In defence of narrative exceptionalism

Thanks to Carol Thomas for transforming a sporadic couple of articles into something worth calling a debate. Thomas correctly observes the difference between Paul Atkinson’s ‘methodology first insistence’ and my understanding that ‘ethics comes first’. What I mean by ethics is expanded in my most recent book (Frank 2004). I would now argue that an ethics-first position is better understood as narrative-first, because anyone’s sense of what counts as ethical is derived, first and often most pervasively, from the stories that a person knows (Frank forthcoming). Thus I am, without apology, a narrative exceptionalist, gratefully taking up the term in which Atkinson crystallises his objections in his response to Thomas (and thanks to Atkinson for advance sharing of his response—his commitment to enriched discussion always being generous). I believe that narrative is distinctive among human capacities and distinctively necessary for human flourishing. To say as Atkinson does that narrative should be treated ‘like any and every form of social action’ makes no sense to me. Not only is narrative distinctive, but so is any ‘social action’. Narrative, or as I prefer, storytelling, is just exceptionally exceptional. Why? Atkinson is correct that the case for narrative exceptionalism has not been made as well as it should have been, and here I can be nothing more than suggestive. My forthcoming work focuses on the capacities of stories: what stories are uniquely able to do, both for people but also with people. The latter raises the dangers of stories, to which my earlier work was insufficiently attentive (Frank 2009). Stories enjoy an exceptional place in human lives, first, because stories are the means and medium through which humans learn who they are, what their relation is to those around them (who counts as family, as community, and as enemies), and what sort of actions they are expected to perform under which circumstances. Stories teach which actions are good and which are bad; without stories, there would be no sense of action as ethical. What storytelling enacts is not individual authenticity; rather it is membership: close to what sociologists once called socialisation, but better described as becoming a subject, that shift emphasising location (Linde 2009: 115 ff.). Stories locate people with respect to others; location is the core of narrative identity. The classic statement is by Alasdair MacIntyre (1984: 216), in a long passage saying that through stories, ‘children learn both what a child is and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they have been born’. Secondly, narrative is exceptional because how else can people come so close to lives lived thousands of years ago, or to contemporary lives that are worlds apart from the listener. Brian Boyd (2009), whose carefully researched case for the exceptionalism of stories in human evolution exceeds even my case for stories’ importance, writes how humans listening to stories become ‘saturated with the knowledge of other perspectives’ (2009: 270). Stories have a unique capacity to connect people (Frank 2006 and forthcoming). Subjectivity comes to be through connection, and also through disconnection. Thirdly, stories work on people, because people become caught up in stories to a degree that is exceptional. Anthropologist Keith Basso (1996: 38) quotes an informant, Benson Lewis as saying: ‘Stories go work on you like arrows… Stories make you replace yourself’. Humans are constantly replacing themselves, as their stock of stories shifts. Subjectivity depends on narrative resources, which have always been my focus: ‘People tell their own unique stories, but they compose stories by adapting and combining narrative types that cultures make available’ (Frank 1995: 75). People do things, often creative things, with those resources; that is agency, exemplified in storytelling. But however creative storytelling is, no one ever makes up a story; people combine and play off resources. I agree with Atkinson that stories are ‘social facts’, in Durkheim’s sense of being external to humans but felt as coming from within, as one’s own sentiments. But for me any interpretation of others’ stories proceeds only from within a habitus affected by stories acquired early in life that have taught the interpreter which later stories to attend to in what ways. Thus, stories seem better described as practices, neither objective nor subjective (Bourdieu 1990). I also agree with Thomas’s materialist emphasis. In my forthcoming work, I borrow from Donna Haraway and John Law to describe stories as being ‘material semiotic’. I demur only from Thomas’s usage of ‘medical despotism’. I have written about medicine’s narrative imperialism, which is different. Today, as I work on medical stories (Frank 2004, 2008 and 2010), I am deeply concerned with turning the private narrative troubles of healthcare workers into public issues. If there is despotism in medicine, healthcare workers are also subject to it. My significant disagreements with Atkinson are, first, his distinction between reproducing stories ‘appreciatively’ versus analysing them ‘formally’. For me, analysis that is not grounded in appreciation of a story risks missing the point of that story. Appreciation involves recognising how storytellers are holding their own in the stories they tell, although this need not imply the analyst's sympathy or agreement with the story. Appreciation entails recognising why the story matters deeply to the person telling it, and why the storyteller tells the story as she or he does. And appreciation sets the terms for analysis remaining answerable to the storyteller (Frank 2005), although specifying what counts as answerable must, as Atkinson says, continue elsewhere. Atkinson and I probably also disagree over what counts as being ‘methodical’ and how far being methodical can carry analysis (Flyvbjerg 2001). Too much social science is methodical to a fault, that fault being lack of appreciation for why a story like that would matter so deeply to a person located there. Being methodical matters, but methodical by itself is what I call reductionism: it reduces stories to inert material, devoid of spirit. When the story, the storyteller, and the narrative analyst are in relations of mutual appreciation, then narrative analysis becomes a living dialogue (Bakhtin 1984).

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