What Is Narrative: Ricoeur, Bakhtin, and Process Approaches

What is Narrative?: Ricoeur, Bakhtin, and Process Approaches, by Jenny Rankin

Philosophy and Cultural Inquiry, Swinburne University, P.O. Box 218, Hawthorn, Vic., 3122 Australia

Abstract

Centuries of indifference to narrative have, according to some insightful writers, culminated in a breakdown or crisis in narrative, characterised by a reduced significance of literary works and by a fragmented temporal organisation of people’s lives. Yet in the twentieth century new academic interest in narrative emerged, particularly through the works of Paul Ricoeur, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Mikhail Bakhtin. Building on their works we may now posit narrative as a triad of the narrative work or artefact, the narrative mode of consciousness, and the relation between these two, characterised as communication. This re-conceptualisation reveals the ongoing, unfolding, temporal, and creative, or in other words, the processual nature of narrative. It also allows us to see that narrative is fundamental to other human processes, such as those of dialogue, intentionality, consciousness, knowledge, culture, community, reality construction, and, ultimately, personal identity. Narrative can now be regarded as primordial to all human affairs and the source of what MacIntyre terms ‘the unity of a life.’

Keywords

Narrative, consciousness, communication, Ricoeur, MacIntyre, Bakhtin, process

Text

Over the last few centuries narrative has been slowly emerging from the mists of philosophical denigration and neglect to reveal itself as a process primordial to human affairs. Narrative is gradually coming to be comprehended as the ground in which, the relations through which and the vehicle by which humans develop knowledge of themselves and the world they inhabit. It can now be seen that human agency, intentionality, actions, perceptions, and experiences are conceived, understood and mediated by cultural and personal narratives, and that the struggle for recognition is played out between humans in the narrative field. Through a process of ongoing creation and recreation, a continual dialectical movement between memory and anticipation, and the relations between humans that it facilitates, narrative brings forth the human processes of knowledge, culture, tradition, truth, reality, consciousness and identity.

Unlike time – which has always preoccupied philosophers with its thorough pervasiveness, ubiquity, and paradoxical universality (Wood, 1991) – narrative has not so much perplexed philosophers through the ages as it has been almost routinely denigrated and neglected (Gare, 2002). This is a curious state of affairs, since it is only through narrative that we comprehend and express time and, indeed, all thought. Nevertheless, narrative has often and for long periods been dismissed as a realm of mere fiction or entertainment, as a representation or imitation of reality, and as an artefact arising from an otherwise idle human consciousness – rather than constitutive of consciousness itself. It has been, and in many spheres is still subordinated variously and often concurrently to reason, to mathematics and philosophy, to objects and forms, to the ‘real’ and the eternal, to instrumental rationality and to science. In short, narrative has been unwittingly relegated to the role of describing being rather than to creating, expressing and unfolding the possibilities of becoming.

This is not to say that narrative has gone out of existence. Rather it is to say that the central role of the process of narrative to other human processes of thought, knowledge and reality, consciousness and identity, has been largely unrecognised or denied, and that both narrative and the other human processes it brings forth are impoverished by such denial. This denial has prompted some to speak of a crisis in literary novels, in the arts generally, and to a breakdown in the temporal organisation of people’s lives – a crisis otherwise known as the ‘postmodern condition’. Yet from this crisis has arisen a renewed interest in narrative, in the form of semiotics, linguistics, and narratology– a seemingly belated study of what many perceive we are losing. This renewed interest has largely confined itself to a systematic study of cultural artefacts – to stories as works, products, or texts. However, from this renewed interest several theorists have emerged who seem to be moving towards a process view of narrative.

One of the most prominent theorists to arise from this new interest is Paul Ricoeur, whose three-volume work Time and Narrative (1994-5) has received world-wide acclaim. He has given us what is regarded as the most complete characterisation of narrative to date. It is a characterisation that sees narrative as the basic structure of our experience of time, and that posits a three-stage process of mimesis, from which stems narrative identity and all human creativity. With the presentation of these ideas Ricoeur sets a program for others to follow. Yet Ricoeur’s ideas are not without problems, and three of these problems will be examined here, especially in regard to the work of David Carr, Mikhail Bakhtin and Alasdair MacIntyre. While none of these problems is insoluble, still they point to a need to re-think and re-work Ricoeur’s three-stage mimesis, and his idea of narrative identity, taking into account the processual nature of narrative and its intimate and inextricable links to other human processes of identity, knowledge, consciousness and reality.

