Opacity, Fiction and Narratives of the Self

There is no need to start with a definition. That can come later and the difficulties explored. At the beginning, it is sufficient to think of narratives as stories. This can be helpful because there is much less pressure to find a theory of stories. Stories vary immensely from one to another, in kind and quality, in length and complexity, in genres — novels, histories, poems, songs — and in degrees of seriousness, from bedtime stories to the Story of Art or the Story of Civilisation. But on the whole, we know a story when we see it (or hear it). To seek to define "story" could seem unduly pedantic. In contrast, "narrative" has become a technical term used across multiple academic disciplines and also in journalism, politics and elsewhere (the "narrative of welfare", the "narrative of human rights"). It even has its own branch of enquiry: narratology. As such, it cries out for a definition because it is far from clear what is meant in these different contexts: narratologists themselves disagree. It might well turn out that there is no single concept that spans every usage. The view I shall advance in this book is that the best way to proceed in so complex a topic is to settle on a common core of meaning that is minimal in its commitments and then account for differences as they emerge in terms of enrichments of the core for different purposes and in different practices. That common core need be little more than the intuitive notion of a story. What is that notion? Minimally, just this: the representation of two or more events, real or imaginary, from a point of view, with some degree of structure and connectedness.

In fact, the focus in what follows will be less on trying to nail down a definition and more on finding satisfactory ways of drawing distinctions between items that all would agree are narratives: those of history, philosophy, biography or the novel, for example, as well as those simple conversational narratives that animate social interactions and those more elusive narratives that individuals create for themselves to help make sense of their lives, perhaps to justify actions, enliven memories or aggrandise mundane existence. Distinctions can be important here because the purposes, achievements and norms of evaluation can differ radically in these contexts and to blur boundaries that matter can have serious consequences both in understanding and at a disciplinary and even personal level. Just how the appropriate distinctions should be drawn can be a subject of contention, in particular that between "fiction" and "nonfiction". A central aim of this book is to propose a basis for how to draw lines here that are not arbitrary or gratuitous.

The place where a definition of "narrative" might be useful is not in drawing distinctions between narratives but in distinguishing narratives from modes of discourse that are not narratives. Again, it is only in some cases that disputes might occur. Historians can agree that annals that merely list facts by date are not examples of "narrative history" (White 1980), and no one supposes that botanical classifications, mathematical proofs or Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus are narratives. But sometimes what is and is not a narrative is not so clear. As we shall see, in discussions of personal narratives or narratives that supposedly shape or constitute our identity as selves, there is unclarity about just what counts as a narrative. Can lives be narratives? Can thinking be a narr