical thought as a way to solve internal problems of modal logic. When applied to the eld of narrative, this concept acquires specic features: “Fictional worlds,” Doležel writes, “are possible worlds in that they are ensembles of non-actualized possible particulars – persons, states, events and so on. Hamlet is not a man to be found in the actual world; he is a possible person inhabiting an alternative world, the ctional world of Shakespeare’s play” (Doležel, 1998, pp. 787-8). Fictional worlds are as-if worlds endowed with an authenticity of their own, connected to the world-constructing force of the text, whose creative power, “calls the world into existence and determines its structures” (ibid., p. 790). This constructive power ( poiesis) legitimizes the autonomy of literary narratives, which

24



are not intended as mirror-representations of specic aspects of reality, but, even in their more realistic versions, as constructions of alternative worlds, characterized by ctional references (ibid., p. 788, see also Walsh, 2007, p. 32). Sophisticated as the concept of the narrative world may be, it see ms to exclude any use of narrative contents as a way to understand the world of human interaction which, on the contrary, the concept of mimesis is able to legitimize. A possible alternative to both a reduction of narrative to its own internal references and a naïve conception of narration as a form of direct access to the world of facts is Paul Ricoeur’s analysis of time and narrative. The work of Ricoeur is so articulated that I will not even attempt to summarize it. As specic aspects of Ricoeur’s complex reasoning will be dealt with elsewhere in this book, it will sufce here to remark some aspects of his conception of narrative, in particular those linked to literary ction as a peculiar kind of mimesis. According to Ricoeur, narrative is the imitation (mimesis) of actions. Besides its mimetic capacities, a narrative is also a form of an understanding of reality which may be compared to metaphors: By means of the plot, goals, causes, and chance are brought together within the temporal unity of a whole and complete action. It is this synthesis of the heterogeneous that brings narrative close to metaphor. In both cases, the new thing—the as yet unsaid, the unwritten— springs up in language. Here a living metaphor, that is, a new pertinence in the predication, there a feigned plot, that is, a new congruence in the organization of the events. (Ricoeur, 1984, p. ix)

Through narratives, we give sense to a variety of apparently scattered elements, making a coherent action out of them, in a process similar to the connection of apparently non-connectible elements which constitute metaphors. Thus narra tives are meaning constitutive processes through which a synthetic understanding is reached, consisting in, “grasping the operation that unies into one whole and complete action the miscellany constituted by the circumstances, ends and means, initiatives and interactions, the reversals of fortune, and all the unintended consequences issuing from human action” (ibid., p. x). In Chapter 2, I will analyse Ricoeur’s idea, developed in his monumental trilogy on Time and Narrative (1984, 1985, 1988), of narrative understanding as a three-phase process, connected to three different concepts of mimesis. According to Ricoeur, the construction of plots ( Mimesis2) is rooted in our pre-understanding of human action ( Mimesis1) which, after being assimilated through the act of reading ( Mimesis3) may retroact on our comprehension of everyday reality (Simms, 2003, p. 86). These brief hints show that Ricoeur’s conception of mimesis has nothing in common with any narrowminded idea of narrative mirroring reality. Mimesis is a hermeneutic process, in which narrative ( Mimesis2) has a mediating function between the everyday premises of understanding and the redenition of shared meanings consequent on the interpretative moment of reception (Ricoeur, 1984, pp. 64-5). Mimesis2 overlaps with the process of emplotment, i.e. the construction of a logical uniformity in the heterogeneity and incoherence of human action. (Ricoeur



25

writes of a synthesis of the heterogeneous brought about by plot [Ricoeur, 1984, p. 7, 84].) According to Ricoeur, both historical and literary narratives share this capacity to create coherence and consistency from a variety of scattered elements. The distinction between ctional and non-ctional, therefore, is not to be detected in some sort of structural difference between narration and historical discourse: historical accounts are narration, in so far as they put events together, within a cause-effect relation (Simms, 2003, p. 87). Yet there is an intrinsic difference between narrative causality and historical causality. The rst is the result of the sole emplotment (the selection of events and characters which are coherently put together in the process of narrating). The second is the emplotment connected to a selective process whereby an historian puts facts together on the basis of evidence. Fictional narratives create imagined realities, somewhat autonomous from external referents, which is what distinguishes history from ction. Autonomy implies the construction of a ctional world thanks to a set of rules and conventions which makes the audience aware that they are entering a ctive realm. Does autonomy mean complete separation? Ricoeur’s critique of structuralist narratology legitimates a negative answer to the question. Indeed, although such authors as Propp and Greimas give relevant contributions to a formal analysis of narratives, their revolutionary approaches, “end up by eliminating history to the prot of structure” (Ricoeur, 1985, p. 31). Yet, a narrative is not simply the output of rules of composition: it is endowed with a telos, which justies a story in terms of its moral value (Dowling, 2011, p. 44). Even for Ricoeur, a narrative is a world on its own, yet in a different sense as compared to structuralism. Its main function is to give sense to the discordant experience of lived temporality and the incoherence of everyday life. Since it gives structure a nd coherence to our experience, it “cannot be the simple imitation of life, in the sense of mirroring or representing it. Narrative mimesis for Ricoeur is not reproduction but production, invention. It may borrow from life but it transforms it” (Carr, 1991, p. 170). Thus narration is the result of an aware construction ( poiesis), which congures it as a highly articial process. A narrative presentation of events implies a description of reality with logical as well as formal rules (e.g. the Aristotelian rules). It entails a conventional use of tenses (past tenses in particular) which have the function of signalling to the reader that he is entering a ctive world (Ricoeur, 1985, pp. 61-99). Moreover, a narrative implies a telos; that is, “a movement to a destined or predetermined end” (Dowling, 2011, p. 9), and thus a development, known to the narrator and unknown to the reading public. The narrator resembles, as it were, the role of God, in so far as the development of the plot is to him totus simul , as the universe to the divinity: he knows how events in the plot will evolve, although we, as readers, may experience them in the form of recognizing the unexpected (ibid., p. 9). What is relevant in Ricoeur is that all the elements as sketched above (past, narrative temporality, narrator) are both part of the structural characteristics of ctional narratives and the prerequisites of a meaning construction process which is neglected by structuralist narratology. A narrative, Ricoeur suggests, is much

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Fiction and Social Reality (Mariano Longo)

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