To illustrate the processual nature of narrative I would like at this point to propose a three-way approach to the question: What is a narrative? The first is to consider narrative as a cultural artefact, a work or text or product that can take many forms but which has the ultimate purpose of telling or unfolding a story. The second approach is to consider narrative as the fundamental mode of human consciousness and self-consciousness. The third approach is to consider the relation between narrative as product and narrative as mode of consciousness. This relation may be characterised as communicative, and as such is the ultimate purpose of language and narrative. Each of these three aspects of narrative is dependent on the other; no one of them could exist without the other two, yet of the three, narrative relation is the most important. From this relation it can be posited that narrative is an ongoing temporal process from which can emerge other processes, of dialogue, intentionality, consciousness of the world and of other, conceptions of temporality beyond that of lived experience, and ultimately personal identity.

I.NARRATIVE AS STORY OR PRODUCT

Generally and perhaps intuitively we know what narrative is: A story – factual, fictitious, or somewhere between the two – that is usually told verbally or in writing, but may be expressed in other symbolic systems, such as those of art, of sign language, or of gesture. We may conceptualise a narrative work as any form of telling, where a telling involves a teller or narrator, an audience, and a subject. The subject concerns the arrangement of elements – actions, events, characters, experiences, and situations – into an unfolding temporal configuration that makes sense of or gives meaning to these elements. This unfolding is a temporal ordering but is not necessarily represented in the strict chronological order in which the events actions or experiences actually occurred. As Patrick O’Neill (1996) comments, narrative is a “…purely discursive system of presentation…[and in this sense all narrative]…is in principle fictional to begin with.” (p. 15). A story is defined, almost unanimously, as a synthesising of heterogeneous elements; a synthesis in which a beginning, middle, and end are construed, where each element and each stage contribute to the whole, and where each are resolved to produce ‘closure.’ To this extent, it might be argued, all telling has some degree of the fictional about it, since it brings together parts (events, characters, actions, situations or circumstances) that seem otherwise unrelated, into a comprehensible unity or whole that did not have prior existence. To the extent that scientific explanations, histories, or critiques are syntheses of unrelated parts they all stories and all contain a degree of the fictional.

Most theorists, including Paul Ricoeur and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, treat the words ‘narrative’ and ‘story’ as synonymous. Thomas Leitch (1986), however, makes a distinction between story and narrative, referring to the closure, the framework or structure of story as its ‘promise.’ A story, he suggests, may be judged good or poor according to how well it fulfils its promise. For Leitch story is but one form of narrative – he intimates that some narratives no longer constitute story when removed from their original context, that some narratives are potential stories waiting to be fleshed out, and that some are never stories because they remain open-ended. Thus we might see the project of science, for example, or social formations, as ongoing or open-ended narratives, constituted by stories but not stories in themselves. Leitch’s ideas seem to be analogous to those of Bakhtin, who talks of ‘utterance’ or ‘text’ to cover all those things Leitch would call narrative.

However, this distinction between story and narrative is not as clear as Leitch would have us believe. It often occurs that an element of one story – a statement, an exclamation, an expletive, a gesture – is taken out of its original context, but this is not to say that it is now context-less. On the contrary, we might contend that the element takes on a new significance as it becomes an element in another telling, a different story. David Carr (1991), drawing on the work of Husserl, argues that there is nothing presented to human consciousness that does not already have a structure similar to that of narrative. Every event, action, or experience, at least, is perceived as having a beginning, a middle and an end, and to unfold over time. They are not received as potential stories but as stories in and of themselves. Moreover, each event, action, or experience is composed of a series of smaller constituent events, actions or experiences, and in turn is part of a larger series of events, actions, or experiences. This accords with Rimmon-Kenan’s idea that “…any single event may be decomposed into a series of mini events and intermediary states…[and] a vast number of events may be subsumed under a single event-title.” (1989, p. 15).

In this sense of narrative we see that it is ubiquitous, limitless, and applicable to everything that humans encounter. As Barthes (1987) states: “The narratives of the world are numberless. Narrative is first and foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed amongst different substances – as though any material were fit to receive man’s stories. Able to be carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting…stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news items, conversation. …[N]arrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative. Narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself.” (p. 79). Of all academic disciplines, literary theory is overtly the most concerned with narrative as story, and it generally treats narrative as a product, one that can be critiqued and repeated, whether in isolation from its origins of production or as one of the greater body of such narratives. This product conception of narrative leads naturally enough to efforts to describe identifiable structures of narrative story that can be diagrammed. The Freytag pyramid (Ong, 1988) is one such diagrammatic description, which finds popularity in both literary circles and in psychology. Freytag suggested that story has a typical climactic linear plot, “…an upward slope followed by a downward slope…[in which] an ascending action builds tension, rising to a climactic point, …and which is followed by denouement or untying…” (Ong, p. 142). Yet even within the literary world this is a constricted notion of narrative structure, outmoded in the realm of the novel since the works of Flaubert and Cervantes, who introduce greater degrees of complexity than can be accounted for by a two-dimensional pyramid. This and other such linear models fail to account for the structure of stories arising from purely oral cultures, or for the narratives of science, of history, of art, of the deaf, or indeed of everyday life.

Most theorists, however, hang onto to the idea that stories are structured. Carr suggests the loosest and perhaps therefore the most adequate structure. His idea is that story construes a temporal ordering or configuration, of beginning, middle, and end, which unfolds over time and stands out from the background; that it describes a subject, a complex experience, action, or event; and that it involves a telling, occurring between a teller and an audience.

Within literary theory the idea of narrative as an inherently structured text or product – as story – has led to a number of differing explanations and analytical methods. Structuralism arises from this conception of narrative, and in turn gives rise to post-structuralism, deconstruction, and a resurgence of interest in phenomenology and hermeneutics; mainly because of its limitations. Structuralism, according to Terry Eagleton (1983) and David Carr, is not concerned with the content or the meaning of narratives – assuming that textual narrative can be intrinsically meaningful – or their relation to things external to the text, but only with internal relations; relations between the apparently interchangeable elements within the narrative work. For structuralists there is no continuity between art and life. Art is envisioned as structured, life as unstructured and chaotic. Moreover, structuralism cannot deal with the temporal nature of narrative, its unfolding over time or its internal treatment of time. Structuralists, rather, treat narrative as “…an object in space rather than a movement in time.” (Eagleton, p. 116). Since narrative is, for them, an atemporal object it cannot adequately or satisfactorily account for historical change, or for the changed conditions from which different cultural literary productions come forth. Eagleton finds that structuralism exhibits a ‘prudish’ evasion of value-judgements, and therefore cannot distinguish a good piece of literary work from a bus ticket (p. 122). Structuralism, it seems, takes narrative product to the extremities of atomistic and instrumental abstraction.

Structuralism aside, there remains dissension among literary theorists regarding what constitutes narrative – whether it is the body of literary works that are the stuff of literary studies, or individual examples from this body; the recounting of events that fit into a particular form or structure, or a diversity of such structures; whether significance and meaning are to be found inherent in the work, or in active engagement with the work, or whether the work is itself a product of a meaning-making process.

Yet such questions tend to mask the narrative composition of literary theory’s own critiques. They obscure the notion that a story is only a story in its telling – that it unfolds over time. Their methods of analysis exclude the underlying importance of the narrative mode of human thought, conceptions, and activity – to human self-consciousness and consciousness of existence itself. And since literary theory “…is careful to maintain the distinction between the inside of the text and its outside.” (Ricoeur, 1991, p. 26) it evades the function and intention of narrative, to communicate meaning and possibilities.

II.NARRATIVE AS MODE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Despite the appropriation of the term ‘narrative’ by literary theorists to describe novelistic story, we must here consider narrative as a broader realm, one in which, as Barbara Hardy suggests, “…we dream…daydream… remember, anticipate, hope despair, believe, doubt, plan revise, criticise, construct, gossip, learn, hate and love by narrative…” (cited in MacIntyre, 1984, p. 211). Although it is presupposed in the previous section, we hear or read very little of narrative as our mode of consciousness and perception of the world. While this is not the place for a full dissertation on the nature of consciousness and perception a few points of view will clarify what is meant by ‘narrative mode of consciousness.’ In this role we might argue that narrative both shapes and informs our knowledge – of ourselves as temporal and social beings, and of the world – and is this knowledge.

Paul Ricoeur suggests, “a life is no more than a biological phenomenon as long as it has not been interpreted.” (Ricoeur, 1991, pp. 27-8). His work has had resounding effects on the theoretical approaches to and investigations into the nature of narrative. Of all his ideas, it is perhaps his reworking of Aristotle’s mimesis, into a three-stage process, that is most widely known and cited, and most contentious. His stages are mimesis1, in which the world is received to perception in a prefigured, pre-narrative or semantic form; mimesis2, in which the pre-narrative reception is configured into narrative form by ‘emplotment’; and mimesis3, the process by which the narrative transfigures our ideas of that world. This mimetic representation is not ‘the world,’ nor an imitation of the world, but a new creation that allows us to comprehend the world. And of these three stages, the first receives most attention, is of concern here, and therefore deserves a fuller description.

By prefiguration Ricoeur means that the world is symbolically prefigured for humans, that our reception of the world is pre-narrative, and that we understand the world “…because it is already articulated in signs, rules and norms; it is always symbolically mediated.” (1991, p. 28). For Ricoeur all human experience is prefigured semantically and linguistically; we understand the semantics of action even before these actions are retold. Ricoeur suggests that human lived or social reality is mediated by symbolic representations, which are waiting for interpretation. Human being-in-the-world is, accordingly, irreducibly linguistic (DiCenso, 1990). Ricoeur is not suggesting that thoughts and actions are always and already narrative but that they are pre-narrative. The process of turning semantic understanding into narrative is the second stage of mimesis, the stage of ‘emplotment’ or configuration. For Ricoeur narrative does not emerge until pre-narrative linguistic and semantic understanding has been translated, or configured, by emplotment. This suggests that Ricoeur’s idea of emplotment is a ‘magical’ creative process – that narrative is a construct invented or imposed by humans on the spur of each moment of description, explanation or telling. But Ricoeur’s analysis raises a few problems.

Perhaps, as the phenomenologists Husserl and Merleau-Ponty argue, perception is already a means of interpreting the world we encounter and is therefore always already narrative. And if, as Ricoeur suggests we are receiving the world semantically, then we are already ordering the world in our very perception of it. Symbolic, linguistic, or semantic understanding already suggests an understanding that relates elements together, that unfolds over time, and that has already been told and received – that has, in short, a narrative structure and a history. Carr proposes that humans are intimately and inevitably connected to their historical past. This past gives definition to our everyday lives as the ground of our present-as-experienced, and for conceptions of the world and conceptions of self and others. It is a ‘pre-thematic background awareness’ which ‘pre-figures’ cognition. History “…serves as the horizon and background for our everyday experience.” (Carr, p. 4). And while the narrative nature of history has been disputed, Carr is suggesting that history follows the same structures as narrative – of identifying beginnings, middles and ends, of turning a chronological succession into a configured sequence.

Bakhtin applies himself to the signs, symbols, and words of human consciousness, and finds that no words and no symbols are neutral. “No natural phenomena has ‘meaning,’ only signs (including words) have meaning. ” (1986, p. 113). He finds that signs, symbols and words are given their sense and meaning through dialogical processes:

“The word (or in general any sign) is interindividual. Everything that is said, expressed, is located outside the ‘soul’ of the speaker and does not belong to him. The word cannot be assigned to a single speaker. The author (speaker) has his own inalienable right to the word, but the listener also has his rights, and those whose voices are heard in the word before the author comes upon it also have their rights (after all, there are no words that belong to no one). The word is a drama in which three characters participate…” (1986, pp. 121-2).

The signs, symbols, rules, and norms of our experience are already mediated by the narratives through which we have come to know them – we already have a historical and narrative knowledge of them. Thus if the world is already and always received semantically, the need to transform this understanding into narrative begins to look superfluous.

Carr, too, finds that the world as received to perception already has a narrative structure. He turns to the phenomenologist Husserl to explain this idea. Husserl suggests that memory plays an important role in maintaining an ongoing consciousness of things as temporal objects, of things that stay the same and endure, or of things that change and thus constitute an event. Consciousness of an event, an action, or an experience takes into account its succession, the ‘just previousness’ that separates memory of this thing from memory of other things. And akin to this memory is anticipation of the immediate future, of how the event is expected to unfold. Husserl calls these two functions ‘retention’ and ‘protention’. The ‘field of occurrence’ consists of the taking together of both past and future horizons, which consciousness spans. An event is not perceived as an atemporal occurrence but is experienced as the retention of the past and the protention of the future which constitute the event in the present. For Carr the organising of events into succession, into story or narrative form, is not fictional but a true representation of human perception.

Additionally, as Carr finds, Ricoeur’s conception of narrative, and particularly of mimesis1, reflects the structuralism that he is seeking to reject. Ricoeur, at first appearance, seems to run counter to the structuralist discontinuity between the ordered realm of art and the chaotic reality of life. However his idea of pre-figuration is merely a mitigation of this stance. Ricoeur’s pre-figuration is not narrative structure, but something between it and the discordance, supposed by structuralism, of discontinuity between the chaos of lived experience and the imposed narrative order of art. For Ricoeur, only plot heals this discordance, bringing harmony and something new to the world by means of language. “Instead of describing the world, it re-describes it.” (Carr, p. 15), a ‘seeing-as,’ or ‘as if’ rather than a ‘seeing’ or an ‘as.’ According to Carr’s reading of Ricoeur “‘[t]he ideas of beginning, middle, and end are not taken from experience: They are not traits of real action but effects of poetic ordering.’…A story redescribes the world, that is, it describes it as if it were what, presumably, in fact it is not.” (Carr, p. 15).

Thus, for humans the world as encountered cannot be, as Ricoeur supposes, pre-narrative. To be pre-narrative it would have to be pre-memory and pre-consciousness. Before narrative there is instinct, but ours is more than an instinctual existence. Philosophers and psychologists alike find that there are no human instincts that survive infancy, no automatic behaviours that are not controlled and/or mediated by social ‘signs, rules and norms’ – by social narrative. These signs, rules, and norms are couched in narrative, conceived and received by narrative consciousnesses, and reproduced and refigured in narrative communication. Although we might hear the echoes of this instinctual existence in some stories or explanations, such as the utilitarian explanation of what it is to be human, still the pleasures we are supposed to maximise and the aversions we minimise are suggested and mediated by narrative.

If consciousness is narrative in nature, thought, too, must be framed in narrative. As Bell (1990) suggests, narrative is a subliminal and primordial process of shaping thought that occurs at deeper levels than those planes of reason and evidence. With the broader definitions of narrative being suggested here – narrative as work or production, and narrative as mode of consciousness, such that perceptions are always and already mediated by narrative – with these broader conceptions it seems that Ricoeur’s pre-narrative world is not the world that humans encounter or inhabit.

Yet even accepting the notion of narrative as the fundamental mode of consciousness does not explain how consciousnesses communicate with each other, how ideas and thoughts are generated and transmitted. To suspend the analysis of narrative here is to invite ideas of a narcissistic and egoistic self, of fragmentation of identity since it is not connected to the moderating influence of others, and of the individualism that seems to predominate advanced capitalistic societies today. The narrative consciousness itself is not concerned with morality and ethics, with the struggle for recognition, both of self and for other, until it connects with other such consciousnesses. Thus, a simple acceptance of narrative as thus far explicated masks the idea that self-consciousness can only arise from connection with others, that identity is constituted through the reflections we see of ourselves in others.

III.NARRATIVE AS COMMUNICATION

Thus the third and most important aspect proposed for consideration is the relation between narrative as work or product and narrative as mode of consciousness. The relation is multifaceted, forging links and relations between the author, the work and the audience; between individual audience members; and between various authors, various works and various audiences. As Bakhtin suggests of any relations – any study of the ordering of parts into a whole, or any architectonics – the relations between the narrative work and narrative consciousnesses are “…never static , but always in the process of being made or unmade.” (Holquist, 1991, p. 29). These relations, as suggested earlier, may be characterised as communication, the essence of which, as with any act, is conscious or unconscious intentionality. We are agents in the narratives we produce, interact with and use to communicate.

Not only is there an intended meaning in the narrative product – the expression of ideas, criticisms, feelings, actions or stories – there is also conscious, quasi-conscious, and unconscious intention in the act of communicating that message; to respond, to speak and be heard, to connect to others, to interact, and to recognise self in actions, to gain recognition from others, and to come to some recognition of the intentions of others. The narrative work is the product of an intentional creative act of a narrative consciousness. The work is not possible without its author, and is always the result of some purpose. Thus to deny authorship of a work, and the circumstances of its production, is to deny the purpose of the work – to communicate.

There is a relation between the narrative product and the primary consciousness, the author, in which each make claims on each other. The work and the author are intimately linked in the act of creativity. The work is the result of a plan, the realisation of that plan, and the interaction and struggle between these two (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 104). In the process of its realisation the plan is open to reconsideration and revision. In its realisation the work is a testament to the author’s intention. The author, through the work, makes claims to truth, morality, and worth – the work reveals something of these claims to the author, reflecting back the author’s intentions and how well or otherwise they have been realised. The author creates the work that, in its creation, affects the author.

The narrative work is re-created and re-worked in its reception by a secondary narrative consciousness. Ricoeur finds of fictional stories that the composition of a narrative work “…is not completed in the text but in the reader…[or] more precisely; the sense or the significance of a narrative stems from the intersection of the world of the text and the world of the reader.” (1991, p. 26). Narrative fiction, in other words, can refigure and transfigure life. The reader moves into the implicit universe, the horizons of experience of the text, in imagination, comparing that universe with her own real or lived (yet already narrative-mediated) experience of the universe. Something of the author and the author’s world and intention are transmitted to the receiver, and transforms the receiver’s understanding. In engaging with the work the receiver and the work are transfigured; the receiver is taken into and re-works the universe of the work, synthesising it with previous horizons of expectation and experience, and thus expanding those horizons. The engaged receiver writes herself into the work as that work unfolds in her consciousness over time. She creates a framing narrative for the received narrative, a frame of critique or evaluation. She brings the ideas of author to life, at once receiving and transforming them, and the author brings the receiver’s imagination alive through new horizons the work presents. Narrative relations allow individuals to become more than the products of their upbringing and circumstances, more than the conditions of their existence.

Thus two consciousnesses meet through the vehicle of the narrative product. The work is both a meeting place and a meeting (Winterson, 2002), a collision of consciousnesses in which both the receiver’s own consciousness and the narrative product are transformed. The work becomes a message and mediation, a vehicle of ideas or information or story. And the narrative work cannot be encountered as a monologue. As Bakhtin suggests, any narrative work, any utterance or story, stands in relation, both temporal and spatial, to all other narratives, utterances, or stories, as responses or to be responded to (Holquist, 1991). Thus the meeting of two consciousnesses, through the narrative work, is the beginning of dialogue. As consciousnesses collide through the vehicle of the work (and implicitly the works to which it is a response and the responsive works it will engender) the narrative work becomes the carrier and instigator of dialectics about traditions and history, and about dreams and hopes for the future, and is, thus, the medium of lived experience of the present. It is the site of Ricoeur’s sedimentation and innovation, of ideology and utopia. Through engagement with or creation of the work the narrative consciousness connects with immediate others, with the family group, with community, with society at large, and so with the unknown other. Narrative becomes the glue of community, the web of culture, the matrix of society. Narrative communication can now be seen as a network of past, present and future dialogues: within the author, between the author and her work; between the author, her work and her audience, between individual members of that audience, between the work and other such works, between history and possible futures, between individual consciousnesses and their culture. And through these various connections, ranging from the intimate to the abstract, the narrative individual consciousness comes to realise its unity of physical embodiment and its individual identity. Character and identity emerge from the connections.

When two consciousnesses meet through the vehicle of the narrative work, when the meeting becomes dialogic, there is the possibility of reflection of self in other. As such, the meeting is the means by which self and other, self in other and other in self (where other is concrete or immediate interlocutor, is nature, or is an abstraction) are comprehended. In this realm of communication narrative blossoms into a depth and richness that cannot be tapped into when contemplating in isolation narrative as work or product (as in everyday and literary understandings of narrative as novelistic story), or narrative as our mode of consciousness (existentialism and phenomenology). Narrative suddenly becomes intentional, creative, interactional, dialogic, emergent and processual.

Literary theorising that deals with the product, the work, cannot explain it as a medium for the transmission of ideas, as a mediation between creator and receiver which transfigures both, or as the meeting place of consciousnesses. For literary theory the product is a static and atemporal work that is the same no matter when or by whom it is read. But communication is a unique event, grounded in the unique circumstances of time and place, and the unique individuals in which and between which it occurs. Bakhtin expresses this sentiment when he writes: “…it is possible, of course, to reproduce a text…but the reception of the text by the subject (a return to it, a repeated reading, a new execution quotation) is a new, unrepeatable event in the life of the text, a new link in the historical chain of speech communication.” (1986, p. 106). [To include this and other quotes here is to illustrate ‘a new execution,’ or an element taken from its original context and finding a new significance in a new narrative work]

Phenomenology, the study of consciousness, cannot explain the dynamism and breadth of interactions between consciousnesses that occur with narrative communication, or the interactions within one narrative consciousness in response to the reception of a narrative work. According to Bender (1998) the early phenomenologists (Berger, Luckman and Husserl) conceptualise the life of an individual to be divided into two broad spheres – the everyday world of habitual action, where questions of meaning are suspended; and the realm of reflection, of pondering meaning. In the former, specific consciousness of others, and the objects we encounter, are givens – a pragmatic assumption of similarity and shared meanings. These phenomenologists find the everyday is a “…monolithic ‘here and now…’” (Bender, p. 183), a space of habitualised actions, of routines and habits, dominated by pragmatic motives and ‘recipe’ knowledge. Life is divided into the sphere of everyday, pragmatic life, and periods of reflection on this everyday life. This reflection does not necessarily, or even often, impinge on our behaviour. But such an analysis has ramifications for identity and the ethical stance of the individual. It suggests that ethics and meaning are not a part of prosaic life, but are located only in the realm of reflection.

Bakhtin, on the other hand, prefers to think that the “…ethical, [the] religious, and the meaningful are constituted and present in each act… [that] the unity of an act and its account, a deed and its meaning,…is something that is never a priori but which must always and everywhere be achieved” (Bell and Gardiner, 1988, pp. 184-5). The narrative, as product, as mode of consciousness and as the relation between the two, can be seen to transcend the spheres of prosaic action and reflection, to at once link them and to make each meaningful; indeed, to banish the duality.

Reflection becomes an act of the introspective consciousness; prosaic action is informed by reflection, either on the part of the individual or of traditions handed down through narrative communication. For Bakhtin, every action, each act of existence, is a unique event, occurring in a unique time and place, to a uniquely situated individual, who nevertheless shares that uniqueness of time, place and individuality with every other individual (Holquist). No action as such is repeatable since each action is new. And as Carr suggests, even in the unfolding of an action, there exists a tripartite narration.

“While story-telling in its usual social and literary forms is an intersubjective activity which assumes a hearer’s or reader’s point of view on the events narrated, …this point of view is at times assumed even by the agent regarding his or her own action, and by the experiencer on his or her own passive experiences. Sometimes I do have the sense of observing myself as if I were observing another person, and as if I did not understand what that person was doing and thus needed to be told…[a telling] in which I (the narrator) tell or remind or explain to myself (the hearer) what I (the character) am doing.” (p. 63).

We are seldom acting without thinking, or thinking without at the same instant acting. We learn to model dialogues with ourselves, the dialogues of thought, between I and me, through this intentional, dialogic, creative, processual, interactional phenomenon. The self becomes both object and subject of internal conversations. Self-reflection and self-consciousness are made possible by the connections with others; by the reflections of self in the eyes of the other, by the model of narrative dialogue, by the content and tone of the dialogue, and by the struggle for recognition that is played out in and through the narrative process.

This does not entirely concur with Ricoeur’s idea of identity. He finds that identity is constituted by a sense of self-constancy and by the appropriation of stories heard or created. Narrative identity for Ricoeur is “…constitutive of self-constancy, can include change, mutability, within the cohesion of one lifetime. The subject then appears both as a reader and the writer of its own life…the story if a life continues to be refigured by all the truthful or fictive stories a subject tells about himself or herself. This refiguration makes this life itself a cloth woven of stories told… The self of self-knowledge is the fruit of an examined life, to recall Socrates’ phrase in the Apology. And an examined life is, in large part, one purged, one clarified by the cathartic effects of the narratives, be they historical or fictional, conveyed by our culture. So self-constancy refers to a self instructed by the works of a culture that it has applied to itself.” (Ricoeur 1985, p. 246-7)

This is reminiscent of the view that human life is storied, a narrative work, and that consciousness is narrative, but fails to take account of the idea that identity is a function of relations, of dialogues and dialectics, of the struggle for recognition. Indeed, Ricoeur seems to ignore the Hegelian idea that identity is constituted in and through the struggle for recognition, and finds, rather, that it is something attained by the individual in a seemingly ‘impersonal’ and unintentional way; in isolation from and without the help of others. Provided we have a good library of novelistic literature, it seems, our identity is assured. This is, of course, an exaggeration, perhaps an unfair reading of Ricoeur, but it highlights his failure to acknowledge the role of concrete, immediate and actual others in the formation of identity. We must receive our stories in the first place, and learn how to receive stories from someone, from some immediate and actual other, since we are not born with the skill to read, to interpret, or to speak – only with the capacity to learn these skills.

In a later work Ricoeur changes his mind about the ‘…subject then appear[ing] both as a reader and the writer of its own life…’ to instead state that “…we learn to become the narrator and the hero of our own story, without actually becoming the author of our own life.” (original italics; 1991, p. 32). He now finds a difference between narrative life and narrative fiction; where the narrator of fiction is the author, while in life we are the narrator but can never be the author. Yet he does not clarify who or what becomes the author of our individual lives.

Both MacIntyre and Bakhtin have clear ideas on this point. For MacIntyre “…we are never more (and sometimes less) that the co-authors of our own narratives. Only in fantasy do we live what story we please… We enter [life] upon a stage which we did not design and we find ourselves part of an action that was not of our making.” (1984, p. 213). Yet we are each of us the main character, the hero, in our own drama, and a subordinate character in the others’ dramas. From this position we can understand that identity is not just the fulfilment of personal potential, nor simply the appropriation of stories, but a dialogic relation between this potential and the unique circumstances of place and time in which we live, brought to fruition through the narrative process of dialogue. So, while Ricoeur looks for the narrative of a life, perhaps MacIntyre’s idea, that we are searching for a unity of narratives is more adequate. Bakhtin’s stance is even further removed from Ricoeur’s than is MacIntyre’s. He finds we are authored by the immediate and concrete Other: that “…‘self’ can never be a self-sufficient construct.” (Holquist, 1991, p. 19). Rather, self is always dialogic, a relation manifested in dialogue between self and other. Bakhtin sums up his thoughts thus: “I am conscious of myself and become myself only while revealing myself for another, through another, and with the help of another. The most important acts constituting self-consciousness are determined by a relationship toward another consciousness (toward a thou)… The very being of man (both external and internal) is the deepest communication. To be means to communicate… To be means to be for another, and through the other, for oneself. A person has no internal sovereign territory, he is wholly and always on the boundary: looking inside himself, he looks into the eyes of another… I cannot manage without another, I cannot become myself without another; I must find myself in another by finding another in myself (in mutual reflection and mutual acceptance).” (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 287, cited in Danow, 1991, p. 59).

IV.CONCLUSION

In this essay it has been suggested that narrative can be defined as a Bakhtinian triad, of the narrative work or product, of the narrative mode of consciousness, and of the relation between these two, characterised as communication. Yet still there is a need to clarify what the word ‘narrative’ refers to. Is it a narrative work, a narrative mode of consciousness, or a narrative communication? It is not one but all of these. It is a synthesis of all three, and is thus an activity and a temporal process. This process entails the absorbing, synthesising, producing, reproducing and transforming of a narrative work by a narrative consciousness, and the transfiguring of a narrative consciousness by a narrative work, where the purpose and the end is communication between consciousnesses. Narrative as such is an ongoing, emergent and creative process. And since narrative is a process it is a temporal phenomenon. It is the vehicle, the means of communication and it is the communication, as it unfolds over time, between narrative consciousnesses.

It has also been suggested that identity emerges from this process of narrative, from the intimate communication with other that narrative makes possible. Identity is a phenomenon of temporality – we have a sense of our own endurance, of an endurance of ourselves as a constant yet changing entity. Yet this sense can only be comprehended through narrative communication and can only be expressed in narrative. Without narrative product, narrative consciousness or narrative communication there would be no such comprehension. It was thus found that Ricoeur’s ideas of mimesis1, or non-narrative prefiguration, of narrative identity, as the combination of self-constancy and the appropriation of stories, and of the authorship of a life are somewhat less than adequate. Mimesis1 does not account for the narrative structure of perception suggested by phenomenology, and therefore makes the transformation from perception to meaning-making seem magical and fictional. His idea of narrative identity require further development, since it does not account sufficiently for the role of the dialogic relation between consciousnesses. And the question of the authorship of a life is better dealt with by MacIntyre and Bakhtin that by Ricoeur. While Ricoeur has thrown open the doors to the debate about the importance of narrative to human existence, supplying a basis from which further investigations may be launched, his work requires revising, amending and supplementing. Bakhtin, Carr, MacIntyre and the phenomenologists all make significant and substantial contributions to this ongoing dialectical debate.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Dr. Arran Gare has my heartfelt gratitude for patiently guiding and supervising my study. His approach made the writing of this paper possible.

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